Cinema: The Dumb Way

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STAR SPANGLED GIRL

Directed by JERRY PARIS

Screenplay by ARNOLD MARGOLIN and JIM PARKER

This is an adaptation of one Neil Simon play that the author might like to forget. The heroine, an aspiring Olympic swimmer, is a jabbering pixy whose notion of Americanism Dr. Carl Mclntire might find a tad overzealous. The premise—a little flimsy even for a half-hour episode on a TV sitcom—is that this young lady drives two underground California journalists into transports of romantic ecstasy.

Star Spangled Girl declares itself fervently in favor of mindlessness in all forms. Despite herself, the girl falls for one of the journalists. She boards a Greyhound for her home in Cypress Gardens, Fla., presumably in order to recover from her passion. The lovesick radical pursues her on his motorcycle and woos her off the bus by vowing to take her home and make her a sex object, an appeal that for some unexplained reason enchants her.

The movie marks the debut of that unrelentingly cute television personality. Sandy Duncan. She manages such soliloquies as "I may believe in a lot of dead things like patriotism and the Constitution, and I like apple pie, because that's the dumb way I was brought up and that's the dumb way I feel" with appalling conviction.