16th Favorite Movie - Raising Arizona

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

Raising Arizona is a movie that I think I will watch again every year or so for the rest of my life. It is that enjoyable.

The film begins with H.I. (played by Nicholas Cage) being thrown in jail for armed robbery. He has a bunkmate who rambles on and on about his childhood in a "Bubba" sort of way: "and when there was no meat, we ate fowl. And when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad. And when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand." In a movie full of memorable secondary characters, this guy is my favorite. H.I. gets out of jail, robs again, gets thrown back in jail, gets out, and decides to propose to Edwina, played by Holly Hunter, who works as a guard at the jail. They get married, and try to start a family, but as H.I. tells it "her insides was a rocky place in which my seed could find no purchase." Edwina gets so depressed she quits her job at the jail and mopes around all day. Then they hear about a couple in Arizona having septuplets, and figure the mom and dad "got more than they can handle", so they set off to kidnap one of the babies.

And that all happens before the opening credits, in what has to be the longest intro in cinematic history.

Like all Coen brothers movies, the ingenuity here is in the writing. Here are some of my favorite lines from Raising Arizona:

"Do these balloons blow up into funny shapes and all?"
"No, not unless round is funny."

"Ya hear that? We're using code names."

"What would happen if you went outside and got run down by a truck, then how would Ed Jr. be provided for?"
"Yeah, honey, what if you get run over?!"

But my favorites come from the mouth of Nathan Arizona Sr.:

"No leads!? Everybody leaves microbes 'n what not!"

"I don't know what his *dang* jammies looked like! They had Yodas and *stuff* on 'em!"

When asked for his comment on the theory that aliens took his baby, he says, "Son don't go printing that. If his momma reads that, she's just gonna lose all hope."

This movie has pretty much everything you expect to find in a Coen brothers movie: great dialogue, funny accents, memorable facial expressions, dream sequences, a ridiculous plot, an element of fantasy, John Goodman and Frances McDormand. I don't think they had discovered Steve Buscemi yet.