As a producer of musicals, Alan Carr isn’t the Arthur Freed of his generation, but he’ll do as the Joe Pasternak—and in first-time director Patricia Birch he’s found his George Sidney, a filmmaker who seems to grasp excess, frenzy, and bad taste as raucous aesthetic principles. Light years ahead of Randal Kleiser’s 1978 original, this 1982 sequel employs the Shakespearean marriage plot so beloved of classic musicals, in which two mismatched couples are straightened out and the songs express the moral distinctions of love and sex. I don’t mean to deny the self-evident second-rateness of the project, just to suggest that it’s preferable to the third-rateness that has become the norm in the genre. With Maxfield Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer; photographed by Blake Edwards’s ex-protege Frank Stanley, which may account for the consistently intelligent use of Panavision.
