And Now, a Wham-Bam Superstar

By KURT ANDERSEN

The new Burt Reynolds shoot-'em-up, Stick, is a commercial and cinematic clunker. Charles Bronson has not had a big U.S. box-office success in years. Steve McQueen is long dead. Meanwhile Code of Silence, Chuck Norris' third movie in eight months, sold more tickets in its opening week than any other movie in the country. In his strictly wham-bam B-movie genre, Norris, a former karate champion, has become the undisputed superstar. No longer a cult figure but still well this side of A-list famous, Norris and some of his Hollywood partisans figure his celebrity is analogous to that of Clint ( Eastwood. "He is the next McQueen and Eastwood," says John Bennett, who produced Forced Vengeance (1982), "because there's nobody else assuming their mantles."

Norris says he feels that acting ability is less important than "screen presence." Maybe so, but he takes artlessness to an extreme. Gary Cooper seems mannered and fidgety by comparison. As a loner cop in Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) or as a loner cop in Code of Silence, Norris comes across as an expressionless blank, conveying nothing but tenacity and absolute cool. His body is impeccable, but the voice is flat and high pitched. He has instructed writers to give him as few lines as possible, yet he rushes the elemental dialogue that remains. Words slur: "didn't" becomes "dint." If he is the first really bankable blond leading man since Robert Redford, he is also the most successful really terrible actor since Audie Murphy.

But blandness has its advantages. Norris is seldom off-putting. In Code of Silence, an exceptionally deft movie of its kind, Director Andy Davis has provided a perfect schematic vehicle: a righteous, nice-looking automaton is caught in a lot of crossfire. There are rotten Italian gangsters, rotten Colombian gangsters and rotten fellow police officers. As Sergeant Eddie Cusak, Norris refuses to go along with the cover-up of a killing by a scruffy underling (Ralph Foody) and tries to mediate a gang war. He may be good, but he has no family and no girlfriend, and gets uncomfortable the one time he is obliged to hug a woman. He displays an unfailing courage and shoots straight, period. But this is a new Norris: he creams bad guys with roundhouse bursts of martial arts just twice. In Forced Vengeance there were 17 karate sequences.

After eleven sloppy movies, the jaunty minimalism of the twelfth is getting good notices. "The critical success is great," says Norris, "but the main thing is still the public. The critics can rave, but if the people don't come to see your movie, what good is it?" Christopher Pearce, head of production for Cannon Films, the company that last year hired Norris to make six movies, is pleased by the lack of artistic ambition. "That is a great advantage," Pearce says, "because he's not out there wanting to do Shakespeare." Rather than Richard II, the next Norris movie will be Invasion U.S.A. now filming in Fort Pierce, Fla. In it, the country is invaded by seaborne terrorists.

Norris is not magnetic; he does not even have the freak appeal of Mr. T. His / popularity, all in all, is curious. The hard-core audience does appreciate his athletic bona fides. Also, says Code of Silence Producer Raymond Wagner, "he's an enormously nice human being, and that can be sensed on the screen." Norris indeed seems like a nice guy: married for 26 years, doting father of two loving sons, loyal to his friends. "The character I want to build," he said last week during the filming of Invasion U.S.A., "is a man who believes in the right things, who fights against drugs and evil." Fine. But the question remains: Why is Chuck Norris a movie star?

With reporting by Cheryl Crooks/Los Angeles and Sandra Hinson/Fort Pierce