They Got What They Wanted ISHTAR

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

"Like Webster's Dictionary, we're Morocco bound." That lyric, warbled by Hope and Crosby as they jounced along one of their more amiable roads back in 1942, is outrageous enough to have been penned by Rogers and Clarke, the comically dreadful songwriting team played by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar. The two pictures share similarities besides their North African setting: agreeably low-keyed playing by their stars, a plot that involves them dangerously in local politics, and about the same quota of gags. There is one important difference: Ishtar cost roughly 40 times as much as Road to Morocco. Laughter can choke on such wretched excess.

The auteur of Ishtar the movie is film's shyest comic talent, Elaine May. The auteur of Ishtar the event (or would-be event) is the medium's shyest -- but also slyest -- actor-producer, Warren Beatty. It is important to keep those functions separate in mind. Otherwise it is hard to enjoy either the film or the media outcry that any overbudget, long-delayed (six months) production is bound to engender.

May is a woman who makes wallflower movies like The Heartbreak Kid and A New Leaf, whose fine individual qualities are overlooked by the great, noisy media bash of the age. Beatty is, of course, Beatty: a man in whose career- drama the actual movies he stars in are merely incidents. In a daringly speculative new book, Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes (Doubleday; $17.95), Critic David Thomson puts it this way: Beatty's ambition now is "to see if he can be only a star -- not a star kept alight by regular work and appearance, but a star who exists according to the self-perpetuating mechanics of stardom." In this grand scheme, his notoriety as a womanizer is of small consequence -- a titillating false trail to keep the gossip press yapping. So is acting, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Performing is something that Beatty, whom Thomson calls a man "doubting and growing querulous . . . at the advisability of the whole pretense," must infrequently and reluctantly do in order to secure a larger, much more complex and devious aim.

This goal is to see if he can turn movie production into a form of seduction, in which large, supposedly rational corporations are encouraged to spend bloated sums of money for unlikely enterprises. Five years ago, Paramount and Barclays Bank parted with not less than $40 million to make Reds, an epic-scale love story of two American radicals of small historical importance and no contemporary resonance. Now he has persuaded Columbia Pictures to throw a similar sum at this modest little comedy.

To be sure, May has sent her plot sense out for assertiveness training. One recognizes her terrible songsters as authentic May characters; she has always had compassion for articulate, depressed dreamers grounded in reality only by two left feet. With visions of Simon and Garfunkel galumphing through their minds, the Rogers and Clarke duo have been sent by their agent to try out their new lounge act -- as far out of town as possible. In Ishtar, they get muddled up with Isabelle Adjani, whom they both mistake for a boy at first; a CIA operative (Charles Grodin) who is not nearly so smooth a counterrevolutionary as he thinks he is; and a blind camel that provides the film with its best running -- actually stumbling -- gag.

This may sound like a sweaty hubbub, one of those desperately contrived comedies that want to have their overproduced action sequences and devour them satirically too. But May is a writer of scripts that are all sneaky asides, no obvious zingers allowed. She is not one to let her voice be drowned out by either a lot of exploding hardware or the buzz about Ishtar's delays and cost overruns. One finally cannot resist warming to a movie in which people are astonished to find out that Gaddafi is the name of a man not a country but are strangely gratified to learn that vultures, like tyro songwriters, work "on spec." And that contains, above all, a golden trashery of dreadful pop lyrics ("There's a wardrobe of love in my eyes,/ Come back and see if there's something your size").

One can almost hear the practiced seducer's rationalization: "What's the harm? Everyone got what they wanted, didn't they?" Heaven help us; it's close to being true. May, whose painstaking ways and modest grosses do not usually commend her to the studios, gets to work in something near her best vein. Hoffman has a role nicely suited to the comic whine of his neuroses. Beatty, 50, has one in which his distracted air and his lack of traditional star presence can be made to look like modesty -- though at his age, his looks are no longer flawlessly tailored to his boyish manner. Thomson has an occasion for his book and a confirmation of his imaginative insights into the star's character. The rest of us can enjoy a movie that is reasonably genial and diverting. At a cost of $10 million or $15 million, it might have made the studio happy. But even the misery of its unrecoupable costs is cushioned; the management that initiated the project has been replaced, and the new team can cheerfully disown it. And the Great Seducer skips off to the next bed -- er -- boardroom.