Word: lila
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...bare bones of the story are familiar, and, once into it, almost predictable. Lenny (Charles Grodin), a nice Jewish guy, marries Lila (Jeannie), a nice Jewish girl, to the strains of that old piano favorite, "I'd like to buy the world a Coke..." On the trip from New York to Miami for their honeymoon, Lila gradually reveals her clumsy, frumpy self (and the wide range of Berlin's comic talents), to the growing dismay of her husband. She proudly thrusts her bare breasts at him in the car, nearly causing an accident. She chews gum loudly, eats candy...
...Lila's mistake is to burn herself under the Miami sun to the point of immobilization, leaving Lenny free to explore the delights and terrors of the Gentile world. He falls madly in love with Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), a nymphet whose sleek beauty and poise draw him all the way to her Minnesota home--and to a hurried divorce from Lila. Lenny's main obstacle to winning Kelly's hand is her father, terrifying portrayed by Eddie Albert, a sort of Old Testament God who threatens to wreak an "ass kicking" on Lenny if he doesn't leave...
...honeymoon in Miami Beach, Lila does little things that start by vaguely irritating her new husband and end by giving him long second thoughts. She talks constantly about what their life will be like after 50 years of marriage, craves chicken salad and postcoital Milky Ways and, on her first day in the sun, bakes herself to a fearful incarnadine. She spends the next couple of days in the hotel room, time enough for Lenny to fall wildly in love with a snippy blonde from Minnesota named Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd...
Lenny is an emotional deadbeat, but he is possessed of singular determination and ambition. He pursues Kelly past the obstacles of her granite father (Eddie Albert) and a divorce from his own weepy Lila, chases her down on campus in Minnesota, where he woos, wins and finally weds her. The ceremony is posh Protestant, the reception elaborate, and that same soft-drink jingle plays brightly in the background...
...watched "the gentile girls" ice-skating at night ("How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde?") might make a good epigraph for The Heartbreak Kid. Lenny's hangdog adoration of Kelly, the definitive homecoming queen, turns him into exactly the kind of chattering fool that Lila was. One of the crucial problems with the movie is that Shepherd, who is ideally icy in the earlier Miami scenes, cannot manage the difficult transition into actually caring for Lenny. Even on the day of the wedding she seems to be putting...