Sex in Cinema 1984

Looking back at 1984 from Hollywood's perspective, one is tempted to label this the Year of Recycled Cinema. Never before have so many major releases been based upon, or adapted from, pictures of the past. Even the independents, who used to produce a wide variety of B movies, from Westerns to motorcycle sagas to prison dramas, have turned to churning out endless variations on the same mindless plot, each aimed at an audience of lubricious teenaged boys. All of this would seem to provide a sure sign that the movie industry has become uncertain of its future. Of one thing it is certain, (text continued on page 201)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 136) however: If you're doing a sequel, prequel or remake, you don't just shoot a duplicate of the original; you punch it up with plenty of sex and/or violence.

In the 1935 Gable-Laughton version of Mutiny on the Bounty, for example, the Tahitian maidens wore wrap-around sarongs that made them look like miniature Dorothy Lamours. In the 1962 Marlon Brando edition, shot in Tahiti, the girls donned what were known locally as "titty cups," little flaps of brown material glued to the bosom--a style they so favored that they continued to wear them on the streets of beautiful downtown Papeete. No such encumbrances in this year's The Bounty, however: Tahiti looks like a dusky version of the nude beaches of St.-Tropez. No wonder the Bounty's crew is so reluctant to leave its island paradise.

Al Pacino's Scarface, an updating of the 1932 shocker that starred Paul Muni (and is arguably the best gangster movie of all time), pulls out all stops to emphasize the sadism of its central character. Besides the violence in Scarface, many objected to what they felt was an excessive use of a certain four-letter word. (One critic opined that without it, the picture could have been an hour shorter, while another stated that by dropping it, Scarface would have become a silent movie.) Actually, as the year wore on, it became increasingly apparent that as far as the classification-and-ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America was concerned, all that separated the PGs from the Rs was a single "fuck" on the sound track. PG-rated movies became more and more violent and/or displayed more and more nudity without a dissenting note from the classifiers. The Bounty, for example, sailed into port with a PG, and Racing with the Moon was similarly rewarded, despite a prolonged, amorous skinny-dip involving teenagers Sean Penn and Elizabeth McGovern (not to mention a subplot involving abortion). For Splash, a charming PG comedy starring shapely Daryl Hannah as a mermaid naked and on the loose in Manhattan, the Disney organization formed a whole new company, Touchstone Films, presumably so that no one would expect Hannah to be playing Snow White. Even Steven Spielberg's blockbusting action adventure Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, despite such nightmarish scenes as a close-up of a living heart's being plucked from a man's chest, got its PG. If this is PG, many were asking, what do you have to do to get an R?

By midsummer, the Motion Picture Association was itself grappling with that question. Its solution, a new category labeled PG-13, would require children under 13 to be accompanied by a parent or guardian at certain films. Predictably, it satisfied no one. Even M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti maintained that the additional category would only confuse the public. The fact is, of course, that the PG-13 rating merely gives sanction to a situation that already exists. Most theater people freely acknowledge that they make a token effort at best to bar adolescents from R-rated product, while producers have become increasingly bolder in shaping their R-rated movies to the tastes of teenagers who wouldn't be caught dead at a PG film.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the dozens of Animal House and Porky's derivatives this year, with the accent falling more on the girls than on the gags. Most of the film makers' effort seems to have been spent on finding new locales, not new plots. In the enormously successful Police Academy, the focus is on rookie cops, misfits all. As a high point, reluctant recruit Steve Guttenberg persuades hooker Georgina Spelvin to give police commandant George Gaynes a blow job while he's addressing a roomful of VIPs; as a low point, Guttenberg receives the same treatment at the film's climax. In Preppies, the scene is an Ivy League college where three town girls are hired to seduce three freshmen and keep them from studying for a crucial exam so that Dennis Drake's villainous cousin can inherit all his money. The female leads, including curvaceous July 1980 Playmate Lynda Wiesmeier, spend most of their screen time wriggling out of their clothes. Hot Dog ... The Movie exhibits some exciting downhill racing on the slopes around Lake Tahoe's Squaw Valley, but more of the story (and most of the female cast) is laid in a ski lodge, where Playboy's Playmate of the Year for 1982, Shannon Tweed, is one of the hottest attractions. Up the Creek sports virtually the same plot (and a different Playmate, November 1980's Jeana Tomasina), this time with white-water rafting as the background. When one of the boys asks a new arrival if she's there for the rafting, she loftily replies, "No, we're here to get laid." Needless to say, the boys are only too happy to oblige. Hollywood High Part II features a horny cop who blackmails a couple of school kids he has photographed having sex with their horny teachers (female). It beats flunking out, they lamely explain. In Splitz, an all-girl rock-'n'-roll band helps a beleaguered sorority house win out against its rivals in such questionable campus competitions as strip basketball and wrestling in scanties--followed, of course, by a refreshing shower. The list goes on and on. Hard-bodies is a beach movie in which three middle-aged businessmen set out to seduce all the sun-kissed cuties they can lure to their kinky abode. Where the Boys Are '84 is spring break at Fort Lauderdale revisited--or regurgitated. Bachelor Party depicts the raunchy doings at a prenuptial bash tossed by pals of school-bus driver Tom Hanks. Not to be outdone, the girlfriends of his gorgeous fiancée, Tawny Kitaen, throw their own bachelorette party, also raunchy. The release of Paramount's Joy of Sex--formerly known as National Lampoon's Joy of Sex--was delayed until August, though it had been in the can since early spring. The Lampoon people were reportedly unhappy with the script and with the fact that no N.L. staffers were around to supervise the shooting, helmed by Valley Girl's Martha Coolidge.

