Tabloid Style

By Christopher Porterfield

THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT

Directed by CHARLES JARROTT Screenplay by HERMAN RAUCHER and DANIEL TARADASH

Deep into this long, mawkish film, the script calls for Susan Sarandon to tumble from a rowboat into a stormy sea off Greece. What she plunges into is some of the phoniest-looking surf since a toy ship foundered in the special-effects tank in The Caine Mutiny. It looks all the more phony because we have earlier seen stunning views of the real Aegean. This neatly symbolizes the trouble with The Other Side of Midnight: the backgrounds are convincing, the drama has been churned up at the studio.

Between Sheets. The story, which made Sidney Sheldon's novel a roaring bestseller in paperback, traces the fortunes of a French girl (Marie-France Pisier), who is seduced and abandoned by an American pilot (John Beck) while she is pregnant. She goes on to sleep her way to the top of the French film industry and become the mistress of an Onassis-like Greek magnate (Raf Vallone), all the while nursing a scheme of vengeance against Beck. Sarandon plays the perky Washington public relations girl whom Beck marries before Pisier finally gets him under her thumb and between her sheets.

Midnight blatantly caters to tabloid feminine fantasies. Given a strong narrative surge and one or two vigorously hammy performances, it might have been good, trashy fun--a throwback to the overblown women's melodramas of two or three decades ago. But the film lacks the courage of its own vulgarity.

Pisier, the betrayed wife in last year's Cousin, Cousine, makes a peppery vixen, but ultimately her performance is blunted by two language problems: hers and the script's. Beck's pilot, who ought to be an irresistible heel, could be upstaged by a Parisian lamppost. Pisier's detectives tell her halfway through the film that they have found him, but dramatically, he remains a missing person throughout.

Christopher Porterfield

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