How Sweet It Is!

For years, old movies have been television's backbone--one reason why TV often appears to be totally spineless. All that is about to change. The networks are running out of films, features are giving way to talk shows and, in historic reversal, TV is starting to invade the movies.

In How Sweet It Is!, nearly all the personnel came out of the tube. Director Jerry Paris is from the Dick Van Dyke show. The writers are out of the Danny Thomas factory. The star, James Garner, was once Maverick. Fair enough; talent has to break in somewhere. But this febrile farce betrays its videosyncrasies wherever it meanders. Garner, a magazine photographer named Grif, finds that he cannot communicate with his hippie dippy son. When the boy decides to tour Europe, his meddle-class mother (Debbie Reynolds) decides to fill the generation gap by taking a house in France for the summer. Togetherness swiftly degenerates into apartheid.

The boy sulks, pop takes up with a willowy tour guide, and mom settles down with a handsome French millionaire. Like all TV sitchcoms, How Sweet It Is! culminates in a stock comedy scene. This time it takes place in an Italian bordello, where too many kooks spoil the brothel.

Garner and Reynolds desperately try to carry on in the tradition of the Rock Hudson-Doris Day sex farces of the '50s. But they are swiftly undone by shameless mugging, slow-running gags and hurried slapstick. This is the kind of comedy that calls for gales of canned laughter on television--which is really the only kind that canned comedy deserves.

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