This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
October 9, 1975
SMILE
By Vincent Canby
Published: October 9, 1975 Middle America is not exactly the fastest-moving target in the world. You don't have to be a sharpshooter to hit it. It just sits there like someone on a giant billboard, wearing an ear-to-ear grin, the eyes sparkling in anticipation of achieving some new plateau of pleasure, waiting to be defaced by anyone who has the price of a can of spray paint.
It's because Middle America is a pushover that Michael Ritchie's new comedy, Smile, about an annual beauty pageant in Santa Rosa, California, is such a pungent surprise, a rollicking satire that misses few of the obvious targets, but without dehumanizing the victims. It's an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.
Smile will be shown at the New York Film Festival tonight and again on Saturday night. No date has yet been set for its regular New York theater opening, though it has already played in several other cities around the country.
On its most general level, Smile is about a society in which optimism and positive thinking virtually amount to a political system, a guide to the making of choices, the principal goal of which is to have fun. A man who is on the brink of suicide is advised by his lifelong friend: "You've got to pull yourself together. Go out there and start having some fun." Fun is the operative word and, of course, fun is as illusive as a dim light in the dark. When you look at it directly, it disappears.
The pageant that is the center of Smile is fictitious, a statewide (California) Young American Miss contest that, one assumes, precedes the kind of national clambake that Bert Parks emcees annually. The film covers the four days of various trials in which the teenage contestants are graded on poise, beauty, zest for living, talent, and their concern for their fellow man.
They are coddled, threatened, and frightened into fakery with such questions as, "Marie, can you tell me why you want to go into missionary work?" and "Why do you play the flute, dear? In your own words..."
The kingpin of the affair is a local Santa Rosa booster, named Big Bob Freelander (Bruce Dern), a live-wire automobile salesman who, in the course of this particular pageant, begins to lose the smile that, until now, he had been convinced was making America great.
This is no big dramatic deal. Smile is not a film of explosive revelations. The soul-searching we do is our own. It's a comedy composed of dozens of vignettes—about Big Bob; about the pageant coordinator, Brenda DiCarlo, a pretty, silly, edgy woman beautifully played by Barbara Feldon; about Brenda's suicidal husband, Andy (Nicholas Pryor); about the other officials of the pageant; and especially about some of the contestants.
Unlike Beauty Knows No Pain, a comic and rude short subject made several years ago about the training of some drum majorettes in Texas, Smile treats its beauty contestants without condescension. The girls are sometimes hugely funny and foolish, but they are also decent and appealing in their earnest efforts to be the Ann-Margrets of tomorrow.
Three young actresses stand out in these roles: Maria O'Brien as a pushy, driving contestant who sells her Mexican-American heritage for all it's worth; Joan Prather, as the most levelheaded of the contestants; and Annette O'Toole, as the most desperate.
Jerry Belson wrote the excellent screenplay. Smile, which is Mr. Ritchie's best film to date (better than both Downhill Racer and The Candidate), questions the quality of our fun, while adding to it.
SMILE (MOVIE)
Produced and directed by Michael Ritchie; written by Jerry Belson; director of photography, Conrad Hall; edited by Richard A. Harris; music by Daniel Osborn, Leroy Holmes, and Charles Chaplin; choreography by Jim Bates; released by United Artists. Running time: 113 minutes.
With: Bruce Dern (Big Bob Freelander), Barbara Feldon (Brenda DiCarlo), Michael Kidd (Tommy French), Geoffrey Lewis (Wilson Shears), Nicholas Pryor (Andy DiCarlo), Joan Prather (Robin), Annette O'Toole (Doria), Maria O'Brien (Maria Gonzalez), Tito Vandis (Emile Eidelman), and Eric Shea (Little Bob Freelander).
Only in the '70s could a film like Smile be produced, and only in the '70s could a film as groundbreaking and influential get lost in the shuffle of other groundbreaking, influential "director's" pictures. Released the same year as Robert Altman's masterpiece Nashville, Michael Ritchie's satire presents a similar, loose-ensemble take on one of the hallmarks of Americana, in this instance, the beauty pageant. Helmed from a script by sitcom writer Jerry Belson, Smile is by far the more unassuming of the two movies, but it has just as much on its mind. Class, race, sex, and capitalist hucksterism all come into play against the backdrop of the Southern Californian "Young American Miss" semi-finals, hilariously rendered by Ritchie and Belson in a series of understated fly-on-the-wall vignettes, parceled out over the course of the pageant's four-day duration. Smile is full of so many droll, deadpan laughs, it's hard to see them coming. Ritchie never transmits a punch line through elaborate setups or nudge-nudge editing, and his sense of humor, however biting, never succumbs to exaggeration or condescension. As it approaches its climactic ceremony, the film effortlessly takes on darker and darker shadings -- courtesy of the two misfits stranded in this gleaming, prefab landscape, the cuckolded husband Andy (Nicholas Pryor) and the reluctant finalist Robin (Joan Prather) -- but despite it all, the tunnel-vision-stricken characters come up just short of epiphany, as they might in real life. Featured at the 1975 New York Film Festival, Smile never caught on at the box office, but its influence could be felt in the caustic, uncertain cinematic atmosphere of the late '90s, in such films as American Beauty, Election, or the far-inferior Drop Dead Gorgeous.
