SMILE (1975)

In Santa Rosa, the statewide beauty pageant to choose California's entrant in the national Young American Miss contest is underway. Brenda (Barbara Feldon, at left), who is running the pageant and in charge of taking care of the 25 girls, is perky and positive, always encouraging the girls to smile at all times. But her husband Andy (Nicholas Pryor, below right) is a depressed alcoholic who can't figure out why he's so unhappy—one reason is that he has hit middle age and is expected by the local Jaycees to undergo a ritual involving wearing Ku Klux Klan-type sheets and kissing the ass of a dead chicken. Mobile home dealer Big Bob (Bruce Dern) is the head of the judging committee, a job he loves, but when Andy tries to talk to Bob about his fears, Bob's replies are just soundbite versions of "Think positive!" Little Bob (Andy Shea), Big Bob's tween-age son, is consumed by the task of trying to take Polaroids of the contest girls in various states of undress to sell to his fellow students. The contestants given the most screen time are Robin, a wholesome girl a little out of her depth among the others (Joan Prather), and Doria (Annette O’Toole), who has done the pageant circuit before and gives Robin advice. We follow a number of plot lines through the week of events, to the announcement of the winner and hints of the futures of some characters.

This film from director Michael Ritchie was, despite good early buzz, given short shrift by its distributor and more or less dumped into a handful of theaters, though as the buzz continued, it did get a larger release, including a spot at the New York Film Festival. Marketed as a fairly hard-edged satire (Robert Altman's Nashville, released the same year, has a similar feel), the years have not been kind to it. Strictly speaking, this is not framed as a mockumentary, but it feels like a predecessor of sorts to the Christopher Guest movies, especially Waiting for Guffman, a behind-the-scenes look at a community theater musical production. Unfortunately, after the Guest movies, this barely registers as satire and instead feels like a comic melodrama, with most of the comedy coming from the girls' attempts at performance and the drama from the townspeople. The mocking of the girls is mostly fairly gentle, more good-humored than in some of the Guest movies, but for that reason, the satire comes off rather limply. The contestant who is mocked the most is a Mexican-American named Maria who is too strident in her earnestness at celebrating her heritage and alienates many of the other girls. In 2023, this comes off as fairly mean-spirited (not to mention politically incorrect) especially as the other girls are not treated in a similar fashion, except for Doria who despite some mocking, comes off sympathetically. Prather and O'Toole give good performances, as do Feldon (always underrated, I thought) and Pryor, who manages to make his sad sack character teeter on the edge between comedy and tragedy—he threatens suicide at one point in an oddly modulated scene that isn't quite funny but isn't quite serious. Dern overdoes his rah-rah shtick a bit, and gets a strange moment at the end that I feel is supposed to give us insight into his character, but I'm not sure what it was telling us. Famous MGM dancer and choreographer Michael Kidd appears as a just-this-side-of-washed-up celeb, Melanie Griffith has an early role as a contestant; William Traylor (as a conductor) and Dick McGarvin (as a smarmy emcee) make good impressions in small roles. Almost fifty years on, this is a good example of a movie that has been hurt by time, partly because, it could be argued, it was a bit ahead of its time in 1975. [Blu-ray]