It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World - Plot

Plot

"Smiler" Grogan (Jimmy Durante), suspect in a tuna factory robbery (possibly a dig on the then-recent tuna advertising campaigns) 15 years before and on the run from the police, recklessly passes a number of vehicles on a twisting, mountainous road in the Mojave Desert of Southern California before careening his car off a cliff and crashing. Five motorists from four of the passed vehicles stop to assist: 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), an entrepreneur. Just before he kicks the bucket (his foot literally kicks a bucket as he dies), Grogan tells the supposedly good Samaritans about $350,000 buried in a box (which turns out to be a suitcase covered loosely on top by a metal plate) in Santa Rosita State Park near the Mexican border, under a "Big W". Two detectives (Norman Fell (main), Nicholas Georgiade (supporting)) arrive, with the main detective asking those five, who descended the hill to the accident site, some pointed questions about their interaction with Grogan. While not so artfully dodging the questions, each of the five internally changes from having had compassion for Grogan to becoming greedy to retrieve the treasure. Then the detectives permit the five to return to their vehicles after demanding and receiving Finch's contact information. The motorists then drive away from the accident site, initially testing each other's resolve on the road, then stop to try to reason with one another on how to share the money, but when they can't agree on any one particular distribution (in Benjy's words, "Look! We've figured it seventeen different ways, and every time we figured it, it was no good, because no matter how we figured it, somebody don't like the way we figured it! So now, there's only one way to figure it. And that is, every man, including the old bag, for himself!"), they run to their vehicles to engage in an all-out race to reach the loot first. All four vehicles are eventually abandoned.

Meanwhile, Captain T. G. Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), of the Santa Rosita Police Department, has been patiently working on the Grogan case for 15 years, hoping to solve it someday and retire with honor. Learning of the fatal crash, he suspects that "Smiler" might have given one or more of the witnesses a clue to the stolen loot's location and has police units track their movements. After mistakenly throwing his hat out of his office window, where a passing motorist (Jerry Lewis) intentionally runs over it, Culpeper phones police (Andy Devine, Stan Freberg) in another jurisdiction about Grogan. Culpeper's switchboard operator (ZaSu Pitts) takes calls, while later on Culpeper has his own disastrous phone conversation with his wife, Ginger (Selma Diamond), and his daughter, Billie Sue (Louise Glenn).

Everyone experiences multiple setbacks en route to the money. Melville and his wife Monica (Edie Adams) charter a shabby World War I-era biplane to Santa Rosita from an unlicensed pilot (Ben Blue). The two arrive by cab at a hardware store. After telling the cabbie (Leo Gorcey) to wait outside, a store employee (Doodles Weaver) lets them in just before closing time. However, the store's owner, a Mr. Dinkler (Edward Everett Horton), then turns off all the lights and closes and locks the door to the basement, into which the two, intending to find and buy a pick and shovel, had just descended. Melville wrecks the place in various failed attempts to escape before blasting a hole in the wall with dynamite.

Dingy and Benjy question an attendant (Charles Lane) and, against his objections, convince pilot Tyler Fitzgerald (Jim Backus) to shuttle them to Santa Rosita in his modern twin-engine aircraft. Fitzgerald carelessly lets them operate the controls while he makes drinks in the back of the plane and is soon knocked unconscious by the pair's erratic steering. The two then have to fly and land the plane on their own. They are eventually talked down by a group of air-traffic controllers (led by Carl Reiner and Jesse White), who pass the radio to their superior (Paul Ford). On the ground, crews including three firemen (The Three Stooges) prepare for a terrible disaster.

Two other cab drivers (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Peter Falk), who respectively whisk Dingy and Benjy away from the airport, and Melville and Monica from the hardware store, also get in on the hunt.

