On Screen

...The scenarist, Diane Thomas, has a definite way with one-liners and I can envision her someday writing an incisive domestic comedy—a less puffy An Unmarried Woman, for example...

...It allows homesick Ira to describe Zo-lo's armed camp as "some spico military compound," and that is exactly the sort of thing an Ira would say...

...The movie doesn't resort to any varoom-varoom cutting...

...The two friends have enlisted in the Marines together and want a fling before they are called up...

...Hopper's best friend is Nicky (Nicholas Cage), the sort of wild and heedless guy any girl's father would show to the door...

...Romancing the Stone gets off to a stunning start and then dips into a more expectable level of entertainment —which is not to say that it is anything other than great fun throughout...

...The remake has been conceived with an artlessness that begins to feel false very quickly...

...Romancing the Stone was directed by Robert Zemeckis—at a pace that is rapid without being frenetic—and produced by Michael Douglas...

...Even when he falls in love with Joan, he seems to be winking at us from behind her back and it is hard to believe he would risk his life for the couple of hundred dollars Joan bribes him with...

...So, too, I like Kathleen Turner's acting best when she hides her glamour under a bush, so to speak...

...The two men wisely permitted the screenwriter to put her materials to the uses she saw fit...

...Racing With the Moon, as American as a Norman Rockwell painting, is smitten with its own air of refinement...

...For all its delicate aspirations, the movie is more bland than gentle...

...The first 15 minutes or so, however, may spoil you for what comes later: I haven't seen such crisp, witty filmmaking in a long time...

...It is intriguing to watch an actress of Turner's natural beauty and sexuality convince us that she is a repressed virginal Author...

...Since Romancing the Stone is unwilling to let a laugh go by, you can never comfortably lapse into feeling frightened...

...Summer of '42 made few claims to art, yet it seemed to me to be accurate within its terms—and it had, at least, the conviction of its vulgarity...

...We watch a distinctly ironic dramatization of the final improbable scenario from her latest creation, The Savage, as a female voiceover narrates the action: "One law of the West," she intones...

...The map points the way to an enormous emerald—the stone of the film's title—and, of course, endangers Joan's life as long as it is in her possession...

...Caddie lives in a fancy white house where her mother is the maid...

...When John Colton hacks the high heels off Joan's pumps with a machete so she will be able to maneuver more quickly through the underbrush, she exclaims horrified-ly only to have him quip: "These were Italian...

...Stone uses the idea of Colombia (actually Mexico) for exotic value only, as "color" in its literal sense...

...Racing With the Moon is essentially a tonier version of 1971's Summer of '42: Shortly before going off to fight "the Japs," a pair of small-town boys look, each according to his need, for Love and Sex...

...She tears a scrawled "Buy Tissue" note off a "Don't Forget" pad next to the kitchen telephone and blows her nose into it...

...He first spotted her dancing Isadora Duncan like on a bluff overlooking the water...

...Perhaps it is fitting that Benjamin, with his cultivated smarmi-ness, fell for the cultivated innocence of the script: Opposites not only attract, they are often adjacent...

...Midway through the role, however, Joan starts acting minxy instead of mousey, playing up to the insouciant Colton with all the assurance of a courtesan...

...Nicky, naturally, isn't too picky...

...The tone is particularly unsettling when it comes to creating a character for the male hero: Michael Douglas stands about three yards back from his role...

...When Nicky needs money to secure his girlfriend's abortion, Hopper agrees to ask Caddie for it...

...Racing With the Moon was directed by that most insinuating of actors, Richard Benjamin...

...it is hard to tell whether he is thick-headed or merely thick-hearted...

...the "older woman" angle has been dropped and although one of the boys is a near-brute, neither of them exhibit the pantingly primal behavior that Jerry Houser did in the earlier movie...

...Luckily for her, she is saved repeatedly in the next hour-and-a-half by the "Savage" himself, John Colton (Michael Douglas), a somewhat noble yet mercenary American drifter played rather too whimsically...

...Our initial glimpse of her—weeping over her typewriter, hair askew, the swelling music on the soundtrack coming out of the earphones that she wears at her desk— establishes an immediate and intriguing contrast between the adventurous-ness of Joan's imagination and the drab-ness of her life...

...As a result, Stone gives off sparks of unconventionally in spite of the limits inherent in the genre and the excessive humor...

...The voice turns out to be Joan's, reading aloud from her manuscript as she pounds it to a rapturous conclusion...

...Sure enough David Denby, from his hatch at the very this- world New York magazine, ostentatiously rapped the movie's knuckles on this account...

