Down and Out in Beverly Hills

When Nolte's gentleman of the road tries to drown himself in a Beverly Hills swimming-pool, coathanger baron Dreyfuss welcomes him into a family riddled with the whole gamut of late 20th century neuroses. Another of Mazursky's looks at the pursuit of happiness, this update of Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning starts life as a satire on the tribal rites of the new and filthy rich, but goes badly wrong somewhere down the line. Renoir's anarchic hobo romantically ditched bourgeois bliss for the open road; Mazursky presents his bag people as pathetic basket cases, with Nolte's upwardly mobile tramp only too happy to take up permanent residence in Lotusland. And it betokens some kind of desperation (or perhaps the fact that this was produced by Disney's adult offshoot) that the comedy rests increasingly on the cute antics of the family dog. As one of David Mamet's characters would say, money talks and bullshit walks.