MacLaine Goes for Broke

What a Way to Go! is five or six big, splashy movies rolled into none. Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a pair of permanently show-struck Broadway librettists, it sets out to satirize the very things it seems head over heels in love with: moom pitchers and the cult of "success--money--success." Shirley MacLaine plays a freckle-faced Ohio gamine whose pastel American Dream is marred by the Midas touch. She wants only "a simple life with one man to love." But the men she marries have a way of getting rich quick, leaving her in widow's weeds with Rolls-Royces, private airplanes, pink mansions, cash and securities. After four husbands and legacies piling up to $211 million, she goes to see Psychiatrist Robert Cummings.

The story unfolds in flashbacks. First, Shirley's mother (Margaret Dumont, that grand battle-axe of Marx Brothers fame) warns her about the high cost of scruples. But having refused to wed Dean Martin because he is a tycoon, Shirley marries Dick Van Dyke, a philosophical hardware merchant who has exactly what she wants -- nothing. "Our life together was just like an old silent movie," says Shirley. Which cues in some grainy black-and-white footage --a slapstick idyl with speeded-up action. The idyl jerks to a stop when Van Dyke throws away his Thoreau and proceeds to make a mint. "A little hard work never killed anybody," he insists. Soon he drops dead, leaving Shirley sadder but richer, and free for Husband No. 2.

Enter Paul Newman, a no-account artist who builds his bank balance up to seven figures by inventing a masterpiece machine. One day the machine turns on its master and beats him into an abstract blob. Husband No. 3 is Robert Mitchum. Already wealthy, he liquidates his assets and goes native down on the farm, only to meet disaster trying to milk a bull. Next comes Gene Kelly ("Our life was like a gay 1930s musical") who hoofs his way to fame, fortune and a grim finale.

By this time, Shirley's psychiatrist wants to try for the jackpot. "I'm honored that you'd risk your life for me," she purrs. She has no sooner declined his proposal than the cleaning man arrives and--hey, guess who? Dean Martin, down on his luck and full of last-reel surprises.

For all its talent and occasional for ward thrust, What a Way to Go! never really gets anywhere. The reasons why are neatly capsuled in Shirley's cinefantasy with Mitchum, described as "one of those Hollywood movies all about love and what'11-she-wear-next?"

This gag sequence, credited as A Lush Budget Production, offers four minutes' worth of opulent sets and a whole spring collection of Edith Head's most improbable costumes. But What a Way itself is so extravagantly overdrawn that the audience well may wonder where parody leaves off and plot begins. To furbish a frail spoof with all that Hollywood upholstery seems a bit like crossing a mountain stream aboard the Queen Mary--and why bother? Shirley MacLaine is a girl who can go for miles just paddling her own canoe.

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