Green and Red for Christmas

By Richard Schickel, Richard Corliss

THREE AMIGOS!

Gene Kelly in The Pirate, Peter O'Toole in My Favorite Year, Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo -- each played an actor forced to project his romantic persona into real life. There are few things funnier or more touching than the sight of a performer's image slipping down around his knees while he tries to yank it into place before anyone notices he is only human.

To the ranks of those who have braved this indignity in the cause of laughter must be added Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short. They play a team of silent movie heroes who from a distance look like just the fellows to save a Mexican village from the depredations of El Guapo and his bandidos. Alas, the telegram inviting them to jump down off the screen and into the dusty Mexican streets is garbled in transmission; to the trio it reads like a bid to make a profitable personal appearance. And it arrives when they need money; their studio boss (Joe Mantegna) has fired them for making an outrageous salary demand: payment in cash rather than in freebies.

As usual, Martin (who wrote the script with Co-Producer Lorne Michaels and Songwriter Randy Newman) plays a fellow with misplaced confidence in his own shrewdness; Chase, for a change, plays a stupid man; Short is pretty much along for the ride, though he has the best actor's moment, choking himself up as he tells some bewildered children about the high point of his life, when Dorothy Gish praised one of his performances. There is a lot of good, broad comedy in Three Amigos!, notably an encounter with a singing bush that knows only public domain songs and Martin's turning an attempt to escape from a dungeon into a parody of a Nautilus workout. Under John Landis' slaphappy direction, the movie does not always bounce that wildly off the wall. But Monty Python would not entirely disown it either.

By Richard Schickel

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) is a skid row nerd, languishing in Mushnik's Flower Shop. He loves the tramp goddess Audrey (Ellen Greene), but she too willingly suffers the bondage and discipline of the notorious Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. (Steve Martin). Not until Seymour strikes a Faustian bargain with a talking plant he calls Audrey II does our hero find the girl of his dreams. And the killer vegetation of his most festering nightmares.

You can try not liking this adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical hit -- it has no polish and a pushy way with a gag -- but the movie sneaks up on you, about as subtly as Audrey II. The songs are neat pastiches of '60s pop. The plant is an animatronic wonder, all blue gums, naughty tendrils and mighty mouth. Moranis and Greene make for a comely-homely pair of thwarted lovers, and Martin is his hilarious self, libeling all dentists who had just managed to forget Marathon Man. Then Bill Murray shows up as the perfect dental patient, sublime masochist to Martin's cheerful sadist, and strolls away with ; the picture. Little Shop never quite recovers its bearings; the viewer may not either. Death by laughter. -- By Richard Corliss

THE MORNING AFTER

Here it is, the worst nightmare of the singles scene: you go home with someone whose name you didn't quite catch in the bar, spend the night with him or her, and wake up to find your brief encounter permanently dead beside you.

Not a bad premise for a mystery. But a premise is only a promise, and The Morning After fails to fulfill it. Jane Fonda is, to be sure, awfully good as Alex Sternbergen, a near-miss movie star now trying to drink her leftover life away. She has the style of such women, a mixture of tough talk and flighty vulnerability, down pat. The stranger who tries to help her is an ex-cop with a blue-collar manner. Underneath, however, he glows with the middle-class spirit of the New Man: he is wise, patient, a good lover and a better cook. As played by Jeff Bridges, he is also a total bore.

Director Sidney Lumet and his cinematographer, Andrzej Bartkowiak, shoot Los Angeles in what they seem to think is a new light but is really imitation Magritte, the kind of thing you can pick up in art galleries where the EVERYTHING MUST GO signs are permanently posted. R.S.

NO MERCY

Critics call this an "O.C." movie; every plot twist is so easy to spot that the only response is "of course." The star (Richard Gere) is a Chicago cop with a dependable partner played by a disposable actor. O.C., the partner gets killed by a visiting New Orleans gangster (Jeroen Krabbe) while keeping tabs on the gangster's moll (Kim Basinger). O.C., the star goes to New Orleans to hunt down the bad guy, gets hassled by the local police and, O.C., falls in love with the moll while they dodge crackers and crocodiles in bayou country. Bullets perforate every bit player in the Vieux Carre, O.C., but keep missing the star. Floorboards creak at propitious moments; tinderbox hotels refuse to go up in flames; heroine watches helplessly as hero and villain fight to the death. O.C., O.C., O.C.

A modest surprise: there is a little meat on these old bones. Screenwriter Jim Carabatsos works efficiently within, rather than against, genre expectations; and Director Richard Pearce (Country) blows the right amount of steam around his characters to create atmosphere; this is the tangiest of the 46 recent movies shot in New Orleans (no, we won't name 'em). Most of the time, Gere and Basinger have their backs to the wall, and it does wonders for their posture if not quite for their performances. Krabbe, though, is a top macho scuzz ball, with his haunting face, menacing whisper and evil ponytail. This stoic, sulfuric Dutch actor helps prove that an O.C. movie, when it plays smartly by the rules, can be O.K. as well. R.C.