Word: screenplay
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...Funny Girl--If you like Barbra Streisand, there is no getting round the fact that this movie works. The score, the screenplay, and even Omar Sharif are fine. The photography, on the other hand, is unfortunate, as is the editing. At the CHERI 2, Dalton St. in Prudential Center...
...cliche. The runaways in Chicago come up against syndicate prostitution and car theft, rather than amphetamine suicides, birth control, and police busts. Harold Fine's final disenchantment with his hippie existence is the combined result of (a) sexual jealousy, and (b) revulsion at how dirty hippies are (the screenplay sanctions the first, and seems deeply repelled by the latter), and leaves him at the finale in a limbo audiences would have found preposterous had not The Graduate conned Americans into thinking such endings dramatically justifiable...
...schemes where addition is allowed to pass for logic, there was the danger of the parts not resting snugly with each other, and it is exactly that danger which hits Promises, Promises hard. The plot, taken step for step from the Billy Wilder-I.A.L. Diamond screenplay, must be counted an asset; Simon has certainly contributed a better than respectable quantity of laughs; and the Bacharach-David score is exceptional by any reckoning, absolutely top-drawer by current musical-comedy standards. The problem is that the property works at cross-purposes to the adaption, and the adaptation at cross-purposes...
...hand, and Simon on the other. There would be no cause to criticize the show in such terms if it hadn't retained so much from the movie and at the same time acquired so much that is new and not quite in phase. Besides holding fast to the screenplay's construction, Simon has used several short sections of dialogue intact, which have in common that they come from the story's more serious episodes. In the funnier scenes, he has cut loose with his own comic style, adding dialogue that is unmistakably Simon's to dialogue unmistakably Wilder...
Sondra Locke, in her first movie, warrants the added attention the screenplay gives her part. When she tells her younger brother, who has pooled his money with his friends to buy fireworks, "Your syndicate is like Communism," she sounds just like the girl your roommate met from Ole Miss. Her boyish profile complements her naivete. Even her seduction scene--watch her shoulder cringe as she surrenders herself to her new boyfriend--seems right...