{"id":9717,"date":"2024-12-01T10:00:35","date_gmt":"2024-12-01T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=9717"},"modified":"2024-12-01T10:00:35","modified_gmt":"2024-12-01T15:00:35","slug":"paternity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/12\/01\/paternity\/","title":{"rendered":"Paternity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Paternity<\/strong> (1981)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paramount\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 94 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (sexual dialogue)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Steinberg\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Charlie Peters\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: David Shire\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Bobby Byrne\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: October 2, 1981 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Burt Reynolds, Beverly D\u2019Angelo, Norman Fell, Paul Dooley, Elizabeth Ashley, Lauren Hutton, Juanita Moore, Peter Billingsley, Jacqueline Brookes, Linda Gillen, Mike Kellin, Victoria Young, Elsa Raven, Carol Locatell, Kay Armen, Murphy Dunne, Kay Kalem, Kathy Bendett, Alfie Wise, Tony DiBenedetto, Dick Wieand, Hector Troy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $18.8M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ** \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Burt Reynolds comedy Paternity<\/strong> didn\u2019t win any Oscars, but it did take home a well-deserved Golden Razzie award for its opening song, the non-hit \u201cBaby Talk\u201d written and sung by David Frishberg. Get a load of these lyrics:<\/p>\n

\u201cPapa says dada, baby says dada too\/Mama goes ga ga, baby goes goo goo goo\/Now that\u2019s hardly fancy phraseology and yet it\u2019s understood\/Babies agree a little baby talk works real good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest of the song isn\u2019t much better and it\u2019s absolutely as annoying to the ear as the words read on paper. Wait, it gets worse. It\u2019s followed by a collage of baby pictures accompanied by the sound of babies crying. A LOT of babies! The end of the opening credits couldn\u2019t come soon enough. Thankfully, what follows is an improvement.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Burt, in nice guy mode here, plays Buddy Evans, a confirmed bachelor going through a mid-life crisis. He just turned 44 and while it seems like he has it all- sweet apartment, great job (he manages events at Madison Square Garden) and playboy lifestyle- something is missing. He wants to leave his mark on the world. He wants everybody to know Buddy Evans was here. Because he likes children, he decides a son is the best way to carry on his name. There\u2019s just one little hitch. He doesn\u2019t want to get married. He decides to hire a surrogate mother, a woman willing to carry his offspring without becoming emotionally involved.<\/p>\n

\u00a0After a series of awkward interviews including one with an attractive interior decorator (Hutton, Zorro the Gay Blade) he mistakes for an applicant, he finds his babymaker by chance. She\u2019s Maggie (D\u2019Angelo, Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter), a coffee shop waitress who\u2019s just been accepted to a prestigious program in Paris to study music. She needs money to pursue her dream which is why she accepts Buddy\u2019s proposition. For $50,000, she\u2019ll gladly conceive and carry his child, no emotions involved. She even moves in with him so he can monitor her pregnancy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Paternity<\/strong> is one of those movies where the notion of spoilers doesn\u2019t apply. There are no surprise plot twists or shocking revelations. The plot is simplicity itself and the outcome is a foregone conclusion. We know right from the start that Buddy and Maggie will develop feelings for each other. We know that he\u2019ll eventually do or say something thoughtless and she\u2019ll walk out on him. A period of sadness on both their parts will follow. That will be followed by the inevitable happy ending where they finally say what they should have said ages ago. It\u2019s a clockwork plot if ever I saw one. That\u2019s not to say Paternity<\/strong> is a bad movie. It\u2019s not. It\u2019s simply a mediocre one.<\/p>\n

\u00a0To be fair, Paternity<\/strong> is amusing at times. I\u2019m talking chuckles, chortles and giggles rather than big belly laughs here. The humor is on the level of a sitcom. It\u2019s directed by comedian David Steinberg whose other major title is the 1983 comedy Going Berserk starring SCTV vets John Candy, Joe Flaherty and Eugene Levy. Trust me, it\u2019s not as horrible as the other critics say. He\u2019s better known for his work on TV shows like Designing Women, Mad About You, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He does a decent job with Paternity<\/strong>. Not every joke lands, but none of them are painful either.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s interesting to see Burt try something a little different. We usually think of him as the cocky good ol\u2019 boy from Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper and The Cannonball Run. He\u2019s done some fine dramatic work too- e.g. Deliverance and Boogie Nights. He dials down his traditional screen persona in Paternity<\/strong> playing a basically nice but selfish guy who doesn\u2019t want to compromise his lifestyle. He\u2019s set in his ways and doesn\u2019t want a wife upending things. Does he really think a child won\u2019t do just that? Can we say clueless? ANYWAY, Burt turns in a decent if unexceptional performance here. He has pretty good comic timing. He also has nice chemistry with co-star D\u2019Angelo in her first leading role. She\u2019s a wonderful actress who totally nailed it as Patsy Cline in Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter. She was also quite good in the underrated Altman-esque comedy Honky Tonk Freeway. She brings plenty of warmth and understanding as Maggie, the woman who might possibly be Buddy\u2019s undoing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Paternity<\/strong> benefits from a great supporting cast that includes Norman Fell (Three\u2019s Company) and Paul Dooley (Popeye) as Burt\u2019s closest friends, a doctor and lawyer respectively. Juanita Moore of the 1974 blaxploitation Exorcist rip-off Abby has some good scenes as the housekeeper who isn\u2019t afraid to tell it like it is. Elizabeth Ashley (Windows) is good as a former lover who comes back into Buddy\u2019s life. If the kid that Buddy shoots baskets with at the Garden looks familiar, it\u2019s because it\u2019s Peter Billingsley, better known as Ralphie from the holiday classic A Christmas Story. Also, Burt\u2019s good buddy Alfie Wise shows up as the most careful cabbie in New York. In a typical \u201cfollow that cab\u201d scenario, he refuses to exceed the legal speed limit (35 MPH).<\/p>\n

\u00a0The thing I like best about Paternity<\/strong> is the setting. It takes place in New York City. Specifically, it\u2019s pre-Giuliani NYC. It\u2019s great to see the Big Apple as it used to be. Woody Allen always romanticizes it in his movies. Steinberg sees the beautiful side of it too. It\u2019s the NYC we only see in pre-Giuliani rom-coms. I like it. It\u2019s probably what appealed to me most when I saw it at a Sunday matinee when I was 13. I liked Paternity<\/strong> a whole lot back then. Today, I think it\u2019s just a hair above mediocre. It\u2019s a harmless light comedy that won\u2019t leave a lasting impression once it\u2019s over. The song \u201cBaby Talk\u201d, on the other hand, is too terrible to be forgotten easily.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paternity (1981)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paramount\/Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 94 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (sexual dialogue)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Steinberg\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Charlie Peters\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: David Shire\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Bobby Byrne\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: October 2, 1981 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Burt Reynolds, Beverly D\u2019Angelo, Norman Fell, Paul Dooley, Elizabeth Ashley, Lauren Hutton, Juanita Moore, Peter Billingsley, Jacqueline Brookes, Linda Gillen, Mike Kellin, Victoria Young, Elsa Raven, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9771,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Paternity-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9717"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9773,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9717\/revisions\/9773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}