As a comedy, "Taking Care of Business" (citywide) has everything going for it but laughs. It's like a stand-up comic who invested his sense of humor in the Sunbelt Jokes Savings and Loan: It hasn't got a million of them.
Take this scene: Manhattan neat freak Spencer Barnes (Charles Grodin), who's lost his Filofax at LAX, drives a rented clunker through L.A.'s Eastside, hails down four grotesque thugs in a convertible and asks how to get to Malibu. They misdirect him and throw him in a trash dumpster. He clambers out, looking messy.
Are you laughing yet? No? Try this: good-hearted Chicago-born slobbo Jimmy Dworski (Jim Belushi), who's just broken out of prison so he can attend a World Series between the Angels and the Cubs, has Spencer's datebook, credit cards and list of power words--none of which will be used in this review. He gets into the Malibu home of Spencer's boss, sees the luscious interior and begins howling and running up and down the stairs. Then he howls and runs up and down the other stairway. Hmmm . . .
Wait a minute. The Cubs? In the World Series? Now, that should be funny . . . There's something eerie about this movie: a kind of mix-and-match "Trading Places," a cross-town "Midnight Run" with an "Odd Couple" who never meet. Everything seems to be in place: cast, direction, sets, the title song (borrowed from Bachman-Turner Overdrive) and, most crucial of all, the ad campaign. Director Arthur Hiller, cinematographer David Walsh and editor William Reynolds are smooth old pros who know how to do the job without jags or rough edges. Executive producer Paul Mazursky is a past master at amiably offbeat, humane, quasi-realistic comedy-dramas: movies very unlike this one.
