Bert Rigby, You're a Fool Reviews

In his first major American film outing, Tony Award-winner Robert Lindsay loses something in the transition from stage to film. His antics, wildly funny on stage in "Me and My Girl," seem unduly labored on the screen and might profitably have been toned down by the film's writer-director, Carl Reiner. The slight, trite plot follows Bert Rigby (Lindsay), a happy-go-lucky Cockney coal miner with a penchant for mimicking Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Buster Keaton, in his antic and amorous adventures though England and eventually to Hollywood, where his goal is to launch a career as a movie song-and-dance man. Instead he winds up as the butler of a Hollywood superstar (Corbin Bernsen) and becomes entangled with a movie mogul's sexually uninhibited wife (Anne Bancroft). Considering that Reiner intentionally fashioned this picture as an unabashed tribute to the "golden era" Hollywood musicals of the '30s and '40s, it's a shame he didn't achieve something more original and inspired and, above all, closer to the realm of a G rating. BERT RIGBY is an R-rated endeavor that incorporates generous doses of profanity, sexual innuendo, toilet humor, and a variety of other vulgarities that hardly relate to its supposed musical prototypes.