CINEMA

By RICHARD CORLISS

Clarice Starling, FBI trainee, is one smart cookie, brighter and more acutely intuitive than the men in charge. Yet she treats them all -- bosses, bureaucrats, the occasional serial killer -- with an elaborate respect whose irony shows only at the cutting edges. When an asylum director sneers that Starling has wasted his time, she replies, "Yessir, but then I would've missed the pleasure of your company, sir." That second sir is the smooth stiletto.

Clarice (Jodie Foster) is the hero of The Silence of the Lambs, a pretty sharp new thriller about a woman poised between two multiple murderers: one a sad sadist (Ted Levine) who flays his victims to "harvest their hides," the other an evil genius (Anthony Hopkins) who might be amused to help Starling solve the crimes. With or without him, she is bound to achieve her double mission. She will save a young woman whom a madman has put down a deep hole, and she will prove herself up to doing a man's job.

If you had Hollywood's taste for melodrama, you could see Clarice as an apt emblem of women in American movies. Patronized and endangered. Deemed too small, too soft to show muscle at the box office. Working -- or, more often, not working -- at the whim of the men who make the movies. According to the Screen Actors Guild, only 29.1% of all feature-film roles in 1989 went to women. The average male SAG member earned 60% more than the average female; of actors in their 50s, men earned 150% more. "It looks to me as though females get hired along procreative lines," says Carrie Fisher, actress (Star Wars) and writer (Postcards from the Edge). "After 40, we're kind of cooked."

Meryl Streep, 41, dominates serious film roles as no actress has before. She gets about $4 million a picture, a fraction of the booty commanded by the dozen or so male stars with whom the world is on a first-name basis (Arnold, Sly, Bruce, Jack, Eddie, Tom . . .). And her sisters on the screen make far less in far fewer roles. "If the trend continues," Streep told a SAG women's conference last summer, "by the year 2000 women will represent 13% of all roles. And in 20 years we will have been eliminated from movies entirely. But that's not going to happen, is it, ladies?"

It won't happen. High-budget action movies will always require a bimbo, a girlfriend. And films with an eye toward Oscar will always need Meryl Streep. But the trend of bigger men in bigger movies will continue as long as the international audience pays to see them. In her one blockbuster of the '80s, Out of Africa, Streep took second billing to Robert Redford. And if industry solons grumble when an Eddie Murphy movie makes only $60 million (Harlem Nights) or $80 million (Another 48 HRS), should they cheer when the Streep- Fisher Postcards hits $40 million?

Last year, when Hollywood shot its wad on steroid spectacles, and the $60 million budget became a ho-hum affair, movie-goers provided a surprise punch line to the financial joke the industry had been playing on itself. For the first time in moguls' memory, none of the top three hits were an action adventure with a big male star. Ghost and Pretty Woman were romantic fantasies angled to women; Home Alone, the year's box-office winner, starred a nine- year-old boy. These modest movies were old-fashioned sleepers, whose success suggested a future for women's movies.

It is unlikely, though, that they signal a return to Hollywood's golden age, when Garbo, Davis, Hepburn, Crawford, Dietrich could sell a film and give it class. That was a more genteel time, one that prized wit, heart and, on screen at least, a sexual equality of emotion and intelligence. Movies were about grownups; the toy-boy heroes stayed in comic books. Maybe audiences were more mature too. These days, Ghost and Pretty Woman are the big-hit exception, not the norm; moviegoers tend to measure heroism in terms of pectorals. Somewhere ! between Rambo and bimbo, between roles for children (the only age group in which the movies employ more females than males) and the over-40 wasteland, lies the precarious terrain where fine young actresses can do fine work. Just now that acreage is the property of Julia Roberts, currently starring in Sleeping with the Enemy. Her combination of girl-next-door beauty, canny vulnerability and great good fortune in roles quickly begat hit movies (Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman), which beget a first look at the hottest scripts. Which means that every other young actress gets sloppy seconds. Says Carrie Fisher: "I wouldn't want to look over my shoulder at Julia Roberts." But some of Roberts' peers don't. They look harder for parts, look deeper into their talent, look hopefully to an industry that will find room for them all.

Demi Moore had the best role of 1990, if you multiply intensity of character by box-office impact. As the grieving widow in Ghost, Moore grounded the preposterous plot -- she gets a last chance to make love with her lost love -- and gave it resonance. She has shone in romantic comedy (about last night . . .) and Brat Pack frippery (St. Elmo's Fire). She always seems wired; nerves on edge, talent on display.

