The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 408

CALENDAR MOVIES t' 7 to Cr I 1 Uq II V7 George C. Scott and Trish Van Devere in characterizations from "Movie, Movie." A MOVIE LIKE THEY USED TO MAKE BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN Stanley Donen's "Movie, Movie" is a whizbang and hugely enjoyable exercise in nostalgia for the kind of all-singing, all-talking, all-dancing, all-corny movies that everybody says nobody makes any more. It celebrates, with accuracy, skill and warm affection, the plotty and propulsive film delights a later generation speaks of fervently as real, by God, movie movies, whence the title. The writers, Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller, have concocted a whole double feature: a fight film in period black and white and a musical in all the colors of a hyped-up rainbow, the two digest-sized movies linked by one of those hyperthyroid previews of coming attractions that are still, and they often were, better than the movie itself turns out to be. This trailer proclaims a World War I aviation epic, a sort of broken "Wings" called "Zero Hour," whose enticing slogan is "War at Its Best!" It stars, as do both of the movies, George C.

Scott. Art Carney, who is a doctor with bad news in the movies, is the escadrille's fighting padre in the preview. Parody, affectionate or otherwise, is harder than it seems, requiring an intimate and total familiarity with whatever it is you are going to have sport with, and the ability to do it as well or better. The special pleasure of "Movie, Movie" is that its creators all have been there and back again and know the territory like the back of their camp chairs. "Dynamite Hands" is a boxing picture right out of the sentimentalized social realism of the '30s.

The particular echoes are, I suppose, as varied in source as "Golden Boy" and the pigeon lofts from "On the Waterfront." The generalized echoes are from a whole genre of (mostly) Warner movies: shadowy dramas of city streets, gangsters and molls, sweet girls abandoned and honest, struggling parents worrying that their nice boy is falling amid evil companions, and liking it. Scott is this time the aging manager who sees his last white hope in the slim form of Harry Hamlin, delivery boy from the family delicatessen, who decks a bully at the gym and then delays law school so he can slug his way to the $25,000 his pretty sister (Kathleen Beller) needs for a sight-saving operation in Vienna. Eli Wallach is the suave hood who muscles in on the boy, and Ann Reinking is Troubles Moran, the nightclub chantoosie who really is trouble. (She does a number which is several centigrades steamier than the Hays Code tolerated, and it's a fine and campy parody within the parody.) Michael Kidd and Jocelyn Brando are the kindly old folks at home and Trish Van Devere is the demure and owlish librarian who keeps birds named Plato and Aristotle on the roof. Barry Bostwick is a swell gangster with eyes for the kid's sister and Red Buttons is in the kid's corner, with collodion and wet sponge.

The montages of time, travel and events -locomotives dissolving into fight posters Every convention of the musical movie is honored, so far as I can remember, from the meeting cute to the seduction of the innocent to the sudden incapacity of the star on opening night. It is to weep twice, for past things remembered but for the sheer and abundant skill of the past recaptured. The first big musical number Bostwick demonstrating one of his songs for Scott in Scott's ornate office is somehow every Junemoon uptempo ballad that ever was, every production number that discovers inside the piano or behind the potted palms See Related Article on Page 65. a 190-piece dance band with the right arrangement up. If movies were equipped to provide encores, "All I Need Is the Girl" would win several.

The plot thickens and twists and Ms. York is every father's dream, even if he doesn't recognize her until almost The End. There is, inevitably, the big night, the whole show telescoped until it is time for the big, big finale, choreographed by Michael Kidd to warm the spirit of Busby Berkeley wherever he may be, and incorporating that zigzagging stairway to the stars without which no Hollywood musical was complete. The scene also has one of the most unforgettable exit lines ever: "Funny," muses the fading Scott, "one day you're in the wings, the next day you're wearing 'em." Anyone who remembers the Scott of "The Flim Flam Man" needs no reminding that humor is part of his vocabulary, even if he is more often cast with brass on his shoulders and fire in his eyes. He takes his humor straight, not letting on that he gets the joke, which is as it should be, and his serene command of the ridiculous is very enjoyable to watch.

