Odd Jobs by John Updike Page A

mounted in some new, but not disturbingly novel, vehicle.
    Next, the theatre. The Cabot Theatre in Beverly is a consciously preserved and considerably restored old-fashioned small-city movie palace, with a stage, a balcony, a uniformed doorman, and a player piano in the lobby; it puts anybody over fifty in a nostalgic, tolerant frame of mind. Admission costs three dollars and the smallest size of popcorn only a dollar, as opposed to twice that at the malls. The floor doesn’t stick to your shoes, an usher will lead you to your seat with a flashlight, and you sit there with the simple heart of a child.
    Then the movie. Goldie Hawn, an impossibly spoiled rich bitch, falls off her yacht and, when rescued, is suffering from amnesia so total thata lowly beer-swilling carpenter (played by Kurt Russell) whom she has recently offended persuades her that she is his wife and must come keep his house and raise his four sons by (in fact) a wife three years dead. The joke and miracle of it is that, though equipped with an incongruously tony accent and a total innocence of housekeeping skills, she gradually submits to the assigned role, falls in love with her false husband, and finds happiness.
    Sound familiar? The story touches timeless themes—the taming of the shrew, and the war of the sexes. It concerns, like the classic romantic comedies of the Thirties, education—the thawing, through a man’s rough care, of a Hepburnesque ice princess. Hawn, cuddly and woozy, is no Hepburn, which makes the transformation rather more affecting: it is her real self she is restored to. When we see her on the yacht, swaggering about with her hair pulled in a tight chignon and her lips twisted in an upper-class sneer, we do not recognize her as Hawn—at least I didn’t, though I knew I had paid three dollars to see her in a movie. As soon as she falls overboard, and is found with scraggly hair half-hiding her face, we know who she is, even if she does not.
    Considerable cruelty attends her initiation into being the carpenter’s house-slave. He and his four sons, who all seem to be crowding adolescence, spatter her with food and fire-extinguisher foam, dunk her in a rain barrel, dress her in grotesquely ill-fitting clothes, and wear her to a delirious frazzle. The abuse is drastic, but, then, her sins, as a rich bitch, have been shown as extreme; when still in her right mind she refused to pay Russell for a cunning shoe-closet he has built for her on the yacht, pushed him overboard, and, worst of all, threw his tools after him into the ruinous saltwater. His revenge has limits, however: he shows his basic decency by not forcing the sexual side of her wifely services, and thereby the film keeps its own honor; a rape, however finagled, would put the moral onus on the poor rather than the rich. Also, Hawn has a legitimate husband (played by Edward Hermann, fresh from his husbandly stint in
Mrs. Soffel
), who, though a callow snob, must be figured into the final moral accounting.
    Her
basic decency comes into play when, against all her pre-amnesia conditioning, she takes hold in the house and becomes a mother to the motherless boys, defending them from a shrewish schoolteacher, rubbing calomine lotion on their poison-oak rash, and teaching the illiterate youngest to read. The slovenly widower’s shack yields to the ordering, cleansing female touch; her own costumes move from grotesque misfitto K-Mart
chic
. Russell, too, suffers some changes: he is surprised into a decent embarrassment as she makes his lies come true, and then into real affection as she settles at his side. His attempts to confess the truth are frustrated by his sons, who have come to need the mock mother, and by a buddy, who tells him the mock marriage is a good one. Her real husband belatedly appears, and her amnesia simultaneously falls away, but we have no doubt that nature, now that it is aroused, will triumph over nurture and come to true love’s rescue.
    Hollywood has always