11 OCTOBER 1997, Page 66

Cinema

Father's Day (12, selected cinemas)

Remembering a superb technician

Mark Steyn

Dorothy Kingsley died last week. I don't suppose more than one in a hundred million moviegoers would know her name. But, if you went to the pictures any time between the 1943 Girl Crazy, for which she was an uncredited writer, and the last screenplay credit for Angels in the Outfield, the 1994 remake of a film she'd written 40 years earlier, chances are you've seen her work. 'I never think of myself as a real writ- er,' she said. 'I only wrote because I needed the money. I had no desire to express myself or anything.' That's no bad thing, especially when viewed from an age in which every film writer thinks he has some- thing to express, even though what he's try- ing to express has been expressed better by a zillion other people before him.

Instead, Miss Kingsley became a superb technician, one of the most reliable of play doctors and the first to be called in when a film was running into trouble. She could write or adapt anything — including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Green Mansions, Can-Can, Valley of the Dolls and virtually all of Esther Williams's watery oeuvre. 'I stopped,' she said, 'when I couldn't figure out any more ways to get her in the water.'

Off screen, she was witty and tenacious. It was she who persuaded Frank Sinatra to take the title role in her film adaptation of Pal Joey; with hindsight, it's one of the few parts in a musical he ever really tapped into. She also talked Cole Porter into putting a forgotten, discarded ballad called 'From This Moment On' into her screen- play for Kiss Me, Kate. The song had been slung out of a flop Broadway show, Out Of This World, by its director, George Abbott. (It slowed the show,' Abbott told me a cou- ple of years back. 'I'd do it again tomor- row.') Dorothy helped the song become a standard, which was nice for Porter.

But, in the film itself, there's a little sequence during the number that more than justifies her efforts. Among the sup- Porting crew backing up Ann Miller and Bobby Van in the song were two unknowns, Bob Fosse and Carol Haney. For their dance break, they were graciously allowed to work up a little routine of their ovvn. The result was not only the first time anyone had ever seen what Fosse and Haney could do, but it's also one of the best 90 seconds of dance ever filmed. We wouldn't have had that without Dorothy Kingsley; she may not have been a 'real writer', but she was a real enabler of talent — and, in Hollywood, that's at least half the job.

You miss her touch in Father's Day, an assembly-line movie in which half the nuts and bolts have dropped off. For some rea- son, Ivan Reitman has chosen to remake a tatty French comedy of 1983, Les Comperes, about two childless men, each of Whom is persuaded that he's the father of a rUnaway teenager. In deference to the ffim's Gallic origins, Reitman casts Nastass- ja Kinski as the boy's mom, so desperate to find her child (he's fallen among punk rockers and drug dealers) that she enlists a brace of ex-beaux. The wannabe dads here are Billy Crystal and Robin Williams. I'm a very big fan of Crystal and a very, very small — so small it's barely measurable _ fan of Williams, so I'd been expecting to have half a good time. Unfortunately, for their first film together, they've chosen to model themselves on Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, which is to say that Williams chews Up everything in sight, while Crystal con- fines himself to frequent exasperated takes and the odd wry one-liner. That wouldn't be so bad were it not that, unlike Martin and Lewis, Reitman's film oozes a cloying boomer sentimentality about parenthood. On top of that, the Jokes seem even staler. Williams does all he stuff he's done for years: a rap spoof; Ins Elvis impersonation; a parody of the funky chicken. Not only is it boring, it's out Of character. He's supposed to be a bag of nerves only one step away from suicide, but everything he does advertises only his super-confident exhibitionist egomania. APart from anything else, it's impossible to believe Nastassja Kinski would ever have gone to bed with him. The more the film settles into a cosy riff on the joys of daddy- llood, the worse Williams gets, descending !In° what even for him are unprecedented levels of mawkishness and self admiration. C.rystal is no great shakes, either: his big set Piece is a speech about how he hates mime. Yeah, right. No one's heard that one before.