Night Shift

The largest shares of credit for this pleasant surprise evidently belong to director Ron Howard--whose assurance behind the camera may come as a revelation to people still associating him with the roles of little Opie on "The Andy Griffith Show" and clean-cut Richie on "Happy Days".

Though the plotline hardly sounds like a family film, this is probably the most sanitized treatment of pimps and prostitution audiences will ever see. None of this much matters, because director Ron Howard and screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, all TV veterans, are only bent on giving the audience a good time.

Ron Howard's direction is carefully balanced, and he treats his characters with humanity and respect. Winkler turns in the best performance of his career, and Keaton is wonderful.

This isn't as snappily directed or as caustically conceived as the subsequent Risky Business, which has a similar theme, but it's arguably just as sexy and almost as funny.

This isn't much of a movie but it manages to be funny a good part of the time anyway.

Winkler isn't half-bad in a role that requires quiet reaction rather than the facile caricature we see in "The Fonz." Keaton is aggressively funny for awhile, though the lasting impression is of a cut-rate Bill Murray. [30 July 1982, p.D2]

Actually it's relatively clean, downright affirmative (the girls get insurance plans and 90 percent of the take) and resoundingly unfunny. [2 Aug 1982, p.63]