Thoroughly Maudlin

Thoroughly Modern Millie. It would take a miracle of invention to find fresh ness in so well-traveled a territory as the 1920s. Unhappily, miracles are difficult to find in this return trip to the decade of Hot Jazz, the Noble Experiment and the Emancipated Woman.

In a fairy-tale format, this song-and-dance film tells the story of Millie (Julie Andrews), a fresh-faced flapper in mad Manhattan circa 1922. As she sets out for her "adventures," Millie bobs her hair, raises her hemline and buys a string of beads. After peering down at her torso, she flutters her eyelids at the camera, whereupon the screen flashes a title, silent-movie style: "Gee, I wish my fronts weren't so big. They sure ruin the line of your beads." It is the first of many slices of cutesie-pie proffered by Director George Roy Hill, including innumerable jokes about the restless, breastless flappers, and oh-you-kidding dialogue indicating that "by jingo" and "gotcha" are supposed to be terrif.

The plot unreels like something left over from an ancient Fu Manchu serial. Together with a friend, Miss Dorothy (Mary Tyler Moore), Millie wanders dizzily around town, avoiding the clutches of a wicked witch of a whiteslaver (Beatrice Lillie) and her gang of scrutable Orientals. In the last reel, both girls foil the villains and tie up their happiness with big pink beaux (James Fox and John Gavin).

The film is at its best when it takes affectionate backward glances: at Harold Lloyd with some adroit window ledgerdemain, at the Modcap costumes of the period, at such ricky-ticky tunes of the '20s as Baby Face and Japanese Sandman. But when nostalgia dims, so does the picture's brightness. The new songs by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn are tepid at best, and Joe Layton's dance interludes are as spurious as bathtub gin, introduced solely to juice up a weak scenario.

Even a first-rate cast cannot help Millie from ultimately being thoroughly maudlin. Julie Andrews' star bright charm and prodigious energies cannot make a hit all by themselves, nor can Beatrice Lillie's still wonderful deadpan drolleries. Carol Channing, in a cameo role, only indicates that she is better as a living Dolly than as an overgrown Jazz Baby. The picture's basic problem, however, lies not with its talent but with its target. Satire is never any stronger than the host it feeds upon; by lampooning an overdone era, the creators of the film have made Millie an aging flapper, hoofing and puffing with jazz and razzmatazz, pretty and polished. But beneath the powder, the mascara and the bee-stung lips, she is wan and rather tired of it all.

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