...Unlike other more pretentious movies set in the Third World, such as The Year of Living Dangerously and Under Fire, this one does not defer to the cultural platitudes of the liberal vigilantes...

...Joan flies off to Colombia to rescue her sister, Elaine, who is being held hostage on a yacht by an American duo...

...Ira is especially funny, a beset little man without a genuinely criminal bone in his body who wants to get out of " this Third World toilet" and go home...

...What I'd like to know is do they, or did they ever, exist...

...Henry—called "Hopper" by one and all—Nash (Sean Penn) is the sort of contained, polite but not wimpy young man any mother would be happy to have her daughter bring home on a date...

...Hopper's parents, on the other hand, are Nice People...

...The novel done, she wanders through her apartment, sniffling...

...Bastards had brothers...

...While watching the film, I wondered whether some righteous critic would sooner or later try and trip it up for its complete honesty...

...Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) is a successful writer of gothic romances...

...Having decided to celebrate the completion of her Wild West love story, Joan lights a candle on a mound of tuna fish that she then feeds to her cat, Romeo...

...he urges the town prostitute (Carol Kane) upon Hopper...

...The 23-year-old screenwriter, Steven Kloves, has cleaned up Summer's story...

...As it is, the irony of her tone becomes a disadvantage for the film once it swerves on to its true course, which is that of an Adventure Story...

...it slides you in, effortlessly...

...Hopper and Nicky live in a coastal town in Northern California...

...Penn portrays him with greater suggestive-ness than is actually written into the role, enabling us to get a sense of the man Hopper will become without losing our grasp of the boy he still is...

...you recognize what it's trying to do while stifling a yawn...

...Whether reluctantly practicing piano or fighting with a snotty customer at the bowling alley where he works, Penn's slightly brooding presence (he looks startling-ly like a young Robert De Niro here) gives the character of Hopper an edge beyond anything he actually says or does...

...Eventually, a tearful Caddie straightens out Hopper and the two buddies race off in their uniforms—but not before the movie has pulled every wide-eyed trick possible, including the appearance of a tough-talking soldier with an amputated leg...

...Although it would be nice if one could amble along docilely with the contrivances of the plot—including the romance—the movie is too sophisticated, too acute a parody of itself for its own good...

...Racing With the Moon, drenched in an atmosphere of unremitting nostalgia, is a great movie for genteel teeny boppers...

...She is afraid to tell Hopper that she is not rich, assuming her supposed wealth to be part of her appeal...

...A pity...

...Because Nicky is more of a caricature than Hopper, and Cage plays him a shade too literally, one is left to fill in the spaces in his psychology for oneself...

...We are given glimpses, for instance, of his bad family situation—a beloved mother who has died, a father who blackens his son's eye in a drunken rage—but they don't do much except carve him further into his Sal Mineo niche...

...While Nicky gets his blonde and bewildered girlfriend pregnant—it is on this wrenchingly familiar axle that the plot creaks forward—Hopper proceeds to fall in love with Caddie (Elizabeth McGovern), whose lips and cheeks look as if they have been stained red...

...now they're practical...

...Since she wears the same gray cardigan throughout the film and holds down about a thousand jobs—Hopper has to fit in his advances between her job at night as a movie house cashier and her after-school job as a library assistant —it is hard to comprehend why the boys can't figure out that she's hardly the swell they mistake her for...

...He is after the same prize as the cousins—a yellowing map that Joan had been sent by Elaine's husband before he was murdered...

...These thugs, cousins named Ralph (Zack Norman) and Ira (Danny DeVito), are played in amusing New Yorkese...

...But both men are sweethearts compared to Zolo (Manuel Ojeda), a duly menacing gangster backed by a private army...

...From an adroitly observed depiction of a professional woman's life in New York City—Joan also meets her publisher, another woman, in a singles bar where the publisher goes down the line of men sitting at the bar, "wimp, wimp, loser, major loser"—the film turns its attention to bigger things...

...It is most successful at its archest, like one of those fast-talking office comedies from the' 30's and '40's...

...Girls wear saddle-shoes, boys ride the back of train cars, and sunlit glens abound...

...It is the spring of 1942, and oh what a time this is...

...Perhaps subtlety is alien to the native Yankee spirit—the province of directors from an older, de-energized Europe such as Claude Gerotta (Swiss), John Schlesinger (British), the late un-garlanded Jan Kadar (Czech), and that master of the softspoken, Francois Truf-faut (French...

...Virtually static, it drips on to the screen in one underwritten scene after another, slow and sticky-sweet...

...Nicky disapproves: "She's a Gatsby," he says, demonstrating that even restless boys hunker down to F. Scott Fitzgerald...