"Smiler" Grogan (Jimmy Durante), a suspect in a long ago tuna factory robbery and on the run from the police, careens his car off a twisting, mountainous road in the Southern California desert and crashes. Five motorists stop to help him - Melville Crump (Sid Caesar), a dentist, Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters), a furniture mover, Dingy Bell (Mickey Rooney) and Benjy Benjamin (Buddy Hackett), two friends on their way to Las Vegas, and J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle), who owns an edible seaweed company. Just before he dies, Grogan tells the five about $350,000 (Equivalent to $3.2 million in 2010 US Dollars) buried in the (fictitious) Santa Rosita State Park, near the Mexican border, under a mysterious "big W". Initially, the motorists try to reason with each other and share the money, but it soon becomes an all-out race to get the money first.
Unbeknownst to them all, Captain Culpepper (Spencer Tracy) of the Santa Rosita Police Department has been patiently working on the Smiler Grogan case for years, hoping to someday solve it and retire. When he learns of the fatal crash, he suspects that Grogan may have tipped off the passersby, so he has them tracked by various police units. His suspicions are confirmed by their behavior.
Everyone experiences multiple setbacks on their way to the money. Crump and his wife Monica (Edie Adams) charter a World War I biplane and barely make it to Santa Rosita, but are almost immediately locked in the basement of a hardware store. They eventually free themselves with dynamite. Bell and Benjamin charter a modern plane, but when their alcoholic pilot (Jim Backus) knocks himself out, the terrified friends are forced to fly and land the plane themselves. Finch, his wife Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and his loud and obnoxious mother-in-law, Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman), get into a crash with Pike. The three enlist the aid of a British army officer they meet, Lt. Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas), to get them to Santa Rosita. After many arguments, most caused by Mrs. Marcus, she and Emmeline refuse to go any farther, and Finch and Hawthorne leave them behind. Pike tries to get motorist Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers) to take him to Santa Rosita, but Meyer betrays Pike and races for the money on his own. Pike is outraged over this and destroys a service station; after the rampage, he steals the station's tow truck and meets up with Mrs. Marcus and Emmeline and picks them up. Mrs. Marcus calls her beatnik son Sylvester (Dick Shawn), who lives near Santa Rosita, to get the money for them, but he instead races hysterically to the defense of his mother. Meyer experiences his own setbacks, including losing his car and nearly being drowned. All the while, Culpepper and the police department secretly track their activities. Around this time two cab drivers (Peter Falk and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) get in on the hunt.
Eventually, all the characters meet up at the state park and search for the W. It is Emmeline, who wants no part of the money, who first finds the W, composed of four palm trees. Pike finds it next and informs everyone else. Culpepper orders all policemen to leave the area, and goes in solo to retrieve the money. However, he actually plans to take the money to Mexico to escape a dysfunctional family and a job with a very small pension. After everyone digs up Smiler Grogan's $350,000, Culpepper identifies himself and orders the now-stunned group to turn themselves in, saying the jury will be more lenient. But when the group sees Culpepper leaving with the money, they follow him. After a long and frantic chase sequence, all the men in the group end up stranded on the fire escape of an old building slated for demolition. While trying to keep from falling off, they lose control of the suitcase containing the money, and all $350,000 flutters down to the crowd watching below. The men then all try to climb down a fire ladder, but their combined weight makes the firemen lose control of the ladder, causing the ladder to fling them everywhere, causing many injuries and landing everyone in the hospital awaiting arrest.
In the hospital, the dejected group criticizes Culpepper for taking the money, but he says they will get off easy with the police because he will have the harsh sentence. He adds that nothing will ever make him laugh again. At that moment Mrs. Marcus enters, begins to scold everyone, and promptly slips on a banana peel. Everyone, including Culpepper, begins to laugh hysterically.
Judy Garland, Groucho Marx, Stan Laurel, George Burns, Bob Hope, Jackie Mason, Don Rickles, Judy Holliday, and Red Skelton were among the many celebrities offered or considered for roles in the film.[citation needed] However, Marx demanded more money and was crossed off the list. Laurel did not want to be seen in his old age, especially without Oliver Hardy.
In the early 1960s, screenwriter William Rose, then living in the UK, conceived the idea for a film (provisionally titled Something a Little Less Serious) about a comedic chase through Scotland. He sent an outline to Stanley Kramer, who agreed to produce and direct the film. (The setting was subsequently shifted to America and the working title changed to One Damn Thing After Another and then It's a Mad World, with Rose and Kramer adding additional Mads to the title as time progressed.)[2]
Although well known for serious films such as Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg (both starring Spencer Tracy), Kramer set out to make the ultimate comedy film with It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Filmed in Ultra Panavision 70 and presented in Cinerama (becoming one of the first Cinerama films originated with one camera), it also had an all-star cast, with dozens of major comedy stars from all eras of cinema making appearances in the film.
The film followed a Hollywood trend in the 1960s of producing "epic" films as a way of wooing audiences away from television and back to movie theaters. Box-office revenues were dropping, so the major studios experimented with a number of gimmicks to attract audiences, including widescreen films.
The title was taken from Thomas Middleton's 1605 comedy A Mad World, My Masters. Kramer considered adding a fifth "mad" to the title before deciding that it would be redundant, but noted in interviews that he later regretted it.[citation needed]
The film's theme music was written by Ernest Gold with lyrics by Mack David.
In the 1970s, ABC broadcast the film on New Year's Eve. The last reported showing of the film on major network television was on May 16, 1978.
The opening scenes in which "Smiler" Grogan goes off the road, and subsequent scenes when the four vehicles briefly speed down the mountain before slowing down and stopping so that the drivers can talk, were filmed on the “Seven Steps” section (also known as "Seven-Level Hill") of the Palms-to-Pines Highway (California State Highway 74), a generally east-west route mostly south of, and west of, the city of Palm Desert, California. Culpepper predicts that the vehicles — going east — will turn south (a right turn), but in the movie they actually turn left. The rocky point at which Durante's car sails off into space, known by Mad World fans as "Smiler's Point," can easily be spotted today on Highway 74, minus the man-made, temporary ramp that was constructed to help launch the car airborne and then was removed after the stunt was completed.
Many of the actors performed some of their own stunts, including some crashing falls by Caesar, physical antics by Jonathan Winters, and Phil Silvers' drive into a flowing river where he almost drowned. Caesar severely injured his back while filming the hardware store scene and was unable to return to the film for some time. Silvers injured himself shortly before the shooting of the scene (one of the last) where the male characters chase Culpepper up several flights of stairs and onto fire-escape ladders. As shot, the scene features Silvers' stunt double.