If you like to watch older films, sometimes you’ve got to bend the parameters of what “classic” means. Because if you’ve ever walked up on a Chevy Nova at a vintage car show, you know — some things are “Classics” and others are just plain old.

“The Fortune” pretty much put an end to Hollywood’s fascination with tales told from the ’20s and early ’30s. “Bonnie and Clyde” kicked off this “Gatsby” era fad. “The Sting” and “Paper Moon” represented its peak. And this Mike Nichols “comedy” and Peter Bogdanovich’s musical “At Long Last Love” drove stakes through its heart.

Nichols’ former comedy partner, Elaine May, had starred in, written and directed “A New Leaf” a couple of years before. Why not get Jack Nicholson‘s old acting class pal, actress turned writer Carole Eastman (“Five Easy Pieces,” “The Shooting”) to knock out another variation on that “marry for money and murder her” “comedy?”

The ’70s were nostalgic that way.

Jack and his Hollywood running mate Warren Beatty would star, and Stockard Channing would play the rich, high-strung and dizzy “victim,” whose mood swings would give the Broadway baby a chance to storm about and sing. Beatty sings, too. Imagine that.

Nichols, who’d helped found the Second City comedy troupe and taken New York by storm as half of the Nichols & May comedy act, already had “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “The Graduate” and “Catch-22” on his resume. He’d make “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Working Girl” and “The Birdcage” in his later years.

I once sat a few rows over from him and May in the back of the theater in a theatrical out-of-town tryouts city in the South as they pondered a stage dramedy being rehearsed and performed, looking for ways it could be “fixed.” They provided that service a lot, because nobody knew comedy better.

But “The Fortune,” while light and kind of antic, barely has a laugh in it. Brisk and occasionally loud, the script never quite hits the funnybone and the players can’t compensate for that.

Where it went wrong, I think, is in the very conceit that “sells” it. It’s a Mann Act comedy.

The joke is that because transporting (women, at the time the act was written) “across state lines for immoral purposes,” aka prostitution or sexual reasons was illegal (ask Chuck Berry, Jeffrey Epstein or Matt Gaetz about that), “the lengths some people would go to” in order to run off with a woman might be funny.

It turns out, it isn’t. In our human-trafficking/child-trafficking obsessed era, nobody would have dared to make a comedy out of this.

All that follows happens shortly after the Mann Act was passed, and just after Lindbergh’s “lucky” flight across the Atlantic.

Beatty plays Nicky Wilson, a married man who can’t get a divorce and be with his beloved, Freddie (Channing). So he gets lowlife embezzler Oscar Dix (Nicholson) to join him and her as they flee “back east” for “out west.” Oscar will marry Freddie as a cover story and all three will start over in the Land of Opportunity — California.

Oscar seems like an agreeable oaf in all this. But he knows that Freddie’s real name is F.Q. Bigard, “Fredrika Quintessa Bigard.” And all the bullying and “Do you wanna go to jail or do you wanna go to California” bluster from mustachioed Nicky can’t throw dim-Oscar off the scent. This broad comes from money.

She may wail how “daddy” has disowned her by this rash act. But Oscar turns on the charm because Oscar doesn’t trust Nicky, and not just because of the mustache.

“You know a man of means and a mean man oftens means the same?”

They travel by Ford Trimotor plane, train and automobile to sundrenched SoCal. And that’s where things really go wrong. Because bitter Nicky is losing faith, and Oscar finally gets the “money” admission out of him. With Nicky’s divorce never quite coming through and Oscar suddenly reluctant to get out of this arranged marriage, can these two dolts go through with what they back into as a solution — murdering Freddie, faking her suicide, to collect the surviving spouse inheritance?

The few chances “The Fortune” has to be madcap is in the botched efforts to do away with the annoying but undeserving-of-this Freddie. She can’t handle her booze, so that’s how they’ll make her “manageable” so that they can pull off her untimely demise.

Nicky might be the mastermind, but he’s no Einstein. And Oscar? He’s a wild-haired, impulsive liability. Hilarity ensues, except it never quite does.

The film’s mixed-reviews, then and now, are merely showing respect to all the talent involved. This is a weak to worse-than-weak screenplay. And all of Beatty, Nicholson and Channing’s over-the-top efforts and all of Nichols’ attempts to cast funny bit players (cornpone Dub Taylor as a rattlesnake salesman, ancient Ian Wolfe as a justice of the peace, mousie John Fiedler as a cute-pose-oriented police photographer, “Barney Miller” actress Florence Stanley as a landlady Scatman Crothers has an eyewitness fisherman) come to naught.

One thought I had, noticing then-unknown Christopher Guest, playing a Lothario parking and making out with his girlfriend in one scene, is that Guest might have been inspired by this debacle to create a whole series of movies about confident, determined and deluded “creative types” foundering and blundering their way into fiascos.

He could see “The Big Picture.” All it took was “Waiting for Guffman” and “For Your Consideration” for it to come to fruition.

Everybody else pulled their fedoras down over their eyes and skulked off to make “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Heaven Can Wait,” “Grease” and (eventually, as Nichols turned to the stage because of a run of big screen flops) “Heartburn,” pretending “The Fortune” never happened.

Rating: PG

Cast: Warren Beatty, Stockard Channing, Jack Nicholson, Dub Taylor, Scatman Crothers, Richard B. Schull and Florence Stanley.

Credits: Directed by Mike Nichols, scripted by Carole Eastman (aka Adrien Joyce). A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:28