Word: wilderness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Taking a longer view, Reynolds adds, "I'm trying very subtly and subliminally to ease myself away from Billy Clyde Puckett and toward Gary Grant. I may be the most unsophisticated Gary Grant in 20 years, but I'm going to get there." Beyond that lies a still wilder dream. "I want to lead a quiet, pseudointellectual life and go out and direct a picture two times a year. You can only hold your stomach in for so many years...
...results are excruciatingly flat. Wilder has little talent for imitating Brooks' mad comic style, no matter how diligently he tries. Though his films have not yet descended to the puerile level of Marty Feldman's recent Brooks knockoff, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, they contain no big laughs. In place of honest humor, Wilder provides the illusion of knockabout comedy-frantically busy scenes and lots of noise. Only Saturday-morning TV addicts could possibly endure the antics of The World's Greatest Lover, in which characters are forever shouting their lines, bulging their eyes and stumbling...
Like all the Brooks-Wilder-Feldman efforts, this one is about old movies. Wilder plays Rudy Valentine, a shnook from Milwaukee who goes West when a film company announces a search for a new star to compete with Valentino. Once the hero hits Hollywood, predictable gags ensue at an alarming rate. There are the usual send-ups of silent movies and film-company yes men, not to mention the now obligatory asides about Valentino's ambiguous sexuality. Rather than recapture the high spirits of Brooks' Silent Movie, this movie more often looks like an overbudgeted tribute...
...addition to Wilder, the other principal stooges are Dom DeLuise and Carol Kane. Since they both copy the star's own hysterical acting style, they fade quickly into the chaotic background. Wilder's performance is just a broader version of the routine he invented a decade ago in The Producers. His one big scene with Richard Pryor in the otherwise feckless Silver Streak is funnier than all 90 minutes of his mugging here...
...director, Wilder fares somewhat better. The film looks handsome, and its few reflective scenes express an idiosyncratic affection for the mythos of American movies. The shots of Hollywood sound stages and Beverly Hills vistas have a Fellini-esque quality, as does a dreamy sequence in which the film's two Rudys spend an unlikely afternoon together. Better yet, The World's Greatest Lover ends with a rush of feeling for both movies and people that is surprisingly touching. While the climax has nothing to do with the film that precedes it, one can at least hope that...