A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : HOPE AND ‘GLORY’ : Funny How a Groundhog Can Generate Buzz

The curse of being branded “a troubled production” has been lifted from “Mad Dog and Glory”--or so its filmmakers hope.

Luck would have it that “Mad Dog and Glory,” which was to be released a year ago and finally opened Friday, falls in the successful shadow currently being cast by “Groundhog Day,” the Bill Murray box-office hit.

Director John McNaughton, for one, believes it’s a good omen that two Murray comedies will be out in the theaters competing for an audience--a highly unusual situation in Hollywood.

“The buzz is now turning around,” he said in a telephone interview from New York, where “Mad Dog and Glory” had its premiere Monday night. “Bill (Murray) saw the picture for the first time and came up and kissed me on the cheek. I haven’t washed it yet.”

McNaughton is upbeat, in part, due to early positive reviews of “Mad Dog and Glory” after a year’s worth of bad press about how the picture was repeatedly postponed because of reshoots--including test audiences who wanted a less saccharine ending--and Universal Pictures’ indecision about when to release it. A Universal Pictures source said she couldn’t remember how many times the studio put it on its schedule--then took it off.

The Times’ Kenneth Turan called the comedy “a small gem of deadpan humor and yearning hearts.” Critic Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety called it “pleasurably offbeat.”

Will spillover business from “Groundhog Day” help “Mad Dog and Glory”? The question awaits the box-office test.