Star Spangled Girl

I watched the first 20-25 minutes and had to shut it off. Sandy Duncan is too cute as Amy, but Todd Susman's character, Norman, is the prototype for the desperate virgin later seen in "Porky's" and satirized in "Not Another Teen Movie". He has as much depth and subtlety as a Tex Avery cartoon. Tony Roberts is merely a younger version of Oscar Madison with the same quips and delivery. In truth, he and Susman are toned down versions of Martin and Lewis, with Roberts as the smooth sexpot and Susman as the insufferable loony. If there was a spark of originality in this film, it went out around 1979.

Sandy Duncan exchanges verbal jabs with Susman and Roberts in a film that doesn't much other than urge a weak grin on the viewers face. The dialogue is over done, marginally self referencing, and dated. It felt like Neil Simon was trying to stick with the times as American culture was transforming, but wound up dating himself.

It's not a bad film as such, but showcases a kind of self indulgent nature by the theatre elite who want more to show their abilities for the sake of it. Not a bad aim, but it does get somewhat tiring.

I think one of the key things about this film is that there isn't too much umph. And it could be because Simon is slightly out of his element here, writing about a place he wants to be part of, but is wholly unfamiliar with. Ergo we get quick witted Southern California characters with New York sensibilities, when their social extraction is Manhattan beach, and not Manhattan itself.

Still, it has a certain charm, even if the characters are reluctant fish out of water via Simon's writing. Southern California doesn't bother with lots of well educated verbiage loaded with political references, but more rather how life can be easier, and is not to be taken too seriously. So it is with the LA metroplex with lots of petty desires and image seeking. So it is that Simon misses the mark with this play set in such a milieu, and so it is that Star Spangled Girl remains an interesting experiment.

See it once.

A woman trying out for the Olympics moves into a suburban home next to a couple of extremists lefty nuts who publish a little underground newspaper (back in the day when both parties distrusted government overreach and the media, before one seized a stranglehold on both). One of them (Todd Susman, Officer Shiflett from "Newhart") falls hard for the girl and makes a nuisance of himself. So?

Neil Simon wrote some great plays. He also wrote lots of twaddle (try "The Cheap Detective" or "Murder By Death," which has a great cast with nothing to say).

The Olympian (perky Sandy Duncan) is "conservative." I despise terms like "left" and "right" and "liberal" and "conservative" (or even "radical" since Republicans and their ilk were called "radical" under Presidents Lincoln and Trump). All these terms are historically meaningless. The USSR types who kidnapped Gorbachev were called "conservative" even though "liberals" here want exactly what they wanted: viz., a Communist autocracy.

But they're the terms we have to use because we're too ignorant to have jargon with greater precision in our combative political vocabulary.

As a writer myself (though not of plays) I can only smile at the likes of Simon, who probably never rubbed shoulders with a "conservative" but out of the depths of his ignorance sets up easy targets he smugly knocks down with softballs.

Curiously enough, though, the "conservative" America-loving Duncan is the only sympathetic character in the movie, terrorized as she is by Susman.

Frankly, the publishers of the underground paper aren't too radical. They're just a couple of nice boys too full of themselves. Tony Roberts' "radicalism" is no deeper than apparently wanting to tear things down simply because they're there. Susman doesn't seem to have the gumption or wherewithal to operate without Roberts' tyranny over him. Yet Susman is the only one who earns any genuine smiles.

Frankly, when I go to the movies I don't want political debate, even with soft targets and idiots on both sides. Simon's constant stream of dialogue gets tiresome quickly. Hardly a great movie; but if you love Simon and have to see everything he wrote, go for it.

The prior year Jerry Paris had directed a movie that was problematic but actually felt like a movie ("The Grasshopper"). When he directed this version of a recent Neil Simon play, however he was in the middle of directing umpteen sitcom episodes and sitcom-ish TV movies, so no wonder this seems incredibly like a sitcom that has no business being on the big screen. The camerawork, the stagey sets, the score, everything is so TV-ish, you keep waiting for the commercial breaks. God, it's horrible. The mind reels at the fact that anything like this script managed to run nearly a year on Broadway (despite poor reviews), but then Simon was so hot at the time that even a play he realized was terrible was bound to be somewhat successful. The movie, however, was not.

Duncan was talented, but this is the nadir of the early "extra-perky girl" roles her career was trapped in for a while. The amazing thing is that Todd Susman, who plays one of two not-remotely-convincing "hippie" boys living next door to her Georgia emigre in Los Angeles, is much more grating. Tony Roberts cannot escape the pervasive sitcom rhythms, but manages to look comparatively good by simply not acting like a dog on its hind legs for 90 minutes. What passes for big comic setpieces, when they're not just like multicamera living-room sitcom scenes, are pathetically bad-the one where a duck gets loose at the YMCA pool makes the slapstick in Duncan's Disney vehicles look like Jacques Tati, it's so haplessly staged and edited.

How did this movie get made? Its prospects were so forlorn, the best it could manage was a title song sung by Davy Jones, the former Monkee whose own career as a recording artist died with the Prefab Four's demise some years earlier. This movie isn't just unfunny, it's shrill, flat, and rather desperate, with no one onscreen resembling a human being...or being entertaining as a caricature of one.

I watched this movie on DVD after seeing a Living In TV Land on tape that featured Davy Jones knowing that his song,"Girl", would be in this movie after reading the other comments on this film. (Personal note: I saw Jones on stage at the Florida Theatre in Jacksonville, FL , where he performed this song in The Real Live Brady Bunch which enacted the episode that had Marcia trying to get him to her prom.) Based on a Neil Simon play adapted by Arnold Margolin and Jim Parker, Star Spangled Girl comes through fast and furious with the wisecracks that makes us forgive the initial annoyingness of the lead characters played by Sandy Duncan, Tony Roberts, and especially Todd Susman in a role completely different from Officer Shifflet on Newhart. Jerry Paris' direction times everything with a sledgehammer that hits more than misses occasionally slowing down so we can take a breath. If you're a fan of all of the above players as well as composer Charles Fox, what are you waiting for? By all means, seek this one out! By the way, Susman would later be the voice of the Greyhound dog on TV and radio. In case anyone didn't notice, Duncan rides Greyhound buses in the movie.