Distant Love

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE FAN Directed by Edward Bianchi Screenplay by Priscilla Chapman and John Hartwell Psychopath stalks celebrated actress, bloodily maims or kills people he thinks are keeping her from him, finally, frighteningly, corners her in deserted theater, with sex and/or murder in mind.

It sounds like the formula for a cheapo exploitation film intended to capitalize on the terrible events of recent months, in which sickened anonymity has struck out at the famous. Indeed, the distributors cannily evoke those tragedies by noting in the credits that The Fan is based on a 1977 novel and had finished production before the John Lennon murder --association by dissociation, as it were. But movies should not be judged on the manner of their promotion, and if this picture is not exactly high art, it is a well-made, quite intelligent piece of popular entertainment, containing a sensibly moral examination of how obsession with a celebrity can lead to mayhem.

The Fan also features a star turn by Lauren Bacall, the object of the psycho's attentions, that is brave, flashy and riveting. It is brave because she plays a woman on the shady side of 50 who hides neither her wrinkles nor the temperamental manipulativeness so common among aging stars; flashy because, besides singing and dancing, she trades in high-gloss show-biz bitchery that sometimes approaches the level of All About Eve; riveting because she shows a touching vulnerability about her professional and personal insecurities (she is torching for her ex-husband, played by James Garner). Bacall may or may not be playing Bacall, but who cares? She is obviously a very knowing lady, and there is at least an illusion of depth about the movie as a whole because there is an honest depth in her performance.

Written with more flak than one might expect in a film of this kind, directed with impersonal stylishness by a onetime TV-commercial director with a fondness for tight closeups of inanimate objects, The Fan has an emptily sophisticated air that, strangely, works for it. Everyone is so busy being chic and bright that no-one notices the developing menace in the title character's letters to the star as his obsessive fantasies of love turn into malevolent schemes of destructiveness. And somehow, when his words become deeds, the intrusion of maniac disorderliness on the slickly complacent world of these show people is extraordinarily harrowing. Michael Biehn, as the madman, combines a sort of mad innocence with creepiness very effectively, and there are good bits, as well, by Maureen Stapleton as Bacall's patiently put-upon secretary and by Hector Elizondo as a smart but slightly star-struck cop.

If the ending is a preachy letdown, what goes before it makes The Fan a surprisingly worthwhile exercise in suspense, a bright, brisk horror show that someone over the age of 16 can sit through enjoyably. And profitably, since it provides an acute, cautionary portrait not only of an all too recognizable lunatic of our time, but of the enviable people and milieu that, viewed from his furnished room, drive him crazy. --By Richard Schickel

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