Business Women

Whindsight, it seems inevitable, fated, a match made in heaven. Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin are, after all, the reigning queens of big-time theatrical comedy— the brainy, wisecracking offspring of Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, and Mae West. The question isn't why someone's cast them in a movie together; the question is why it took so long. Their first joint effort is this month's Big Business, a comedy of errors whose premise goes like this: Midler and Tomlin play wealthy New Yorkers who have grown up believing themselves to be fraternal twins; they also play those New Yorkers' real twins, who now reside in the deeply southern hamlet of Jupiter Hollow, where some four decades earlier they had all been mismatched at birth. Now the bumpkin Midler and Tomlin are headed for New York, where they will get all mixed up with the city-slicker Midler and Tomlin, with results that will prove either knee-slapping or just plain confusing, depending on how good the director, Jim Abrahams, turns out to be at keeping farce alive and frothing. And even if that souffle of a plot falls, Big Business is bound to be a hit. Is there a moviegoer alive who won't want to see what happens when Tomlin's cerebral loopiness collides with Midler's bawdy va-va-va-voom?