Sneer

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SMILE

Directed by MICHAEL RITCHIE

Screenplay by JERRY BELSON

It is hard to understand why anyone would bother to make Smile at all--let alone with loving, modish, professional care. The movie undertakes to point out that beauty contests--in this case, the California finals of the mythical Young American Miss Pageant--are vulgar and stupid exercises that bring out the worst in everyone: sponsors, contestants, audiences. This is not exactly big news. If it were, Bert Parks would be out of the last of his jobs, since the reason that most people tune in events like the Miss America Contest is to prove their cultural superiority to the few remaining dopes who take such matters seriously. Indeed, if there is any point at all in watching beauty contests at this late date, it is as a moral exercise: to see if one can pass beyond easy hilarity to develop compassion for those poor bimbos parading around in swimsuits and earnestly demonstrating their nonexistent talents. More and more, one finds perfectly ordinary televiewers confessing that they can no longer bear to watch the annual Atlantic City frolic.

Would that Writer Belson and Director Ritchie had exercised the same discretion, or perhaps developed some genuine sympathy for the exploited young women. They might even have at tempted the more difficult task of probing the psyches of the grown men and women who voluntarily expend time and energy organizing these events and share the illusion that the contests are "a good thing" for their communities.

Big Bob. Instead, the movie is one long cheap shot. Honcho of the pageant is "Big Bob" Freelander (Bruce Bern), who is--you guessed it--a used-car dealer. His friends from the Jaycees are variously venal and small-minded; their wives, we are given to understand, are frigid. Big Bob's little boy is caught by the cops trying to take pictures of the contestants in their undies through a dressing-room window. He intends to sell them, of course. And so it goes.

The one exception to the general air of unctuous duplicity is an outsider, a Hollywood choreographer brought in to stage the song-and-dance numbers. Appealingly played by real-life Choreographer Michael Kidd, he treats his charges roughly, without cant, but with genuine, humorously phrased care for their welfare. He almost cons the viewer into believing that the film actually has a heart ticking away fitfully some where near its sneer-meter.

But then one remembers that the Kidd character is intended to be a surrogate for the people who made Smile, that his adorableness is a projection of their own self-images. Somehow that seems to be the worst offense of all.

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