Based loosely on Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, this is Paul Mazursky's second attempt at a transatlantic transplant (the first was Willie and Phil, from Truffaut's Jules and Jim) -- and better luck this time. In fact, better luck than the original. The anarchic vagabond and the bourgeois home he invades and alters are both, in Mazursky's treatment, more specific and less emblematic than in Renoir's. The vagabond is perhaps too much so, with too much power and impact, almost like Terence Stamp's mysterious stranger in Teorema. But the milieu nonetheless holds its own as subject-matter, and even upstages the vagabond as the movie's real protagonist. This is only to be expected, since Mazursky, who lives there, surely knows Beverly Hills better than he knows the homeless; and his concern for the plight of the latter, closing in like a throng of the Living Dead on the contemporary urbanscape, is a natural outgrowth of his journalistic trendiness. Indeed there is no reason here to revise even slightly the prevailing diagnosis of Mazursky as a director with his nose to the wind, a forager and a retriever, not so much a storyteller as a mere data collector, a compiler and cataloguer, a -- to put it more brutally than necessary -- file clerk and cashier. With Nick Nolte, Richard Dreyfuss, and Bette Midler. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd