Crimebuster Compromising Positions

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

By her refusals do you know that Judith Singer (Susan Sarandon) is not only a likable woman but a good one. She is very nearly the only lady in her Long Island suburb who has resisted the oleaginous charms of Dr. Bruce Fleckstein, a periodontist whose hands tend to roam from his drill and who has a taste for taking pictures of his female patients that reveal more than the condition of their root canals. Judith even has the sweetly articulated moral fiber to resist the more attractive proposals of the nice police detective (Raul Julia) who is investigating Dr. Bruce's entirely justifiable homicide.

A feminist buried under mounds of laundry, Judith hopes solving the murder will put a little intellectual excitement back into her life and perhaps help her regain her old job as a newspaper reporter. She is occasionally scared by her own boldness, always quick-witted in stating her emotional needs and her findings as a self- appointed crimebuster. Indeed, it is a measure of Compromising Positions' intelligence that the big speech on malefemale relations falls to Edward Herrmann, playing her husband. Angrily but without self-pity, he makes the case of the drudge-aholic whose toil supports his spouse's self-realization but whose reward is often a diagnosis that he has an intimacy problem. Like such other New York stage stalwarts as Mary Beth Hurt and Judith Ivey, he is well cast and directed by Frank Perry. They are figures who seem really to live in this landscape. Susan Isaacs' adaptation of her own novel is a socially observant example of an almost vanished genre, the comedy- mystery with blessedly discreet romantic overtones. R.S.