Given the many screen properties being adapted as Broadway tuners (from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to Spongebob Squarepants), it is curious nobody has yet mounted a musicalization of writer-director-actor Alan Alda's enjoyable if somewhat uneven 1986 Universal Pictures release. Small-screen home-video is probably the ideal venue for the civilized rom-com, now getting its Blu-ray debut.
In a venerable Eastern college town, Professor Michael Burgess (Alda) wrote Sweet Liberty, a best-selling, Pulitzer-winning book about local Revolutionary War heroine Mary Slocumb. A Hollywood crew arrives for the movie version, and Burgess is dismayed to learn from the callow, boyish director (Saul Rubinek, nicely underplaying) and the trash-hound scriptwriter (Bob Hoskins, nicely overplaying) that the production is going to be more of a lowbrow sex'n'slob comedy than a serious period drama.
Burgess insinuates himself into the shooting, trying, in particular, to win over the international matinee idol/hopeless womanizer star (Michael Caine) in the quixotic quest to preserve the integrity of the Mary Slocumb story. Burgess also falls for the fetching leading lady (Michelle Pfeiffer), although his attraction is entirely based on her impersonation of Mary Slocumb. When she's just another career-oriented LA actress, the interest wanes. All this shakes up Prof. Burgess' on/off love affair with a fellow scholar (the underrated Lise Hilboldt); both are commitment-shy after divorces, and there is the typical cinema sub-theme that a little bit of infidelity is actually good for a relationship. Discuss amongst yourselves...
Other highlights are knowing on-set farces of creative egos and film-folk foibles that earn this a place in the pantheon besides Living in Oblivion, The Big Picture, Day for Night, State and Main, and others, as movie-insider comedy dish by a filmmaker who very likely has seen this type of thing for real.
In addition to a grab-bag of trailers, the disc features a commentary by filmmakers and historians Daniel Kremer and Nat Segaloff, who reveal, among other things, that Mary Slocumb was an actual colonial figure, one whose life and loves had been much romanticized and distorted by earlier generations of historians—a sublime inside joke by Alda (who, alas, announced in 2018 he was struggling with Parkinson's disease). Recommended. (Aud: P)