Star Turns on a Slippery Road

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

RICH AND FAMOUS Directed by George Cukor

Screenplay by Gerald Ayres

There are two movies going on here. In one of them, a sober and artistically respectable novelist named Liz Hamilton (Jacqueline Bisset) fights several decades of writer's block to emerge, finally, as an archetype of contemporary feminist dissatisfactions. In the other film, her best friend and worst rival, Merry Noel Blake (Candice Bergen), is a sort of magnolia-dipped Judith Krantz. She writes money-making trash and leads a life to match her art. She does not end up any happier than her pal, but she certainly has more fun.

It cannot be said that their stories believably mesh or that as a result, Rich and Famous--an adaptation of Old Acquaintance, the 1943 Bette Davis--Miriam Hopkins catfigh--ever fully grips one's emotions. It is a shifty little devil, never quite deciding whether it is trying to say something serious about the nature of fame and riches (and, more important, love and sex in the feminist age) or if it is just out for a good time. Still, when it relaxes and allows its bitchy nature full play, it can be entertaining.

Credit for this must go largely to its stars. Under the permissive encouragement of 82-year-old George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story, Little Women, Born Yesterday), who has been urging female stars to be their best selves for half a century, Bisset is deliberately recessive, Bergen deliberately excessive, and neither has ever been better. The former is a subtle bundle of wariness and vulnerability, and if the screenwriter actually knew how real writers talk, this might have been one of the best portrayals of a working artist ever placed onscreen. There is also a scene in which for no special reason--except to open a closet door and let in a truly strong odor of the misogyny that lightly scents much of the film--Liz succumbs humiliatingly to a gigolo. It does not suit either o: the picture's contrasting modes, and should have been excised.

As for Bergen, her progress from dithery housewife putting fantasies on paper to multimedia celebrity, living out the American fantasy of success, is gorgeously bold. Her bravura is entirely selfconscious, but this once bland beauty has become one of the screen's most arresting comedians. Somehow she manages to stay likable--maybe even lovable--no matter how her character uses and abuses friends and relatives on her way to the top, which is defined here as a good old-fashioned suite in the Waldorf Towers.

It is not entirely sexist to say that Rich and Famous, based on a famous "woman's picture," has not changed its thesis, however oddly it sometimes characterizes its leading ladies. What was implicit in the old film, namely that men are no good, is now painfully explicit. The husband Bergen sheds, once she begins her climb, is basically a nerd. The man Bisset finally decides might be all right--he is, in the current fashion, younger than she is and without a traditionally masculine brain wave--dumps her for her friend's daughter. The conviction of its stars, however carries one past this dreary consistency just as it does the movie's more troublesome inconsistencies. The trick to enjoying the film is not to take anything about it seriously, except the talents of Bisset and Bergen. --By Richard Schickel

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