Smile (1975)

Review by All Movie Guide
Only in the '70s could a film like Smile be produced, and only in the '70s could a film as groundbreaking and influential get lost in the shuffle of other groundbreaking, influential "director's" pictures. Released the same year as Robert Altman's masterpiece Nashville, Michael Ritchie's satire presents a similar, loose-ensemble take on one of the hallmarks of Americana, in this instance, the beauty pageant. Helmed from a script by sitcom writer Jerry Belson, Smile is by far the more unassuming of the two movies, but it has just as much on its mind. Class, race, sex, and capitalist hucksterism all come into play against the backdrop of the Southern Californian "Young American Miss" semi-finals, hilariously rendered by Ritchie and Belson in a series of understated fly-on-the-wall vignettes, parceled out over the course of the pageant's four-day duration. Smile is full of so many droll, deadpan laughs, it's hard to see them coming. Ritchie never transmits a punch line through elaborate setups or nudge-nudge editing, and his sense of humor, however biting, never succumbs to exaggeration or condescension. As it approaches its climactic ceremony, the film effortlessly takes on darker and darker shadings -- courtesy of the two misfits stranded in this gleaming, prefab landscape, the cuckolded husband Andy (Nicholas Pryor) and the reluctant finalist Robin (Joan Prather) -- but despite it all, the tunnel-vision-stricken characters come up just short of epiphany, as they might in real life. Featured at the 1975 New York Film Festival, Smile never caught on at the box office, but its influence could be felt in the caustic, uncertain cinematic atmosphere of the late '90s, in such films as American Beauty, Election, or the far-inferior Drop Dead Gorgeous. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide