Tired Intrigue

By J.C.

S*P*Y*S

Directed by IRVIN KERSHNER

Screenplay by MALCOLM MARMORSTEIN, LAWRENCE J. COHEN and FRED FREEMAN

The punctuation is misleading. The only similarities between this bedraggled comedy of foreign intrigue and M*A*S*H are two leading men and three asterisks.

The credits are especially beefy in the writing department, but one can only guess at the contribution the scenarists made. Perhaps each supplied one bit of title punctuation. S*P*Y*S seems to have been tailored to and by the talents of Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. The movie has a tone of smug bemusement, as if the actors had gone pretty much their own way with it. That can work out fine, given the proper combination, but like their director, Irvin Kershner (Up the Sandbox, The Flint Flam Man), Sutherland and Gould rather drastically overestimate their own charms. In M*A*S*H they played well together because they both worked with precision, timing themselves off each other like a couple of telepathic tumblers. Here, their slackness, their contempt for the movie (richly merited though it may be) come across too clearly, and are catching besides.

There is little sense in spending much time on the plot, since nobody involved in the film did. Sutherland plays a straight-arrow American agent, Gould a rather more cynical and rumpled crony. Running about Paris, dabbling in all sorts of mediocre intrigues, they discover that their own intelligence agency is trying to eliminate them. They attempt to turn this situation to their advantage by stealing secrets from one source and selling them to the highest international bidder. But they are not very adept at political manipulation, so they find themselves being threatened, beaten and shot at with a frequency that is mostly what passes for comedy.

The movie's credits introduce the two leading men simply as "Sutherland and Gould," as if they were some sort of two-a-day act like Weber and Fields. Get the hook.

sbJ.C.

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