It's a long, long, long, long movie

You'd expect to see an intermission in a 1960s historical epic like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago or The Sound of Music.

But you know it was a decade of cinematic bloat when even the all-star ensemble comedy, the Cannonball Run of its day, has a prelude, intermission and postlude, and runs an enormous 154 minutes.

When I put on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World yesterday, as afternoon viewing for my earache, I thought it was an hour and 54 minutes, not 154 minutes. You can tell I was running at some percentage of my usual capacity to make a mistake like that. But I had plenty of time to finish it ... and it took plenty of time. With naps and other interruptions, I was probably watching it for the better part of five hours.

Even with upwards of 70 of the day's most famous comedic performers (or so it felt), there's no reason this movie should have run two hours and 30 minutes. No reason. And it steadily wore away at my good will until I finally gave it only 3 out of 5 stars, when I'd been having a 3.5-star or even 4-star experience for parts of the film.

On the one hand it was really fun to identify all the cameos, some of which were previewed in the (extremely bloated) opening credits, and some of which were not. As I am not necessarily an aficionado of the films of that era, I wasn't immediately able to supply names for everyone. There were a lot of "that guys" and a lot of time spent consulting IMDB. For instance, I even had to look up Sid Caesar, a "Hollywood old guy" from when I was first coming of age as a kid -- in part because I didn't know if I'd actually seen him in anything outside of Bob Hope specials, and he was 20 years younger than that here. It was also great to see Ethel Merman in something, as I knew her only from that very brief cameo in Airplane!

But my goodness, in the end, a little of Mad Mad goes a long way. I took a basic silly joy in all the various planes, trains, bicycles and automobiles they used to try to make it to the treasure spot in the fictitious Santa Rosita. But each episode could have been 40 percent shorter and achieved the same effect, while bringing the thing in under two hours -- and without an intermission.

The final scene is like a ridiculous slapstick culmination of everything we've seen before then, with a firetruck ladder swaying back and forth (is that a thing that happens?) of its own volition, tossing Caesar, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Peter Falk and Spencer Tracey this way and that. They all end up in traction in a hospital, contemplating their miserable fate and their likelihood of long prison sentences, and then Merman comes in and slips on a banana, ending the movie in gales of laughter from all.

It's hard to watch a movie like this today as an audience of the time would have watched it, as it's probably a bit racist and definitely a bit sexist, plus everything is ludicrous in a way that feels out of scale with what we would attempt today.

But I did have fun. I just wish I'd had less than five hours of fun.