| | | A Comedy Beyond Belief.
Nicholas Cage, Holly Hunter and John Goodman star in Ethan and Joel Coen's acclaimed screwball love story filled with mad chases, unexpected plot twists and wild pyrotechnics. Vowing to go straight, a convenience store bandit (Cage) proposes marriage to the police department's photographer (Hunter). All is wedded bliss until they discover she's unable to get pregnant and are turned down by every adoption agency in town. It doesn't take long before they realize the only solution is to kidnap one of the town's celebrated quintuplets and hit the road!
"Sharp, inventive and hilarious, with a marvellous cast of Coen regulars." Channel 4 Film
"One of the most inventive, original, absolutely wacko comedies in years." Joel Siegel, Good Morning America
"...a wacky, happy, daring, darkly comic tale of parenting outside the law...It's a bundle of joy." Rita Kempley, The Washington Post
"An entertaining, energetic, and stylish comedy about a simple but loving couple who long to be parents." TV Guide
"A brilliant, original comedy...Wild, surreal and hilarious." VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever
Editor's Note
A childless couple unable to adopt decide that a couple who just had quintuplets won't mind if they steal one of the babies. Thus begins the Coen brothers' madcap romp RAISING ARIZONA. Holly Hunter stars as Ed, a cop who is devastated when she learns that she cannot get pregnant. Nicolas Cage is her husband, H.I., an ex-con who wants nothing more than to make his wife the happiest woman in the world. So if she wants a baby, she's going to have a baby, one way or another.Heading up the supporting cast of bizarre characters are John Goodman and William Forsythe as crazy cousins who have just busted out of prison, Sam McMurray and Frances McDormand as Ed and H.I.'s swinging friends, and Randall "Tex" Cobb as a motorcycle madman hired to rescue the baby. RAISING ARIZONA is the Coen brothers' most consistently funny film. Carter Burwell's score, replete with infectious yodeling, is relentless, Barry Sonnenfeld's cinematography is beautifully wacky, and the manic dialogue is the brothers' most quotable. The film is a treat for the ears and the eyes, a one-of-a-kind sensation from a marvelous pair of filmmakers.
Plot Summary
RAISING ARIZONA is a surreal, hyperactive farce in which a bumbling petty thief and the lady cop who keeps arresting him fall in love and decide to start a family. When they discover they can't have babies, they steal one from a furniture mogul who has just sired a set of quintuplets. The joys of parenthood are soon marred, however, by the difficulties of raising an infant on the run. The none-too-bright couple must flee across the southwestern desert in order to elude the villainous biker that has been hired to retrieve the tyke.
| Features | Audio: English, French Dolby Digital Stereo | | Dubbed: French | | Interactive Menus | | Original Theatrical Trailer | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, Spanish | | TV Spots |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Fox Home Entertainment |
| Release Date: 4/7/2009 |
| Running Time: 94 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1987 | | Catalog ID: 2257766 | | UPC: 00024543577669 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English, French Dubbed | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 1.85:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Memorable Quotes| "The first time I met Ed was in the county lockup in Tempe, Arizona. The day I'll never forget"----H.I. (Nicolas Cage), in voice--over | | "When they was no meat we ate fowl, when there was no fowl we ate crawdad. And when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand."----Cellmate (Sidney Dawson)|"You ate what?"----H.I. |"We ate sand."----Cellmate |"You ate sand?"----H.I. |"That's right."----Cellmate | | "So, why do you use the word 'trapped'?"----Prison Counselor|"Huh?"----Prisoner (Ruben Young)|"Why do you say you feel 'trapped' in a man's body?"----Prison Counselor|"Well, sometimes I get the menstrual cramps real hard."----Prisoner | | "You're not just telling us what we want to hear?"----Parole board member #1|"No sir, no way."----H.I.|"Cause we just want to hear the truth."----Parole board member #2|"Well, then I guess I am telling you what you want to hear."----H.I.|"Boy, didn't we just tell you not to do that?"----Parole board member #1|"Yes, sir."----H.I.|"Okay then."----Parole board member #1 | | "Me and Dot went in to adopt on account of somethin' went wrong with my semen and they said we had to wait five years for a healthy white baby. I said, 'Healthy white baby? Five years? Okay, what else ya got?' Said they got two Koreans and a negra born with his heart on the outside...It's a crazy world."----Glen (Sam McMurray) |"Someone oughta sell tickets."----H.I. |"Sure, I'd buy one."----Glen | | "...But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."----H.I., in voice--over | | "Ed felt that havin' a critter was the next logical step."----H.I., in voice--over | | "So come on down to Unpainted Arizona where you can get the finest selection in fixtures and appointments for your bathroom, bedroom, boudoir. And if you can find lower prices anywhere...my name ain't Nathan Arizona!"----Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) | | "I think we got the best one."----H.I. to Ed (Holly Hunter), regarding the baby, Nathan Jr. | | "He's an angel. He's an angel straight from heaven!"----Ed to H.I. | | "You...busted out of jail?"----Ed |"No ma'am, uh...we released ourselves on our own recognizance."