Dead End on Sesame Street

By RICHARD CORLISS

City is a dirty word now. To most Americans it is the hole the welfare state crawled in to die. It is the grand urban experiment -- O.K., everybody into the melting pot -- gone spectacularly awry. And what's left? The city as techno-sump, the pot of ordure at the end of the rainbow coalition, the dead end of Sesame Street.

Films used to portray New York City as a penthouse aerie, where tuxes and smart chat were mandatory. Moviegoers saw the jagged grandeur of Manhattan's skyline as a cardiogram of American sophistication. Fred Astaire used to symbolize New York; now Al Sharpton does, and the metropolis is just a detention center for too many folks you'd rather not dine with. Rank congestion is the norm; you can't buy your way out of the line of fire. Question: Does anyone still dream of coming to town and becoming a star? Funny answer: Yes, because New York's desperate energy still makes it the most exciting and relevant place to be.

Even Hollywood understands this. The movie bosses -- transplanted Easterners, many of them -- know that Los Angeles is no city, just a desert suburb with lawn sprinklers, a Disneyland where all the rides are bumper cars, where you can smell a man's exhaust fumes but not his breath on the back of your neck. They may figure, too, that old-city competition and corruption are the best metaphor for their mode of doing business. So in between crafting fantasies of L.A. dolce vita, they make occasional fantasies about the towns they left behind.

Sometimes, as with the new romantic comedy Frankie & Johnny, the fantasy is a love song for what's left of New York. Playwright Terrence McNally loves the city as only a recruit from Corpus Christi, Texas, can. Director Garry Marshall, a native New Yorker, loves it as one who has escaped its boundaries but not its nostalgic magnetic pull. So their lovable ex-con Johnny (Al Pacino) may come on to rumpled beauty Frankie (Michelle Pfeiffer) in a workplace seduction straight out of Anita Hill's nightmares, but he's really a sweet guy who can make a cactus bloom. Pacino plays Johnny as if he is New York: pushy, forlorn, indomitable. And Pfeiffer, laying claim to the title of Hollywood's most accomplished stunner, is every skeptic who tried vainly to fight off the city's spell.

Marshall has made some meretricious movies (we'll just mention his last two, Beaches and Pretty Woman), but in the '70s he produced some bright, populist TV comedy (Laverne and Shirley, Mork & Mindy). No surprise, then, that McNally's play, a bedroom debate for two characters, is now a superior sitcom pilot, with lots of brisk banter and a wacky supporting cast. Setting: West Side luncheonette. Owner: a menschy Greek (Hector Elizondo). Waitresses: & sleep-around Cora (Kate Nelligan) and drab, acid Nedda (Jane Morris). Mood: strenuously genial. Take on New York: it's a hard place, but ya gotta go for it.

Just don't go across the river. Writer-director John Sayles calls his shoestring epic City of Hope, but to the movie tourist, his fictional Hudson City, N.J., offers a panorama of venality. The mayor's on the take. The establishment is in his pocket and riffling through everyone else's. The local contractor has to let thugs burn one of his buildings down to keep his lay- about son out of jail. The fading Italo grandees and the blacks on the rise are fighting over scraps, as if they were two generations of a homeless family. It's business as usual for a society at toxic twilight.

What a superb film these stories could make! And what a stately mess Sayles has made of them. The three dozen characters he spills onto the wide screen weave past one another, or arrantly collide, like sodden sparring partners. Talk like them too -- Damon Runyon gonifs gone sourly self-conscious. Thanks to cinematographer Robert Richardson, the picture looks great. But it has a tin ear and a soft head. The complex evil of which a big city is capable deserves better than this reductio ad urbem.

It deserves Homicide, David Mamet's dandy morality play, where bad things not only happen to good people, they are caused by them. Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna -- tops) is an exemplary detective, a daring persuader, who thinks of himself as traditional cops do: in his heart he's Irish. "Let's go see who did what to who," he says, ready to sweet-talk black malefactors into custody. When he's yanked off a big case to handle the murder of an old Jewish woman, he bleats like a kidnapped child. But Bobby is Jewish by blood, and he soon finds out how deep that river runs. Resentment cedes to curiosity, then to admiration, then to a kind of principled betrayal. And as often happens when people follow their root obsessions, everyone loses big.

Mamet, tweaking orthodoxy, teaches a truism of urban survival: You're what you do (cop work) more than what you are (a Jew). As always, the lesson is in the way his characters say it -- whether ornate and muscular, like a Dali tattoo on a sailor's bicep, or as direct as a ransom note. "I'm 'his people' ?" Bobby asks the boss who assigns him to the Jewish case. "I thought I was your people, Lou." That's the kicker to living in the city. Everyone's related; everyone's alone.