After the success of 'Down and Out in Beverly Hills' director Paul Mazursky reunited with Richard Dreyfuss for yet another engaging comedy of manners. This time around, perhaps hoping that box office lightning would strike twice, Mazursky borrowed a plot device that was already old when movies first learned to talk, about a naive pretender installed on a foreign throne in place of a look-alike monarch. Richard Dreyfuss is the unemployed actor replacing Paradorian President Alphonse Simms, for reasons Dreyfuss may not altogether trust, but his vanity won't let him refuse a choice role. After a while he (inevitably) begins taking an active interest in affairs of State (and, with the President's mistress, played by Sonia Braga, affairs of the State Bedroom), but the film is more a parody of self-indulgent acting than a satire of Latin American politics. Mazursky digresses from the comedy only occasionally to acknowledge Third World social conditions (with lip service, but better than nothing for such otherwise frothy entertainment), and Dreyfuss is more amusing playing a frustrated actor than he is playing a frustrated actor playing a dictator.
Review of Moon Over Parador