On the other hand, N.L.'s John Hughes (of National Lampoon's Vacation) was very much around as both writer and director of Sixteen Candles, and the difference shows. Although it's stuffed with hilarious sight gags, such as a swimming pool that a gang of high schoolers transforms into an enormous bubble bath, it's essentially a coming-of-age story, with sweet Molly Ringwald distressed on her 16th birthday because her breasts haven't suddenly expanded--and, worse, because her family has forgotten the date. Similarly, Weekend Pass follows the misadventures of a quartet of Naval recruits, fresh out of basic training and on the loose in Los Angeles. Although the promotional trailers make Pass seem like the old, familiar formula of sex and high-jinks, including a visit to a strip joint and fun and games on the beach at Venice, the kids come off as remarkably likable and decent.

Also aimed at the teenaged audience (or, at least, the teenage mentality) are the innumerable Friday the 13th spin-offs, including this year's Friday the 13th--The Final Chapter. It's a cycle that seems to be abating; perhaps Jason's demise in The Final Chapter is meant to be prophetic. And not a moment too soon. What has always been sinister about those sick films is their persistent linkage of nudity and sex with the act of murder; the kids in these movies no sooner get it on than they're taken out--invariably in the most gruesome manner imaginable. In The Final Chapter, the murder instruments include a bowie knife, a spear, a hack saw, an ax, a harpoon, a kitchen knife and, in the film's most horrific moment, a scalpel that slits open attractive Lisa Freeman from her breastbone right down the length of her body. By the time the end titles roll, just about everyone in the cast has been eliminated, including Jason himself. The Dorm That Dripped Blood, hewing to the formula, offers a homicidal maniac prowling the corridors of gloomy Dayton Hall, which Laurie Lapinski and friends are readying for a much-needed renovation. At least half a dozen of the friends have been butchered before anyone even begins to realize that something strange is happening. In Fear City, the madman is a martial-arts expert whose devotion to "purity" leads him to knock off the girls who work in strip joints--always as messily as possible. It's frank sexploitation, with the accent not only on mayhem but on drugs, lesbianism, mobsters and naked broads. (These films, nearly all made by men, rarely hold women in any high esteem; they are invariably portrayed as stupid, venal and hungry for sex.) In Scalps, the scene is switched to the desert, where a group of college students on an archaeological dig unwittingly disturb an Indian burial ground, with resultant scalpings and decapitations. In Mardi Gras Massacre, a New Orleans fanatic prowls the French Quarter in search of prostitutes to be offered as human sacrifices to an Aztec goddess, a ritual that he repeats every Tuesday, binding the naked girl to a table and slashing her hands and feet before cutting her heart out. He comes a cropper when, for Mardi Gras, he tries to offer up three prostitutes. They're Playing with Fire attempts, not too successfully, to combine horror with the sexual initiation of a young lad by an older woman (as in Private Lessons). Here, college professor Sybil Danning seduces student Eric Brown to help her do in her doddering but rich mother-in-law. Whenever the plotting gets too tangled, Danning sheds her clothes.

