Sowing Wild Oafs

By Christopher Porterfield

HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK

Directed by MARK RYDELL Screenplay by JOHN BYRUM and ROBERT KAUFMAN

Movies like this are the price audiences have to pay for liking The Sting. Harry (James Caan) and Walter (Elliott Gould) are bumptious turn-of-the-century vaudevillians with more talent for stealing the customers' wallets than for stealing the show. Offstage they drink out of the finger bowls at posh restaurants, swat each other with their hats a la Laurel and Hardy and cause everything they touch to blow up in their faces, from a bottle of champagne to a vial of nitroglycerin. "They're not oafs," someone says of them. "They would require practice to become oafs."

Since they cannot crack Broadway, Harry and Walter decide the next best thing would be to break into a bank vault. Having met a notorious gentleman thief (Michael Caine) during a prison stretch, they filch the plans for his next job and try to beat him to it. Their unlikely accomplices: a radical newspaper editor (Diane Keaton) and her band of ragged reformers, who want to use the loot to set up a milk fund for New York City's poor.

The real quest of both sets of thieves is for some spark of genuine humor amid all these outrageous contrivances. The screenplay is little help. It keeps turning up yokel lines like, "Paris -- that's near Europe and Asia." Caan and Gould fall back on a series of frantic semaphores to the audience, calling attention to how adorably prankish they are being. Director Mark Rydell's notion of how to give shape to a scene apparently is to make it louder and faster. This does produce an occasional laugh, just as somebody pounding a piano with a baseball bat is bound to produce an occasional musical tone.

But taken in its two-hour entirety, Harry and Walter is not very tedious.

It would require practice to become tedious. Christopher Porterfield

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