Pike crashes his furniture truck into the car containing Finch, his wife Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and his overbearing dictatorial mother-in-law, Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman). Finch persuades Pike to ride off for help on a bicycle, then the three flag down British army Lt. Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas) to get them to Santa Rosita and ignore Pike on the roadside nearby. The four stop at a service station owned by two brothers (Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan), who decline Finch's request to rent the station's tow truck. Mrs. Marcus refuses the aid of a passing motorist (Jack Benny), who is driving an old Maxwell. 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 foolishly tells him about the scheme, prompting the greedy Meyer to race for the money himself. Pike, outraged, destroys the aforementioned service station at which Meyer has been forced to stop due to a tire blowout. After the rampage, Pike steals the station's tow truck and later picks up Mrs. Marcus and Emmeline. Mrs. Marcus calls her beach bum son Sylvester (Dick Shawn), who lives near Santa Rosita, to look for the loot, but the Oedipally-obsessed Sylvester, who is dancing with his laconic girlfriend (Barrie Chase), races hysterically to the defense of his mother instead. Meyer experiences his own setbacks, including losing his car in a river. After flagging down a nervous motorist (Don Knotts), persuading the motorist by a conspiracy theory that he is a hunted man (the unstated implication is a CIA man hunted by Russians), Meyer steals the motorist's car. All the while, the police secretly track their activities while Culpeper bides his time.

Eventually, all of the interlopers arrive at the state park and begin searching for the "Big W", overseen by Captain Culpeper, secretly disgruntled and intent on keeping all of the loot for himself on being promised only a too-small pension, despite solving the Grogan case. He orders all policemen to leave the area and waits for the others to retrieve the money. Emmeline, the only one who wanted no part of the scheme, is the first to recognize the "Big W" — four large palm trees standing at odd angles. As the watching Culpeper steps out of the bushes and greets her, she unwittingly reveals the location to him and suggests they split the money. Soon Pike, then the others, notice the palm trees as well and frantically begin digging beneath them while Culpeper quietly mixes in with the non-diggers. After the suitcase containing the loot is dug up and opened, the group argues about the money's distribution. Culpeper then identifies himself, takes the suitcase, and suggests to the stunned ensemble that they turn themselves in, stating that a jury might be more lenient if they do. Initially taking Culpeper's advice, the defeated claimants climb into the two taxis and drive out of the park.

When the two taxicab groups notice Culpeper heading away from Santa Rosita with the money, they immediately reverse direction and chase him, foiling his plan to store his police vehicle with a pre-arranged crony (Buster Keaton) in a seaside garage and hop a boat bound for Mexico. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to reach Culpeper by radio, Police Chief Aloysius (William Demarest) realizes what Culpeper is doing and revokes his newly-trebled pension — which Aloysius had secured by arm twisting the mayor (Lloyd Corrigan) less than a half hour before — and orders Culpeper's arrest.

At the end of the chase, stranded high up on an abandoned building are the eleven men in the group, each of whom is continually trying to keep the other ten men from possessing the suitcase containing the money, despite warnings from a speech-maker (Joe E. Brown) below that the stairs are unsafe. While the men were trying to avoid falling off the building's disintegrating fire escape ladders, the suitcase accidentally opens. The astonished crowd watching below reaches for much of the money fluttering down but inexplicably leaves a significant amount of it untouched. The men then simultaneously attempt to climb down an extended fire truck ladder, but their combined weight makes the firemen lose control of the ladder, which gyrates wildly, flinging or dropping them off to various locations.

The dejected men, now immobile in a prison hospital in bandages and casts, blame one another for their predicament and criticize Culpeper for seizing the money. Replying that their sentences likely will be lighter because he will probably take most of the blame in court, ex-Captain Culpeper adds that perhaps in ten or twenty years, there will be something about all this he can laugh about. Benjy throws a banana peel towards, but beyond, a waste basket, landing on the floor, moments before the nagging Mrs. Marcus enters, flanked by Monica and Emmeline, scolding all of the hospitalized men for everything. When Mrs. Marcus slips on the banana peel and is carried off on a gurney, all the injured men, including Culpeper, begin to laugh hysterically.