Numerically, this type of exploitation fare dominates the year's releases; of perhaps 400 movies that will go into distribution by the end of the year, at least 200 will be low-budgeted, quick-buck items designed to cash in on previously successful themes and genres. Still, their share of the present four-billion dollars gross at the nation's box offices is probably less than ten percent. The major companies, with their stars, their production values, their marketing know-how and, above all, their advertising dollars, have a penetration that the exploitation people can only envy.

With all that going for them, one can legitimately ask why the major studios are not more venturesome in their choice of material. Why the umpteenth version of Tarzan, a third outing for The Bounty, a remake of a perfectly good little 1947 B movie, Out of the Past, into a not-so-good A movie, Against All Odds? Why a Cannonball Run II, Star Trek III, a Rocky IV, a Supergirl to wear the billowing mantle of those previous Supermen? Why, for that matter, Americanized versions of such thoroughly French fare as The Man Who Loved Women, One Wild Moment (Blame It on Rio), The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe and Pardon Mon Affaire (The Woman in Red)? Studio executives, pointing to the relaxed standards of the Production Code, are apt to reply that this time around they can do it right--meaning, of course, that they can steam it up a bit. As for the translations from the French, their explanation is that they are merely taking proved material and shaping it for a wider audience, an audience that couldn't be dragged to an art house but can be lured by the likes of Burt Reynolds, Michael Caine, Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner. But others, such as Orion's forthright Barbara Boyle, assert that this year's spate of remakes has come about because many of the studios are now controlled by marketing people, who are less concerned with how good a movie is going to be than with how much it will make. For them, familiar star names, a familiar title and a readily exploitable theme are the bottom line. And, adds Boyle, "With the cost of releasing a picture equaling the cost of the negative, you'd better start listening to your marketing people."

Although on the face of it that sounds like sage advice, the box office has a way of fooling the sages. The Bounty, despite a superb performance by Anthony Hopkins as Bligh (and despite all those naked Tahitian wahines), brought in less than $10,000,000. Mel Brooks's faithful adaptation of the fondly remembered Jack Benny comedy To Be or Not to Be also proved disappointing, even though it featured a stunning Anne Bancroft in the funniest and sexiest role of her career. Nor is Burt Reynolds likely to look back upon The Man Who Loved Women, adapted from a Truffaut movie, as one of his major achievements. Reynolds seems so smug about being surrounded by beautiful women that it's difficult to work up much sympathy for him. Blame It on Rio, also from the French, lacks the proper French élan to make it work; Michael Caine and Joseph Bologna are just too staid and proper to enjoy a fling--Caine, as it happens, with best friend Bologna's bosomy teenaged daughter (Michelle Johnson). Bologna, it turns out, has been having his fling with Caine's wife (Valerie Harper). Just what producer-director Stanley Donen hoped to gain by transposing the action from the nude beaches at St.-Tropez to the equally nude beaches of Rio is anybody's guess; but somehow, one has the feeling that two Frenchmen wouldn't be quite so embarrassed as Caine and Bologna, who, after ogling and admiring some bare-assed cuties in the surf, discover that the girls are their own daughters, naked as jay birds. The actors manage to make the moment as uncomfortable for the audience as it is for their characters. Unfaithfully Yours, based on a 1948 Preston Sturges comedy, stars Dudley Moore in a role originated by Rex Harrison, that of a symphony conductor insanely suspicious that his beautiful young wife (Nastassja Kinski) may be having an affair with a handsome violinist (Armand Assante). To the strains of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, he plots to murder her and throw the blame on the fiddler, who's been fiddling around. Most of the film's humor stems from Moore's wretched bungling of his best-laid plans. It's amusing enough, but Sturges did it better.

That's the trouble with remakes: If a picture was good enough the first time around to be remembered fondly, the follow-up had better be at least as good. That was the problem with Unfaithfully Yours--at least for those few who had seen the original (which was probably much too sophisticated for its time). It certainly was the problem with Against All Odds, even though Columbia didn't stint on the production, the cast or the sex scenes. Now regarded as one of the best of the films noirs that emerged after World War Two, Out of the Past was a taut psychological thriller that had the further advantage of providing Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas with two of the juiciest roles of their early careers. In the original, Mitchum played one of those trench-coated private eyes; in the remake, Jeff Bridges, as a down-on-his-luck ex-footballer, falls for the radiant, smoldering Rachel Ward, who had been small-time hood James Woods's live-in girlfriend. The two run off to picturesque Cozumel for some steamy sex in the sun; but the movie's hottest sequence is a breakneck car chase through the twists and turns of Sunset Boulevard. For the record, a sparkling Jane Greer played the Rachel Ward role in the original; she appears here as Ward's wicked, manipulative mother. It's called growing old disgracefully.

Aging far more gracefully is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, at least as exemplified by the handsomely chiseled Christopher Lambert in Warner Bros.' sumptuous Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Created by Burroughs in 1914 (and on the screen almost continually since 1918), the story of a white child growing up wild in the jungle has never ceased to enthrall. The first half of Greystoke is the most fascinating Tarzan film ever (and also the one truest to Burroughs' original intentions). The film rapidly loses focus, however, when explorer Ian Holm, realizing that Tarzan is, indeed, the long-lost heir to the earl of Greystoke, takes him to Scotland to assume his rightful place in society. There is humor, even poignancy in Tarzan's courtship of Jane (model Andie MacDowell), the American-born ward of the sixth earl of Greystoke (Ralph Richardson), especially when he breaks off a romantic interlude to go after a fly or expresses his delight with the girl by leaping up and down on her bed like a monkey at the sight of a banana. Even so, there's a sigh of relief when he goes loping back into the jungle, leaving both Jane and civilization far behind him.

Hollywood is not alone in its devotion to the ongoing series, as witnessed by such sexy French imports as Story of O, Part II and, especially, Emmanuelle 4. The original, directed by Just Jaeckin back in 1975, introduced beautiful Sylvia Kristel as the ever-loving heroine whose giddy pursuit of pleasure led her from one lushly exotic locale to another. Kristel has since graduated to more prestigious, if not necessarily loftier, enterprises (such as Private Lessons) but apparently was lured back to the series for what amounts to a cameo appearance. After running into an old beau at a Beverly Hills party, she decides to avoid future embarrassments by flying down to Rio for a complete redo of face and figure. The bandages come off and--presto!--she's Swedish model Mia Nygren, a 23-year-old beauty. Oddly enough, the new body has to learn the joys of sex all over again, and Nygren addresses herself to the chore with the utmost enthusiasm--so much so that one wonders what she will do for an encore in the inevitable Emmanuelle 5. And what does one make of Brazil's long-delayed Gabriela (featured in last year's Sex in Cinema)? Starring the sultry Sonia Braga, it just happens to be the spin-off of an 85-part TV maxiseries (also starring Braga) that has been called the Gone with the Wind of Brazil. The movie, which costars Marcello Mastroianni, centers on Braga's teasing displays of her sensuous torso as she wins sexual liberation for the women of a provincial Brazilian town in 1925 and was made subsequent to--and independently of--the television series. While the extensive TV exposure is said to have hurt the movie in Rio, the delays in bringing Gabriela to the American public were apparently caused primarily by the distributor's determination to find the right theaters and the right time to launch its initial screenings in this country.

Troubles of another kind delayed the arrival of John and Bo Derek's Bolero (also known variously as Bo-lero and Bo-Bolero). Bank-rolled by the Cannon Group for an MGM/UA release, the sexually explicit film, recounting the romantic escapades of wealthy, adventurous Bo, was rejected early on by MGM because, the studio stated, it was against company policy to release X-rated merchandise--and in its opinion, Bolero was clearly headed for an X. The Dereks countered by claiming that all concerned had known from the start that their movie was going to be an X--and, indeed, some had stated that they preferred it that way. Then the Cannon people averred that they, too, were unwilling to handle an X-rated picture, asking the Dereks (who contractually held "artistic control") to modify it to an R. After an early screening of the film, Cannon chairman Menahem Golan declared, "We looked at it and we were shocked. The word porno may be too strong, but it is not far from porno," adding that the film shows Bo Derek "from her toes to the very last tip of her hair in very erotic scenes." His bottom line, after a studio preview that elicited boos and jeers from an industry audience: "In its present form, the movie is unreleasable." By May, however, at the Cannes festival, Golan was saying that his company would distribute Bolero, X rating or no, with a midsummer release to 2000 (quickly revised to 1000) theaters, presumably based on the response to his trailers. (The film itself wasn't screened in Cannes.) Announcing also that he would release the Dereks' cut, he stated, "It's the hottest of hot versions. It's all there in a big way, but it's not porno. Not since Last Tango in Paris and Emmanuelle has there been anything this hot, but you don't see men naked; you just think you see it." So much for the Golan heights of integrity. At this writing, Bolero still has not been screened for the press, but word has been leaking out from sneak-preview audiences that Golan was right the first time around: It's unreleasable. In fact, people say, it's so awful, it might just make tons of money.

