Star Spangled Girl

The prior year Jerry Paris had directed a movie that was problematic but actually felt like a movie ("The Grasshopper"). When he directed this version of a recent Neil Simon play, however he was in the middle of directing umpteen sitcom episodes and sitcom-ish TV movies, so no wonder this seems incredibly like a sitcom that has no business being on the big screen. The camerawork, the stagey sets, the score, everything is so TV-ish, you keep waiting for the commercial breaks. God, it's horrible. The mind reels at the fact that anything like this script managed to run nearly a year on Broadway (despite poor reviews), but then Simon was so hot at the time that even a play he realized was terrible was bound to be somewhat successful. The movie, however, was not.

Duncan was talented, but this is the nadir of the early "extra-perky girl" roles her career was trapped in for a while. The amazing thing is that Todd Susman, who plays one of two not-remotely-convincing "hippie" boys living next door to her Georgia emigre in Los Angeles, is much more grating. Tony Roberts cannot escape the pervasive sitcom rhythms, but manages to look comparatively good by simply not acting like a dog on its hind legs for 90 minutes. What passes for big comic setpieces, when they're not just like multicamera living-room sitcom scenes, are pathetically bad-the one where a duck gets loose at the YMCA pool makes the slapstick in Duncan's Disney vehicles look like Jacques Tati, it's so haplessly staged and edited.

How did this movie get made? Its prospects were so forlorn, the best it could manage was a title song sung by Davy Jones, the former Monkee whose own career as a recording artist died with the Prefab Four's demise some years earlier. This movie isn't just unfunny, it's shrill, flat, and rather desperate, with no one onscreen resembling a human being...or being entertaining as a caricature of one.