Smile (1975)

Isn't she lovely? Aren't they all lovely? Isn't everyone lovely?

In 1973, Michael Ritchie and Robert Redford were shooting The Candidate in Santa Rosa, then a picturesque mid-sized town with a population of around fifty thousand and growing, and previously the location for “small town” movies Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Pollyanna (1960).¹ While Ritchie was there, he was invited to be a judge in the California Junior Miss finals – it would prove to be vital inspiration for his next film. He corralled veteran comedy writer Jerry Belson (The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Odd Couple) into drafting a satire about a beauty pageant, now named Young American Miss. It wasn’t the first time pageants had been treated this way – The Great American Beauty Contest (1973) had taken a stab as a TV movie – but this would be a more parochial take on the event, deceptively loose in its storytelling, dense in one-liners, and gently devastating in its treatment of small-town hypocrisies and middle-aged disappointments.

Smile follows various contestants as they prepare for and perform in the California Young American Miss beauty pageant, including damaged pageant veteran Doria (Annette O’Toole) from Anaheim, newcomer Robin (Joan Prather) from Antelope Valley, the emphatically Mexican-American Maria (Maria O’Brien)² from Salinas, suitcase packer extraordinaire Connie (Colleen Camp) from Imperial Valley (specifically El Centro)³, medley-murdering Shirley (Denise Nickerson)⁴ from San Diego, and the sweet-and-sour Karen (Melanie Griffith)⁵ from Simi Valley. Heading up the pageant are Wilson Shears (Geoffrey Lewis) - who spends most of his time in a state of high anxiety, not least because his big-city choreographer Tommy French (Michael Kidd)⁶ is perpetually late and demanding – and former beauty queen Brenda (Barbara Feldon), who has to contend with both the girls and her alcoholic husband Andy (Nicholas Pryor). Meanwhile, used RV salesman “Big Bob” Freelander (Bruce Dern) tries to hold it all together as lead judge and eternal optimist, even as his entire worldview threatens to come crashing down. Through all the accidents, sabotages, teenage peepers, and some of the worst talent spots you’ve ever seen,⁷ the pageant lumbers through to its tear-drenched conclusion.

As you can no doubt surmise, Smile’s plot is almost impossible to pin down; it is a roving, restless movie more akin to Nashville (1975) in its sprawling cast of characters and event-as-microcosm-for-America, but it is also way more than the sum of its (many) parts. Even if it never quite reaches the “national statement” of Nashville, Smile provides a warmer, funnier precursor to it, using the beauty pageant as a means not only to gently satirise the idiosyncrasies of small-town life, but also to interrogate and expand upon Ritchie’s previous themes around competition. Where Nashville is cynical and sour, Smile is humane; where Nashville is epic, Smile is modest; and where Nashville is snide, Smile is funny.⁸

And make no mistake, Smile is very funny. Jerry Belson’s status as the best punch-up writer in the business was well-earned. Initially a writing partner to Garry Marshall, Belson had carved out a strong reputation as a guy who could deliver on gags – Carl Reiner once called them “a wonderful team,” so good that “I didn’t have to work as hard.” Writer Mark Rothman said of his time on The Odd Couple: “Out of ten jokes, ten were funny, and four made it into the script. And the four that got into the script were home runs.” Tracey Ullman declared that “some of the best lines on any of shows I’ve done were Jerry Belson’s.” Belson was also the guy who popularised the old saw “Never assume, because when you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME,” which he attributed to a teacher in a typewriter repair class.⁹

For the most part, his work on Smile is throwaway in the best possible sense – most of his lines aren’t gags, per se, but character-specific wit, whether it’s Big Bob doing the hard sell on his RVs (in the middle of an oil crisis) by saying “it’s a hell of a safe feeling knowing you’re sleeping on fifty gallons of gas,” the vodka-soaked janitor obsessed with the damage the girls’ “napkins” will do to his beloved pipes (“It’s starting. I told them it would start, and it’s starting.”), Wilsons Shears’s clear discomfort at saying the word “sanitary,” or Tommy French’s reply to a mother asking if he thinks her daughter has a future: “Not unless Florence Henderson dies.” Throw in the broader comic scenes of Little Bob (Big Bob’s son) and his horndog mates trying to snap candids of the contestants, the outrageously ethnic Maria who brings a bowl of guacamole to every meeting and has some choice words for the pageant stage manager, and a perfectly uncomfortable visit to a psychiatrist, and you’re only scratching the surface. Smile is consistently amusing, frequently laugh-out-loud, and – for a comedy that’s pushing two hours – never outstays its welcome.

