Could It Be . . . Satan? THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK

By RICHARD CORLISS

Andrew Wyeth might summer there. Bob Newhart could run the colonial inn. Eastwick -- it looks like a travel poster for the New England dream. It surely boasts a trio of dream girls: Alexandra (Cher), who sculpts clay Earth Mothers; Jane (Susan Sarandon), who cues the school band with a hearty "Horns up!"; and Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer), abustle with her six kids. All are displaced, not quite fulfilled by their evenings together swapping naughty secrets. And when this comely sorority is restless, Eastwick suffers, with plagues of sudden storms and cherry pits. The women are witches, you see. And now they dare to pray for the perfect man to save them from rural rectitude: "a tall, dark prince traveling under a curse." Worse luck for the witches, they get him.

Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson), a newcomer to Eastwick, is everything the women crave, fear, pity, hate. He is, in other words, a man. In public, he snores like a boar. His jokes smell, and he does too. He is, he admits with the grin of a baby Hitler, "just your average horny little devil." With a capital D. Big Bad Beelzebub. But devilry in New England is not what it used to be. Women suspected of having sex with Satan are not burned at the stake; they are snubbed in the check-out line. And in an age when even witches are feminists, a sexist like Daryl doesn't stand a chance.

John Updike, on whose lovely, wicked novel this film is based, is alert to the minutest shifts in a suburbanite's emotional barometer. George Miller, director of the wondrously violent Mad Max movies, sneezes and blows a typhoon. At first it seems a mix of two unsuited masters. And anyone who comes to The Witches of Eastwick expecting a Masterpiece Theatre adaptation will be disappointed, not to say grossed out. Alex wakes up in a bed of snakes; puke spumes as if from a seasick sewer pipe. No problem. Miller and Michael Cristofer have simply chosen to tell the story from coarse Daryl's point of view rather than, as Updike did, from the ironic women's. This is not a movie of compound-complex sentences and nuances. But it is a damned entertaining one, with a textbook display of camerabatics -- if textbooks were comic books with a mean streak.

The performances are in perfect high pitch. Cher and her screen sisters all catch the edge of flinty, frantic resilience; these three could bewitch any prospective devil. There are nifty turns from Veronica Cartwright (as the local prude) and Helen Lloyd Breed (as a sprightly oldster). Then there's Nicholson. Well! He might have been rehearsing for this role ever since The Shining. If he was over the top there, he is stratospheric here. He is a beast on two legs, grunting, slavering, pawing anyone, and never mind the scratches. Does Jack stink like Daryl? No, he is gloriously rank. Sulfuric, in fact.