Follow That Mothball

The Honeymoon Machine (Avon; MGM) is the Hollywood machine in a rare moment of felicitous clank, turning out the slick, quick, funny film for which it was designed. Among the astonishingly lifelike moving parts are: Steve McQueen, a sailor (sailors are dependably hilarious); Jack Mullaney, a sailor and a Southerner (Southerners used to be hilarious); and Jim Hutton. a missile scientist (scientists never were very funny, but Hutton is also a man in love, and thus hilarious). The three of them decide to become wealthy at a Venice casino, using as their good-luck talisman a ship-based, missile-tracking electronic computer named MAX.

The aspiring bandits are all set to clock Ihe roulette action and flash the data to MAX, when suddenly--quick now, what next?--a beautiful chick pops into the room. She is Brigid Bazlen, a cute, twitchy little trick who does most of her acting with her eyebrows. Then in pops Paula Prentiss, a tall, gawkily gorgeous brunette who is, as one girl must be in every properly run comedy, helplessly nearsighted. She is an old flame of Hutton's whom he left, not, as it would happen in the real world, because she had a cork leg or wanted to live in Chicago, but because she had $40 million and he had none. According to the ancient and wonderful rules of this sort of kabuki, Hutton's share of the roulette killing will let him have matrimony with honor.

Things are going dandily--the boys are $18,000 ahead--but the admiral (Dean Jagger) has noticed signals flashing from MAX's ship and concludes from the Morse that the Russians are attacking. Whereupon: somebody drinks a quart of bourbon and walks a window ledge. Somebody says, "Follow that gondola." The Russian consul pounds a table with his shoe. Somebody falls into a canal. Somebody proposes marriage. Somebody eats a mothball.

Director Richard Thorpe's machine clicks cheerfully to the end, when it produces a satisfyingly idiotic conclusion. The only thing wrong with any of this excellent nonsense is an embarrassingly bad title song that, as is the current fashion, mewls while the credits are being shown. Thoughtful viewers will escape distress by arriving two minutes late.

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