Clearance Sale

By Christopher Porterfield

MR. BILLION

Directed by JONATHAN KAPLAN Screenplay by KEN FRIEDMAN and JONATHAN KAPLAN

Inflation overtakes everything, even movie plots. Back in 1936, when Frank Capra made Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, an inheritance of $20 million was sufficient to surpass the ordinary man's dreams of wealth. Today, it seems, nothing less than $1 billion will do. In Mr. Billion that is the value of the conglomerate a San Francisco financier bequeaths to an obscure nephew in Italy (Terence Hill). The hitch is that the nephew, a garage mechanic who idolizes John Wayne and Steve McQueen, must reach San Francisco within 20 days to sign for his legacy.

As a devoted moviegoer, the nephew might have foreseen the all too predictable misadventures that beset him on his quest. His billion-dollar journey is a veritable clearance sale of Hollywood comedy-adventure cliches. He is conned, harassed, rolled, clumsily kidnaped, chased across the landscape, and jailed by a redneck sheriff. His putative protector in San Francisco, ripely played by Jackie Gleason, is in fact a devious executive who covets the conglomerate for himself. Gleason dispatches Valerie Perrine, as an implausible private eye, to wangle power of attorney out of Hill, but instead, of course, she falls in love with him.

Western Vision. Director-Writer Jonathan Kaplan and his co-writer Ken Friedman have aimed no higher than the innocent fun of so-called family entertainment. Fair enough -- indeed commendable in view of the paucity of acceptable films to take the kids to.

But even the featherweight conventions of family entertainment allow for more than the cartoon characterizations and obvious knockabout farce of Mr. Billion. Hill, the Italian-born European star who is making his U.S. film debut, is sometimes wistfully appealing as he tries to live a western-movie vision of America. His best moment occurs when he acts out a favorite fantasy by clobbering Slim Pickens in a Texas barroom brawl. But when he turns up in the old fight-to-the-death on the edge of a cliff (this time in the Grand Canyon), with Perrine lashed prettily to a nearby rock, he and the film makers have to be kidding -- only they don't seem to know it.

At the end, Hill installs as his new board of directors all the little people who helped him beat his deadline -- a widow, a kindly barfly, a dispossessed rancher, a cable-car conductor, and so on. The Frank Capra of Mr. Deeds would have used this simplistic notion to say something stirring, if sentimental, about social inequities and financial gouging. Here the situation is squandered for a few strained jokes. The viewer is left with the uncharitable suspicion that the conglomerate -- and the film -- would have been better off in the hands of experts with less good intentions.

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