Make 'Em Laugh! Make 'Em Pay!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Four new comedies blighten up the Christmas movie season

'Tis the season to mint money. Hollywood traditionally saves its big comedies for Christmas and, almost invariably, fills its stockings with hits. In 1980, for example, a trio of holiday comediesying home with their new video games. This season moviemakers are playing by the old rules, with bantamweight farces and mellow romantic comedies that are luring sizable audiences to the local Cineplex. The class comedy act is Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman winningly proves that an actor's life is a drag. But there are other new comedies aiming to answer the moguls' prayer: that this Christmas will be business as usual.

Best Friends Or: They're Playing Our Script. Richard (Burt Reynolds) and Paula (Goldie Hawn) are successful screenwriters who play out the new Hollywood romance. Boy lives with Girl, Boy marries Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy meets Girl and realizes that amity is as important to their relationship as ecstasy. As it happens, the film's real-life writers, Valerie Curtin and Barry (Diner) Levinson, are married. The picture is a skewed documentary about two professionals working hard to be both witty and romantic. This time they worked too hard. In an attempt, perhaps, to place a discreet distance between confession and comedy, they allowed the tone of their script to become jarringly uneven. Barnard Hughes and Jessica Tandy, as Paula's parents, are repositories of senile pathos; Audra Lindley, as Richard's mom, is a shtik figureggressively annoying the next, with sutures provided by background music that never lets the viewer discover a mood on his own. One can still savor the moments when Reynolds and Hawn display their easy strengths: Burt's shrugged-off sexiness and decent vulnerability, Goldie's ditsy-pixie charm and daredevil comic timing. The two should remain among the audience's best friends, even if this picture may not make many new ones.

Airplane II: The Sequel.

What is the memory span of moviegoers these days? Like Rockys II and III, Airplane II is less a sequel than an instant remake. Same actors: Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty as the star-crossed-eyed lovers, and a supporting cast of TV stars with the chance to guy their small-screen images. Same situation: an airliner (well, this time a space shuttle) careers wildly off course. Even same gags: Hays' terminally boring monologues, black men's jive talk, Peter Graves' penchant for talking dirty to little boys, Lloyd Bridges' strikebreaking air traffic controller.

The original Airplane! was an original, written and directed by three funny fellows who went on to greater folly and glory with the spoof TV show Police Squad! The sequel is written and directed by Ken Finkleman, whose previous credit (make that debit) was Grease 2.

He has injected a few droll jokes: an Iran Air airport bus disgorges three terrorists and some American hostages; a nurse takes her patient's temperature with a long oil dip stick. With its throwaway references to E.T., Ronald Reagan, TV anchormen and movies that have not even been released yet, Airplane II might deserve a place in a time capsule of pop culture circa 1982. Pia Zadora is already in there waiting.

Trail of the Pink Panther. Peter Sellers died in July 1980. You'd think that would put an end to the profitable series of Pink Panther farces in which Sellers starred as the dithery Inspector Clouseau. But no. Writer-Director Blake Edwards has basted together seven "outtake" sequences with Sellers, scenes from other Pink Panther movies and some supporting footage from series regulars to produce what may be the cinema's first posthumous sequel.

For half an hour or so the ploy works, as jerry-built narrative if not as inspired physical comedy. Then Clouseau's plane is reported missing and an embarrassing elegy begins. "Men like Clouseau never die," intones one mourner. "They're unique. They help us preserve our sense of humor." Not, alas, when we are invited to genuflect at the coffin. Better to recall the lively Sellers-Clouseau: facing every indignity with stoic fatuity, bulldogging through the minefield of his own ineptitude, working new variations on that preposterous French accent. What a shame we will never hear him say, "Eh Teh, pheune heume."

The Toy. If Dustin Hoffman can wear a dress to get his movie character an acting job, Richard Pryor can wear a dress in his job as a waitress. Pryor plays an underemployed journalist who, for $10,000, agrees to act as the baby-sitter in the swimming pool.

Producer Ray Stark and Screenwriter Carol Sobieski, the perpetrators of the film Annie, here switch the situationyor has said: "I'm better than my movies." He is too modest, and not nearly discriminating enough in his choice of roles. Pryor makes a terrific Christmas present for any moviegoer. He just needs better wrapping.

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