----Evelle (William Forsythe)|"What Evelle means to say is, we felt that the institution no longer had anything to offer us."----Gale (John Goodman) | | "Nathan Jr. accepts me for what I am, and I think you better had too. You know honey, I'm OK, you're OK. That there's what it is!"----H.I. to Ed | | "Right, you hayseeds, it's a stick--up. Everybody freeze. Everybody down on the ground."----Gale |"Well, which is it, young feller? You want I should freeze or get down on the ground? I mean to say if'n I freeze, I can't rightly drop, and if'n I drop, I'm gonna be in motion. Ya see."----Feisty Hayseed (Rusty Lee) |"Shut up!"----Gale |"Okay then."----Feisty Hayseed | | "Do these blow into funny shapes and all?"----Evelle|"Well, no...unless round is funny."----Elderly grocer | | "Son, you got a panty on your head."----Hayseed in the Pickup (John O'Donnal) to H.I. | | "Gimme that baby, you warthog from hell!"----Ed to Leonard Smalls (Randall "Tex" Cobb) | | "I'll be taking these Huggies and, uh, whatever cash you got."----H.I. | | "It just ain't family life."----Ed |"Well, it ain't Ozzie and Harriet."----H.I. | | "Okay then."----spoken by many characters throughout the film |
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| | Professional Reviews | Sight and Sound
"...Wonderfully funny....Joel Coen is an original..." 06/01/1987 p.218-9Variety
"...Quirky humor and off-the-wall situations....As a director Coen demonstrates an assured technical touch..." 03/04/1987 Los Angeles Times
"...RAISING ARIZONA is miraculously adept technically....Nicolas Cage has crammed every ounce of sweet earnestness into Hi..." 03/20/1987 p.C1 USA Today
"...Still one of its year's best movies..." 04/30/1996 p.8D Apollo Movie Guide 8 of 10
Everyone and everything is larger than life in Raising Arizona...It's an amazing world...For H.I. (Nicolas Cage), life is pretty simple. He robs convenience stores; he goes to jail; he talks nice to a parole board; the cycle repeats itself. But this pattern is broken -- sort of -- when he meets the cop who takes his mug shots. With Ed (Holly Hunter), it's love at first sight, and after a few more cycles in and out of jail, H.I. gives Ed a ring and they're off to wedded bliss...The happy time is short-lived, as the quirky couple soon start pining for a little one...Raising Arizona is a remarkable spectacle of overblown characters, sights, sounds and events. Director Joel Coen, and his co-screenwriting brother Ethan, have created a fantastic and hilarious world that's close to the one we live in, but with the brightness turned way, way up. There's little room for subtlety here, and the audience doesn't mind in the least. Memorable scenes include the 'birth' of two screaming convicts (one played by John Goodman) who gain freedom from their underground tunnel by pushing their way out and into freedom through the mud created by a downpour...Both Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter were early in their careers when they made Raising Arizona, and each of them makes a great impact. Cage gives the good-hearted but consistently dazed H.I. an odd credibility. Wacky though he and everything around him may be, he actually seems real and exceedingly likeable. Hunter is even better as the diminutive police officer who falls for the crook. She's at once terse and cop-like uptight, and perpetually ready to spill over with emotion on a moment's notice. She too is delightfully likable...Raising Arizona is a cartoon-like movie that defines the word 'quirky' and is equally good whether you watch it purely for laughs or for its messages about the decency that's in almost everyone, no matter what their line of work or appearances. - Brian Webster
Chicago Sun-Times 5 of 10
I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters. They usually end up sounding silly. For every movie like "True Grit" that works with lines like "I was determined not to give them anything to chaff me about," there is a "Black Shield of Falworth," with lines like "Yonder lies the castle of my father." Generally speaking, it's best to have your characters speak in strong but unaffected English, especially when your story is set in the present. Otherwise they'll end up distracting the hell out of everybody...That's one of the problems with "Raising Arizona." The movie is narrated by its hero, a man who specializes in robbing convenience stores, but it sounds as if he just graduated from the Rooster Cogburn school of elocution. There are so many "far be it from me's" and "inasmuches" in his language that he could play Ebenezer Scrooge with the same vocabulary - and that's not what you expect from a two-bit thief who lives in an Arizona trailer park...The movie cannot decide if it exists in the real world of trailer parks and 7-Elevens and Pampers, or in a fantasy world of characters from another dimension. It cannot decide if it is about real people, or comic exaggerations. It moves so uneasily from one level of reality to another that finally we're just baffled. Comedy often depends on frustrating the audience's expectations. But how can it work when we don't have a clue about what to expect - when the movie itself doesn't know what is possible and what is not? "Raising Arizona" is the new work by the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, whose previous film was the superb thriller "Blood Simple." That was a movie that pushed reality as far as it could go within the rigid confines of a well-made thriller. "Raising Arizona" needs the same kind of restraint. It's all over the map. If the same story had been told straight, as a comic slice of life, it might have really worked. - Roger Ebert
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