*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Rob Lowe, Colleen Camp, Kenneth Mars, Kim Myers
screenplay by M.A. Stewart & Max Dickens
directed by Peter Bogdanovich
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The '80s drove a lot of talented filmmakers to desperate lengths, but few sank to the levels of depravity that Peter Bogdanovich did with Illegally Yours. Like so many before him, the once-unstoppable cineaste was forced to rethink his auteurism along cheesy romantic-comedy lines; unlike so many before him, he chose to ignore the ugly implications of a disturbingly infantile screenplay, instead committing to a literal interpretation as tedious as it is unpleasant. Watching Rob Lowe pester a suffering woman on the flimsiest of pretexts isn't at all funny (it's like watching a stalker get rewarded for his predations), and as he's surrounded by some of the most irritating "hilarious" types ever to grace the screen, the only variation is in the switch from creepiness to frustrated annoyance.
Lowe's character Richard Dice isn't the kind of person who offers easy identification. In fact, he's an openly pathetic loser harbouring delusions of romance with a woman who barely knows he exists. After being dumped by a clearly sensible love-partner early on, he moves back in with his hostile family and simultaneously tries to dodge jury duty–until he realizes that the murder suspect in question is one Molly Gilbert (Colleen Camp), the object of a grade-school crush he's nursed well into adulthood. Presuming her innocence, Dice begins sleuthing on her behalf and uncovers a massive conspiracy that could redeem his would-be paramour. Assuming either one survives his adventure in perjury.
Martin Scorsese helmed a couple of movies about men infatuated with distantly-connected women…except that Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy were meant as indictments of a social phenomenon and not the stuff of screwball romance. Dice, alas, is intended as our unproblematic in-point, the man for whom we root and secretly acknowledge as redemption of our own failed puppy-love adventures. This despite a development that can be charitably described as arrested: does anyone carry a torch for a grade-school crush other than a man-child with serious mental problems? That he has a domineering mother (Jessica James) is par for the misogynist course, but the combination of a miserable home life (complete with mother's authoritarian-cop boyfriend) and a fantasy existence to beggar Henry Darger's makes for some pretty hair-raising connotations.
To be sure, the creep factor is minimized by the blandness of the production–a sad measure of how far the director had fallen since the 1970s. Whatever you made of his pretensions, you could at least expect a modicum of style from high-period Bogdanovich. By contrast, Illegally Yours looks like every other slapped-together comedy from the late-Eighties. Of course, the milling background characters–including a butch villainess who always wears a tie, two sisters who keep changing their reasons for following Molly, and Kenneth Mars as the inevitable ridiculous rich man wearing a uniform–offer interest in the form of irritation, if that's your idea of killing time. That none of these caricatures would be out of place in Altman's low-ebb epic O.C. and Stiggs is perhaps a statement on what happened to American Renaissance auteurs during the Reagan years, though I can't imagine non-specialists having a reason to care.
THE DVD
MGM presents Illegally Yours on DVD in a flipper fullscreen/1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen edition. The image falls down somewhat thanks to oversaturation and blotchy blacks; otherwise, the transfer is acceptable. Though perhaps a tad lacking in sharpness, the Dolby Digital 2.0 mono audio is likewise palatable. The only extra is the film's trailer.
109 minutes; PG; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; MGM
