Review: Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Rod Steiger is a pompous, chauvinistic adventurer who returns home after being lost in the jungle for several years, and presumed dead by wife Susannah York. Hoping to once again claim masculine superiority over the household he previously abandoned, he finds York has become liberated and is currently dating a dopey, peacenik liberal doctor (George Grizzard), to his horror. Steven Paul plays Steiger and York’s opinionated son, who is just as mortified with the hippie doctor as Steiger is. Don Murray is another interested suitor, who like Steiger is a macho idiot (and a vacuum salesman to boot), but much more of the ‘idiot’ than the ‘macho’, though he certainly tries. William Hickey turns up as Steiger’s acid-brained test pilot buddy, who has to explain to his own wife where he’s been all these years.

 

More accessible than the film version of “Slaughterhouse-Five”, but also stagey and far less interesting, this awkward 1971 comedy is loud, shouty, pretentious, and uneven. Directed by the eclectic Mark Robson (“The Harder They Fall”, “Inn of the Sixth Happiness”, “The Seventh Victim”, “Valley of the Dolls”) and adapted by Kurt Vonnegut himself from his play, it’s got terrific work by a scene-stealing Don Murray (as a man too stupid to be a macho man), and fine moments for Rod Steiger and William Hickey, but has dated considerably and I can’t say I found its themes terribly interesting or relevant. I would’ve foregone the irritating characters played by Susannah York and Steven Paul (who would later become the world record ‘youngest producer’ and the writer/producer behind the infamously bad “Baby Geniuses”), and just focussed on Steiger, Murray, and the fascinatingly idiosyncratic Hickey (Imagine Michael Crawford’s hilariously accident-prone Frank Spencer recast as a New York acid-tripper). Paul in particular, is one of the most irritating child actors I’ve come across, whilst York has been much better elsewhere.

 

Say what you will about “Slaughterhouse-Five”, but at least it was one-of-a-kind, this is very much a 70s-era adapted stage play comedy, and not one of the better ones. Some will see a lot of Vonnegut in some of the narrative tricks and so on, I just found that stuff typically stagey, not typically Vonnegut, and all they do is attempt (and fail) to mask what is otherwise a very typical and very dated romantic comedy about the battle for a woman’s affections by a lout and two dopes. The one truly Vonnegut touch is all the stuff with the Nazis up in heaven, and that’s the film’s weakest material. It plays like a deleted scene from “Slaughterhouse-Five” (admittedly that film adaptation was made after this film) and certainly would’ve played better there. Hickey does have one hilarious bit when Murray asks him what it’s like to be a test pilot. Let’s just say that this is one guy you hope never pilots a plane with actual people in it.

 

The film gets better and less quirky the longer it goes on, but I really do think this is one of those films that was once topical and now reads rather ho-hum. It’s a film that seems just as disapproving of fuddy-duddy peacenik intellectuals as it is of overly macho chauvinists, but was there any other point to it than that? Someone out there probably loves this film, I found it watchable and occasionally funny, but pretentious, stagey and ultimately parts are much better than the whole. Probably a must-see for Steiger fans, though, it’s a real showcase for his blowhard theatrics.

 

Rating: C+