If that’s all Smile was, it would still be a triumph, but Ritchie and Belson have slightly bigger fish to fry. If Downhill Racer was about the hollowness of victory and The Candidate the inherent compromise of competition, then Smile is as good a takedown of relentless positive thinking as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided (2009). Santa Rosa seems to exist as a sunny, fixed grin, as complacent as it is proud of its aw-shucks Americana. As a setting for an event that promotes Vaseline smiles and ruthless sanctimony, it is perfect. For the likes of trophy-maker Andy, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which is one of the reasons he slides into heavy drinking); for others like Brenda and Big Bob, it’s an aspirational place where American values are seen on every street corner, car lot, and trailer park within the town limits.

But Ritchie is careful to show the hairline cracks in the façade. Brenda’s home life is all pageant work, frozen dinners, hideous cat ornaments, and freshly cleaned wall-to-wall carpets. Barbara Feldon said that “Smile was the only film I am proud to have been in,” and for good reason: the former Agent 99 struggled to make the leap from television to features, and would only make another couple of theatrical movies before her retirement. Her Brenda is a bristling extension of Agent 99, a smart and capable woman dealing with idiotic men, but one riven with neuroses and marital problems. She needs the pageant for her life to make sense; without it, she’s just another well-dressed, frustrated housewife. And Feldon makes the most of the part, whether she’s breezing through the girls and telling them to smile, avoiding her husband’s presence, or struggling through a domestic argument.

As for Bob, with his hokey aphorisms and wide-eyed, cornfed positivity, he’s one observation about his Young American Miss-inspired pep talks away from coming apart at the seams. Naturally this comes from the discontented Andy (who has recently shot Brenda – she’s fine, it’s just a nick in the shoulder), who now sees Bob for the affable fraud he is, the former Marine who once had a date with Elizabeth Taylor (she stood him up – “that was the weekend she ran off and married the hotel guy.”), who hides himself behind the white sheets of the local business fraternity (and makes people kiss the dead chicken ring), and whose brief time in a psychiatrist’s office reveals a writhing bundle of insecurities. Bruce Dern never struck me as a particularly comic actor prior to Smile – he was the guy you got if you wanted someone to shoot John Wayne¹⁰ or play the jittery weirdo – but Dern is pitch-perfect as Big Bob, delivering the otherwise bland line “No, I’m not angry with you” like a cagey child and delivering comedy gold as he feebly tries to seem nonchalant in an uncomfortable chair. For all intents and purposes, he is the protagonist in Smile, and a reasonably subtle presentation of the self-delusion and smothered dreams required to be an otherwise purposeless pillar of this sunny community.

At least Bob recognises the futility of his position, even if he does ultimately return to his old ways. The girls, all white teeth and bright futures, for the most part seem to see the pageant as a valuable thing. For many, like Annette O’Toole’s Doria and Maria O’Brien’s Maria, the pageant is a stepping stone to success, and they’ll do pretty much anything to guarantee it: Doria uses her innocent feminine wiles in a pseudo-striptease talent spot with Beethoven as accompaniment, while Maria’s rictus grin and overegged accent hide a ruthless competitor, using her identity as Mexican-American to ram home both her ostensible exoticism (that accent drops when she’s angry) and her love for her adoptive homeland. The other girls tend to range from knuckleheaded innocents who become the butt of adult jokes – Shirley’s “seasonal medley,” meet the arsehole band – or just plain teenage clumsiness: witness Connie’s suitcase packing routine fall apart the moment she rushes to make the plane at the beginning or Karen’s inability to twirl a bamboo cane. This is usually played for laughs, but it’s never cruel: the idiocy presented is just a symptom of the overall ridiculousness of the pageant. The only girl to recognise it as such is Robin, the outsider contender brought up by a single parent, who questions the idea of the pageant just as much as she questions the boys making money by scoring touchdowns. But even then, it’s difficult not to feel something like affection when her mother turns up to give her a hug at the end of the movie.

After all, the pageant is the system, and everyone is trying to make the best of it, enjoying whatever small victories come their way, even though they all know deep down that it’s absurd. The same can’t be said for the majority of the cast, many of whom weren’t professional actors, or the audience at the pageant, all of whom were locals who had paid to be there.¹¹ Only Ritchie and Belson knew the ultimate winner, which is one of the reasons Conrad Hall’s camera is all over the place at the end of the movie, and why so many of the reactions have a verisimilitude that was by now a hallmark of Ritchie’s work. Again, his crowds look real (mostly because they are), populated with the kind of faces you don’t see very often. Also again, these people aren’t being mocked – Ritchie’s satire is of the cheerful sort, a gentle ribbing of idiosyncrasies rather than a full-throated demolition of the American way of life.

