Edward Norton picks his three desert island movies: “One of the funniest ever made”
Comedy is a genre few movie buffs would associate Edward Norton with. After all, the fiercely talented and sometimes controversial star burst onto the Hollywood scene in the 1990s as the intense, meticulous, and driven star of movies like Primal Fear, American History X, and Fight Club.
However, casting an eagle eye over Norton’s career reveals that we cinephiles may be doing the man a slight disservice. For instance, while the movie may be an egregious waste of 109 minutes, Norton was certainly aiming for laughs in the 2002 black comedy Death to Smoochy.
Similarly, his collaborations with Wes Anderson see him embrace his kooky side, and in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, he takes his best shot at the achingly modern “rich weirdo who is obviously a parody of Elon Musk” character.
All this is to say, while Norton mightn’t exactly be one of Hollywood’s greatest rib-ticklers, he has tried his hand at making audiences laugh from time to time. He mightn’t have always hit the bullseye, but his love for comedy has kept him coming back to the well. Hell, he even made a bold attempt to direct a comedy the first time he stepped behind the camera: Keeping the Faith, a romcom co-starring Dharma & Greg‘s Jenna Elfman and Ben Stiller. Was it any good? Not really, but few could fault the guy for trying.
So, with his abiding love for making people laugh humming along in the background, unbeknownst to much of his audience, Norton’s desert island movie picks probably surprised a lot of people. He was asked about them during a Q&A at the Sarasota Film Festival in 2007, and picked two comedies, one of which was the deepest of deep cuts.
Before getting into these films, though, it’s worth noting the outlier in Norton’s list: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a 1988 romantic drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis. In this notably laugh-free film, Day-Lewis played a brain surgeon navigating the social and political upheaval of communist Czechoslovakia’s ‘Prague Spring’ in the late ’60s, while embroiled in an affair with a beautiful artist.
The esteemed thespian, of course, went ‘full method’ for the picture, learning to speak Czech despite the film being in English, and refusing to drop character when cameras weren’t rolling. Perhaps Norton saw an intense, dedicated kindred spirit in Day-Lewis, and the film was hailed as a handsome, well-made adaptation of an important piece of modern literature.
Moving into Norton’s comedy sweet spot, though, his second pick to while away the lazy days on a desert island was Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Norton remembers watching the pioneering romcom-drama when he was a boy, and the way Allen played with storytelling tropes and filmmaking norms blew his young mind.
He recalls thinking, “This guy’s just doing whatever he wants to do!” and cites Allen’s use of animation and the film’s non-linear structure as things that inspired him. “It was so liberated,” he noted. “It was so incredibly free.” To him, though, the biggest innovation was Allen’s regular breaking of the Fourth Wall, which Norton described as “hysterical.”
Finally, Norton’s third desert island pick is, in his opinion, “one of the funniest movies ever made” and one “you might have never heard of.” The bizarrely-titled Ruggles of Red Gap is a 1935 comedy starring Charles Laughton as an obscenely British butler who finds himself navigating the dusty trails of America after losing a card game to a rancher. Even though it was a huge box office hit at the time, Norton hadn’t heard of it until he watched an early ’90s Hollywood-skewering black comedy made by two men who are even bigger comedy nerds than him.
“I discovered that film by watching the Coen brothers movie Barton Fink,” he revealed, “where one character says to the other, ‘What the hell do you think this is? Hamlet? Gone With the Wind? Ruggles of Red Gap? It’s a goddamn B-picture!'”
Norton’s brain fritzed when he heard that third title, so he immediately tracked the film down, and instantly realised, “It’s a comedy classic.”
