Moon Over Parador

This broad farce set in a fictional Latin American country has actor Dreyfuss, having finished work on a movie shot on location in Parador, expressing his desire to find the part of a lifetime. He little bargains for what follows: bearing a resemblance to the country's dictator, he is abducted by Chief of Police Julia and forced to impersonate the recently deceased tyrant in order to forestall revolution. Inevitably, after initial stage nerves, he takes to the part, revelling in deception and falling for the dead man's mistress (Braga), who persuades him to disobey his captors and involve himself in social reforms. Cameos by Mazursky himself (as the late dictator's mother) and Sammy Davis Jr only increase the impression that the whole thing is a lazy, self-indulgent home movie born of its creator's taste for theatricality. For one brief moment, with a malignant CIA introduced, the film looks a little more promising, but all too soon it slips back into soppy sentimentality.