Rushes

OH, GOD! YOU DEVIL

In his third outing as the stand-up Supreme Being, George Burns, 88, adds a new wrinkle: he also plays Satan. Quotable quips from Writer Andrew Bergman (The In-Laws) include the Lord's back-lot zinger, "I put the fear of me in you," and Talent Agent Harry O. Tophet's devilish irreverence, "He had to close the big dining room up there." Tophet cuts a deal with a young songwriter (Ted Wass), offering fame in exchange for his soul. Director Paul Bogart's muzzy little comedy appropriately pivots on the Burns-Burns confrontation when Lucifer and the Lord play poker in Caesars Palace to win the yuppie Faustus. Oh, God! You Devil has a shopping-mall message: Don't do drugs or dream of fame; go home, be ordinary. If only Gracie were alive to play the devil's advocate, this biblical vaudeville might have had a little more class.

PARIS, TEXAS

A man named Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) staggers through the desert, mute and loco. His square brother (Dean Stockwell) hauls Travis home to be reunited with his young son (Hunter Carson). Now Travis goes searching, with the boy in tow, for his long-lost wife (Nastassja Kinski). Welcome to the new West, pardner, where the myth of the loner is yoked to the grail of domestic reconciliation. No wonder Paris, Texas is as powerfully schizoid as its title: German director (Wim Wenders), American screenwriter (Sam Shepard), the clashing strategies of an international cast. With his gorgeous, precise images of the American Southwest, Wenders suggests a cinematic landscape artist forced by the moneylenders to add some human figures to the picture. Their motivations refuse to parse, and the film ends up where Travis began: parched and lost in a desert of its own device.

A NOS AMOURS

Sandrine Bonnaire has a peasant sensuality; naked, she looks like the figurehead on a pirate ship. The camera closes in on the stolid planes of her face, and voil`a a deep dimple appears incongruously in her left cheek. From wanton to elfin in the flick of an adolescent whim--such are the compelling mysteries of personality. Bonnaire stars as the teen-age Suzanne in this doggedly unsentimental French film from Writer-Director Maurice Pialat. Suzanne's family has stayed together by corseting all hostilities. Then she discovers the power of her own erotic impulse. Overnight, Daddy's little girl is a slut in Mama's eyes, and the family falls into convulsions of jealousy and hatred. Like the off-Hollywood films of John Cassavetes, A Nos Amours is less drama than psychodrama; it wears its artlessness as a badge of intrepid truth-telling. Bonnaire's artlessness though, marks her as an exotic found object and a genuine movie find.