Screen

...Shockingly, when once touring the luscious Italian countryside, Lucy is kissed by young fellow tourist George Emerson (Julian Sands), shortly after he has fallen from a tree while expansively hanging from its limbs and crying out, "Beauty...

...Some shots of her at the piano (she loves Beethoven, but his impassioned sonatas make her "peevish") are extraordinarily fine, especially when director Ivory focuses on her fingers and their peevish energy...

...Indeed, the film could have plausibly ended with Nolte's becoming a stockbroker, just like other sixties' rebels...

...the parts are there, but the soul of either part is missing...

...Beebe (played by someone named Simon Callow...

...Fortunately, as she demonstrated also in Lady Jane, she can act, and uses an array of body language and instantaneous facial transitions between sulks, smiles, frowns, questioning glances, and confusion to convey the kaleidoscope of adolescent sensuality...

...But the bite of social satire is superficial...

...Fortunately, Emerson shows up again, living across the street from the kindly Reverend Mr...

...Miss Carter's other performance now on view, Lady Jane, is being ignored because it dared to he sincere about matters of faith and morals...

...Despite their theoretical and philosophical differences, they have co-authored several books, including a textbook for collegelevel courses in introductory economics...

...ME: Must be New York...

...Indeed, Steven Spielberg already made the point, and with far more imagination, in E.T...

...Nolte is not really one of the homeless...

...Forster's work also derives from the turn of the century, thus providing the Ivory-Merchant-Jhabvala team plenty of opportunity for gorgeous Edwardian sets, sophisticated wit on- the foibles-of-the- upper classes, suppressed but highly charged sexual sighing, tea parties, lawn badminton, and the like...

...The lady explained we had to look at a condo in New Hampshire and could take the luxury cruise anytime within a year...

...Mazursky aimed to synthesize a film classic with contempo,rary social notes...

...Beebe (perhaps a play on "bee" and a link to Miss Honeychurch...

...The first side of the tendency is the familiar business cycle -- fluctuations in production and employment from short booms to temporary recessions...

...It must be from Florida...

...As Midler says of Nolte, with offhand conviction, "He provides some sort of wisdom...

...is forever photographed from a low angle, his vertical face transformed into an even sweeter caricature of parsonly benevolence...

...I said, "Probably New York...

...But one day a homeless tramp, having been deserted by his dog, tries to commit suicide by jumping into one of the many private local swimming pools, only to be saved by its owner...

...Joy...

...One can hardly blame the young ones: poor Emerson not only has a romantic name but a "freethinking" journalist father (Denholm Elliot0, and the country expedition was initiated by risqu6 novelist Eleanor Lavish (Judi Dench), who flamboyantly proclaims the sensuality of Italy with earnest gusto...

...In Down and Out, everyone eventually falls for the tramp, beginning with the house dog and moving on through the teenage daughter home from Sarah Lawrence...

...Forster's classic...

...Eight hours from New York to the Bahamas...

...His heroine is an embodiment of both sweetness and light, the aptly named Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter), who is chaperoned around Florence by her fussy, overprotective cousin Miss Bartlett (Maggie Smith...

...I Screen COMEDY HIGH & LOW 'DOWN & OUT' & 'ROOM WITH A VIEW' D OWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS provides a cool, glib treatment of contemporary social issues...

...As a housewife addicted to swamis and aerobics, she is initially hostile to the tramp, and is most chillingly convincing when cold with Dreyfuss...

...The acting, at least, holds up to Renoir's standards, and, as in all Mazursky films, saves the director from his deficiencies...

...She said she'd be willing to drive to the New Hampshire condo Saturday, but wanted to know where the cruise disembarked...

...In any case, A Room with a View is the sort of film that's perfectly calibrated to feed the upscale, highbrow tastes of the college-educated audience nursed on Upstairs, Downstairs -- as sure a niche in movie-marketing sociology as young male adolescents...

...Charles K. Wilber the American economy...

...Worse, the homeless friends that Nolte encounters once he has entered his new life are never seen as suffering or unhappy...

...THE ZERO-SUM SOLUTION BUILBING A WORLD-CLASS AMERICAN ECONOMY Lester C. Thurow Simon and Schuster, $18.95, 414 pp...

...They seem to have a life of refreshing freedom...

...Despite his attack against over-reliance on market solutions, Thurow's analysis derives from the tradition of mainstream neoclassical/ Keynesian economics...

...One never gets a full sense of his past, but his ready adaptation to Beverly Hills life -- all the way to his expertise at Debussy -- mark him off as a cultured hippie, not someone forced against will or choice into the streets...

...The arch tone is present even in Forster's names, which often scream with shamelessly allegorical hints about character...

...At one point, mocking the everpresent song, "We Are the World," a chorus of tramps sings "we are the bums, we are the homeless...

...With Miss Carter's work, it makes the film exceptional...

...Or perhaps the walk was to suggest the sting a honeybee can use on occasion...

...It is less apt for today's mood, which prefers comedy of manners to historical tragedy, in which one is asked to think too much...

