IMDb RATING
7.1/10
2.6K
YOUR RATING
A social comedy about a beauty pageant for young Californian women, held annually in Santa Rosa, and how it affects the locals and participants.A social comedy about a beauty pageant for young Californian women, held annually in Santa Rosa, and how it affects the locals and participants.A social comedy about a beauty pageant for young Californian women, held annually in Santa Rosa, and how it affects the locals and participants.
- Awards
- 1 nomination
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaAccording to Bruce Dern, who talked about the movie on The Projection Booth podcast in 2016, there were suppose to be 2500 extras in the film for the pageant scenes. Since it was really important that the same faces show up in the audience in every scene for consistency, the filmmakers came up with an idea to give away five Cadillacs each day of the three-day pageant shoot to five lucky extras. Each extra would get a ticket in the morning and by the end of the day they'd get to enter the Cadillac lottery. This not only made sure that the same people would return each day, but 7000 additional people showed up to play extras and try to win the cars. Since they didn't need that many extras, the filmmakers decided to charge the extras 25 dollars to let them be in the movie and play the Cadillac lottery. Dern concludes the anecdote by amusingly stating that this was the only time in his career that he saw a movie making money directly off the people who worked for the movie.
- GoofsDuring pageant finale, many letters in the electrical Young American Miss sign are unlit in a long shot of stage, but shine brightly in other angles.
- Quotes
Doria Houston: Santa Rosa is so beautiful. I mean, I thought the shopping mall in Anaheim was great until I saw yours. It's... a credit to the vision of your business community.
- Crazy creditsBecause Mara Finerty's most noticeable scene in the movie shows her saying, "Rotting maggots of death, crawling out of the skull of war," she is listed in the closing credits as "Maggots Girl."
- ConnectionsFeatured in TCM Guest Programmer: Robert Wuhl (2010)
- SoundtracksSmile
(1936)
Music by Charles Chaplin
Lyrics by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons
Sung by Nat 'King' Cole
Nat King Cole is heard through the Courtesy of Capitol Records
Featured review
Director Michael Ritchie made two films in the seventies that nailed the suburban existence, not just of Southern California, but of America right on the head.
While Bad News Bears was a deserved box office hit, the under-recognized Smile is the better movie...and that's saying a lot as I adore them both. Having seen the recently released Thank You For Smoking and its lame attempt at broad satire it made me reflect about what made Smile so great. Ritchie genuinely cares for his characters, making them sympathetic instead of one dimensional cardboard cut-outs which would have been very easy to do. The many characters Ritchie focuses on are human, with all the foibles that entails, so while it may be easy to laugh at the beauty pageant contestants and their problems, you do it with a touch of guilt because they are so earnest in their attempt to win respect from not only the judges, but the choreographer (Michael Kidd), the den mother (Barbara Feldon), and ultimately themselves.
To mock them is to mock yourself for rooting for your favorite girl at the film's conclusion which fittingly, as it turns out, doesn't matter anyway.
Now that's good satire.
A truly under appreciated gem.
While Bad News Bears was a deserved box office hit, the under-recognized Smile is the better movie...and that's saying a lot as I adore them both. Having seen the recently released Thank You For Smoking and its lame attempt at broad satire it made me reflect about what made Smile so great. Ritchie genuinely cares for his characters, making them sympathetic instead of one dimensional cardboard cut-outs which would have been very easy to do. The many characters Ritchie focuses on are human, with all the foibles that entails, so while it may be easy to laugh at the beauty pageant contestants and their problems, you do it with a touch of guilt because they are so earnest in their attempt to win respect from not only the judges, but the choreographer (Michael Kidd), the den mother (Barbara Feldon), and ultimately themselves.
To mock them is to mock yourself for rooting for your favorite girl at the film's conclusion which fittingly, as it turns out, doesn't matter anyway.
Now that's good satire.
A truly under appreciated gem.
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Box office
- Budget
- $1,300,000 (estimated)
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