Star Spangled Girl (1971)

Something about Neil Simon's work is very special to me. I haven't yet seen a Neil Simon play I didn't like. This isn't one of his more well-known plays, but it was one of my very favorites in a collection I read this past year. The cast in this movie are all superb, embodying their characters perfectly and delivering Simon's brilliant dialogue with their own comedic timing. Aside from a few awkward in-between montage sequences (primarily the ones not taken directly from Simon's script), this movie flows beautifully from beginning to end, and had me laughing and smiling the entire time. And somehow it all manages not to be too sentimental, or at least to play around with stereotypical sentimentality. When Tony Roberts rushes to catch Sandy Duncan's bus and is chasing after it on his bike, his final cry to her is not the anticipated "I love you," but the briliant, "I like the way you smell." Great stuff. 4.5 stars.