On the Street

By J.C.

THE HAPPY HOOKER

Directed by NICHOLAS SGARRO

Screenplay by WILLIAM RICHERT

There is not a great deal to say about this pea-brained adaptation of a best-selling paperback by Xaviera Hollander, once secretary of the year in The Netherlands and, more recently, New York City's most prominent madam. In the old days, the book might have been called "spicy," delving as it does into the intimate details of the author's more elaborate entanglements. The movie--rated a no-risk R--is short on specifics of any sort and stringently unimaginative. If anything, it seems to be trying comedy, although not even that is certain.

Coy Puns. The casting of Lynn Redgrave as the titular heroine is one clue to this light direction. Redgrave is long of leg and spunky, and does an amusing accent, sort of a delicatessen Dutch. She also narrates the film and dispenses some of the screenwriters' coy puns. One reminiscence begins with "Long before they could call me madam . . ." Other putatively funny episodes involve a striptease performed in the board room of a large corporation before a chairman dressed in tie, pinstripes and undershorts and a wealthy fetishist who enjoys an exotic combination of leather, a barking dog and a telephone.

The Happy Hooker was made on location in Manhattan and seems to use New York's most bleakly excessive character actors. Many of them are familiar from the Broadway stage and, indeed, do their bits as if filling in the time between the matinee and the evening performance. Not the most professional attitude, perhaps, but in this case worthy of a little sympathy.

--J.C.

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