"Overboard Film"
''OVERBOARD'' is an apt title for a comedy that tries to show how the hard, brittle, thoroughly horrible exterior of an heiress named Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) actually conceals a sweet, spunky, hard-working little homemaker and mom. All Joanna needs is a bout of amnesia to bring the better person within her to the fore.
While the prospect of watching Miss Hawn play a rude, nasty socialite is appealing (indeed, she has a wonderful time with this brief part of the role), and even the transformation to homebody is a funny idea, ''Overboard'' winds up taking things too far. By the end of the film, Miss Hawn has become just too virtuous to be any fun.
In ''Overboard,'' which opens today at the Warner and other theaters, Joanna starts off aboard her yacht near the none-too-picturesque village of Elk Cove, Ore. The boat is stuck there while some repairs are being done, and this leaves Joanna even more bored and irritable than usual. So she torments Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell), the carpenter she has hired to improve her closets, and then she refuses to pay his bill. Soon afterward, when Joanna accidentally falls overboard and develops amnesia, Dean has an opportunity to get even.
Ensconced in the local hospital as a ''mystery woman,'' Joanna goes unclaimed for quite a while. Her husband, Grant (played by Edward Herrmann as an even sillier twit than he had to be), knows full well where Joanna is, but decides to take advantage of her memory loss. So does Dean, who claims her as his wife and takes her home to his messy shack and his four unruly children.
As written by Leslie Dixon (who wrote ''Outrageous Fortune'') and directed by Garry Marshall, ''Overboard'' is loaded with potential as long as it sticks to Joanna's comic revulsion at all this squalor, and her suspicion that she may be cut from different cloth. Dean really exacerbates matters by making up stories about how forward she was on their first date, and insisting that his oafish, beer-drinking buddy (played enjoyably by Michael Hagerty) is her high-school beau.
However, no one is content to leave well enough alone. Miss Hawn, now called Annie, must rise magnificently to her new responsibilities. After the initial funny complaints let up (''My life is like death, my children are the spawn of hell!'' she shrieks at one point), the shack begins to look better and everyone's spirits improve. The place is clean. The kids behave. Store-bought marigolds sprout in the yard. Pretty soon, Annie is even self-possessed enough to go to school with ''her'' children and berate their teacher.
''Overboard,'' which sinks when it becomes this self-righteous, is clever enough to let love bloom spontaneously between Dean and his Annie, thus avoiding charges of sexism or white slavery. Though it starts on a note of enjoyable hostility between the two of them, the film soon aims for lighthearted romance. Mr. Marshall does a much better job with the feistier early scenes than with this subsequent mush, so the film does have a good first hour. But by the end, the process of getting Annie/Joanna back to her husband and mother (Katherine Helmond) and making her realize that money isn't everything is as laborious as lifting luggage (and incidentally, she's able to keep her money, no matter what). The film goes on much longer than it should.
The physical look of ''Overboard'' is also surprisingly dreary. Though the yacht scenes have some visual wit, particularly where Miss Hawn's outrageous costumes are concerned, John A. Alonzo's cinematography is conspicuously poor.
I was shocked at the end because of how the lesson in the story connect with the viewers, this movie is fun to watch even though it's an old movie.
