But is it with or at Peter Bogdanovich, the writer and director of this unrelentingly frothy romantic comedy set in Manhattan? Ben Gazzara and John Ritter are private eyes who enjoy their work too much when they are hired to follow two wandering wives. Ritter's lovesick pursuit of the late Dorothy Stratten is most often a grating, WASPy Woody Allen shtick—except for one inspired roller-skating sequence. Gazzara's gumshoeing leads him into a subdued, richer bond with an underused Audrey Hepburn. Freckled top model Patti Hansen isn't bad as a cabby in her first film, and Colleen Camp (Apocalypse Now and Smile) is brilliantly funny as a bitchy motor-mouth country singer who has designs on every man she spots. But even if this movie were funnier, it would be hard to laugh much, knowing that the lovely Stratten was shotgunned in a 1980 murder-suicide by her jealous estranged husband, in part because she and Bogdanovich had become close during its filming. (PG)
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