That '70s Drift

SMILE (1975) (B+) - This is a dry, satisfying comedy putting Bruce Dern through the paces as chief judge of California's "Young American Miss" beauty pageant.

Dern is Big Bob, a used-car (and RV) salesman who is a fading frat-boy type, active in all the bizarre little fraternal organizations, like the one that kicks men out when they turn 35. Grown-up Girl Scout Brenda ropes him into judging the beauty pageant that she runs like a boot camp. His son, Little Bob, is featured in an undercooked, proto-"Porky's" subplot involving attempts by him and two teen pals to snap secret Polaroid shots of the contestants in various stages of undress. (They do succeed in capturing a topless photo of teenage Melanie Griffith, who that same year, in "Night Moves," also wasn't shy about displaying a pair of breasts that were perkier than Feldon's Sister Bertrille hair flip. The photograph here provides a perfect punch line to the film.)

The script by Jerry Belson ("Fun With Dick and Jane," TV's "The Odd Couple") is full of sarcastic swipes at suburbia and America's consumerist culture. (I got a 12-year-old's giggle out of a drive-through scene at a fast food joint called Major Weenie.) It's tough at times to tell whether he's truly satirizing the last gasps of old-boy clubism or lamenting its demise. Brenda's husband, Andy (Nicholas Pryor, the dad in "Risky Business"), is frustrated with his frigid wife and is feeding his ennui and depression with booze. Despite a tragic domestic showdown, the show still goes on.

Annette O'Toole, in her first major role, carries the load as the lead contestant, who figures she's a shoo-in because her talent is essentially tossing out double entendres and stripping down to a body stocking. She rooms with prim-and-proper Robin, played by Joan Prather, her generation's Kristen Stewart. The pageant itself and the preparation for it provide endless opportunities for sight gags, including one contestant's tone-deaf rendition of "Delta Dawn" that she ends with a saxophone flourish. Brenda decides to spend extravagantly ($2,000) on a big-time choreographer/producer to whip the girls in shape, and he shows up as a burned-out grump embarrassed by such a sell-out gig.

With his parade of men on the brink of middle age, Belson has various outlets for expressing his exhaustion with our culture's media-driven depiction of love, beauty and happiness. Director Michael Ritchie (in a middle of a great run from "The Candidate" to "Semi-Tough") keeps the proceedings understated and cheeky. This holds up well with the next generation's much broader and vulgar variation on the theme, the amusing "Drop Dead Gorgeous," which came at the beauty pageant industry from the burned-out mom point of view.

WISE BLOOD (1979) (B+) - What a bizarre little fever dream of a film. John Huston, late career, interprets a seedy Flannery O'Connor story, setting it in rundown Macon, Ga. (On the Criterion DVD extras, you can hear O'Connor read her classic "A Good Man Is Hard to Find.")

The film stars the unnerving Brad Dourif, whose resume ranges from stuttering Billy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Doc in HBO's "Deadwood," and who was sort of his generation's Mike White. Dourif is Hazel Motes (an anagram of "smote"), a young man returning from military service to find his boyhood home decrepit and abandoned. He is haunted by memories of his grandfather (Huston in flashbacks), a shady preacher who used the young Hazel as a prop in his stage show. (The boy walked around with stones in his shoes and was known to pee himself as he sat on stage during the hellfire sermons.

Hazel is an unrepentant born sinner who finds company by reading the "for a good time" listings on men's room walls. He styles himself as an anti-preacher and vows to start a Church of Christ Without Christ. While it's not clear what he would replace Christ with, a local unstable teen, Enoch (Dan Shor), suggests a creepy museum artifact as a replacement idol.

Hazel becomes obsessed with street preacher/beggar, Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton), who the papers say blinded himself with lime but who appears to be one big scam artist.  Hawks' plain daughter, Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright), has her bug-eyes set on Hazel and is determined to finagle her way into his bed. Ned Beatty has a brief role as a would-be business partner with Hazel. When Hazel rejects him, Beatty recruits some random poor soul (the sublime William Hickey ("Moonlighting"), buys him a cheap suit and sends him out to the curb to compete with Hazel -- with disastrous results.

The script is loose, with stray scenes involving Hazel's escapades in a beat-up jalopy (that he insists, repeatedly, is a "good car," as if it's a stand-in for his own character and reputation). Those bits play like broad "Laugh-In" blackouts and make it seem as if much of the film's action might be taking place in Hazel's hallucinations. (Enoch's obsession with a movie character in a gorilla suit just seems random, playing like a series of outtakes from a '60s beach movie.)

The blatant racism of 1979 Georgia is shocking to the ear. Even though the movie is set in the present day, Hazel's car is a '50s heap, and the street-preacher motif lends a Depression-era vibe to the proceedings. This is a dark comedy that draws its color scheme from the darkness of our souls. It's haunting.