Arthur

Arthur

Only a person without a heart of stone could not love Arthur Bach, the drunk who spends his wasted days looking for someone to love him, take care of him, inflame his passions and calm his fears, and laugh at his one-liners. In fact, he is such a friend to mankind that he even makes up new one-liners and keeps them in reserve, just in case somebody walks into his life needing a laugh.

Arthur (Dudley Moore) is the drunken hero of “Arthur,” the comedy about the man worth $750 million who would never try to buy anyone’s love with it. Arthur is like Yeats’ woman who spent her days in innocent good will, and her nights in argument till her voice grew shrill. He’s a drunk. He slips into his bath of a morning, and his butler brings him a martini. When he has finished bathing for the day, Arthur sets out on what remains getting drunk and riding around Manhattan in a limousine looking for love.

There are problems with trying to find love when you are drunk: (a) nobody wants to love you when you’re drunk; (b) you’re not at your best when you’re drunk so they won’t know what they’re missing; (c) if somebody does finally fall in love with you, chances are you’ll be too drunk to notice it; and (d) even if none of these dire things comes to pass you will still wake up hung over, and scientific studies have shown that hangovers dissolve love.

Now having said all this stuff I have just said about searching for love while being intoxicated about how nobody wants to do it with someone who is three sheets to the wind let me say that against all these odds Arthur does find love. He finds it in Linda (Liza Minnelli), who is smart as a whip but doesn’t give a damn about his money.

All she knows is that he is a bottomless pit of needs. Arthur would like to marry Linda because he loves her, but his billionaire father insists that he marry a perfectly boring WASP (Jill Eikenberry) whose idea of a good time is probably the January white sales.

So Arthur turns to his loyal butler, Hobson, played by John Gielgud with understated elegance and an evil tongue. Hobson is dying. But Hobson wants to see Arthur win one against Arthur’s father, who has been manipulating him sadistically for years. So Hobson engineers the situation so that the lovers are thrown together at the party announcing Arthur’s engagement to the WASP.

This inspires a rupture within the family, followed by a very drunken odyssey on Arthur’s part, who wants to press $100,000 into Linda’s hands and goes out to Queens where she lives, and indeed discovers there not only love but also an incredibly funny scene in which Linda turns him down and her father (Barney Martin) becomes a grown man who cries

Dudley Moore’s star was born with 10 where he plays a guy who becomes obsessed with Bo Derek, and why wouldn’t he? In “Arthur,” he attempts to become a world-renowned comic character actor. He gives an incredible commitment to scenes like the one at the beginning of the movie when he’s invited a hooker to dinner at the Plaza but can’t remember who she is, or what, or why. It’s amazing watching him try to focus his attention which he seems to think is all in his eyebrow muscles.

Aside from Moore, this film’s riches are in its supporting performances especially Gielgud although everyone in it has great moments. You might think that “Arthur” would be a bore because it’s about a drunk who’s always trying to tell you stories. You’d be right if “Arthur” were a party and you were at it.

But “Arthur” is a movie. And so its drunk, unlike real drunks, is more entertaining than you are; more witty; more human; more poignant. He embodies all those lovely human qualities that drunks charitably believe the booze brings out in them.

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