Movie Reviews : ‘Bert Rigby’ a Musical Misfire, Despite Affable Star

Watching “Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool” (citywide) you can understand how its English star, Robert Lindsay, was such a sensation on stage in the revival of the 50-year-old British musical, “Me and My Girl”--and how Carl Reiner could get sufficiently carried away when seeing him perform to write and direct this misfired movie especially for him.

Lindsay is an affable, old-fashioned song-and-dance man but lacks charisma on screen. (Mary Martin and Ethel Merman had the same problem.) Not that he gets much help from Reiner, who encourages him to strive to please so endlessly that he becomes tiresome and bland. Lindsay’s repeated homages to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly end up underlining the inimitableness of the originals. (His Chaplin and Keaton are far crisper.) “Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool” overdoses on nostalgia.

You know that you’re in vintage musical comedy fantasy land when Rigby, a naive North of England coal miner dreaming of music hall stardom, emerges at the end of the day from the colliery performing “The Continental” and his fellow miners don’t think he’s out of his mind. Chance and a labor strike take him to Hollywood to do a Keaton routine for a jogging shoe commercial (easily the best thing in the film), but he’s soon met with a struggle for survival rather than the promised fame and fortune.

At this point the innocuous slides into the tedious, especially when Bert encounters Anne Bancroft, the least likely woman ever to have been a dancer in “Royal Wedding” and “Silk Stockings.” Bancroft seems to be giving us her impression of Marilyn Monroe, had Monroe lived to a sexually predatory middle age, married a crass studio mogul (the late Jackie Gayle) and somehow acquired Kay Francis’ well-known problem in pronouncing r. The total effect is simply appalling. More on target are Corbin Bernsen with his relaxed portrayal of an amiably caddish big star to whom Bert teaches a North of England accent and Robbie Coltrane as Bert’s shamelessly ruthless English manager. Cathryn Bradshaw is Rigby’s pert childhood sweetheart, wondering when he’ll ever return home.

Most everyone professes a longing for the return of the musical, but “Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool” (rated R for crude language, much of it needless) and the more vital “Tap,” both of which should have been set no later than the ‘50s, reveal how badly the form needs to be brought up to date.