Date Misbehavin'

AFTER SEEING Blind Date, I finally understood that Bruce Willis' irresistable charm comes from his cosmic ordinariness: he seems like just an average guy trying to get from A to B. Women want to straighten out his ever-crooked tie, men want to share a few rounds of beer with him, and the fact that Willis is simply not an average guy makes him no less appealing.

Blind Date

Written by Dale Launer

Directed by Blake Edwards

There is something else I learned from this movie (and this is a (movie, not a film). Before I saw Blind Date, I thought that Kim Basinger was actually a Barbi Doll. Now I know it's true.

But Blind Date is not really meant to teach lessons. In fact, it is silly, silly, silly--so silly that it is hysterically funny in a way that moronic comedies ought to be. It's almost campy.

Which is not to say that this movie isn't somewhat enlightening. I mean, what man on earth could ever guess that going on a blind date with Kim Basinger could end up ruining your life? What begins as pleasant enough evening for fast-track L.A. careerist Walter Davis (Bruce Willis), leaves him fired, arrested, injured, hung over, and with only the frame of his sporty white car to drive home in.

It all starts out innocently enough. After his date stands him up, Walter is desperately seeking someone sensational to attend a business dinner with him. His boss warns him in advance that the evening is for a Japanese client who keeps several concubines in addition to a slavish wife, and who has extremely conservative attitudes toward women. Even though his sleazy car dealer brother-in-law has set him up on more than one date with disaster, Walter is assured that Nadia (Kim Basinger), a Southern tart who's new to town, will be different.

And different she is.

When Walter first sees lovely and demure Nadia--and it's only through a match light, since she's blown a fuse in her hotel room--he is, to say the least, pleased.

With thick dark bangs, a prissy hairstyle and a dire need for some face powder, Basinger doesn't look as good as usual, but she is a striking presence in her little red suit. Before the dinner, Nadia and Walter attend an art exhibit that will strike Northeasterners as very L.A., and he shyly asks her what a nice girl like her is doing with a free evening.

Bad question. With a chemical allergy to alcohol, the tiniest bit of champagne completely uninhibits prim Kim and turns her into nasty Nadia. She undoes the floral arrangement, curses at the waiter in French, trips the pockets off all the men's jackets ("It's the new style," she exclaims), and convinces the Japanese client's obsequious Geisha Doll of a wife to leave him and claim the 50% of the property she's entitled to by California law. Walter is not pleased.

IN FILMING this blind date gone rotten, Blake Edwards leaves no nightmares undreamt. Houses that have always stood in one place are suddenly carried away and beds that have always been sturdy cave in. Following the dinner fiasco, the rest of the night is spent in a California-freeway car chase with Nadia's homicidal ex-boyfriend David (John Larroquette), who also happens to be a trial lawyer.

This is Murphy's Movie and everything that can possibly go wrong on celluloid does.

All of it is very improbable, stupid stuff, but it is also what physical farce is made of. The Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin used to play these sorts of raucous gags, and these days people like the Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona) are among its most skillful practitioners. Blake Edwards may have lost his touch recently, but this is the man who exposed Mary Poppins' (wife Julie Andrews') breasts in the clever Hollywood expose S.O.B., and it is also the man who exposed everything you ever wanted to know about Bo Derek in 10. In addition, he is the genius behind the Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers.

A lot of how much you like Blind Date depends on how much you love soon-to-be-overexposed Bruce Willis, who gives a likable performance as the yuppie next door who should have been a big star. Surprisingly, Willis ends up spending most of the movie playing the straight man to Basinger's drunken antics. And after watching her passively pout her way through 9-1/2 Weeks, it is hard to believe what a convincing comedienne this Barbi Doll can be. This may just be Basinger's calling.

Blind Date is the sort of movie that is hard to like and impossible to dislike. It is consistently funny (or, at least, constantly laughable), and in the end the bad guys get burned, the good guy gets the girl--and, most important, Willis recovers swiftly enough to survive his first feature film.