Smile

Managing to be cynical and heartwarming at the same time, this is an almost perfect satire on the American Institution of beauty pageants. Read full review

Long before David Lynch mined the seedy underbelly of small-town life for the film "Blue Velvet" and the TV series "Twin Peaks," Michael Ritchie directed Smile, one of the smartest, most-biting satires on the glossy veneer of middle-class America ever put on film. [18 Oct 1990, p.7]

Smarter and funnier than the recent theatrical release, "Drop Dead Gorgeous," Michael Ritchie's superficially similar beauty-contest satire was mostly ignored when it came out in 1975. It has since become a classic, and a high point in the careers of Bruce Dern, Annette O'Toole, Barbara Feldon, Michael Kidd and Melanie Griffith. [05 Aug 1999]

The film feels like the midpoint of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, and perhaps one of the reasons it’s been overlooked is that it arrived the same year as two similar masterpieces from those directors, in “Nashville” and “Shampoo,” and if this isn’t quite as flawless as those films (it’s admittedly somewhat sprawling and unfocused), it’s nevertheless worth a watch for many reasons. Read full review

Perhaps a more caustic picture was intended, but the film grows to like its characters, and the final result is amusingly indulgent and generous in a way few current American films are: one has to look to East Europe (especially the work of Milos Forman) for a similar quality of ironic compassion. Read full review

This 1975 satire about a “Young American Miss” beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves. Read full review

The original script, written by TV veteran Belson, supplies plenty of laughs, but the picture has so many characters we never get to truly know any of them, and the result, while often hilarious, is ultimately skin-deep, just as the beauty contestants are. Read full review

Ritchie has so messy targets that he misses some and never quite gets back to others. But Smile does a good job of working over the hypocrisy and sexism of a typical beauty pageant. Read full review

It's an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them. Read full review

Michael Ritchie's direction is highly variable in quality, but he's a whiz at catching details of frazzled behaviour.

Smile is a hilarious but ultimately shallow putdown of teenage beauty contests. Read full review