Low Blow

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE MAIN EVENT

Directed by Howard Zieff

Screenplay by Gail Parent and Andrew Smith

Barbra Streisand may be the only female star in films with the box-office power to do almost anything she wants. That being so, it passeth all understanding why she would want to star in and produce (with her housemate, the distinguished hair stylist Jon Peters) anything as misbegotten as The Main Event.

It is a throwback to the fighting love stories Hollywood used to do in the 1930s: hero and heroine take an instant dislike to each other, then find grounds for affection in the course of squabbling their way through the picture. In this case the premise involves a successful perfume manufacturer (this ties in with Streisand's famous proboscis--get it?) whose accountant has absconded with all her assets except an inactive prizefighter (Ryan O'Neal). The boxer had been kept on the payroll as a tax loss, which suited him just fine since boxing was the sort of sport at which he imagined he might get hurt.

Now, however, his owner insists that he must pursue his pugilistic career in earnest. This leads to much yelling between them and much misunderstanding of the rules and traditions of boxing once she takes a hand in his training. The feuding is supposed to be funny, but the film is so repetitive that it is usually boring, when it isn't uncomfortable.

The fighter finally gets a big match mostly because he and his owner are so cute and publicizable when they scream at each other in the ring. This leads to the movie's nadir, a training camp sequence in which we are asked to believe that a competent, liberated woman of our time would passively accept living quarters in an open dormitory populated entirely by the fighter's all-male staff. Streisand is, if anything, less attractive when she goes all cute and kittenish than when she is being strident and pushy.

Were she not an unquestioned star, one would suspect The Main Event of being a vanity production--the sort of thing aging screen queens sometimes get their wealthy admirers to buy for them so that the camera may once again be permitted to adore them. In particular, this star seems to labor under the delusion that it is not so much her face as her bottom that is her fortune--so many low angles of it upturned and bouncing about are featured. It's not a bad bottom, but you can't really make a movie of it. You can make a good movie that allows Streisand to employ fully her unquestioned gifts as singer and comedienne. But first, she's got to stop mooning around.

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