Geniality can often be misinterpreted as superficiality, however. While reviews were largely good, advance word from the festival circuit was not. Even the likes of Ebert, Kael, and Maslin saddled their positives with a host of caveats, as if unwilling to relax into a movie that was trying to say something mildly serious in an obviously comic way. This is often the case with comedies that don’t wield their serious themes like a sledgehammer, and the glossy exploitation of the beauty pageant may have felt like an easy target for some, especially with Nashville right around the corner, all too eager to tell Americans how shitty their country had become. Smile doesn’t want to do that: it’s as much a celebration of American oddity as the early work of Errol Morris.¹² Had it been a documentary (and much of the events are based on real life), it would have been praised as a significant slice of Americana.

Alas, this was not to be. United Artists chucked out Smile in a limited release of only four theatres and despite Ritchie’s promotional efforts, the movie tanked. It didn’t help that Altman was about to overshadow the movie with his own scabrous take on national identity, or that the summer of 1975 was the summer of Jaws. Ritchie was rightly proud of the film, but his career was starting to look a little shaky: “If it wasn’t going to be a hit at the box office, I needed my next job. Again, you got to pay the bills.” That next job would be found on the back of Smile’s portrayal of the horndog, foul-mouthed kids, but that, as they say, is for next time …

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Next Up: “The coach is waiting for his next beer. The pitcher is waiting for her first bra. The team is waiting for a miracle. Consider the possibilities.”

1. For a great look at the filming of Smile from a local point of view, I highly recommend “When ‘Smile’ made Santa Rosans do anything but” by Gaye LeBaron.

2. Daughter of Edmond O’Brien, and about as Mexican as a pint of Guinness in a Los Angeles theme pub.

3. Like the great Annette O’Toole (who apparently got the part because she did an impression of a dead cockroach at the audition - I don’t know if this is a step up or a step down from writing a song about maraschino cherries), I believe this was Camp’s feature debut (or near as dammit). That her character comes from El Centro (the same place as Belson) is a nice touch. For those unaware of Camp’s work, you may recognise her as one of the ill-fated bunnies in Apocalypse Now (1979) or Tracy Flick’s mother in Election (1999). For men of a certain age, she will always be Yvette in Clue (1985), a movie so good I wish I could extend the remit of this here Substack. “But eet eez dark oopsturs an ah am frahtened of ze dark …” She also turned up in a recent episode of Matlock, which I was very pleased about.

4. Violet Beauregard herself! Also extremely funny. Especially when she gets startled by the horn section.

5. Naturally, this being the 1970s, seventeen-year-old Melanie Griffith is the only one to be thoroughly exploited and end up on a cop’s sun visor. I suppose it’s marginally better than being mauled by yer mam’s lions.

6. The Great Michael Kidd, I should say. Choreographer for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), and Hello, Dolly (1969) among many others. Also certified “evil Mark Ruffalo lookalike.”

7. Those I haven’t mentioned: “Delta Dawn” on saxophone, a girl doing Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine and Edith Bunker impressions, a girl singing “You Were Meant For Me” with no microphone awareness, a poem about the “rotting maggots of death,” and a girl mashing her way through a piano version of “Ebb Tide” while a spotlight picks out her sub-Bob Ross paintings.

8. In case you didn’t notice, I have issues with Nashville. I appreciate it for its artistry, but Gwen Welles’s Sueleen haunts me in ways I cannot fully articulate and it’s overall a little sour for my taste.

9. When Smile was adapted into an ill-fated Broadway musical in 1986, his programme bio read, “Smile fulfils a lifelong dream for Mr Belson - to be paid twice for the same script.”

10. Yes, I know The Shootist came out after Smile. Shut up. I make the rules here. I can say stupid shit if I want.

11. According to Bruce Dern, Ritchie ran a Cadillac lottery to get the same faces in the audience every day which became so popular, they ended up charging people to enter. Other sources state that the audience paid no more than $2.50 to be a part of the movie. Either way, it’s not often a movie makes money during production.

12. Specifically Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981), both of which are fantastic, not least because the former famously obligated Werner Herzog to eat his own shoe.