Cinema: What's So Bad About Feeling Good?

"Ah, ya mudder sleeps in pay toilets," grouses a guttural voice. The place could be nowhere but Manhattan, where a bunch of grass-puffing adult dropouts 'ive in communal squalor. But when a toucan with an exotic virus wings in he window, everyone suddenly breaks out in smiles.

The disease, it develops, is a rampant euphoria that turns New Yorkers off liquor and tranquilizers and into platonically perfect citizens. The most alienated hippie (George Peppard) turns happy, his tacky chick (Mary Tyler Moore) turns chic, and they promptly infect the town with their beatitude. Industry and commerce slow to a standstill until the Government sends an investigator (Dom DeLuise) who restores the right amount of sullen chaos.

What's So Bad? is the kind of fantasy comedy that depends heavily on the audience's suspension of disbelief for success. This time, disbelief is almost impossible to overcome, thanks to a clumsy script that features such antique devices as a shoe-banging Russian U.N. delegate, cliché-spouting admen and a sound track that plays The Dragnet Theme whenever the fuzz appear.

Occasionally, there is some real fun in Fun City—notably a caricature by John McMartin of a Lindsay-like mayor who listens to bad news while a perpetual smile congeals on his face like a soft-boiled egg. But such high moments are rare, and most of the time the answer to that long questioning title is the movie itself.