Petty Larceny

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THIEVES

Directed by JOHN BERRY Screenplay by HERB GARDNER

In the first act of Thieves an adorable young couple fall to squabbling. In the second act they decide to take it to the divorce courts. In the third act they get back together again. No, the theatrical terminology is not a mistake. Herb Gardner has not so much adapted his Broadway comedy as retyped it in screenplay form. Despite a fair amount of New York City location shooting, the old act breaks are so apparent in the movie that it is as if a curtain had fallen to mark them off. Worse, the dialogue retains its aimed-at-the-balcony archness, a self-conscious cuteness that destroys any hope of inducing a suspension of disbelief. Nobody --thank heaven--talks like this for more than a few moments at a time, and two hours of such highly stylized gabble are enough to send one screaming from the theater.

Unamusing Neurotics. The marital combatants are Mario Thomas and Charles Grodin, and the casus belli is their upward social mobility. He has become the headmaster of a fashionable Manhattan private school; she is still teaching in a public school in a slum. He is very pleased with their new high-rise apartment; she is so displeased that she has sent their antique furniture to their first apartment on the Lower East Side, in the neighborhood where they grew up. He is glumly preoccupied with getting and spending, she with gaminish stratagems designed to break through his fagade of indifference. None of these are as amusing as she (or Gardner) thinks they are. A powerful odor of neuroticism -- anything but funny -- emanates from both parties.

Gardner, as he showed in A Thousand Clowns, is a writer who comes armed with a little atomizer. It is filled with a blend of heartwarming innocence and sweet-spirited childishness, with which he tries to freshen the air when all this plotting gets too thick. But since his story includes, among other misadventures, a one-night stand for each of his protagonists, an unwanted pregnancy and consequent flirtation with abortion, not to mention such urban delights as an attempted mugging, sudden death in the indifferent streets and a racist cab driver (Irwin Corey, working hard) whom Gardner tries desperately to make us see as a wise fool, the author has his work cut out for him. The smell of damp garbage never quite leaves this enterprise.

Perhaps the most powerful sign of how badly Gardner has miscalculated is the belief that a reconciliation between Thomas and Grodin constitutes a happy ending. In fact, their dismal marriage makes the best argument yet for rapid passage of no-fault divorce laws.

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