Word: dreyfuss
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...close encounter with Richard Dreyfuss...
That exchange says three things about the actor, hereafter identified as Richard Dreyfuss, the star of Jaws and two of this year's best films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goodbye Girl: 1) he is brash, 2) he is never at a loss for words and 3) he knows what he likes when he sees it-he and the girl, Lucinda Valles, 23, have been together, off and on, ever since they met in a Manhattan restaurant three years...
...such has been the case up until The Goodbye Girl, a film that reveals a Richard Dreyfuss we have not seen before. This romantic comedy is a rather modest entertainment, but it forces its star to open up by placing him in a role that demands a generosity of spirit. The character Dreyfuss plays, Elliott Garfield, is a struggling New York actor who is mad for an emotionally battered Broadway dancer (Marsha Mason) who will have nothing to do with him. To win the woman's affection, Elliott must rise above his neuroses-he must be strong enough...
...Dreyfuss aside, The Goodbye Girl is not without its unpretentious merits, the most notable of which is Neil Simon's script. Though the film relies heavily on the mechanical plot devices of '40s boy-meets-girl movies, Simon keeps gratuitous punch lines to a minimum and shows an open-hearted concern for his fetching characters. Unfortunately, The Goodbye Girl's direction has been entrusted to Herbert Ross (The Turning Point), a film maker who has a bizarre knack for making almost any screenplay look as if it were written for radio. This time around he photographs...
...milieu that Ross, an ex-Broadway choreographer, and Simon know uncannily well. In the film's funniest sequence, Elliott opens off-off-Broadway in an outlandishly homosexual production of Shakespeare's Richard III; Ross captures the texture of a disastrous opening night in all its horror, and Dreyfuss's flaming king proves the nuttiest send-up of bad acting since Dick Shawn created a musical-comedy Hitler for Mel Brooks' The Producers...