Double Feature

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MOVIE MOVIE Directed by Stanley Donen Screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller

The only question raised by Movie Movie is one of timing. Not that there is anything wrong with the way gags are paced within the film. Stylish Stanley Donen, who co-directed Singin' in the Rain and later did Charade and Two for the Road, has seen to that with his usual elan. No, what one wonders is whether after living off its own history for so long, satirizing and parodying the beloved forms of the movies' far-receded golden age, Hollywood can persuade audiences to come out again to share a laugh at lost innocence.

They are well advised to do so in this instance. For Movie Movie is the most detailed and carefully worked parody of them all, a good-natured and expert send-up not only of what was silly about the movies that, thanks to TV, continue-to shape our collective unconscious, but what was enduringly entertaining about them as well.

The picture is actually two pictures, an old-fashioned double feature consisting of a black-and-white boxing story, Dynamite Hands, and a Technicolor backstage musical, Baxter's Beauties of 1933. Both are supposed to be program features, that is, routine fare produced by the same mythical studio, Warren Bros., an outfit definitely to be confused with Warner Bros.

Like the products of such factories in the '30s, actors from the same term-contract stable are to be seen in both movies, as are the same hopelessly unrealistic standing sets, only cursorily redecorated. In the first, a New York errand boy (Harry Hamlin), affronted by a contender, knocks him out with a single punch and is induced to abandon his quest for a night-school law degree in order to enter the square circle (about the only cliche not to be heard in the script), in order to earn money for an operation to save his sister's eyesight. "You'll be on the next train to Vienna,'' he tells her, his dimness about geography matching his dimness about the fast women and corrupting mobsters he meets on his rise to the top. Aided by his gruff but honest manager (George C. Scott), his faithful second (Red Buttons), and the love of a good woman (Trish Van Devere), he refuses to tank his big fight and somehow manages to get his law degree. In one of those lightning denouements that were a feature of this kind of moviemaking, he becomes a district attorney so that he can prosecute the heavy (Eli Wallach) for murder.

The musical features Scott as a producer with a month left to live. As his doctor (Art Carney) tells him, his inexplicable illness is one that seems only to afflict show people. Scott's last show must be a hit in order for him to leave a proper inheritance to the daughter he has never seen as a grownup. She, of course, turns out to be the chorus girl who saves the show by secretly advancing him money and then going on when the temper amental star (Van Devere) incapacitates herself. The juvenile she falls in love with --he is an accountant who composes a hit score overnight--is played by Barry Bostwick, who is also a gangster in Dynamite Hands, which wins for him the versatility award for this picture and serious consideration as a very promising newcomer.

But it is the writers of Movie Movie who really deserve the largest prize, because they have skewed the tough-sentimental dialogue conventions of the old behind-the-scenes-in-a-tough-racket genre so deftly. Whether they are just aping the old strained metaphors ("One day you're standing in the wings, the next day you're wearing them," Producer Scott mutters just before expiring) or gloriously scrambling them ("Angle's eyes are below the belt," says her brother when someone refers to the impending operation in the boxing picture), their ear for the silly sound of olden times is true. There are perhaps a few too many good lines, but Donen and his cast casually throw them away, so we are undistracted by their cleverness. Because no one is bent on proving his superiority to the past, we can root for these lunatics even as we laugh at them. In short, the movie gently embraces its heritage and encourages us to do the same. -- Richard Schickel

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