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By RICHARD CORLISS

On Mandy Patinkin's first day on the Dick Tracy set, a bizarre apparition walked up to the actor -- it looked like Olivier's Richard III in a turquoise pinstripe suit -- and urgently confided, "He has a vision. He has a vision." The hunchbacked creature was Al Pacino, in makeup and costume as the archfiend Big Boy Caprice, and the object of his admiration was Warren Beatty.

In the tabloid headlines of popular perception, Beatty may be typecast as the roguish movie actor, or the legendary roue, or Shirley MacLaine's current brother, or the man who persuaded Gary Hart to make one last humiliating run for the presidency. But he is also, over the past quarter-century, the movies' most distinctive producer-star, with Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait and Reds to his credit (and Ishtar to his debit). As the only person to have been nominated for Oscars in four different categories on two separate occasions -- for acting in, and producing, writing and directing Reds and Heaven Can Wait -- Beatty has to be more than an indefatigable stud. He could be a man with a vision. And he is.

He had never faced a sterner challenge than Dick Tracy, his adaptation of Chester Gould's comic strip about the big-city detective with a right-angle jaw. Batman, the comic-strip blockbuster of 1989, had entranced moviegoers with its dark, brooding take on urban corruption. Would the brighter, perkier Dick Tracy seem of less heft? More to the box-office point, would young people want to see the movie? Who is Dick Tracy anyway? The strip runs in only about half the 550 newspapers that carried it in the Eisenhower years. And who's this Warren Beatty? He hasn't had a big hit since Heaven Can Wait in 1978, a lifetime ago for the new movie generation. If kids knew him, it was mainly as Madonna's 53-year-old boyfriend.

Fortunately, Beatty had the vision thing for Dick Tracy. As he expressed it in code to his longtime collaborator, production designer Richard Sylbert, Beatty wanted a live-action comic-strip movie with a "super-real" feel. The style would be "going to the edge and not falling off." A 1930s city would come to life, not on location, where reality must be counterfeited, but through mattes, combining live action with painted backdrops, which would lend a "magical" air and keep the budget at a bearable $30 million. The final decision was radical: to shoot the picture in seven primary and secondary colors that would define the characters and story while adding a unique visual humor. "Love it or hate it," Disney movie boss Jeffrey Katzenberg kept saying, "Dick Tracy will look unlike any movie you've ever seen."

Love it. Dick Tracy's look surely does merit rapture, but the movie also has wit and grace in a film era of witless gross-out. Scan the bold sweep of the narrative, which poses ripe dilemmas of career, love and family for a loner sleuth. Hum the songs written by Stephen Sondheim in his (hummable) Follies mode and splendidly performed by Madonna and Patinkin. Attend to the bold filigree work of the film's supporting cast of rogues, most of whom are devil- dolled up in grotesque prostheses and outlandish mannerisms but are given ample room to strut their stuff. Their leader is Pacino, who as Big Boy gives Batman's Jack Nicholson a lesson or two in how to play a comic-book villain: as part psychotic mastermind, part Hollywood dance director -- a Bugsy Siegel who wants to be Busby Berkeley.

The story has Tracy (Beatty) and his long-suffering sweetie, Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), informally adopting a tough street urchin, the Kid (Charlie Korsmo). In their separate, winning ways, Tess and the Kid are conspiring to settle Dick down, while Big Boy and his gang are aiming to blow Tracy up. Also in pursuit of the yellow-raincoated one is Breathless Mahoney (Madonna), a chanteuse at Big Boy's nightclub. In her music career Madonna has remade herself so many times she could be called Star Trek VI. But she has had trouble adapting to film; 20th Century Fox Chairman Barry Diller has called her "a movie star without a movie." Now she has one, and she is a knockout: sexy and wily, a bracing blend of Marilyn Monroe and Jessica Rabbit.

Beatty populates his large canvas with familiar actors whom the audience will have fun trying to spot under the makeup. Why, there's Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles, spitting out an unintelligible confession and addling the police stenographer. There's Paul Sorvino as Lips Manlis, with an Edward G. Robinson scowl frozen on his face. William Forsythe is the literally level-headed Flattop, with a mug like an amalgam of all the Bowery Boys. Dick Tracy finds its equipoise in the tension between the extravagance of these featured players and the realistic playing of the lead roles. The picture moves at will from deliriously farcical to seriously romantic and never loses its balance.

