Keaton is former improvisatory comedian whose timing is as good as his gags and who doesn't miss a beat when he is sparring with Mr. Keaton, who is making his memorable screen debut. Reality would catch up a lot sooner were it not for the antics of Mr. Howard's good-naturedly antiseptic approach. Reality, and the potential distastefulness of the premise, inevitably catch up with Mr. Howard tries to overlook both the morgue is apparently corpseless, and the film's few amorous scenes are either fully romantic (with Miss Long) or wearily comic (with Miss Hecht). Sex and death figure prominently in the movie, but Mr. Howard is well-versed in the techniques of staging situation comedy, and he keeps the movie fast and entertaining until the material bogs down. The two real discoveries of ''Night Shift,'' which opens today at the Cinerama and other theaters, are Mr. Winker, ''You're like a saint,'' he doesn't exactly disagree. Turning sentimental and sanctimonious, he offers the prostitutes a square deal and a health plan, talks back to a rude delivery man and generally tries to do the right thing by everybody. By Fred Schruers SeptemRON HOWARD, the suddenly respectable director of the comedy 'Night Shift,' played his first television role 26 years earlier - cradled in the arms of his. Later, Chuck becomes much less satisfactory as a stand-up guy. Whenever she looks at Chuck, Miss Long adopts the same admiring, damp-eyed smile. He has a diet-crazy fiancee (Gina Hecht) who is more interested in Mallomars than she is in him, and his next door neighbor, Belinda (Shelley Long), is a very clean-cut, very friendly prostitute with whom he cannot quite make time. When it occurs to Billy that the quiet, unsupervised morgue might be a good place to conduct moneymaking extracurricular activities, this isn't the least bit inconsistent with his other brainstorms.Īside from his professional problems, Chuck is also unlucky in love. Billy is full of ideas, like his plan for edible paper (''to eliminate garbage'') and the notion that it might save a step if live tuna fish were fed a diet of mayonnaise. At night, Chuck is teamed with a new assistant, Billy (Blaze) Blazejowski (Michael Keaton), who is one of the screen's more hilarious hipsters. Chuck is transferred to night duty to make room for his boss's nephew, a person of questionable ability (Bobby DiCicco), who watches ''The Flintstones'' on the job. The story is about Chuck Lumley (Henry Winkler), a milquetoast of a morgue supervisor. Eventually, ''Night Shift'' can't help becoming a lot more farfetched than it is funny. Getting the film's two heroes into their unlikely situation proves an awful lot easier than getting them out of it, even for Ron Howard, whose direction of ''Night Shift'' shows that his years of experience with situation comedies have paid off. Nevertheless, this is a halfway funny movie, one that's got loads of good gags in its first half and nothing but trouble in its second. THE makers of ''Night Shift'' must have been in a mighty odd mood when they came up with the idea for a comedy about a prostitution ring that operates out of a morgue.
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