MOVIE REVIEW : ‘FINE MESS’ FAILS TO SCORE A CLEAN KO

Everyone has an off day and, unfortunately, “A Fine Mess” (citywide) is one of Blake Edwards’. It’s not really a bad movie. In some ways, it’s a better directed farce than the current hits “Back to School” or “Legal Eagles.” But it’s erratic, and often weightless or uncentered; the pieces keep flying apart.

This extended slapstick chasemovie--about a horse-doping scandal, two hapless Hollywood hangers-on and the two bumbling torpedoes pursuing them--doesn’t have the flair of Edwards at his best. It often lacks real character, comic tension and inevitability.

The movie takes place in modern Hollywood, but its soul lies in the pre-smog, sunny, palm-latticed wonderland of the ‘20s and ‘30s. In that tinseltown limbo between the two, womanizing studio extra Spence Holden (Ted Danson) and his frantic carhop buddy Dennis Powell (Howie Mandel) keep fleeing the inept onslaughts of Wayne (Turnip) Farragalla (Richard Mulligan) and Maurice (Binky) Dzundza (Stuart Margolin)--two monumentally accident-prone hoodlums, whom Spence has surprised in the act of horse-race fixing.

When these two pairs aren’t stumbling all over each other, Dennis and Spence romance some women on the fly: respectively, a starchy art auctioneer (Jennifer Edwards) and a Mafia mistress (Maria Conchita Alonso), whose sugar daddy (Paul Sorvino) is Turnip and Binky’s employer.

Edwards’ model here, as in “The Great Race,” is the comedy of Laurel and Hardy. The title, “A Fine Mess,” echoes Hardy’s frequent lament about the destiny to which Laurel’s ineptitude dooms them both. And the movie was originally based on “The Music Box,” the 1932 L. & H. short about two furniture movers’ Sisyphean attempt to carry a huge piano up a hilly staircase. Dennis and Spence move a piano too, but Edwards doesn’t work up the classic routine you expect, and his homage goes awry in other ways too.

“A Fine Mess” has a design problem: Its Laurel & Hardy prototypes aren’t really its heroes. Instead, it’s the pratfalling gunsels, Turnip and Binky, who ape Stan’s and Ollie’s miscues, bawling and slow burns. Spence and Dennis resemble another comic pair: smoothie Dean Martin & stooge-hysteric Jerry Lewis (or Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in “Some Like It Hot,” are also reminiscent of Martin & Lewis).

Spence and Dennis occupy a racier psychic territory than moon children Laurel & Hardy; the same kind of sight gags don’t work for them. We need something sharper, more detailed, and, as the sole scriptwriter, Edwards doesn’t supply it. He leaps right in, starting with a big slapstick set-piece, then vaulting from one to the other--when he’d have been better off with a slower buildup and more character embroidery. (The wall-to-wall rock sound track, very peculiar for Henry Mancini, also seems a mistake.)

The movie is no success, but it still has some of Edwards’ cinematic savoir-faire and lambent comic flights. Edwards, a master of the accumulating mechanical gag and a virtuoso of misdirection and delayed reactions, is also often a fine satirist-romantic, who can both puncture and exalt the poetry and cliches of courtship. But not, often enough, in “A Fine Mess.”

Perhaps he needed a script-collaborator. “A Fine Mess” (MPAA-rated: PG) has structure and good sight gags--and often expert funny work from Mandel, Margolin and Mulligan--but it’s weak on personality and dialogue. It seems too airy and free-floating. It delivers a lazy Sunday TV afternoon’s worth of laughs, rather than the wonderfully simple, lucidly intricate pleasures you get from the “Pink Panther” movies, “The Party,” “Victor/Victoria” “Micki and Maude,” “Darling Lili” or “10.”