Word: rios
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WHILE WATCHING director Stanley Donen's latest film. Blame It on Rio, the viewers feel like tourists who have spent a day without suntan lotion under the scorching rays of Rio-completely burned. Unlike the cast, who blame Rio's sultry steaminess for their inane behavior, we can only blame co-writers Charles Peters and Larry Gelbart for their soap-opera like script and contrived plot...
...film centers around a holiday vacation, in which two middle-aged friends. Matthew (Michael Caine) and Victor (Joseph Bologna) escape to Rio to offset their mid-life crises with some warn weather adventure. When the movie opens, Victor is already in the midst of a divorce, while Matthew receives a rude awakening when packing with his wife Karen, (Valerie Harper) for Rio. Karen informs Matthew that he cannot put his snorkeling equipment in her suitcase because she has decided to go to Club Med to think their marriage over...
...plot has two businessmen, Matthew Hollis (Michael Caine) and Victor Lyons (Joseph Bologna), their marriages in disarray, renting a house in Rio in order to share a vacation with their adolescent daughters. Whereupon Jennifer Lyons (Michelle Johnson, whose awkwardness may be attributed in part to the fact that she is a model rather than an actress and in part to the fact that she is required to do about half her scenes nude to the waist) seduces "Uncle Matthew." The joke-if the word can be applied here-is that she is cool and sophisticated, while he gets all flustered...
...capacity for turning sexual adventure into sexual folly, and a firm sense of values on the director's part. Farce, which must accept its characters on their own dumb or dizzy terms, is the wrong way to handle the dubious premise of a film like Blame It on Rio. It is too indelicate...
...Morality, to emulate his try for modest craftsmanship. It is dismaying to see them sell off comedy's right to social criticism in exchange for the chance to make soft-core porn. Perhaps that accounts for the dispirited and guilty air of a film that makes even Rio look ugly and cannot work up so much as an honest smirk over what it is doing. -By Richard Schickel