Styles for a Summer Night

By RICHARD SCHICKEL, R.S., RICHARD CORLISS, R.C.

New films from the U.S., The Netherlands, Britain and Mexico

THE LAST STARFIGHTER

Nice idea: a video game that is designed not merely as an amusement for idle teenage reflexes but as aptitude test and recruiting device for Star- fighters. These warriors are needed to defend a space frontier, maintained by the Star League, an interplanetary alliance threatened by the dread, yucky Ko-Dan.

Nice performance: Robert Preston as a sort of intergalactic Music Man who markets the games here below and lures earthlings skyward to battle for righteousness. After almost a half-century, Preston's energy and infectious pleasure in performance remain delightful.

Curious lapse: once young Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) reluctantly leaves his dismal trailer park and his pert girlfriend (Catherine Mary Stewart) and arrives on Rylos, staging area for the paltry battle to come, he is either too polite or too dense to mention its uncanny resemblance to the mechanical landscapes scattered about the Star Wars galaxy. Of course he can't hear the score (marked-down John Williams) and is perhaps too caught up in the action to notice how much everyone and everything he meets resembles software, hardware and ideas people have all had just about enough of. Inexpressively written by Jonathan Betuel and languidly directed by Nick Castle Jr., The Last Starfighter offers the audience little more than the pleasure of naming its previous movie bases as it touches them. Let's see: TRON... E.T. ...Close Encounters... And so to sleep. --By Richard Schickel

THE 4TH MAN

Sometimes menacing, often bleakly comic, always alarmingly precognitive, the visions of Writer Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbe) have their cinematic possibilities. The trouble is his movie is mostly banal, the stuff of arrested adolescence. It contains obsessively recurring images: woman as spider, devouring her mate once she has lured him to sexual consummation; woman as elusive Madonna, offering salvation to wayward boys if only they can catch her attention; campy sacrilege committed on Catholic iconography gloomy reflections on the artist's unhappy lot in a staid bourgeois society, with particular reference to Holland, where the audience is uneconomically small and the language is not exactly a popular international currency.

All of this decorates, like so many ostrich feathers, Gerard Soeteman's perverse script of a homosexual who grudgingly accepts a wealthy woman's favors in the hope that she will introduce him to her other lover, a lovely, coarse lad who seems to offer the possibility of degradation along with the joy of sex. The question is, will one or the other of them meet with murder (or just incredibly bad luck) after conjoining with her? The answer is, who cares?, especially as she is played with a placid lack of threat by Renee Sontendijk.

Buoyed by some stylish exoticism, by Krabbe's ferocious performance as its bedeviled protagonist (a less-gay gay the movies have never offered) and by the mysteriously growing repute of Director Paul Verhoeven (he was responsible for the stodgy Soldier of Orange and the ugly Spelters), The 4th Man is bobbing prosperously along the art circuit, a midsummer night's titillation for the would-be with-its. But the movie's ultimate fate, surely, is to be celebrated, along with Pink Flamingos and its ilk, at the midnight masses of the lavender thrill mob. --R.S.

ANOTHER COUNTRY

A decade after the Great War, the playing fields of Eton and Westminster were trod by a generation of upper-class traitors to the Empire: Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and the rest. In the 1980s, these homegrown spies have stoked a boomlet of plays, TV shows and films. Julian Mitchell's 1981 play, Another Country, is set in a public school very much like Eton and features a 17-year-old, Guy Bennett, very much like the young Guy Burgess. Prinked up in Oscar Wilde frippery, gaily mocking the prefects' hypocritical rites of passage, standing defiantly outside this class system, Bennett is a sexual subversive. By play's end, encouraged by a caustic Marxist classmate, Guy is ready to become a political subversive as well. Traitor to his gender, traitor to his country. Why bloody not?

The play worked. As witty and discreet as if it had been written in the 1930's, it defined Bennett's rebellion against his austere schoolmates as one of style and substance. The film version, directed by Marek Kanievska, is a botch. Every shot is vaselined with romanticism; every dewy undergraduate looks ready to pose in his Calvins; and Rupert Everett's Bennett, a dandy dandy on the London stage, has become gross onscreen. Instead of a national tragedy in embryo, what we get is a posh summer camp. --By Richard Corliss

ERENDIRA The dreamscape of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story is like the vision of a Chagall on peyote. Violence and magic live there, in a desert village that holds the secret to every folktale and human atrocity. There a rose can glow in the dark, an orange open to reveal a diamond in its center, a paper butterfly take flight and land against a wall, fresh and flat as new paint. In a dark, lush corner of the Garcia Marquez canvas one can see Erendira (pronounced Eh-ren-de-ra) and her dotty grandmother. They live alone, slave and exacting mistress of a crumbling manor, and when the house burns down, Grandma blames Erendira and takes the girl out to the desert to earn their keep on her back. Erendira's passive expertise as a prostitute makes her famous and her grandmother rich; soldiers and senators pay dearly for her favors. Only a young man named Ulysses has the key to her chaste heart. He will free Erendira by killing Grandma--he will try, anyway, with a knife, explosives and a ton of rat poison--but the tenacious crone is as hard to dispatch as Rasputin, or the Roadrunner, or a nightmare of repression.

Years ago, Garcia Marquez wrote an early version of the Erendira script; later the story served as an anecdote in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now it serves as Third World political metaphor: the old woman is a conquistador who exploits the native beauty and animal passions of the new land; Erendira is like a developing country, silently fighting her way out of debt and domination. As directed by Ruy Guerra, this made-in-Mexico movie is often careless about building tension within the frame or climaxes within the story. But it captures enough of Garcia Marquez's surreal humor to make for an entertaining fable with the aftertaste of narrative anarchy. Claudia Ghana, a dusky young stunner with a feral strength about her, is an ideal Erendira. And Irene Papas, her eyes ablaze with deranged hauteur, gives a hilarious, all-stops-out performance as Grandma. Through these two attractive opposites, Garcia Marquez's demons leap off the screen and into the moviegoer's own unshakable dreams. --R.C.