GET OUT AND GET UNDER

Another thin, stretched-out caper comedy from the author of The Moving Picture Boys (1979)--with a handful of vignette plots converging on an antique car auction in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mastermind of the auction is veteran scam-man G. Dudley Lester, who has used his bedroom charms to enlist the cooperation of widow Joyce (and her auctioneer father) in arranging The First Southwestern Classic and Vintage Car Auction. . . the proceeds of which Lester plans to scamper away with. And we also watch four far-flung characters who will wind up at the Auction, two as sellers and two as buyers: nurse Benita Lorenzo will come from Connecticut, eager to buy a 1933 Plymouth which (according to one of her dying patients) has pure gold inside its wheels; once-great, now-poor C&W songwriter Chuck Malone sends his beloved Model AA pickup truck to be sold (but later, in the chips again, will try to retrieve it); Louise Bigelow, fed-up wife of Indiana antique-car nut Dusty, will take off in their 1955 T-Bird, ready to sell it to buy herself a new life; and from London will come restaurateur Cyril Banks, ostensibly to buy a Rolls for his Arabian patron. . . but really to avenge himself on the man who betrayed him in a group-tours scare some time back--G. Dudley Lester. True, this isn't a setup without potential--light TV-movie fare perhaps--but Wilk rolls it all out in a cutesy, slow narrative that has obvious twists (Cyril and Benita team up to foil Lester's scare and get the gold, Dusty shows up to buy his own T-Bird, etc,), lots of padding, smirky double-entendres, few engaging characters, and not even much vividness in the antiquecar lore. In sum: hardworking farce with nary a laugh.