Review of It's My Turn

Before "Wall Street" and "Fatal Attraction" put him on Hollywood's A-list, Michael Douglas kicked around with secondary roles in an assortment of comedies and dramas, and he was usually miscast. Either playing the smartass cameraman in "The China Syndrome" or the judge in "The Star Chamber", Douglas exuded confidence but no star-wattage. In "It's My Turn", a sort-of feminist comedy-drama second-biller for "An Unmarried Woman", Douglas is an ex-pro ballplayer with a scruffy beard who dates teacher Jill Clayburgh, the Unmarried Woman herself, who apparently hadn't used up all her feminist angst. Written and directed by women (Eleanor Bergstein and Claudia Weill, respectively), the movie wobbles around from scene to scene without a hope in hell of satisfying an audience of either sex. Clayburgh tries out different bits of shtick, but this persona (a brilliant-but-klutzy gal on the go) isn't funny or very interesting. Poor Charles Grodin is stuck yet again playing third fiddle, while Douglas is amiable and rascally and livens things up briefly (you can feel the movie come to life when he's on-screen). The theme song, sung by Diana Ross and co-written by Carole Bayer Sager, is pretty yet filled with claptrap rhetoric and fantasy delusions ("I've given up the truth/To those I've tried to please"). "It's My Turn" ends up pleasing nobody. *1/2 from ****