Georgie Boy

By S.K.

Question: Who is Harry Kellerman and why is he saying those terrible things about me?

Answer: Harry Kellerman is the villain of a mystery-comedy. The questioner in the coy, interminable title of this film is Georgie Soloway (Dustin Hoffman). The mystery is why it should be called a comedy.

Hovering miserably around 40, Rock Composer Soloway has a score of gold platters, his picture on the cover of TIME, an airplane and a triplex atop Manhattan's General Motors building. But like something is missing. Truth, maybe. Or beauty. Whatever it is, girls start refusing his sack and his own psychiatrist (Jack Warden) muses, "Mr. Soloway, we must not rule out the possibility that you are a bird--a loony bird."

And a familiar one. In A Thousand Clowns, Scenarist Herb Gardner created Murray Burns, the same avian specimen ostentatiously hiding his self-pity in a cloak of jokes. Georgie is a blurred replica of Murray, surrounded by the same narcissistic suffering and arriving at the same lame insights: "Time is not a thief; he's an embezzler, juggling the books at night so you don't notice anything's missing."

Like many rock concerts, Harry Kellerman has about 15 minutes of entertainment and hours to kill. Accordingly, Director Ulu Grosbard shot endless footage of the sidewalks of New York City, a view of the city from the air, and Georgie and his shrink schussing downhill in the snow. The pictorial trickery cannot disguise the vapidity of the film.

Now and then a few bits gleam. Hoffman's sluggish nasal metabolism is still amusing if familiar; Barbara Harris has a few moving moments as an auditioning singer with only three good notes; and the late David Burns is the archetypal Jewish father who seems to have sired every writer from Philip Roth to Erich Segal. But that troupe would be funny reading subway signs. Maybe more so. . S.K.

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