Smack on the Balcony

By * i.C.

The young American slumps languidly at a cafe table in Venice. Suddenly, a vision! A blonde, fair-skinned creature crosses the canal by balancing on the edge of a footbridge. Enchanted, he goes over to make conversation: "Can I show you Venice?"

So much for dialogue. Jennifer on My Mind is the saga of the ill-fated relationship born at this moment. Hero Marcus (Michael Brandon) is a footloose heir with a wallet and a head full of dough. Heroine Jennifer (Tippy Walker) is a flighty little psychopath with a couple of nasty habits--bitchiness and dope. After leading Marcus a merry chase from Venice to New York City and back again, she gives him the slip. He returns to the U.S. and settles down in an apartment in New Jersey, of all places, to try to forget. Jenny, by now badly strung out on heroin, finds him and does her balancing act once more --this time on his balcony. He rescues her, she has hysterics. To quiet her he gives her another shot of smack, which kills her.

This will come as a surprise to no one, since the film--told largely in flashbacks--opens with a shot of Jenny's corpse. What is surprising is that Jennifer on My Mind is allegedly a comedy. The subject, which has only slightly less comic potential than Bangla Desh, was written up with unbounded vulgarity by Erich Segal, who has wrung laughs from young love and leukemia in his time. As in Love Story, however, they are all the wrong kind.

The movie was directed by Noel Black, who several years back made a quirkish little black comedy called Pretty Poison. None of the shrewd, chilly humor present in that effort can be detected in Jennifer on My Mind. There are only two small bright moments: Peter Bonerz does a funny, lamentably brief turn as an unctuous psychiatrist. And Robert De Niro appears as a speed-freak gypsy cab driver who doesn't want to take Marcus to Oyster Bay. "Come up, see my sister instead," De Niro leers. Marcus declines, and as De Niro hurls his purple Day-Glo cab into gear, he screams, "The gypsies lose again!"

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