Love And Pain And The Whole Damn Thing (1973)

On a bus tour of Spain, a young American boy (Timothy Bottoms) and an English spinster (Maggie Smith) form an unlikely romantic alliance. This beastly, ill conceived sappy film could only have been made in the early 1970s. It's like HAROLD AND MAUDE but with a younger actress playing the Maude role. It's the kind of unimaginative obvious comedy that when Maggie Smith gets locked in an outhouse and has an imperious look on her face as she's freed, you think "Oh God, please don't let her have toilet paper stuck to her shoes" and the next shot is Smith walking away ..... with toilet paper stuck to her shoes. Smith also smokes a cigar and trips over her panties, she's a laugh riot in this one! Faring worse is poor Timothy Bottoms who comes across as a wimpy cry baby. At his best, he's an uninteresting actor. Here, at his worst, you cringe at his ineptness. As a travelogue of Spain though, the film works quite well. The Spanish actors seem inhibited by having to speak in English, in particular, Don Jaime De Mora Y Aragon as a mama's boy who attempts to seduce Smith. Quite possibly the nadir of all involved including its director Alan Pakula (ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN). Michael Small did the dreary score.