The Great Profile

Art imitates life as Barrymore spoofs himself while playing a character who is a thinly-veiled version of the way he was living at the time. He's a drunken ham who gets thrown off a film and goes astray on a three-day drunk. Now he finds a lousy play and secures some backers for it, takes it to Chicago and opens it. Act One is a bust, and Barrymore decides that he can ad-lib a better Act Two than what was written. So he juices up during the intermission, and the second act is a riot. Ratoff plays Barrymore's long-suffering manager and Hughes his equally long-suffering wife. Ratoff is in the hole to gangster Brophy in a sub-plot that's quickly over. The smaller part...