Downward Mobility

By Christopher Porterfield

FUN WITH DICK AND JANE

Directed by TED KOTCHEFF

Screenplay by DAVID GILER, JERRY BELSON and MORDECAI RICHLER

Daddy has lost his job as an aerospace executive. The family finances are a shambles. Neighborhood stores have stopped giving credit where credit is overdue. What stern measures can the family bring itself to take in the face of this crisis? Simple. Dad will stop eating steak, Daughter will give up her skiing lessons, and Mom will resign from the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Viewers who find this response funny will be able to bounce along cheerfully with Fun with Dick and Jane. Dick and Jane Harper (George Segal and Jane Fonda) have been rudely awakened from the American dream. They find that downward mobility squeezes the middle class as much as upward mobility does. They are denied the legalistic safety nets of the rich, and they lack the street smarts to cut themselves in on such benefits of the poor as unemployment pay and food stamps. Since they are hopelessly overqualified for any available honest job, they turn to dishonest work. They begin a lucrative career as a holdup team.

Safe Targets. For better or for worse, this is a fairy tale, not a cutting satire. Neither the bullets nor the issues are real. Dick and Jane pick only safe targets; they knock over a telephone company office and win a round of applause from the queue of bill payers. Briskly propelled by Director Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), they skim through their adventures as innocently as a pair of prankish collegians. The only laws they are unable to flout are the iron laws of comic contrivance. They must, it seems, receive an implausible invitation to a party at the offices of the firm that fired Dick, for only then can they get at a huge slush fund that rests in the safe of Dick's ex-boss (played by TV's Ed McMahon).

Dresses must get snagged in closing doors. Pistols must slip maddeningly down trouser legs. Lines like Dick's complaint that he is not cut out for blue-collar crime must be spoken: "I have a white-collar mentality. I panic in the face of death."

Segal and Fonda are resourceful per formers. Fonda, improbably pert and stylish even while cleaning out a cash drawer, is especially winning. But both are forced to work hard to keep the laughs coming. So hard, in fact, that it al most hurts.

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