Funny Smell

By R.C.

COAST TO COAST Directed by Joseph Sargent Screenplay by Stanley Weiser

Fashions in movie genres hit Hollywood in successive waves of benign silliness. Remember the gang-war cycle, the roller-disco pix, the movies about movie stuntmen? Now there's another improbable genre: Noah's ark meets the road movie. Within the past year, three films have told the story of a salt-of-the-earth guy and a sugar-and-spice gal who meet, fight and find true love while trucking cross-country in the company of large animals. Robert Redford and Jane Fonda liberated a Thoroughbred in The Electric Horseman; Burt Reynolds and Sally Field midwifed a pregnant elephant in Smokey and the Bandit II; and now Robert Blake and Dyan Cannon transport a herd of cattle Coast to Coast. This picture follows the standard itinerary: "meeting cute" in Pennsylvania, mutual suspicion in Appalachia, fistfight and car crash in Kansas City, loving and leaving in the Rockies, reconciliation in California. At the fadeout, man, woman and cows are all contented.

The animal metaphor obtains here. Blake is a rambunctious baby bull, snorting and butting and pawing the ground, looking for a matador his own size. Cannon is a gorgeous, frisky filly with a case of the giggles. Together, even in a pasture full of chuckholes, the lovers have a lot of fun, and some of it is infectious. Director Sargent orchestrates the punch-drunk merriment with finesse. But one cannot help remembering that the movie's working title was What's That Funny Smell? Under any title, it offers the film equivalent of a day on the farm: a little fowl and a lot of bull.

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