While not an outright flop, Neil Simon’s comic
play The Star Spangled Girl ran for
less than nine months in 1966 and 1967, a disappointment given the outsized
expectations created by Simon’s previous successes—Barefoot in the Park had a four-year run, The Odd Couple lasted more than two years, and so on. Ever the
pragmatist, Simon agreed with critics that The
Star Spangled Girl was not his best work, a notion instead of a premise,
and the play’s clumsy engagement with ’60s counterculture revealed that
politics were not good fodder for Simon’s imagination. Nonetheless, Simon’s
name had gained sufficient marketplace value by the early ’70s that even his
failures were given screen adaptations, hence this middling and tiresome
romantic comedy.
In 1970s Los Angeles, impoverished activist Andy Hobart (Tony
Roberts) publishes an underground newspaper, The Nitty Gritty, out of the filthy garden apartment he shares with
his one and only contributor, brilliant but eccentric Norman Cornell (Todd
Susman). Andy makes ends meet through chicanery and petty theft. One day, wholesome
would-be Olympic swimmer Amy Cooper (Sandy Duncan) moves into the same
apartment complex, and Norman becomes infatuated with her, which distracts him
from writing. Norman harasses Amy relentlessly, breaking into her apartment and
spray-painting love messages all over town, but she finds him repellant.
Eventually, Andy persuades Amy to take a part-time job at the paper, hoping
this will inspire Norman to resume his work. Predictably, Amy and Andy fall in love,
putting a wedge into Andy’s friendship with Norman.
At its most tedious, the
film features drab political “debates” between Amy and Andy, she the aw-shucks
heartland gal and he the intellectual pinko. It is beyond inconceivable that
these characters find each other attractive. Even though screenwriters Arnold
Margolin and Jim Parks tweaked Simon’s narrative to pull the story forward into
the ’70s, traces of the play’s temporal origins peek through the surface in
unhelpful ways. It’s as if this movie desperately wants to engage with the
fraught political atmosphere of the period during which the Civil Rights
movement and the Vietnam War were escalating, but lacks the nerve to do so. Furthermore,
because Star Spangled Girl forefronts
romantic banter and sight gags, the sense that something more substantial is
being suppressed makes the film feel even more trivial than it might otherwise. In sum, Star Spangled Girl pairs
frenetic silliness with unformed political musings, so the film strikes out on
two levels at once.
That said, Roberts—later to become a staple in a decade’s
worth of Woody Allen movies—delivers Simon’s one-liners well, and both Duncan and Susman exhibit boundless energy. Star Spangled Girl also contains a peculiar
shout-out to another movie: During one early scene, a lookalike for Midnight Cowboy character Joe Buck references Buck’s experiences in that film.
Star
Spangled Girl: FUNKY
