Cineman-32

This is a modest but affecting little film. Besides his gift for one-line zingers, Neil Simon has a way of giving his characters lines that are both surprising and believable. Dinah Manoff is perhaps a bit abrasively cooky at first, but she moderates the Brooklyn shtick after awhile and comes over as more complex and real. Walter Matthau as her bewildered but finally disarmed dad is consummately believable. Ann Margaret has little to do, but she does it with superb subtlety. Just watch how well she listens and understands

After all the relentlessly hyped bad movies, it's a treat to stumble on a gem that was shelved or underpublicized a few years ago, this one on the Romance Channel. (This channel turns out to be, surprisingly, a source for some excellent modest movies in addition to the occasional bodice-ripper). "Rich in Love" is a 1992 movie that manages to be heart-warming without sentimentality. The focus is on a high-school girl (Kathryn Erbe) whose mother, with great deliberation, has walked out on the likeable slob of a father (Albert Finney) and her. The girl, Lucy, misses her high-school graduation in order to stabilize her stunned father, to try to understand the action of her mother (Jill Clayburgh), to head off her dad's new girlfriend (Tuesday Weld), and to cope with her neurotic older sister when she makes a surprise appearance with a new husband and an unwanted pregnancy. Finney, whom I find insufferably mannered in most of his recent roles, is marvelously believable as a cheerful but bewildered southern good-ol' boy. Weld and Clayburgh are both equally good as very different and very real women. Still, the acting honors, which the whole cast earns, go especially to Erbe who plays the youngest daughter with a kind of low-key truth and strength that is a pleasure to watch. One of the chief charms of the direction is a sense of reality in the place. Almost every scene evokes small-town South Carolina, and even the interiors of three houses seem far more like actual places than Hollywood usually manages. This movie is the antithesis of "sensational," but when your last megamonster movie leaves a crater in your memory, you will