After escaping the dog pound, a German Shepherd links up with a budding actress and a wannabe film screenwriter and then becomes a Hollywood star.

It was developed by David Picker at Warner Bros who requested the title be changed so as to not clash with their upcoming version of A Star is Born.

[9] Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote, "What saves the movie, a jumble of good jokes and bad, sloppiness, chaos and apparently any old thing that came to hand, is Madeline Kahn...What she has – as W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin had – is a kind of unwavering purpose at right angles to reality, a concentration that she bears, Magoolike, through all kinds of unreasonable events.

But the alchemy in the direction has turned potential cotton candy into reinforced concrete; Winner's Death Wish is funnier in comparison.

"[13] Jerry Oster of the New York Daily News wrote that "the script, by Arnold Schulman and Cy Howard, is singular among comedies in that it has not one funny line.

Art Carney, as a producer, and Ron Leibman, as a Valentino-esque actor—is extravagantly bad, as if grimaces and gesticulations would conceal the script's inadequacies.

But director Winner has given the film such a ragged, patchwork quality that the plot becomes a hopleless muddle (as if it needed any help in that direction), and there are only three really good jokes in the entire thing.

[15]John Pym of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote "Michael Winner does not have Mel Brooks' frenzied gift for marshaling this sort of material; and, to make matters worse, the script attains a level of parody no higher than Ron Leibman's mincing caricature of Valentino, embellished with little more than the standard mannerisms of the familiar theatrical queen.

"[16] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post stated "This tacky exercise in mock nostalgia may be added to that recent, weirdly miscalculated genre that includes W.C. Fields and Me, Gable and Lombard and The Day of the Locust...They may be presented as uninhibited, madcap spoofs of Old Hollywood, but they tend to end up illustrating the New Hollywood at its most crass, insecure and condescending.

Of the acting, Stark wrote that "not even an actor of Dern's estimable caliber can do a thing with that kind of tiresome material", that Kahn, "In addition to being given a wealth of flat comic material", "is coiffed and clothed in exceptionally unflattering style" and that "the dog, a German shepherd, comes off best, largely because he does not have to share the burden of speaking the lines as written but also because no one interfered much with his naturally dignified appearance.

The rhinestone collar he has to wear for the part is all but obscured by his healthy coat and they never did get him to use the gold-plated fire hydrant parked next to his between-takes spot on the movie-within-a-movie set."

It also lacks grace, class, style and intelligence, a group of attributes more common in their absence than their presence in many Hollywood productions, but not generally absent to such a great degree.

It is an exercise in how to take a pretty good idea and to overdo it until quintessential boredom is reached, but it also provides an opportunity to see a fading galaxy of former-stars, most of whom cause a first reaction of, 'Gee, I didn't know he was still alive.

Their walk-ons suggest that they were required at the studio so briefly that there was not even time to make them up or light them, let alone explain what they were supposed to be doing; certainly aging people could hardly be filmed with less sympathy.

Carmel Myers, once the leading lady of Fairbanks, Valentino and Ramon Novarro and a star of Ben-Hur, is a walk-on.

But the meanness is as unduckable in the treatment of the humans as in a particularly brutal (however tricked) gag of the dog, having been trained to jump through prop paper walls, hurling himself bewilderedly against real ones.

The Strong Man, even though not the best of the three films in which Frank Capra directed Harry Langdon, the elderly baby of slapstick comedy, is about a hundred times funnier than Michael Winner could ever be.