...Such views are daring, since they risk depriving us for a moment of the sight of the whole woman, who is perhaps the most lovely newcomer on film in many years...

...LADY: I don't know sir, it's an eight-hour cruise...

...Thurow's book is a practical "how-to" study on restoring the competitivenes of THE NATURE AND LOGIC OF CAPITALISM Robert L. Heilbroner Norton, $15.95, 225 pp...

...Which is to say, never send a technician to do a storyteller's work...

...Crucial to both Marx and Heilbroner is the argument that capitalist economies are characterized by a dual tendency within the structure of the system...

...I called my wife at work and asked her if we could rearrange Christmas plans to take this luxury, free vacation...

...I could feel the wind leaving my sails...

...Everything was paid for except food and entertainment...

...All this provides, except for a penultimate chase scene, is the comment that the ritzy bourgeois life-style-needs some emotional repair...

...Director Paul Mazursky is an expert on the coasts of America (his last film was Moscow on the Hudson) and here lets his cameras spend much of the film simply gawking at California luxury...

...Except for Lucy's development, much of the material is clichrd...

...Richard Dreyfuss is manically fine as ~lolte's would-be redeemer, playing a reedy-voiced millionaire hanger salesman, bent on do-goodism...

...I made that telephone call, even though this time it wasn't an 800 number...

...Oh, well that's out of the question...

...She also perfects a resolute comic stalk toward the end of the film that subtly, but strongly, transmits the "Beethovenian spirit" that eventually fully reveals itself in Lucy's character...

...The best performance belongs to Bette Midler, who has always had more talent than her pretenses to vulgarity suggest...

...The Law of Inertia was being sorely tested by the Gift Horse in the Mouth Principle...

...In these two books they go their separate ways...

...Truth...

...The authors are both wellknown political economists who have written a number of best-sellers...

...B ETTER COMEDY, and more elegant settings, are found in A Room with a View, a James Ivory film of E.M...

...ME: Where does this cruise leave from...

...Its setting includes the glitzy homes, chi-chi restaurants, and palmlined boulevards of Southern California's most prestigious neighborhood, where somehow the plethora of things never seems to take up the spacious amplitude that surrounds them...

...Ivory has teamed with producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on similar material from Henry James before -- in the mildly amusing comedy of manners The Europeans, and in the less successful The Bostonians...

...These short cycles are an Commonweal: 214...

...The song may deserve ironic treatment, but the poor, at least, deserve more...

...Heilbroner's book is an abstract, theoretical inquiry into the logic of longrun capitalist development that owes more than a little to Marxian theory...

...Miss Carter as Lucy is also beautifully served by the camera, or vice-versa...

...Cecil is quickly tiresome, as are-the lawn games played to show he's a wimp...

...Nevertheless, A Room with a View richly amuses, and one scene at a swimming hole photogenically and hilariously renews some of the old clichrs about Victorianism...

...What is most interesting about the two books is the way Thurow's work can be seen as a specific instance of Heilbroner's theory...

...TOM O'BRIEN Books: FISCAL THESES FOR SALE T HESE two books, written from radically different theoretical perspectives, are at the same time quite complementary...

...As a social comment, despite the new setting, this is old and thin...

...Thanks, All American Sweepstakes, but I can't get there from here...

...ROBERT H. BELE (Robert H. Bell teaches English at Williams College, and airs his humor on National Public Radio...

...Despite these limitations, A Room with a View is the best film of its kind in some time, held together by tight 11 April 1986:2-13editing, strong photography, and the masterful team acting of the English cast which manages to catch the precise right note of subtle high camp...

...The key is synthesize...

...Playing the tramp is Nick Nolte, whose hulk formidably conveys both menace and a sense of power self-betrayed...

...The chase scene is the only point in the second half of the movie that's fully alive, and it's pure Hollywood, both past and present...

...Heilbroner's book demonstrates that Marxist-like (i.e., structural) interpretations and explanations of our current economic dilemma have a surprising degree of coherence and relevance...

...Mazursky's treatment of the homeless is also painfully superficial, even allowing or excusing the comic setting...

...The jokes on Victorian repression are also old hat, although they seem to feed a current nostalgia for the quaint repressions of the time, as if the exhibitionism of our time made such innocence, or such pretense, appealing...

...An added attraction involves, perhaps, the freedom from labor in Edwardian social comedy, providing escapism from contemporary career pressures...

...Once home, however, the "scandal" kept secret, Lucy is engaged to Cecil Vyse (Ruppert Graves), an affected, supercilious culture-vulture, who frowns on sports, is uneasy with a kiss, but seems as if he would like to suffocate his betrothed with superiority...

...The film isn't about the American middle class reaching out to understand something ugly and terrifying, but reaching out to one of its own -- a far cry from Renoir, where Boudu is consistently crude...

...Mazursky knows film history: the ironic tale of generosity rewarded that follows is taken from Jean Renoir's early black comic classic, Boudu Saved from Drowning...

...Of course you're right: it must leave from Key West, you know, down at the bottom of Hell there, where thehighway patrol won't even go, and bandidos attack you on Route One, rob us, rape you, even steal my car...