It wouldn't be the first time that reams of advance publicity, plus a canny ad campaign have saved a junk movie from the trash pile of history. One thinks immediately of Howard Hughes's The Outlaw, which introduced to the screen bosomy Jane Russell--to the accompaniment of a press campaign that first emphasized Hughes's invention of a cantilevered bra that capitalized on her charms, then detailed his numerous run-ins with the censors because the damned thing worked. Also to the point is this year's Angel, a low-budgeted exploitation item from Roger Corman's old company, New World. Honor Student by Day/Teenaged Hooker by Night trumpeted the film's costly but effective ad campaign. Unfortunately, all the ingenuity went into dreaming up the ad copy and the accompanying art; our teenaged heroine (Donna Wilkes), whose nocturnal prowling of Hollywood Boulevard is supposed to be paying her way through an expensive, exclusive private school, is a hooker who doesn't hook. Although there's no dearth of offers, she always finds it more expedient to decline, leaving the pedophiles with a movie about a teenaged prostitute who not only never climbs into bed--she never even climbs out of her clothes! Meanwhile, as might be expected, there's a slasher on the loose who has his own way of ridding the boulevard of its transient tradespeople.

The story of Angel is a movie that has yet to be made; it's just possible that the surprise success of New World's timid approach will inspire someone to try again--but correctly. Maybe, for example, Swedish ex-actress Mai Zetterling, whose tough, no-nonsense Scrubbers has been creating quite a stir even beyond the art-house circuit. Her first English-language feature, it depicts the bawdy, brutal life in a Borstal Institution, a British reform school for young girls. Also impressive, at least (so far) in the film festivals, is the Canadian documentary Hookers on Davie Street. Davie Street, in Vancouver, is unique territory for prostitutes, a pimp-free strip where the girls don't have to pay for protection, legal or otherwise. These hookers have an honesty about them that Angel never begins to approach.

In a similar vein is Improper Conduct, filmed by Nestor Almendros (the great cinematographer of Sophie's Choice) and Orlando Jimenez-Leal. A monumental documentary covering the 25 years of Castro's regime in Cuba, it suggests that the Cubans regard any form of nonconformity as "improper conduct"--with the harshest treatment reserved for homosexuals. The sinister underbelly of that attitude is underscored in an interview with poet Armando Valladares, who, after 22 years in Castro's prisons, survived to describe the rape and torture of the captives by their guards. Curiously, it's a French film, with dialog in French, Spanish and English.

Or perhaps not so curiously, for the French keep reminding us that they have a special sensibility in dealing with what some call aberrant behavior. They don't pretend to be shocked, outraged or even sophisticatedly amused by it; they find it something to be studied for what it reveals of the human condition. A notable example (and one that has been exceptionally well received in American art houses) is Diane Kurys' Entre Nous, reputedly based on her own mother's liaison with a young female art student during the early Fifties. Kurys suggests, with the utmost delicacy, that the relationship may have been more than Platonic; but the point of her movie is that the two women, played by Isabelle Huppert and Miou-Miou, draw greater strength and self-realization from each other than normal family ties can provide. Swann in Love, distilled by German director Volker Schlöndorff from Marcel Proust's mammoth Swann's Way, offers England's Jeremy Irons as the boudoir sensualist Charles Swann, Italy's ravishing Ornella Muti as the principal object of his affections and France's Alain Delon in a career-capping performance as the homosexual Baron de Charlus. It's a model of delicacy and good taste.

Neither delicacy nor good taste has ever been director Andrzej Zulawski's strongest suit; but in La Femme Publique (The Public Woman), he once again demonstrates his flair for uninhibited sexual drama, offering Valerie Kaprisky as a determined but not particularly talented actress who lands a role in a film version of Dostoievsky's The Possessed. After going to bed with the director, however, she's kicked off the picture and drawn into a plot involving a political assassination. High point of the movie--at least for fans of the lissome Kaprisky--is her nude, erotic dancing for the benefit of voyeuristic photographer Roger Dumas' agile camera.

