Hey, it’s Burl here with a review of
another great Michael Ritchie picture! Like The Bad News Bears, this one concentrates on, and dissects in sublime,
satirical detail, one of Americaland’s favourite competitive pastimes! The
picture is Smile, and the subject,
ostensibly, is beauty pageants!
But like so many Ritchie films, the real
subject is middle-class America! Ha ha, as the picture begins we find ourselves
plunk in the middle of Santa Rosa, California, which is hosting the Young Miss
America statewide finals, featuring winning girls from all across the state!
The town is in a tizzy, and we follow some of the young ladies and a number of
the townsfolk through a week of life’s rich pageant! Ha ha, the approach is
Altmanesque, or you might say it was if the key Altman films of this sort had
come out earlier; but can you imagine, this picture and Nashville were shooting at exactly the same time in the summer of
’74! So is Smile Altmanesque, or is Nashville Ritchie-esque? Ha ha, both,
neither!
Our biggest star in the film is Bruce Dern,
well known from Django Unchained and
so many other films; but he’s not exactly the main character! Well, he’s close,
but the focus is mainly on the girls, and in particular a girl called Robin,
played with great appeal by Joan Prather from The Devil’s Rain! Robin is the one who can’t quite get into the
pageant spirit, and for this reason she seems the most sensible and intelligent
characters!
There are plenty of familiar faces among
the other girls! Annette O’Toole, who has always struck me as extraordinarily
beautiful, is excellent as a girl who knows a few pageant tricks; and we also
have such pretty and talented lasses as Melanie Griffith from Fear City, Caroline Williams from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Maria
O’Brien from Protocol, Colleen Camp
from Track 29, and Denise Nickerson,
Violet Beauregard herself from Willy
Wonka & the Chocolate Factory!
There are terrific performances from the
townsfolk too, especially that of Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 herself, as a
housewife who takes on organizational duties with an almost supernatural
fervor! We also get Geoffrey Lewis from ‘Salem’s Lot as another organizer, Dennis
Dugan from Night Moves as a janitor’s assistant, and three horny kids who seem
like the prototypes for any number of 80s teen sex comedy gangs! Ha ha, that
redheaded kid was a particular laff-riot!
Dern’s character is a local car salesman
and clubman, an eternal optimist and a true believer in the pageant and its principles!
There’s a scene in the middle of the picture in which Dern and his aging
fratboy clubmates have a big party in the woods, in which they dress in sheets
for some reason - not KKK sheets, but only just - and smash eggs on each others’
heads, and watermelons on their own! Frankly it looks like the absolute last
sort of party I’d ever want to attend, and that of course is the point! The
picture looks at middle class amusements and mores with the same acid eye of
someone like John Cheever!
The movie is shapeless in the best 1970s way,
frequently very funny, and has a nice little punchline! Ha ha, and the
punchline undercuts what I was seeing as a certain naïveté or willful blindness
in its attitude, so I was glad of that! Maybe it wasn’t the most realistic look
at the exploitation angle of these contests, but that’s okay! Ha ha, it doesn’t
have to be everything! Smile was
great just as it was, and I give it three wooden feet!
No comments:
Post a Comment