Head Trip

By R. S.

THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS Directed by Carl Reiner Screenplay by Carl Reiner, Steve Martin and George Gipe

How sweet it is to find a movie in which the hero, having lusted after purely carnal pleasures for much of its length, finally falls in love with a woman's mind.

That there is no body attached to it, that it is, in fact, a brain kept alive in a bottle by a half-mad scientist, might strike some people as a little funny. It will strike vaster numbers of them as very funny -- especially after Steve Martin pastes plastic lips on the bottle so he can kiss his beloved.

Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr (for a sample of this movie's longest-running gag, try pronouncing that name aloud) has been under a strain. A desperately randy brain surgeon ("I had the top of her head off, but that's as far as it went"), he marries one of his patients, only to discover that Dolores (well played by Kathleen Turner) is not as nice as she looks. After six weeks, she still refuses to consummate their union, although when someone has just undergone Hfuhruhurr's specialty, the cranial screw-top procedure, one tends to believe her when she claims to have a headache. Still, that's the least of her meanness, and one is sympathetic, even relieved, when Martin makes a citizen's divorce (it consists of making an announcement and taking a hike) in order to sin in his mind, as it were.

This is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations. There is something classically American about its monomaniacal pursuit of a gag every five seconds, characterization and redeeming social value be damned. The movie is rather like a Henny Youngman monologue combined with a National Lampoon spread. And it offers reassuring proof that the spirit of arrested adolescence lives on, at least for one more summer.

--R.S. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.