Smiles (And Yuks) Of a Summer Night

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SOAPDISH

We sometimes forget that besides providing merriment for us yokels, show business performs an even more valuable social function. It provides livelihoods and a home for thousands of certifiable lunatics. The savings to our overburdened health-care system are simply incalculable.

Case in point: the cast and staff of The Sun Also Sets, a soap opera of transcendent tackiness. Its reigning diva is Celeste Talbert (Sally Field), so insecure that she must periodically journey to New Jersey shopping malls so she can be fawned over by her fans.

Supporting player Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty) is scheming to supplant Celeste, and has enlisted snaky, horny David Barnes (Robert Downey Jr.), the show's line producer, in a plot to bring back Jeffrey Anderson (Kevin Kline), once the soap's leading man and the star's lover. Reduced to playing Willy Loman at a Florida dinner theater, he is eager for a comeback. This presents a practical problem: Jeffrey was rather definitely written out of the soap when his character was decapitated.

In the Robert Harling-Andrew Bergman script, loopy life contrives to imitate trashy art with marvelous fidelity. There are moments when the plot of The Sun Also Sets seems marginally more realistic -- or anyway more temperate -- than the lives of its performers. For Soapdish is something the movies rarely attempt: a flat-out farce, all slamming doors, thrown objects, misplaced emotions and terrific timing by a wonderful ensemble of actors. Field has an unsuspected gift for comic malevolence, and Kline has a way of putting a soft, almost endearing spin on egomania. No one has ever acted bad acting better than these two, and cool Michael Hoffman is a director who never misses the point or rattles on past it.

Show biz may be full of nut cases, but it has this saving grace: an ability to pull itself up short, take a hard look in the mirror and bust out laughing. When the danger of inside jokiness is avoided, the result can be Tootsie or Noises Off. Or Soapdish.

CITY SLICKERS

Late thirtysomething and first mid-life crisis loom for three urban types lovingly played by Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby. What better cure for their variegated blues than a dude cattle drive? Joining with other frustrated fantasists, they move a herd from point A to point B under the supervision of a hilariously traditional cowman (Jack Palance). The script acknowledges a structural debt to Red River, but its spin is strictly Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel: sharply turned observations on contemporary angst blended with agreeable sentiments by Parenthood's writers. O.K., it would be nice if this film paused to sniff the locoweed, but director Ron Underwood yippee-ki-yos the yuppies quite smartly along a pretty fresh trail.

HUDSON HAWK

By common consent, it's Ishtar for the '90s, an overpriced, overproduced comedy that has critics blustering moral outrage. But if you can see past the thicket of dollar signs surrounding Hudson Hawk, you may discern quite a funny movie -- sort of an Indiana Jones send-up with a hip undertone all its own. Bruce Willis is the title cat burglar, recruited against his will to steal the secrets of alchemy from the various sites where Leonardo da Vinci long ago secreted them. His employers, Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard, are viciously funny caricatures of excessive wealth; his sidekick is a streetwise Danny Aiello. Sacred cattle, ranging from the CIA to the Vatican, are prodded by the Steven E. de Souza-Daniel Waters script, and director Michael Lehmann's action set pieces are intricately developed. In other words, Hudson Hawk is a high-budget movie full of low-budget eccentricity. Any movie in which a heavy is caught reading Dr. Seuss books just can't be all bad.