Troubled Pair

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BLAME IT ON RIO

Directed by Stanley Donen Screenplay by Charlie Peters and Larry Gelbart

There is the good Stanley Donen and there is the bad Stanley Donen. The good one has for 35 years directed elegant entertainments like Singin' in the Rain, Charade, Two for the Road and Movie Movie. Every once in a while, though, his dark double appears and turns out something like Staircase or Lucky Lady and, now, Blame It on Rio. Inelegant is too mild a word for it; even distasteful doesn't quite cover it. Shall we say disgusting?

The plot has two businessmen, Matthew Hollis (Michael Caine) and Victor Lyons (Joseph Bologna), their marriages in disarray, renting a house in Rio in order to share a vacation with their adolescent daughters. Whereupon Jennifer Lyons (Michelle Johnson, whose awkwardness may be attributed in part to the fact that she is a model rather than an actress and in part to the fact that she is required to do about half her scenes nude to the waist) seduces "Uncle Matthew." The joke--if the word can be applied here--is that she is cool and sophisticated, while he gets all flustered and furtive in a supposedly comic way. What the writers want to have taken as a morally balancing conclusion--it is actually just another act of desperation--is supplied by the revelation that Matthew's wife has, all along, been having an affair with Victor.

It is possible to put this kind of material on the screen successfully, as Stanley Kubrick proved in Lolita. But it requires discretion in handling the queasy physical facts of the case, a certain ironic detachment about the human capacity for turning sexual adventure into sexual folly, and a firm sense of values on the director's part. Farce, which must accept its characters on their own dumb or dizzy terms, is the wrong way to handle the dubious premise of a film like Blame It on Rio. It is too indelicate.

This is something Michael Caine, that tasteful man, instinctively understands.

An actor of integrity, he has found a style that permits him to withdraw a certain distance from his material without entirely dissociating himself from it. And there are moments when he actually persuades you that a Restoration comedy might get going around here any minute now, though the air in that country is too thin for the hard-breathing Bologna to breathe.

Donen and Producer-Co-Writer Gelbart (M*A*S*H) are, like Caine, men who know better than to do the shoddy, but they are too busy trying to prove they are hip guys, cool on the trail of the rapidly aging New Morality, to emulate his try for modest craftsmanship. It is dismaying to see them sell off comedy's right to social criticism in exchange for the chance to make soft-core porn. Perhaps that accounts for the dispirited and guilty air of a film that makes even Rio look ugly and cannot work up so much as an honest smirk over what it is doing. --By Richard Schickel