Charles Rosher Jr. photographed "Dynamite Hands" in a symphony of black and white and Bruce Surtees did "Baxter's" in a rainbow profusion that recalls the days when movie color had not yet learned that pale is pretty, too. The very creative art direction is by Jack Fisk and the music, which catches its own set of echoes of Gershwin, the studio scorers and the Tin Pan Alley gang as a whole, is by Ralph Burns, joined in the songwriting by Buster Davis. Gelbart and Keller did the lyrics themselves. The use of a kind of repertory cast lends additional strength to the notion of the movie, since of course each studio's stock company was its strength.

Trish Van Devere is equally at home as all-maiden and all-soused star. Harry Hamlin has a dark, intense idealism that was meant, I'm sure, to recall a very early John Garfield. Barry Bostwick, lanky and amiable, falls into the '30s spirit as if he'd always lived there. George Burns does an amusing Introduction, apparently added as a nervous afterthought, to set the scene for the program to follow, enlightening and reassuring audiences who presumably have long since forgotten what it is like to get two for the price of one of anything. "Movie, Movie," Rated is a fine family Christmas present with a wide-ranging appeal, not least to those who have written off the movies because they don't make them the way they used to.

This, seen in a slightly distorting mirror, is what the used to was like. It arrives-plcase note week after next, Dec. 22 at the Avco Cinema Center. one last musical hit to serve as an annuity for the daughter who doesn't know he exists. Meantime, he's stuck with a temperamental and hard-drinking star Trish Van Devere again who knows the score and demands a new one.

Barry Bostwick is the gangling and bow -tied new bookkeeper who, as the plot would have it, is a secret songwriter. Red Buttons is the stage manager, loyal to the end, and Eli Wallach is Pops, the kindly stage doorkeeper. Barbara Harris is the Kewpie chorine who has the yen for Scott, who can't see her except as a pal. Up to the theater, suitcase in hand, comes a tentative new girl in town (Rebecca York), in from upstate New York where, by an enchanting coincidence, Scott's unsuspecting daughter lives. She and the clumsy bookkeeper meet cute, atop a sidewalk elevator, and the plot, the lovely and intricate and beautifully predictable plot, is in motion, 7.

a 08 dissolving into more locomotives and dissolving again-are a key element in the style of "Dynamite Hands" and they are, as they are intended to be, curiously moving as mementos of the movie grammar a lot of us grew up with and others have caught up with on television's continuous replay of the Hollywood past. The characterizations, the action and most notably the dialogue enlarge upon the originals that were larger than life to start with. Your heart, as I remember, keeps taking it on the chin, but with you behind me standing at my side, it'll all be swell. Occasionally, the spoken jokes get a little too jokey, striking camp a little too vigorously. Yet the spirit of the enterprise is an admiring sendup, not a put-down, There seems no doubt, watching, that the directors and the author enriched their Saturdays in attendance at just such pleasures as they have reconstructed here, and in the fullness of time realized the great technical craft that was on display, and the loss of innocence that makes the tidy plottings and the happy endings now seem as distant as Oz.

The second and considerably more successful and elaborate of the features is "Baxter's Beauties of 1933," an absolutely dazzing backstage musical made to measure for a director whose own musicals in the Rain," which he did with Gene Kelly, "Seven Brides," "Pajama are memorable. In "Baxter's," Scott is an impresario in the Ziegfeld vein, fur-collared, spatted and center-parted, under sentence of death (from his saddened doctor) and trying for y. jo MOVIE, MOVIE' A Warner Bros, production. Producer-director Stanley Donen. Executive producer Martin Slar-ger.

Screenplay Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller. Music Ralph Burns and Buster Davis. Musical numbers Michael Kidd. Photography: "Dynamite Hands" by Charles Rosher, "Baxter's Beauties of 1933" by Bruce Surtccs. Film editor George Hivcly.

Art director Jack Fisk. Costume designer Patty Norns. Featuring: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Red Buttons, Eli Wallach, Harry Hamlin, Ann Reimking, Jocelyn Brando, Michael Kidd, Kathleen Boiler, Barry Bostwick, Art Carney, Rebecca York. MPAA rating: PG.