Several years ago, a very clever man started a website called Roger Ebert’s Worst Reviews. In his opinion, the influential film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times botched a lot of calls. 79 titles are listed including a summary of Ebert’s assessments, his rating for each film and why the site’s owner believes he fucked up.
For instance, Ebert originally gave Blade Runner three stars instead of four, the same rating as the godawful Cop And A Half. The Shining only got two! To Ebert’s credit, as acknowledged on the site, he eventually realized his errors and evolved. But not on everything he got wrong.
One curious omission from the list is Doctor Detroit, the 1983 comedy starring Dan Aykroyd in his first solo push. (His longtime SNL comedy partner, John Belushi, had tragically died the previous year.) Ebert gave this thing an undeserved three-star rave. Here’s why he got it wrong.
Aykroyd plays a super square professor whose idea of fun is speed walking six miles from his father’s college (he’s the chancellor) to its alumni club, then treating himself to a solitary restaurant meal and a foreign film trilogy at a local theatre. He lives with his parents and apparently has no friends nor a social life. He is the definition of dull.
That is until WKRP’s Howard Hesseman gets a hold of him. Hesseman plays an improbably polite pimp named Smooth Walker, which sounds more like a well-aged whisky than a street hustler. He has a big problem. He’s overspent money that belongs to his aggrieved boss, Mom (Kate Murtagh), who unfortunately resembles Dave Hester from Storage Wars.
He needs to fork over 80 grand or somebody’s gonna get a-hurt real bad. Thinking quickly on his feet, he pretends he has a new, aggressive partner muscling in on his professional harem. Mom buys his bullshit and now he has to find some dumb sap to play the part.
While dining in an Indian restaurant with his four ladies (among them, Fran Drescher and Lynn Whitfield), he spots Aykroyd sitting alone who he remembers speed walking around in his short shorts. He butters him up, buys him dinner, offers him a fun time in club after club after club with his eager employees constantly plying him with weed and drink. Not paying attention to what’s going on, at one point, a delirious Aykroyd finds himself unwittingly guzzling pills with his wine. Too wired to sleep the next day, he is very late for his comparative literature class.
Meanwhile, Hesseman demands his loyal limo driver Diavolo (T.K. Carter) beat him up so the next time he sees Mom she’ll know Doctor Detroit, the fake partner he made up, is not to be fucked with. That’s Hesseman’s cue to exit the movie, leaving his ladies and personal driver to fend for themselves. But that’s not what they do. They call Aykroyd, disrupting his sleep in the middle of an important board meeting chaired by his father.
Before his sudden skedaddle out of town, Hesseman gives the gullible professor a major sales pitch about the glories of keeping your pimp hand strong. Look at the girls! Check out this tacky apartment! So, when Whitfield gets cheesed, Aykroyd shows up outside a courtroom, buys a suit from a conveniently placed low-rent attorney and walks in acting like Colonel Sanders ultimately resulting in her freedom. The judge’s outraged reaction at the end of the scene is the film’s funniest moment, sadly one of only two overall.
In the meantime, an impatient Mom arrives at Hesseman’s lair looking for Doctor Detroit. Aykroyd pretends to be his assistant and arranges a midnight meeting between the two at an old junkyard. Belatedly realizing he has to pick up an important donor to his dad’s college (they’re desperate for funding) that same night (the money will be presented at a swanky dinner in a swanky hotel), he calls Mom to get her to agree to an earlier time. For obvious reasons, he changes his voice to keep her snowed. It is not a good pimp voice. He sounds like a whiny Edward G. Robinson crossed with Liberace.
With a little help from the prop department at his college, he shows up to the 9 p.m. meeting looking absolutely ridiculous. A flamboyant, makeshift suit, a bad wig and, an unmistakably symbolic right steel glove straight out of the crusades. He is not intimidating. He is not even remotely believable. It really doesn’t matter, though. Mom wants him killed but of course this doesn’t happen because her goons are incompetent. He seemingly takes her out himself but we know better.
Doctor Detroit was supposed to be Dan Aykroyd’s breakthrough solo movie. Instead, it’s a disaster. Not only is his fake pimp a bust, so is Mom, his sudden rival. She’s even less threatening. It’s hard to believe the hookers and the limo driver don’t just vanish, too. Nothing bad ever happens to Hesseman.
Speaking of these ladies of the night, they’re more like fairy godmothers than sex workers. When a flustered, distracted and thoroughly exhausted Aykroyd is reminded at the last minute that he needs to cater an alumni gathering at his parents’ place, the ladies and Diavolo spring into action, buying some KFC, cooking it with a blowtorch and dousing it in gravy. It’s supposed to be Indian food. The oblivious guests love it anyway, crunchy skin and all.
Once again realizing he’ll need to be in two places at once in the movie’s finale, his new helpers make sure the annual Players Ball, which looks more like an adult prom than a sex workers convention, takes place in that exact same hotel where the alumni dinner is being held. (How were they able to get it booked so late?) Unlike Mrs. Doubtfire, where a frantic Robin Williams amusingly and constantly switches between himself and his Scottish alter ego until he gets confused, there is no such worry for Aykroyd.
At the Dinners Ball, he introduces James Brown (how very missed he is), dances a little, switches back to his normal attire, prematurely introduces the big donor at the alumni dinner, goes back to the party as Doctor Detroit until inevitably his two worlds collide when Mom returns. (That is not a good sword fight.) When the big reveal predictably happens, all Aykroyd has to do is cut a promo and all is well.
Doctor Detroit was directed by Michael Pressman who eight years later would go on to direct the worst Ninja Turtles movie, The Secret Of The Ooze. Aykroyd’s easily convincing as the overwhelmed professor but he’s not given anything funny to say no matter which of his forgettable personas he’s portraying.
Real pimps are nasty pieces of work so it’s hard to accept Howard Hesseman’s gentle demeanour, let alone his cowardice in the presence of the decidedly unscary Mom. As for his employees, T.K. Carter is your usual hip, wide-eyed Black character from the 80s, ever helpful and subservient, just like the ladies. During his final speech in front of both crowds, Aykroyd reminds them they’re free and no longer obligated to be sex workers. But at no time before do they ever seem eager to quit. Their agency is secondary to the needs and desires of men.
Doctor Detroit lives in a fantasy land where pimps are just colourful, misunderstood characters and the sex workers are perfectly fine with being glamourous props of carnality. There’s no violence against them so there’s no need for them to run. They live in luxury and face no real threats from a ruthless police. Hard to believe that fancy hotel would allow the Players Ball to happen right there in their ballroom.
In his original review, Roger Ebert admitted the film has a sitcom set-up, but that it “could be a Jerry Lewis movie.” That does not sound as complimentary as he intended. He goes on to praise Aykroyd’s performance, asserting that “he knows it’s just a humble little screenplay, but he’s amused by its pretension.” Not very persuasive.
Ebert laughed far more than I did which explains his overly generous three-star rating, two more than I give it. Doctor Detroit should be the 80th entry on Roger Ebert’s Worst Reviews.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, August 17, 2020
12:26 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 