With his wayward orange mane and glazed fish-green eyes. Gene Wilder conveys a beguiling look of incipient madness. In his films to date he has seemed always on the verge of lurching into some marvelously insane enterprise. For a time he worried about becoming typecast as Hollywood's favorite neurasthenic comedian. "There was always a reservoir of hysteria in me that I could call upon as an actor," says Wilder. "As I grew out of it, I became more and more dissatisfied with the parts I was playing. But Hollywood, of course, couldn't keep up with my psychological advancement. So I played hysterical accountants [The Producers], nervous undertakers [Bonnie and Clyde], and mad aristocrats [Start the Revolution Without Me]."
Hollywood has caught up at last. Wilder, 35, has lately been besieged with scripts and has sifted through them with his own brand of mad logic. What sort of actor would turn down a tempting offer from Mike Nichols to play in Catch-22, but accept the lead role as a Dublin manure spreader in a film improbably titled Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in The Bronx? To everyone's good fortune (especially his own), Wilder did just that. Says he: "Quackser was the idealization of everything I've wanted to do as an actor. He typifies where I'm at now—humorous, sexual, innocent and striving for simplicity." Wilder's delicate blend of humor and pathos makes the viewer think he is seeing young Charlie Chaplin with reddish hair and an Irish brogue. It also makes Quackser Fortune one of the most delightful comic dramas in recent years.
Quackser is an urban savage who prefers shoveling horse manure from the streets of Dublin and spreading it on ladies' flowers to working in the foundry with his father. Without Wilder's protean talents, the film could have been absurd: an upper-middle-class American girl studying at Trinity College (Margot Kidder) nearly runs Quackser over in an MG but winds up taking him to her farewell dance and ultimately to bed. Wilder makes the affair believable by investing his role with an appealing integrity as well as sexual overtones; he himself added two scenes early in the film in which Quackser stays his daily rounds long enough to dally with a lusty Gaelic wench. The romance is only part of the film; the rest concerns Quackser's slow, painful acceptance of the inexorability of civilization. He is forced to a showdown with himself when the last milkwagon horses are cleared from the streets, and his eventual compromise is both whimsical and affecting.