Star Spangled Girl

Neil Simon's Broadway dud, which featured Connie Stevens, Anthony Perkins and Richard Benjamin, has been recast but not rethought for this unbearable screen-translation. The grating text has been preserved as if each verbal volley was actually worth keeping. If this picture were to succeed at all, screenwriters Arnold Margolin and Jim Parker should have thrown out most of the source material and started from scratch. Twangy-voiced swimmer Sandy Duncan, an Olympic hopeful arriving in Los Angeles to teach and to train, gets mixed up with her nutty bungalow neighbors, a writer and an editor for a protest newspaper (the Nitty Gritty...its motto is "A Remedy for a Sick Society"). Duncan ends up working for the fellas, but she can't cook, can't type, and can't take shorthand. She pretends not to know how to dust. The guys (Tony Roberts and manic Todd Susman) pretend to find her adorable. Actually, Duncan has an appealing personality, but the silly voice she uses here (coupled with the dim lines) just about ruins her chances of charming the audience. The picture is over-lit, over-directed, over-acted, and completely underwhelming. * from ****

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.

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!

A woman trying out for the Olympics moves into a suburban home next to a couple of extremists lefty nuts who publish a little underground newspaper (back in the day when both parties distrusted government overreach and the media, before one seized a stranglehold on both). One of them (Todd Susman, Officer Shiflett from "Newhart") falls hard for the girl and makes a nuisance of himself. So?

Neil Simon wrote some great plays. He also wrote lots of twaddle (try "The Cheap Detective" or "Murder By Death," which has a great cast with nothing to say).

The Olympian (perky Sandy Duncan) is "conservative." I despise terms like "left" and "right" and "liberal" and "conservative" (or even "radical" since Republicans and their ilk were called "radical" under Presidents Lincoln and Trump). All these terms are historically meaningless. The USSR types who kidnapped Gorbachev were called "conservative" even though "liberals" here want exactly what they wanted: viz., a Communist autocracy.

But they're the terms we have to use because we're too ignorant to have jargon with greater precision in our combative political vocabulary.

As a writer myself (though not of plays) I can only smile at the likes of Simon, who probably never rubbed shoulders with a "conservative" but out of the depths of his ignorance sets up easy targets he smugly knocks down with softballs.

Curiously enough, though, the "conservative" America-loving Duncan is the only sympathetic character in the movie, terrorized as she is by Susman.

Frankly, the publishers of the underground paper aren't too radical. They're just a couple of nice boys too full of themselves. Tony Roberts' "radicalism" is no deeper than apparently wanting to tear things down simply because they're there. Susman doesn't seem to have the gumption or wherewithal to operate without Roberts' tyranny over him. Yet Susman is the only one who earns any genuine smiles.

Frankly, when I go to the movies I don't want political debate, even with soft targets and idiots on both sides. Simon's constant stream of dialogue gets tiresome quickly. Hardly a great movie; but if you love Simon and have to see everything he wrote, go for it.