Anxious parents should be pleased by Dick Tracy. It can rev up the underworld violence -- tommy guns drilling vintage autos -- without spilling much blood. Dozens get killed, but nobody gets hurt; the movie is a gangland ballet, as stylized as the Girl Hunt number in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (which Beatty's film also resembles in the climactic plot twist). Though Tracy packs a wallop, it's mostly in long shot.

This is comic-strip art, a flip-book of impudent images that is faithful in detail to Gould's boisterous graphics. The film frame plays with perspective, a champagne glass filling the foreground while a moll in widow's weeds recedes into the distance. The colors are, of course, Sunday-funnies bold; they dominate the screen as Gould's colors bled from the rotogravure. The film also obliges the comic by turning everything generic; it strips the brand names off chili cans, car hoods, newspaper logos, theater marquees, hotel facades -- even U.S. currency, which bears just a huge dollar sign.

But this is 1990, not 1931 (when the strip first appeared in the Detroit Mirror) or 1938 (the more-or-less date for the film). These days everything is ironic, everything is in quotes. This Dick Tracy is as knowing as a Roy Lichtenstein Pop art painting of a comic strip. Still, Beatty manages to honor the conventions of the '30s -- as in the dazzling montages that propel the story through its zippy 105 minutes -- and the imperatives of filmmaking in the '90s. "We were after a generic apple pie," says designer Sylbert. "A small, simple, extraordinarily American statement about a guy who says, 'Stick 'em up.' "

And Beatty's Tracy is the generic detective, ever resourceful and ramrod- righteous, with the stolid, compact expressions and heavy pancake makeup of a B-movie hero. Every other character, including "normal" ones like the wonderfully engaging Tess and the Kid, fills the picture frame with personality. Tracy empties it. He has a less complicated, less interesting inner life. He is his job. Only when Breathless threatens to tilt his world away from duty and toward desire does Tracy begin to resemble the actor playing him. Says Sylbert: "I have always thought that the appeal of Dick Tracy to Warren was the man conflicted between two women. A guy who has a job that is more important than anything in life. He has a girlfriend whom he has never committed himself to. Then he finds a kid, and now he has a family to take care of. And then he meets another woman. Emotional parallels were what he was looking for. That, and the fun of it."

What is fun to Beatty can be preproduction torture to the gifted artisans in his employ. His method is somewhere between Socratic and demonic: he keeps asking questions and butting heads until all inspiration breaks loose. The Dick Tracy dream, with its endless demands for color precision, took some doing.

Vittorio Storaro, the brilliant camera mind behind Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor and Reds, explains how he devised a "dramaturgy of color" for the film's characters: "Tracy, with his yellow raincoat and yellow hat, represents one side of the color spectrum: light, day, sun. Tess is mainly represented by orange, a warm color. Red is the Kid. They face the opposite side -- Big Boy, Breathless, Pruneface -- who belong on the inside of our subconscious, which is blue, indigo, violet. So the story of Dick Tracy and Breathless is really an impossible communion between the sun and moon, day and night, good and evil."

For an actor, evil is spending 3 1/2 hours a day getting your face baked into elaborate makeup. "We didn't want to obliterate the actors," says Doug - Drexler, who with John Caglione Jr. supervised the torture. "What's the use of having Al Pacino in the movie if you don't recognize him? So we split the difference between fantasy and reality." The true difference was between the fantasy villains and the real star. Says Sorvino: "This film is Warren's dream come true. Every other actor is as ugly as sin, and he looks just beautiful."

Cut to the final scene. The detective sits in a diner with Tess and the Kid, trying to give voice to an important domestic decision. For once, Tracy can't get a word out. He stammers and pauses until Tess, the Kid and half the audience want to strangle him. Here, Tracy might be Beatty, the obsessive auteur who worries each of a movie's million details, driving his colleagues bats until he gets it right.

The man with the vision can stop worrying now, because this time he got it marvelously right. Dick Tracy may not be a great movie -- save that superlative for a bigger theme than comic-book crime fighting -- but it is surely great moviemaking. And if there is any justice under the yellow summer moon, it will earn B.O. plenty.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/Los Angeles