Not that France doesn't produce its share of sexploitation movies, too. The Perils of Gwendoline, for example, might almost be a spin-off from the Emmanuelle series--especially since it's the work of Emmanuelle's original director, Jaeckin. Based on a once-popular, slightly risqué French comic strip and starring American Tawny Kitaen as the convent-bred innocent whose inherent sexiness makes her the perpetual target of lusting males, the movie shares something of Emmanuelle's wanderlust--it's an erotic travelog, with our heroine constantly being saved from a fate worse than death by adventurer Brent Huff. In Venus (filmed in 3-D), a Paris ad agency conducts a talent hunt for the sexiest model to tout a new suntan lotion called Venus. Dozens of applicants swab their naked torsos with the stuff, and the runners-up are invited for a Mediterranean cruise aboard a private yacht--presumably to improve their tans or, at least, their chances of winning. All are diverted from their enterprise by the sudden emergence from the blue-green waters of Venus herself, all naked and dripping, to protest the commercialization of her good name and to offer the agency people all sorts of alluring alternatives. Although these films offer an abundance of nudity and soft-core sex as well, a subtle provision in the French censorship laws keeps anything stronger to a minimum. Producers aren't barred from making hard-core; they simply know that if they do make it, they'll be refused export licenses or any form of government subsidy. It's subtle, but it works.

Even so, it isn't always easy' -- not even for censors--to differentiate between movies that deal openly and honestly with the sexuality of women and those that merely exploit the theme for an easy buck. Take, for example, Erendira, an ambitious Mexican-French--West German entry in which an innocent young girl (Claudia Ohana) is forced into prostitution by her own grandmother (Irene Papas). Its point seems to be that despite the sordid encounters she endures, the girl never loses her inherent innocence--though director Ruy Guerra's enthusiasm for depicting the degrading details makes that a bit difficult to believe. On the other hand, it is precisely this attention to detail that makes A Woman in Flames, from West Germany, such a compelling and disturbing experience--that and a high-voltage performance by gorgeous Gudrun Landgrebe in the title role. The quintessence of the sexually liberated female, she has walked out on her complacent husband, abandoned her plans for an advanced university degree and become a high-priced whore. For convenience, she settles in with a male hooker (Mathieu Carriere) who is equally adept at servicing male and female clients but desires respectability (or the appearance of respectability) above all else. Not so Landgrebe, who is almost demonic in exploring her own sexuality to its limits.

It would be difficult to find American counterparts for pictures such as these, mainly because our studios are more geared to plot than to character. To be sure, there are exceptions. In John Huston's Under the Volcano, based on Malcolm Lowry's formidable, searing novel, the focus is on the last 24 hours of a former British consul (Albert Finney) boozing his life away in Cuernavaca. His wife (Jacqueline Bisset), we discover, has had an affair with his half-brother (Anthony Andrews); but while that gives Finney the excuse to go on drinking, we also learn that his drinking was what drove her into another's arms in the first place. During the course of a long day and night spent celebrating Mexico's macabre Day of the Dead, we come to realize that the man is bright, charming and totally self-destructive, with his final coming apart set in the seamiest bordello ever seen in a movie. Finney's finely shaded performance is bound to be remembered come Oscar time, and Huston's wry, colorful direction as well. But with its absence of conventional plot, Under the Volcano is the kind of movie American critics often describe as "European."

They would probably say the same for Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson if its core weren't so thoroughly pro-American. Robin Williams is sensational as a sax-tooting member of a Russian circus troupe who, opting for freedom, defects at, of all places, Bloomingdale's. Eluding his Soviet guards, he makes his way through a series of odd jobs that give him--and us--insights into the American scene that we tend to take for granted. None of us would take for granted, however, his romantic bathtub interlude with delicious Maria Conchita Alonso, a salesgirl at Bloomie's who knows what the good life is all about.

Freedom is also what the odd assortment of characters inhabiting The Hotel New Hampshire are all about--the freedom to realize one's personal goals, no matter what the cost. Based on John Irving's best seller, Hotel introduces an extended family that's constantly on the move as poppa Beau Bridges opens one hotel after another--disastrously. Along the way, daughter Jodie Foster is gang-raped, has a brief lesbian encounter with Nastassja Kinski (who disguises herself as a bear through much of the film) and a steamy interlude with her own brother (Rob Lowe) in an attempt to exorcise her feelings for her rapist, who has become an anarchistic pornographer. Lowe, an exceptionally handsome young man, manages to seduce just about every female member of the large cast, including busty waitress Anita Morris and virginal anarchist Amanda Plummer. Rounding out this family are a homosexual brother (Paul McCrane) and a little sister (Jennifer Dundas) who remains so little that she becomes famous by writing an autobiography titled Trying to Grow. Like The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire is quintessentially a black comedy.

