Heat Prostration

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE LAST REMAKE OF BEAU GESTE

Directed by MARTY FELDMAN Screenplay by MARTY FELDMAN and CHRIS ALLEN

What will Mel Brooks and his little band of comic brothers do when they run out of old movie genres to parody? In the course of a distinguished career in anarchy, Brooks himself has taken on the backstage musical, the western, the gothic creature feature and silent comedy. His sometime star Gene Wilder made steak-and-kidney pie of the Victorian detective romance in Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother year before last. Now we must somehow come to grips with another Brooks star turning director-writer in'order to send up a formerly beloved movie form in a show called The Last Remake of Beau Geste --which it probably isn't.

Young Frankenstein it also isn't.

Feldman does not yet have Brooks' sure ability to touch and goofily transform each and every cliche base on which his chosen model rests. Around the middle of this picture, energy flags and a sort of desperate silliness begins to set in.

On the other hand, the movie, especially in the early going, is full of good gags -- the very idea that handsome Michael York, in the title role, and the diminutive, popeyed Feldman could be twin brothers being among the best of them. It has good fun as well with a Dickensian orphanage and Trevor Howard, as a hearty English squire, who, upon hearing his newborn baby cry, instantly rushes into the room to give the infant a hiding so that early on he will appreciate the value of stoicism. Feldman has a keen eye for the sillier conventions of movie narrative.

The picture's best sight gag may be leaves blowing off a calendar to symbolize the passage of time. So many of them are caught in the breeze that they knock down and almost bury Spike Milligan, playing an aged retainer trapped in their path.

Movable Scar. At a guess, it is fa miliarity with the social usages of his na tive England and the accumulated non sense of the medium in which he works that generate the affectionate, and effective, contempt animating the first portion of Feldman's film. Even when he and it move further afield, following the disgraced Beau into his North Af rican exile as a legionnaire, there's some amusing game afoot. Peter Ustinov, as a sadistic sergeant, is equipped with a movable scar -- not unlike Feldman's shifty hump in Frankenstein -- and the director has given Ustinov and his horse matching peg legs. But the whole pro ject soon begins to deflate under the hot sun. Maybe the canvas -- all those broad desert expanses and empty skies -- is just too big to fill up with gags, or maybe the nostalgic pull of earlier Beau Gestes remains too strong, even at this late date, to succumb to a jokester's darts. There is a great deal of falling about in the last half of the picture, to no great humorous avail.

Even so, there are enough imaginative gags and such a pleasantly adoles cent spirit about the film as to warrant looking in on it some hot summer's night. It is to be hoped, though, that Feldman -- and everybody else -- will follow Woody Allen's lead, give up parodies of popular cultural forms and turn their attention, in the manner of Annie Hall, to life itself.

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