Haggling, Honors and Hype

By RICHARD CORLISS

Clint Eastwood strode down the steps of the Palais des Festivals, and the townsfolk swooned as if a god had descended to earth. Another Hollywood deity ambled onto the Palais stage, heard himself introduced as "Mon General James Stewart" and watched a couple of thousand people in evening clothes stand up to cheer and salute. Earlier, gallant as always, Stewart had served as foil for June Allyson's sparkle at a press conference celebrating the screening of their 1954 film The Glenn Miller Story. Cher, the star of Mask, impressed everyone by winning a prize for best actress and, earlier, by arriving with 25 suitcases and a trampoline in tow.

There were plenty of movies in Cannes -- a thousand or so, from dozens of countries, on big theater screens and hotel-room cassettes -- as part of the 38th International Film Festival. But this was truly, as the trade paper Variety headlined it, "The Year of the Yank." A battalion of them landed at this Riviera beach resort, and before you could say "cultural imperialism" had convinced the assembled film world that they owned it.

Established in 1939 as a cozy little celebration of film art, the festival is now a giant bazaar, full of hagglers and houris, that draws 35,000 visitors each May. Israeli-born Producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, now based in Los Angeles, set up shop at the posh Carlton Hotel, and by the end of the 13-day festival their company, the Cannon Group, had cut $65 million worth of movie deals. Or was it $90 million? When money talks in this town, the details sometimes get lost in translation.

So do national identities. More than half the prizes handed out by jury President Milos Forman went to films with multiple passports. The jury prizes (first and second runners-up) were awarded to Birdy, an American film directed and produced by Englishmen, and Colonel Redl, a period political drama made under German, Austrian and Hungarian aegis. The choice for best actor was American Star William Hurt, playing an imprisoned homosexual in the Brazilian film Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on a novel by the Argentine Manuel Puig. Insignificance, which took the technical prize, was the official British entry, but its setting (Manhattan), cast (including Tony Curtis) and characters (fictionalized renderings of Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein and Senator Joseph McCarthy) were uniquely American.

From nowhere -- well, Yugoslavia, actually -- came one of the few entries to uphold the standard of defiantly indigenous "little" films, Emir Kusturica's Papa's Away on a Business Trip. A brutal, poignant, exuberant story of a family rent by political and sexual chicanery, Papa boasts nary a Hurt nor a Kinski among its actors, and earned every frond of Cannes's grand prize, the Palme d'Or.

Looking ahead to future productions, Golan announced the signing, on a Carlton Hotel napkin, of aging Enfant Terrible Jean-Luc Godard to direct a modern version of King Lear in Hollywood, perhaps with Marlon Brando as Lear and Woody Allen as the fool. (No, Golan admitted, the two stars had not even been approached to appear in the film -- but then again, they hadn't said no.) In any case, Godard by now should be accustomed to negative responses. His new film, a handsome, typically perverse antidrama called Detective, was booed at ; its gala screening, and as he was about to walk into a press conference, the director received a tart surprise: a pie in the face. The culprit was, reportedly, a man outraged by Godard's previous film, Hail Mary, a somewhat irreverent modernization of the nativity story (Mary is portrayed as a cabdriver's girlfriend and is shown in the nude) that earned a rebuke from no less a reviewer than Pope John Paul II.

Godard's crusty critique was one of this festival's few moments of redeeming silliness. For the third straight year, a nagging rain dampened spirits, and neither green-haired mimes nor 6-ft.-tall strolling Care Bears could lure visitors outside. The weather also diminished opportunities for the festival's oldest and most assiduously recorded sideshow: the ritual display of starlet flesh. Young women desiring to disrobe in public were forced to go high tech. Isabelle Solar, chief ornament of the French soft-core epic Joan, could be seen on the closed-circuit hotel TV network slipping into a steamy bubble bath. In other respects, Cannes voyeurism may be entering the Workout '80s. The town summoned its largest turnout of gawkers for a midnight chorus line of musclewomen from the American documentary Pumping Iron II.

More serious -- and moving -- tributes were offered to two absent friends. One afternoon a single spotlight illuminated the Palais stage -- the aura left vacant by Francois Truffaut, who died at 52 last October -- and slowly two dozen figures gathered in the shadows. Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant and a host of old colleagues were there to wreathe the great director's memory in their affection and gratitude.

If there were a competition for indelible images, this simple homage to Truffaut would be matched only by the sustained audience applause that greeted the final shot of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, another critical favorite. A young wife, her dream of eloping with a movie idol crushed, finds another dream born while gazing raptly at another wonderful picture. For the few privileged moments when Truffaut and Allen occupied center screen, Cannes declared that the film industry is only on loan to the merchants. It belongs, first and finally, to the magicians.