Star Spangled Girl

This rates high on my scale of lousiest movies, only slightly better than "Dudley-do-Right", which probably says it all.

Sandy Duncan wasted her bubbly talent playing Amy Cooper, southern Olympic swimmer, who comes to LA to work and train, and (unfortunately), becomes neighbors with two radical newspaper publishers (Tony Roberts and Todd Susman), whose liberal ideas clash with her traditional conservatism. This could have been a good movie if it had been just Amy and Andy Hobart (Roberts), as it could have turned into one of those love stories, where the couple are real opposites and clash a lot, but then fall in love.

Instead, they had to throw Norman Cornell (Susman) in, when he should have been thrown out! The whole character was ridiculous, like he O. D'd on uppers mixed with acid. He wasn't funny, he wasn't even silly, he was just plain ridiculous, so much so, that he's embarrassing to watch. He gets a case of love at first sight (or in his case, smell) for Amy, apparently addicted to the scent of her hair. He then proceeds to make a nuisance of himself, to the point of harrassment. (Today, he'd be arrested for stalking!) There was nothing funny about any of this, it was just plain annoying!

The rest of the movie fell flat, as the whole basis of what the newspaper stood for, Amy's own traditional standards, and some of the realities of life in the city in the early 70's were downplayed and a lot of nonsense (like a duck running wild in the YWCA) took center stage, instead.

It's hard to believe this was based on a Neil Simon play, unless someone put his name to it, as a (very bad) joke.

SKIP THIS ONE, LIKE I WISH I HAD!

Sandy Duncan exchanges verbal jabs with Susman and Roberts in a film that doesn't much other than urge a weak grin on the viewers face. The dialogue is over done, marginally self referencing, and dated. It felt like Neil Simon was trying to stick with the times as American culture was transforming, but wound up dating himself.

It's not a bad film as such, but showcases a kind of self indulgent nature by the theatre elite who want more to show their abilities for the sake of it. Not a bad aim, but it does get somewhat tiring.

I think one of the key things about this film is that there isn't too much umph. And it could be because Simon is slightly out of his element here, writing about a place he wants to be part of, but is wholly unfamiliar with. Ergo we get quick witted Southern California characters with New York sensibilities, when their social extraction is Manhattan beach, and not Manhattan itself.

Still, it has a certain charm, even if the characters are reluctant fish out of water via Simon's writing. Southern California doesn't bother with lots of well educated verbiage loaded with political references, but more rather how life can be easier, and is not to be taken too seriously. So it is with the LA metroplex with lots of petty desires and image seeking. So it is that Simon misses the mark with this play set in such a milieu, and so it is that Star Spangled Girl remains an interesting experiment.

See it once.

Two journalist-radicals find themselves attracted to a patriotic Olympic hopeful. Sparks fly as they find themselves sparring with her on political subjects, while trying to win her over romantically. Naturally the politics get in the way, but in the end everybody comes to their own philosophical accommodations and try to get along. Aww.

The movie looks quite good despite a modest budget, but part of the reason for this is that it is just another filmed play, with limited cinematic ambitions beyond creating a credible scenic background for the dialogue. This is true of so many adaptations of stage plays: they tend to be no more visually sophisticated than the average sit-com. SSG is well cast, with Tony Roberts especially good in one of his trademark fast-talking roles as one of the radicals. Sandy Duncan looks cute and holds her own as the stubborn, clean-cut object of his romantic attention and political exasperation. Known for family friendly TV projects mostly, Sandy nevertheless could reach down and give her end of the dialog a little spitfire bite where necessary. Go girl!

The script itself reads a bit 'lite' as an exercise in political head- banging though. The Vietnam period was ALL about politics and revolution and youth culture and the 'radicals' seem rather tame and naive in that context. Neil Simon could have found stronger stuff in ANY underground newspaper around at that time than he put into the script, and this tends to weaken the credibility of everything. The movie is clearly aimed at a middle American audience and tries not to be too frightening or threatening on the subject of political strife. That wouldn't play in Kansas City, as the movie moguls used to say.

Worth a watch.

I watched the first 20-25 minutes and had to shut it off. Sandy Duncan is too cute as Amy, but Todd Susman's character, Norman, is the prototype for the desperate virgin later seen in "Porky's" and satirized in "Not Another Teen Movie". He has as much depth and subtlety as a Tex Avery cartoon. Tony Roberts is merely a younger version of Oscar Madison with the same quips and delivery. In truth, he and Susman are toned down versions of Martin and Lewis, with Roberts as the smooth sexpot and Susman as the insufferable loony. If there was a spark of originality in this film, it went out around 1979.

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.