Mildly amusing Pacino sitcom

This is Al Pacino’s 1982 change-of pace movie between the underworlds of “Cruising” and of “Scarface.” He plays am Armenian-American playwright, Ivan Travalian, who has written a play that will be backed if screenstar Alice Detroit (Dyan Cannon) will sign on. The lunch that impresario Alan King arranges is the best scene between adults in the movie.

Besides getting his first Broadway production going and trying to do major revisions to its second act, as demanded by everyone involved, Ivan has to deal with the breakdown of his marriage to Gloria (Tuesday Weld). She has a history of getting bored with a husband after a child or two and three or so years of living together. She leaves Ivan with their son, a son (or two?) of his from a previous marriage, and half a dozen of her daughters. They all prefer him to her. (He’s the bigger star, right?) Although dispatched to their fathers, they drift back.

If you have difficulty imaging Al Pacino as an Earth Mother, seeing “Author! Author!” provides only minimal aid. He doesn’t seem very comfortable--comfortable not being a notable aspect of the rest of the repertoire of Al Pacino movies, of course. Ditto for “domestic.” With so many demands from so many people, he has good reason to be frenetic. (Now that’s something Pacino does all the time!) When he focuses on the play’s second act problem is not clear. Nonetheless, the play is a great success. (I already mentioned that Pacino is the star, I know, and I think that explains this, too.) He takes a cab from Manhattan to Cape Cod to bring Gloria back (the second-best scene of supposed adults).

There is a certain fascination with seeing Pacino so out of character, and the wise and compassionate children are entertaining. The girls are not very individuated, but the boys are. Igor and Geraldo never leave, and Spike returns quickly, while most of the girls are living with their biological fathers for part of the movie.

The parts of the two female stars are also underwritten. Although I rather like Dyan Cannon (who, I’m told, has moved from “Ally McBeal” to “Three Sisters” on tv), it is hard to accept her as a big movie star. Her only major big-screen success was as Alice in “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.” She all but disappears in the last half of the “Author! Author!”, and I don’t have any clear idea of what her part in the play might be.

I like the name “Alice Detroit.” It’s almost as good as “Tuesday Weld” as a name. Tuesday Weld as an actress puzzles me. There are many people who think she is very talented and was and is underutilized on screen. I am not convinced. I vaguely remember her being good in “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and “Lord Love a Duck,” but she had a major chance in “Play It As It Lays” and stank. Be that as it may, what little screenwriter Israel Horovitz (a hack responsible for the abomination of “The Strawberry Statement”) and producer/director Arthur Hiller (the hack who perpetrated “Man from La Mancha” on screen) gave her to do in this movie, she phoned in.

Although the children in “Author! Author!” (especially the mordant Eric Curry as Igor) are more entertaining than those in “Please Don’t Eat the Daises,” I’d have to say the latter is a better movie about trying to raise children and have a life in The Theatuh. David Niven is more charming than Al Pacino (isn’t that a big surprise?) and Doris Day is more convincing than Tuesday Weld. (That may surprise some, but I think that Doris Day was a better actress than she is given credit for. Some other blonde 1950s stars--Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak--who were dismissed as being merely photogenic have been re-evaluated and are more highly regarded as actresses now. I think that Ms. Day often did a lot with very little, and was especially good as the iron-willed mother in Hitchcock’s (second) “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”)

“Author! Author!” is primarily a sitcom about a harried but devoted single father. There are better sitcom writers working in tv, but those interested in the complete work of Cannon, Pacino, or Weld need to see it and probably will not be harmed by the movie. (And Eric Gurry was in “Bad Boys” (1983) with Sean Penn, BTW, but hasn’t been see onscreen since.)