Now so far my life had been one of dominance of females over males—in the years prior to the rise of feminism, it was as evident to me in the insurance office as it was in my family. Due to their hard earned success, the company offered to buy the basketball team proper singlets and shorts,  and as soon as it became about money, the females wanted to be in it too. Lead by Janie Prentiss—bottle-blonde, the sexiest thing in the office—they promptly formed a team of their own, entered it the women’s Tuesday night competition, and obtained fancy tops that maximised their busts and slinky shorts that offered their pert bottoms to best effect. All this before any of them had ever touched a basketball.
    Donny Ruddock supported their efforts to his fullest—a notorious womaniser, he saw endless possibilities in this enterprise, but the girls promptly outwitted him. They demanded the right to choose their own coach, and unanimously picked me. I can assure you that no one was more astonished by this outcome than I was, nor more terrified.

Stanley Kramer had a distinguished career making very serious dramas like High Noon and On the Beach, always small screen and always black and white. Then he went seriously mad and made a gigantic epic comedy in colour and on the massive Cinerama screen called It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. And an enormous cast of comic players went mad with him—Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, Ethel Merman, Jonathan Winters, Dick Shawn just to name a few, and a massive supporting cast of comic cameos by the likes of The Three Stooges, Don Knotts, Buster Keaton, Andy Devine, Joe E Brown—it’s never-ending. Not everybody liked it but it was funny, if also overkill.
    Many thought this an inappropriate end to the long career of Spencer Tracy who was very ill during filming and died not long after. But in fact he made as many comedies as dramas, and was chosen for the part because, as Kramer put it, of his remarkable ability to subdue scene stealers. He plays the cop that chases the rest of the cast, steals the money from them and ends up being chased by everyone else. Jimmy Durante plays Smiler Grogan, who sets the whole plot in motion by killing himself in a motor accident (literally kicking the bucket). But before he dies he tells the witnesses (the principle cast) where he has stashed the loot. They then in set out variously on a mad race across USA to try and get there before all the others. But forget the story — just sit back and let the cast do what they do, be funny.