Chicken Feed

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS

Directed by Colin Higgins Screenplay by Larry L. King, Peter Masterson and Colin Higgins

On Broadway it used to be known as the 10:40 number. It is the song that comes about halfway through the second act, and it is designed to remind an audience deep into digestion and plot development that there is a musical going on around here. In the otherwise hopeless movie version of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the 10:40 is called Sidestep, and it falls to that rotund and expert character actor Charles Burning. He plays a Governor of Texas known for his ability to float away from difficult issues in a cloud of obfuscating verbiage. For Burning this obviously represents the opportunity of a hard-working lifetime, and the high-strutting job he does, the pleased-with-himself energy he brings to his caper through the rotunda of the state Capitol, is utterly infectious.

And utterly unexpected. By the time this lift comes along, one feels numbed and battered by the movie's relentless vulgarity. Whorehouse began as a Playboy article by Larry L. King about the life and death of a not-too-bawdy house known as the Chicken Ranch. The process of mythologizing the basic material started with a Broadway musical. By now the misguided newsman whose crusade shut down the historical Chicken Ranch has evolved into an unbelievably flamboyant TV reporter

(Dom DeLuise again, less lucky than he is in The Secret of NIMH). His part is so badly written that he never develops either menace or humor. The rest of the movie talks dirty in a witless way, yet always looks cute and sanitized. In its roundheeled way it wants to please everyone.

Burt Reynolds plays the beleaguered sheriff who has tolerated the Chicken Ranch, in part because he loves Mona, the madam (Dolly Parton). One has never seen him so glumly tentative in a role. Parton plays Mona as if Mae West had been cryonically preserved but someone didn't quite finish the job of unfreezing her while restoring her to life. What is mostly missing is a sense of comic authority. Parton has interpolated a couple of her plaintive country songs, which do not fit the brassy Broadway banalities of Carol Hall's basic score. On the other hand, as is generally the case when shows are restaged in a realistic movie context, the original numbers do not work either. They come out of nowhere and blow, rootless as tumbleweeds, across the Texas landscape. The writing is aimless when it is not offensive, and the picture appears to have been agglomerated rather than directed. Burning's achievement in the midst of all this incompetence is not just a high point; it is something like a miracle. -- By Richard Schickel

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