The Gams and Guns of August

By RICHARD SCHICKEL, RICHARD CORLISS, R.S, R.C

A quartet of comedies and thrillers for dog-day afternoons

THE WOMAN IN RED

Teddy Pierce (Gene Wilder) is a sound husband, father and junior executive who, at a glance, falls prey to an obsession with the leggy Woman in Red (Kelly Le Brock). He is also the leading player in one of this summer's more pungent pleasures: a well-made sex farce of classical proportions. If there is a horse to fall off or an airplane forced to land at the wrong airport, you may be sure Teddy will be aboard.

And if there is a husband who decides to return home ahead of schedule, you may be sure Teddy will encounter him--and scramble out onto a ledge 100 ft. above the ground.

Adapting the 1977 French movie Pardon Man Affaire to his own rubber-faced disciplines, Writer-Director Wilder has fashioned an ironic, worldly, yet sternly moral comedy that gives an energizing twist to every farcical convention and finds the perfect timing for every rubber-faced reaction to calamity. Judith Ivey as a wife whose dimness is perfectly shaded, Gilda Radner as an angry romantic, and Charles Grodin as a secretive goof all follow their leader's spirit. The result is the summer's first comedy for adults. May they respond profitably to so rare a gift. --By Richard Schickel RED DAWN

Ronald Reagan may have been kidding when he announced that he had authorized the nuking of the Soviet Union.

John Milius, though, is deadly serious.

For 15 years the writer-director has been devising scenarios of mastodon machismo (Jeremiah Johnson, Magnum Force, Big Wednesday, Apocalypse Now) in which Real Men--guys so tough you could ice-skate on them--attain a state of Zen purity through self-denial, cunning and random slaughter. But these films were like peace pamphlets compared with his latest crimson vision. In Red Dawn he and Co-Author Kevin Reynolds suggest that the U.S. is susceptible to military takeover by parachuting Communist troops; that the Soviets would establish "reeducation camps" in Colorado and show Ivan the Terrible at the local moviehouse; and that an army of Cubans and Soviets could be stalemated by the woodlore and firepower of half a dozen Foolhardy Boys and a couple of radical feminist teenyboppers.

It gets worse--or better, depending on your tolerance for fascist fantasies. The most sensitive boy in the group (C. Thomas Howell) is compelled to drink the blood of a freshly killed deer; later, asked what it was like to kill a man, he grunts, "It was good."The town high school's star quarterback (Patrick Swayze) turns to tossing grenades soon after his father shouts, "Avenge me! Avenge me!" He refuses, however, to kill a wounded female comrade (Lea Thompson), so she borrows a spare grenade to blow up herself and an enemy soldier. Red Dawn is too crude and incoherent to be taken either seriously by Milius' ideological allies or frivolously by the nuclear-freezers. So how to explain the robust $8.2 million in ticket sales on its first weekend of release, when most Americans were engaged in the sissy activity of watching the Olympics? Perhaps the film's audience loves guerrilla theater, no matter who the bad guys are. You can, after all, key a crowd up by shooting at anything that moves. It doesn't even have to be red. --By Richard Corliss TIGHTROPE

When Hollywood actors play against type--when the hunk plays a drunk, or the leading lady a slattern--they can count on critical raves and Oscar nominations. Clint Eastwood has tried something more dangerous in Tightrope: he has dared to play into type, to bring to the surface certain disturbing aspects of his Dirty Harry character.

Wes Block (Eastwood) is, to be sure, a tough, taciturn, street-wise (or, in this case, brothel-wise) detective, investigating a series of sadistic sex murders in New Orleans. But there are two major differences between Harry and Wes. The former has always been rootless as well as ruthless, whereas Wes' unhappy divorce has left him with the custody of two daughters, to whom he can rarely devote the attention they need. And if Harry is brutally casual about sex, Wes is brutally obsessed with it. Since his divorce he has fallen into the habit of visiting the prostitutes he encounters in his work and paying them to submit to him in bondage.

Because the killer he is stalking is also stalking him, and knows they share this kink, it makes Wes' job fatally risky. But that is minor compared with the risk Eastwood takes in acknowledging the secret pathology of his basic screen character: cruel, dominating, sexist.

Writer-Director Richard Tuggle sets forth Wes' adventures in the skin trade unsensationally, in the manner of a police procedural, and deals with his aberrance with near clinical understatement.

Tuggle also provides Wes with a feminist rape counselor (played with gentle force by Genevieve Bujold) to lead the detective back from his nightmare. Until its weak and unconvincing climax, Tightrope offers more intricacy, suspense and atmospheric color than most of Eastwood's other gumshoe safaris through the urban jungle. More important, it represents a provocative advance in the consciousness, self and social, of Eastwood's one-man genre. --R.S.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

The fantasy life of any film extends only from the movie projector to the screen.

Even children know this. Though they may scream and goggle at the antics of Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker, they understand that their Hollywood heroes are two-di mensional toys to be left in the theater, not lived with. The mod est achievement of Cloak and Dagger is to dramatize this dis tinction. Davey Osborne is a boy who, after the death of his mother, has retreated from home-life into the derring-do world of a video game and its hero, Jack Flack. When Davey gets embroiled with some genuine spies and thugs, no one believes him, least of all his gruff but caring father. Because both Dad and Jack Flack are played by Dabney Coleman, the viewer can easily compare the strengths and limitations of these two fantasies: the film fantasy of a rogue ad venturer vs. the domestic fantasy of an everyday hero like Dad. "Heroes don't just shoot people," Dad tells Davey. "They put supper on the table."

This homey moral is embedded in an anthology of Hitchcock twists: the missing finger from The 39 Steps, the midnight air flight from North by North west, the dangerous secret from The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Tom Holland and Director Richard Franklin (who last year collaborated on the ham-fisted sequel to Hitchcock's Psycho) work these devices neatly into the plot, though the visual style is as flat as a TV movie's.

Henry Thomas, best known as E.T.'s best friend, is strong and touching as the boy who must soon try to make his peace with the real world, and Coleman is just fine as the split-image hero who can lead him into it. -- R.C.