Jennifer Jason Leigh shines, but in a different equation: she has been terrific in a dozen films almost nobody has seen. Her only hit was Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and that was a decade ago. Her main roles are as dimwit sluts and babes in bondage. But the daughter of actor Vic Morrow finds subtle shadings in all these parts: the put-upon homeowner in Heart of Midnight, the woozy Delta princess in Sister Sister, the victimized trollop Tra-La-La in Last Exit to Brooklyn and, triumphantly, the pathetic young prostitute in Miami Blues. A ferocious student in the Method tradition, Leigh has crammed for everything but stardom. That too will come, if she gets some of the luck denied to the characters she makes sizzle on-screen.

Annette Bening plays whores too -- Hollywood sometimes thinks that for women prostitution is the world's only profession -- but these doxies are in control. The smile that dimples her face in Valmont and The Grifters signals the sexual predator anticipating a hearty meal. An off-Broadway alumnus, Bening also did brief time in Postcards from the Edge as a romantic rival of Meryl Streep's. Time will tell if she can challenge Streep's pre-eminence. For now she seems a better bet as a threat to Kathleen Turner; she comes on like Turner's slim, sex-kitten kid sister.

Winona Ryder, at 19, has already achieved the status of existentialist's pinup. Her characters -- the death-devoted child in Beetlejuice, the reckless intellectual in Heathers, the Jewish teen obsessed with Catholic saints in Mermaids -- are moody airs in a spook sonata. If the Beat Generation is due for a '90s comeback, Ryder will be its patron saint. But there is precocious craft anchoring the attitude, and a sepulchral glamour that makes her the wanna-watch face of the '90s and beyond.

As for Jodie Foster, people have been watching her for 25 of her 28 years, since she appeared as a child in Coppertone commercials. One roiled soul, John Hinckley, watched her so closely that his obsession drove him to try to assassinate President Reagan. That morbid jolt might have stunted and encaved a frailer spirit than Foster's. But this woman is sturdy, creative, resilient. Clarice Starling isn't all of the actress -- she can lighten up, whereas Clarice is ever clenched -- but The Silence of the Lambs character is a good part of the best part of Foster. "This is a real hero," she says, "using her training, her gifts, her emotions, her fears. Both head and heart. It's not about brawn."

Silence, under Jonathan Demme's direction, is a compelling, judicious scare show that occasionally suffers from excess of heart and a certain softheadedness. It fudges the complex psychosis of Hopkins' Dr. Lecter -- "Hannibal the Cannibal" preens too much and bites too rarely -- and is so little interested in the inner workings of its other murderer, a would-be transsexual, that some critics have accused the film of gay baiting. Clarice, for the most part an exemplary sleuth, nearly stumbles at the climax into the tritest of movie stereotypes, the klutzy victim. Thomas Harris' source novel got all this right, in taut, probing prose. Demme's Silence is a good thriller from a great chiller.

Any movie can deliver tingles by placing a little lady in an old dark house. What beguiled Demme and Foster was the character study of a young woman discovering strength under pressure. Clarice is under scrutiny by everyone, especially the camera. It observes her in relentless close-ups, and Foster, her mouth set in a line as straight as Clarice's priorities, doesn't wilt under the glare. After The Accused, which won her an Academy Award as the good-time girl who confronts her rapists, Foster can be declared current world , champion of the working-class woman standing tall in crisis.

If Foster ever doubted the seductiveness of this role, she need only have considered the competition. "Women's roles are rarely written as human beings," she says. "Instead, they are written as plot adjuncts: sister of, daughter of. The hero has to save someone, so they wrap that someone in cord and put her on a railroad track. But don't kid yourself: there are very few good scripts -- for men, women or dogs. This business has gotten to the point where everyone writes from the producer's notes, or they write for audience marketing." Then this 19-year movie veteran segues to long shot. "It all goes in phases," she says. "I have seen everyone come and go. In the long run, you have to stick with quality. The only thing you can count on is your instinct for quality."

Now she is testing that instinct in her directorial debut with Little Man Tate, the story of a child prodigy (Adam Hann-Byrd), his caring mother (Foster) and a psychiatrist (Dianne Wiest). The film is due in the fall, but this month the new auteur is ecstatic. "I'm jammin'," she says. "It's getting a little hectic, but it's coming along great."

Let's do a quick fade-out on that happy ending; women in movies have so few. What they and Hollywood need is to start at Reel 1 with a happy beginning. Meryl Streep can star. Carrie Fisher will write the script. And Jodie Foster, a child of the movies who has always known the direction she and her films should take, will shout, "Action!" And never mind the sir.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/Los Angeles