Lucifer In Disguise with Diamonds ANGEL HEART

By RICHARD CORLISS

Oedipus Rex: now there was a great mystery plot. The detective is the murderer; his mother is the femme fatale; his father is the victim. And Faust: a good chase tale. Guy sells his soul to the devil, then chases after secrets of life and death. Today, though, the mysteries are more mundane, the deals more damning. Like why in hell was Angel Heart -- a detective story about secret loves and profane pacts -- ever considered worthy of an X by the movie industry's rating board?

The board's hackles were raised by a nightmare sequence in which Mickey Rourke, as a gumshoe named Harry Angel, and Lisa Bonet, as a mambo princess with a murky pedigree, engage in some mad pash while blood leaks from the ceiling of his New Orleans hotel room. The two performers might seem unlikely company -- the star of 9 1/2 Weeks and the prima donna of the Cosby kids -- but their exertions were no more extreme than the acrobatics in many an R- | rated teen farce, and the carnal violence was a lot less toxic than the damage Freddy or Jason or any other horror-show serial killer wreaks in an eyewink. Further, the intent of Director Alan Parker was serious and free of titillation. The board's game was a sick joke at the expense of ambitious filmmakers, and it was resolved last week with the snipping of ten seconds of feral footsie. In the movie business, almost everyone has to make deals with the devil.

Harry Angel is investigating one such compact. Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro), a dapper gent with long fingernails that could rip your heart out, has hired him to find Johnny Favorite, who hit it big as a crooner before the war, then disappeared, body and soul, welshing on a commitment to Cyphre. The people who knew Favorite -- a junkie physician (Michael Higgins), a blues guitarist (Brownie McGhee), a society girlfriend (Charlotte Rampling) and her father (Stocker Fontelieu) -- share two annoying habits: they won't tell all they know, and they keep turning up dead, in circumstances that implicate Angel. Let's see now. Who was God's favorite angel? Wasn't it . . . Lou Cyphre?

Labyrinthine tales like this (based on William Hjortsberg's 1978 novel Falling Angel) rarely make it to the screen, for a simple reason: the significant action has occurred a dozen years before, so the entire plot must be exposition pocked with explosions of violence. Parker, an itchy director (Midnight Express, Fame) with a bang-on sense of textbook timing, occasionally tries to pump up his flashback talkathon with chase scenes that distract from the film's mood. But he has located a chic, grim style for the story. Garish, ominous colors flash vividly across his monochrome palette. The streets keep sweating rain, and clouds loom over the bayou like threats written in cigar smoke. Images of mirrors, feet, overhead fans, unknown soldiers and shrouded figures punctuate Harry's waking dreams, inching him closer to the terrible truth.

With Rourke shambling smartly toward his doom, Bonet radiating elfin sensuality, and De Niro looking natty with his fancy jewelry and sulfurous smile, Angel Heart holds the mind and eye throughout. To be sure, even the most attentive viewer may still have one small question at the end: Whodunit? (Frankly, we think it was a satanic frame-up.) It is a question that could provoke more profitable debate than the needless fury raised by the rating board's attempted Heart transplant.