Americanized, and accordingly broadened and coarsened, version of Agnes Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't: an improbable friendship founded on one meeting in girlhood and carried on for three decades, and across a huge cultural gap, primarily through letters and in total oblivion of those "Reach-out-and-touch-someone" telephone ads. As a supposed "buddy film" it is steeply tilted toward one half of the twosome, Bette Midler, who gets to sing a handful of songs in a handful of styles, and even sneaks in an autobiographical last crack in her feud with film director Don Siegel (under another identity). Little Mayim Bialik does what had sounded impossible: to stand in acceptably as the eleven-year-old Bette. But even there the other half of the duo, Barbara Hershey, doesn't rate equal attention. With John Heard; directed by Garry Marshall. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd