The Heartbreak Kid

Marital comedy with its characters distanced just enough to prevent the barbs coming too close to home. Lenny (Grodin) woos and weds Lila (Berlin), only to have his carefully nurtured pre-wedding romantic ideas bite the dust from the moment the ceremony is concluded. His inaccessible goddess becomes the all too accessible Lila, gorging herself on egg salad sandwiches, getting sunburned, and generally behaving like a normal human being. It's too much for Lenny, stuck as he is in a state of pre-wedding hots. He finds another object for his fantasies (Shepherd), and pursues her with a kind of crass desperation all the way to her midwest college, where she is, as expected, every football hero's dream date. Wittily directed by May, and neatly scripted by Neil Simon (from Bruce Jay Friedman's story A Change of Plan), though somewhere the film loses its thread and forgets how to draw things decently to a close.