Show-Off

By -- Richard Schickel

THE ONE AND ONLY

Directed by Carl Reiner

Screenplay by Steve Gordon

On the football field he fakes injury, mostly to draw the sympathetic cheers of the crowd. In the school play he insists on proving that there are no small parts, only small actors, thereby disrupting the show by turning a bit role in a tragedy into a major comic turn. On a date, he insists on loudly crooning Getting to Know You into the ear of his companion--in a crowded, stuffy restaurant.

In short, Andy Schmidt is a showoff, a permanent elbow in the eye of polite society. One can only be awed by the comic daring of everyone concerned with The One and Only for trying to make such a character appealing for the length of a movie. The One and Only does not quite make it, because even as portrayed by the likable Henry Winkler, Andy is finally a tiresome fellow. But the effort is a game one, and there is a certain originality about the fate that the film works out for Andy. Having failed as an actor in New York, he takes his special brand of egomania over to professional wrestling. The time is the early '50s. when the sport was a TV staple and a man with an arresting gimmick could become a star. Andy flops as a clean-cut hero and a rough-cut villain (in Nazi helmet and Hitler mustache), then finally reaches apotheosis as a Gorgeous George type -- golden curls, campy cape, mincing manner.

The movie is content to look back at wrestling's tacky milieu without trying to score any pretentious, socially significant points. It also leaves Andy happy with celebrity at any price, and that may be a mistake. Winkler's essential intelligence shines through anything he does, and it would not make his character's strange fate any less funny if, finally, he were permitted to discover that there was some thing missing from his scheme of values.

Indeed, some sense of growth in Andy would give the film a little more resonance than that of a well-made sitcom. It has good gags, and expert performances by Gene Saks as a dyspeptic manager and by Herve Villechaize as a midget wrestler who refuses to think small. They offer intimations of a picture that might have been memorable instead of merely inoffensive.

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