Sometimes, a long and unwieldy title is preferable to the alternative. When this movie was re-released as Fun Loving, audiences understandably avoided it. But who wouldn’t be intrigued by the original title, however ungainly? The movie is a romantic comedy about an Irish dreamer (played by far-from-Irish Gene Wilder) who lives at home and makes a few pounds by picking up horse manure off the streets of Dublin and selling it as fertilizer. But modernity encroaches, in the form of an edict banning horse-drawn wagons from the city and a clock-punching job alongside his father at a factory after the manure business dries up. Fortunately for Fortune, there’s an opportunity for escape in the form of a romance with a proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl, an American college student with the equally unlikely name of Zazel (Margot Kidder). And there’s also that title cousin, though it’s not clear how Quackser expects to escape modernity by moving to New York City. Most of the movie’s strange charm may lie in the title. It does have some fans who insist that Wilder and Kidder make a winning couple, as well as detractors who feel that the movie, like Quackser’s pushcart, is full of, um, blarney.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbk48E-lhTA]