Sweet Liberty

Alda casts himself as a liberal college professor whose Reader's Digest-style book on the War of Independence is being made into a gross-out movie by the manic film crew who take over his somnolent home town for the summer. His struggles to drag the production back to the path of middlebrow virtue are impeded by the film's pathologically vulgar screenwriter (Hoskins), by his dotty old mother (Gish), and by his growing fascination with the leading lady (Pfeiffer). Surprisingly, all this is nearly as dull as it sounds, intermittently enlivened only by Hoskins and Caine, the latter effortlessly amusing as the production's leading man.