Films, TV, and Theatre

TV Guide

This very first R-rated picture ever to come out of that bastion of squeaky-cleanness, Walt Disney Studios (under the aegis of their subsidiary Touchstone), is a howl from start to finish. Dave Whiteman (Dreyfuss) has made it big in the coat hanger business. He and wife Barbara (Midler) live in a huge house in Beverly Hills with their children, Jenny (Nelson), an anorexic college student, and Max (Richards), an androgynous budding filmmaker. Barbara is the ultimate yenta who spends her days having her hair and nails done, shopping, and going to classes. Also living in the house are Carmen (Pena), a seductive Latino maid with whom Dave is having an affair, and Matisse (Mike), the family dog who refuses to eat despite regular visits to a doggie psychiatrist. When tramp Jerry Baskin (Nolte) enters their lives after attempting to drown himself in the Whiteman swimming pool, Dave saves his life and invites him to become part of the family, a decision that has some very comic results.

A sometimes extremely funny revamping of Jean Renoir's classic black comedy BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, Mazursky's film also works as a broad but scathing satire of upper-class California culture. Although the ending is softened from Renoir's original, this garishly colored film succeeds quite well on its own terms. The film is full of moments both surprising (Jerry showing Matisse that his dog food is eminently eatable) and entertainingly predictable (Jerry getting intimately involved with several family members; an "everyone into the pool" sequence). The cast is entirely up to the comic hysteria Mazursky requires of them, though Mike the dog steals whatever scene he is in. Look for Mazursky in a bit part as an accountant.

Variety Staff

Down and Out in Beverly Hills continues Paul Mazursky's love-hate relationship with the bourgeoisie and its institutions, especially marriage. It's a loving caricature of the nouveau riche (Beverly Hills variety) and although it is more of a comedy of manners than a well-developed story, there are enough yocks and bright moments to make it a thoroughly enjoyable outing.

Mazursky and co-writer Leon Capetanos have cleverly taken the basic premise of Jean Renoir's 1932 classic Boudu Saved from Drowning [from the play by Rene Fauchois] and used it as a looking glass for the foibles of the rich and bored.

Head of the household is the aptly named David Whiteman (Richard Dreyfuss). Bette Midler is the lady of the house with their near anorexic daughter Tracy Nelson and son Evan Richards.

In short it's a household of unhappy people and the fly (perhaps flea is more accurate) in the ointment is Nick Nolte as the bum Jerry Baskin. A disheveled and dirty street person, Jerry is an artist of sorts, a con artist. For the Whitemans he becomes their idealized bum, the family pet.

Roger Ebert

Buddy Hackett once said that the problem with Beverly Hills is, you go to sleep beside your pool one day and when you wake up you're 75 years old. "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" understands that statement inside-out.

It tells the story of a rich family that lives in the timeless comfort of a Beverly Hills mansion - in the kind of house where they use Architectural Digest for pornography. One day a bum wanders down the alley and into their backyard and tries to drown himself in their swimming pool. After he is saved, he changes their lives forever.

In its broad outlines, this story is borrowed from Jean Renoir's classic film "Boudo Saved from Drowning." But this isn't just a remake. The director, Paul Mazursky, makes his whole film depend on the very close observation of his characters. Mazursky knows Beverly Hills (he lives there, on the quiet cloistered flatlands below Sunset Boulevard), and he knows the deceptions and compromises of upper-middle-class life (his credits include "An Unmarried Woman" and "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice"). With great attention and affection, he shows us the lives that are disrupted by the arrival of the derelict - this seedy failure whose whole life is an affront to the consumer society.

The film's heroes are the Whitemans, Dave and Barbara (Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler), and the bum, Jerry Baskin. He is played by Nick Nolte as the kind of guy who didn't set out in life to be a failure, but just sort of drifted from one plateau down to the next one, until finally he was spending most of his time talking to his dog.

It is, indeed, the dog's disappearance that inspires Nolte's suicide attempt, and it will be the Whitemans' own amazing dog, named Matisse, that gets some of the loudest laughs in the movie. Maybe Mazursky is trying to tell us something about the quality of human relationships in Beverly Hills.

