‘Panic Button’ Needs More Panic

One useful aspect of on-demand and streaming titles from Warner Archive is the chance to see obscurities that sound halfway interesting, as well as to confirm that, in some cases, obscurity is merited.

Shot in Italy with a mostly Italian cast and crew (and obvious dubbing in certain scenes), Panic Button offers several points of half-interest. Top-billed Maurice Chevalier spends the whole movie winking and shrugging and mugging as though paid by the tic, twice bursting into jaunty if unmemorable songs by George Garvarentz. It will also appeal to fans of Jayne Mansfield, who has a reasonable role showing off her assets, although this film is shot in a flat, unflattering black and white that devalues what should have been all its pleasing vistas.

The most intriguing aspect is a set-up that unwittingly foreshadows The Producers. As the opening scene explains and belabors, a group of semi-gangster businessmen must lose some money before being audited by the IRS, and they decide to write it off by producing a lousy pilot film for a TV series. Mike Connors, several years before playing TV’s Mannix, goes to Rome to hire a forgotten actor (Chevalier), a talentless starlet (Mansfield), and a pretentious director (Akim Tamiroff, the most amusing element). Tamiroff’s character expends more energy as a director than George Sherman, a prolific helmer of B westerns for whom this must have been a working vacation. (We suspect the presence of an Italian co-director, and Wikipedia confirms this as Giulano Carnimeo.)

Unfortunately, Panic Button doesn’t have nearly the riotous panic required. The movie wastes a lot of time in a climactic chase through Rome to Venice in which two men are disguised as nuns, which is supposedly always hilarious; we can tell by a soundtrack of bouncy pseudo-Italian pastafazoo to convince us of a jolly lark. Ironically, one problem with this film is that too much time is spent on character development: the Connors-Mansfield romance and the relations between Chevalier and his ex-wife (Eleanor Parker, radiating too much intelligence).

As a result of all this talky care with characters who aren’t that interesting, we never see any of the pilot until it’s shown publicly — and turns out to be Romeo and Juliet. How is that supposed to be a TV pilot? Anyway, it’s not bad enough for the brief snippet we see to justify its now-predictable reception as a comic hit, so we get the feeling that a good premise has been botched. Good thing Mel Brooks picked up on the idea a few years later, though it had been around at least since New Faces of 1937 (also available from Warner Archive).

By the way, one of the most interesting sequences isn’t on this print. In the nightclub scene where Chevalier dances with Mansfield, some versions continue into an extended sequence of Mansfield dancing the twist, at first with Chevalier and then with the whole room. She’s doing her full Marilyn impression, and at one point looks about to pass out. The scene can be found on YouTube, and it’s not clear why it’s not on the Warner print.