Earlier in the year, the Oscar-laden Terms of Endearment demonstrated (though not for all time) that audiences will turn out in great numbers for a picture offering a minimum of story provided it's fleshed out with people who are warm, human and fun to be with--even if one of them (Debra Winger) is suffering from terminal cancer. But before we learn about her disease, we have become so caught up in the tug of wills between Winger and her tough, sexually repressed mother (Shirley MacLaine) that the deathbed sequences seem almost to have dropped in from another movie--especially since by that time, MacLaine has been thoroughly thawed by her swinging neighbor, ex-astronaut Jack Nicholson. In a film littered with extramarital affairs, there is a notable absence of moralizing--mainly because we know so well the needs and the drives of each of the characters.

Surprisingly, Steve Martin's The Lonely Guy falls into that category as well. This modest comedy finds Martin searching for someone to replace the live-in girlfriend who has deserted him for a ballet dancer. With pal Charles Grodin, he prowls Manhattan's bars for the perfect woman (Judith Ivey)--who soon sends him packing because he's "too right" for her. The film's high point comes when Martin climbs to the roof of his apartment building to howl out the name of his beloved to the night sky and finds another dozen or so guys up there doing the same thing.

The mere absence of a conventional story does not necessarily create a masterpiece, however, as demonstrated rather painfully by The Natural, starring Robert Redford, Swing Shift, with Goldie Hawn, and Sergio Leone's pseudo epic Once upon a Time in America, starring Robert De Niro. Although based on Bernard Malamud's resonant novel that made baseball the apotheosis of the American dream, the screen incarnation of The Natural loses all resonance as Redford--more handsome than ever--gives us his portrait of a whiz-bang pitcher who comes to grief thanks to the ladies in his life (Kim Basinger, Glenn Close, Barbara Hershey). Nor does Goldie Hawn win much sympathy in Swing Shift, which is reminiscent of the wartime Swing Shift Maisie movies only in its locale. When hubby Ed Harris volunteers for the Navy, Hawn finds a job in an aircraft plant--and almost immediately hits the sack with the 4-F Kurt Russell. Despite Hawn's wide-eyed, dewy presence, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm for a girl like that, even though the script provides her with what is presumably a happy ending.

Once upon a Time in America might also be called a "people" movie, especially in the truncated version released to American audiences by the Ladd Company and Warner Bros. With well over an hour excised from the original film, great chunks of story have fallen by the wayside, leaving the focus on Robert De Niro and James Woods, two nice Jewish boys who grow up to be gangsters on New York's Lower East Side. Although the film spans a period of roughly 50 years, beginning early in the Twenties, there are such arbitrary leaps in the continuity that it's often difficult to know just what's going on, much less why. Instead, we get set pieces--the shooting up of a kosher restaurant, a gang fight in the city streets, a boldly planned heist, De Niro inviting his childhood sweetheart (Elizabeth McGovern) to a lavish dinner, then raping her on the way home. Reportedly, Leone's own version was considerably more graphic in its scenes of both violence and sex; it may be released here before the year is out.

One thing about "people" stories--the people have to be either fully dimensional human beings or fully dimensional monsters. An in-betweener just won't do. Perhaps that is why so many of today's films are so deeply unsatisfying. Our movies are giving us precious few heroes, unless you want to count the likes of Indiana Jones and Conan the Destroyer--hardly the kind of fellows you're likely to run into at the office. Yes, we cherish such romantic, if improbable, adventure tales as Romancing the Stone; the frantic, good-humored high-jinks of Ghostbusters; even the send-up of that semi-sacred cow Elvis Presley in Top Secret! But we also want people we can recognize, people with whom we can identify. Perhaps the saddest commentary on the films of 1984 is that they have failed to uncover any new major female star. Although Romancing the Stone's spunky Kathleen Turner comes closest, most of moviedom's women have become as gray and sexless as the men. Come back to the five-and-dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean--and Marilyn, too--before Boy George and Michael Jackson take over completely.