The Dreyfuss character is a coat-hanger manufacturer. He didn't set out in life to be rich (one of his favorite conversational gambits involves his own good luck and assurances that it could have happened to you as easily as to him - nice if you are him, but not if you are you). Here he is, living in a manicured mansion, exploiting wetback labor, sleeping with the Mexican maid, driving a Rolls convertible, selling 900 million coat hangers to the Chinese, and yet, somehow, something is missing. And almost from the first moment he sets eyes on the Nolte character, he realizes what it is: the authenticity of poverty.

The movie has a quiet, offhand way of introducing us to the rich man's milieu. We meet his wife, whose life involves long sessions with masseurs, yogis and shrinks (even her dog has a doggie psychiatrist). We meet his daughter (Tracy Nelson), a sunny-faced, milk-fed child of prosperity. We meet the Whiteman's neighbor, played by Little Richard with an incongruous mixture of anger and affluence (he complains that he doesn't get full service from the police; when he reports prowlers, they don't send helicopters and attack dogs).

We meet Carmen (Elizabeth Pena), the maid, who greets her employer lustily in her servant's quarters but who grows, during the movie, from a soap opera addict into a political radical. We also meet the extended family and friends of the Whitemans, each one a perfectly written vignette, right down to the dog's analyst.

"Down and Out in Beverly Hills" revolves around the fascination that Dreyfuss feels for Nolte's life of dissipation and idleness. He is drawn to the shiftless sloth like a moth to a flame. A bum's life seems to have more authenticity than his own pampered existence.

And, indeed, perhaps the last unreachable frontier of the very rich, the one last thing they cannot buy, is poverty. Dreyfuss spends a night down on the beach with Nolte and his bum friends, and there is a breathtaking moment at sundown when Nolte (who claims to be a failed actor) recites Shakespeare's lines beginning "What a piece of work is a man!"

Certain predictable things happen. Nolte not only becomes Dreyfuss' good buddy, but is enlisted by all of the women in the household - the wife, the daughter and the maid - as a sex therapist. Dreyfuss will put up with almost anything, because he really likes this guy, and Nolte's best hold on them is the threat to leave. Mazursky makes the most of that paradox, and gradually we see the buried theme of the movie emerging, and it is the power of friendship. What these people all really lacked, rich and poor, sane and crazy alike, was the power to really like other people.

The movie should get some kind of award for its casting. Dreyfuss, who has been so good in the past as a hyperactive overachiever, succeeds here in slightly deflecting that energy. He has the success, but is bedazzled by it, as if not quite trusting why great wealth should come to him for doing so little. He channels his energy, not into work, but into enthusiasms - and Nolte becomes his greatest enthusiasm.

For Bette Midler, Barbara Whiteman is the perfect character, all filled with the distractions of living up to her level of consumption. Nolte in some ways has the subtlest role to play, although when we first see it, it seems the broadest. His shiftless drifter has to metamorphize into a man who understands his hosts so deeply that he can play them like a piano.

The supporting roles are so well filled, one after another, that we almost feel we recognize the characters before they're introduced. And Mike, the dog, should get an honorary walk-on at the Oscars.

Perhaps I have made the movie sound too serious. Mazursky has a way of making comedies that are more intelligent and relevant than most of the serious films around; his last credit, for example, was the challenging "Moscow on the Hudson." So let me just say that "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" made me laugh longer and louder than any film I've seen in a long time.

Sky Movies

A modishly alternative comedy based on but with none of the class of the 1932 French classic Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, on which it is based. Nick Nolte is a vagrant pulled from a rich man's swimming pool, predictably bedding the rich man's wife, mistress and daughter in the course of the film. Nolte never suggests the irresistible sexual charisma involved and, although Richard Dreyfuss is good as the cuckolded millionaire, other star players barge unsubtly through director Paul Mazursky's witless script, allowing a dog called Mike to steal the show.