THE SHAGGY D.A. (1976) *** Lucretia Borgia's rotten ring still haunts the world, now turning the "clean" candidate for District Attorney into a big, shaggy dog. Robert Stevenson went out, obviously, with a film that deserves a great deal of serious consideration. First off, in the wake of Watergate, who wouldn't readily vote for a shaggy dog over the subhumanoid alternatives? I mean, shouldn't this sort of thing be the centerpiece of the campaign? So many of Stevenson's films share the same wonderful sense of whimsy, and not least because he isn't shy about using familiar and proven pieces. Keenan Wynn as the grotesque but witty caricature of the respectable face of corruption, Tim Conway as the well meaning doofus who needs a dog to explain the plot to him, Dean Jones as the less maladroit Fred MacMurray, Suzanne Pleshette as the slim but slightly uptight feminist totem, Dick Van Patten as the misanthropic gopher...even a lot of the faces around the edges are the familiar, the dogcatchers, even the dogs. But Stevenson also shows that the dice can land a million different ways, all apparently friendly to the worthy, and makes a strength out of demonstrating the manner in which the same dynamic plays itself out through various arenas of endeavour. You have to let it engage the kid in you (which is, incidentally, different than the "inner child," though no less important), and you have to let go, and you have to count both of those as strengths. But you have to do all of that, again, this time through an adult's eyes, and then the magic you once took for granted becomes not only apparent, but explicable. The scientific foundation of faith, the equation that stands for nothing until the spell is cast. And you don't know what it stands for then, because at first you only caught a glimpse out of the corner of your eye, and now the unified factor absorbs everything into joy.
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