The Return of Comedy as King

By RICHARD CORLISS

If Hollywood moguls had a New Year's wish, it would be that every week was Christmas. This season, box-office cash registers have been ringing like sleigh bells, to push the 1987 theatrical take toward a record $4.2 billion, up 11% from 1986. Even more encouraging for industry executives was the return of a species that had looked endangered throughout the year: the comedy.

Flashback. From New Year's Day until Thanksgiving, not a single old- fashioned feel-good comedy was to be found among the ten top-grossing films released in 1987. Audiences seemed to take more pleasure in the spectacle of people and things that went blam! in the night: Fatal Attraction, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Predator. Oh, there were cop comedies (Beverly Hills Cop II, the No. 1 hit, and Stakeout and Dragnet) and a devil comedy (The Witches of Eastwick) and an oddly amoral Michael J. Fox comedy (The Secret of My Success -- sort of Wall Street for the Smurf set). But all these films traded in physical or emotional degradation; they left an acrid aftertaste. One began to wonder how long Hollywood could continue to cash in on its own and the nation's cynicism.

Answer: until 3 Men and a Baby began gathering its December momentum. Here was an amiable, air-headed fable about baby love. Its male leads were two TV stars, Tom Selleck and Ted Danson, who had never seemed big enough for the big screen and a third, Steve Guttenberg, best known for fronting the Police Academy farces. The story -- of three roguish bachelors forced to care for an abandoned infant -- cradled few surprises and, for great barren stretches, got lost in a draggy drug plot. The film's direction had all the comic subtlety one would expect from that Merlin of mirth, Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy. Maybe the producers thought he was Doctor Spock.

No matter: the movie had a high awww-Q. Audiences rushed to indulge its inanities and curl into its warmth, to google like proud relatives when the infant appears at a construction site in a pink hard hat, or when Selleck tries, too manfully, to diaper his fidgety bundle for the first time. There is nothing sinister about the success of a bad picture that makes people feel good. Imagine: people want to enjoy themselves at the movies. Sometimes they can convince themselves they had a fine time even at an inferior show. It guarantees they get their money's worth.

And a little child shall lead them. Hollywood got happier as viewers adopted the movie and word of mouth kept Baby booming. Even at Christmas, after a month's exposure, 3 Men easily led the box-office pack. By early this month it will have clambered up the Top Ten list to become 1987's fourth biggest hit. In its wake have come half a dozen newer comedies, most of which are Christmas carols in disguise. It is as if the industry realized that at holiday time comedies need to begin as Scrooge and end up as Santa. They must pretend to a cleansing meanness of spirit they cannot honorably sustain. In movie terms, they wear the mask of the Me-First '80s only to reveal the crinkly face of '30s romantic farce. Two of them boast the most ingratiating doll faces in today's Hollywood: the cartoon countenance of Goldie Hawn, in Overboard, and the Garbage Pail Kid visage of Danny DeVito, in Throw Momma from the Train.

Idling on her stretch yacht, sporting a taut hairdo like Attila the Bun, Joanna Stayton (Hawn) dispenses insults with the ease of a born screwball ^ heiress. Joanna is way less mature than 3 Men's six-month-old star; her fatuous husband (Edward Herrmann) calls her "Diddums," and her ditsy mom (Katherine Helmond) advises her, "If you have a baby, you won't be the baby anymore." Joanna's big worry is that Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell), the uncouth guy she has hired to do some carpentry, will carp right back. Which he does. Well, throw him overboard!

Movie tradition and Leslie Dixon's clever script ordain that Joanna follow Dean into the sea, lose her memory, wind up humiliated in his hovel with his four grungy sons and, presto!, fall in love with her vengeful bohunk. The plot structure is a sophisticated torture device for social adaptability, and Garry Marshall's direction carries the sadism too far, but the picture is funny when it strips Joanna of everything but her rich-bitch wit: "I don't know who I am, but I'm sure I have a lawyer." Because the two stars give good humor, Overboard is a small ornament to the season. Sometimes it shines.

Throw Momma from the Train: But will they? Will Owen (DeVito) and his captive pal Larry (Billy Crystal) really bump off Owen's towering troglodyte mom? Naaah! Though Screenwriter Stu Silver filched the plot from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Throw Momma is a bonding-buddy romance, a sweet bedtime story disguised as macabre farce. The only surprise the movie offers is DeVito's inventive direction; his busy camera is almost always in the right place. As Momma, Anne Ramsey has the face of an abused duffel bag and the rottenest spirit west of Caligula. Turns out, of course, she's nice too; lawn gnomes come in all sizes this movie season. Throw Momma from the train a little holiday kiss.

Then sic big bad Momma on Bill Cosby. TV's favorite obstetrician deserves the worst for piddling away America's goodwill on a $20 million bomb called Leonard Part 6. Cosby plays a retired secret agent, fabulously rich and anomic, who must defeat a conspiracy to unleash the animal kingdom in a kamikaze raid on humankind. Director Paul Weiland exerts much effort in achieving such comic effects as a car-wrecking ring of frogs, a rainbow trout with the soul of a pit bull, a belching ostrich, and a lobster that goes for Leonard's crotch. There are also loving, intrusive displays of a Coke bottle, a commercial that would make Cosby's patrons happy if anyone were going to see it. Cosby produced and co-wrote Leonard, and now he has disowned it. That is his first smart move in this whole sorry caper.

In his concert film Raw, Eddie Murphy does a mean impression of Cosby -- sputtering, paternal, obsessively self-censoring -- and it is funnier than anything the real Cosby manages in Leonard Part 6. It is almost funnier than anything else in Raw. As Cosby is to television, Murphy is to movies: the undisputed popular champ. Cos plays the good father, Eddie the adorable, rank- mouthed boy. And Murphy is more: a gifted mimic with explosive sexual charisma. That's what gives the Beverly Hills Cop films their sleek, self- satisfied zing. But 90 minutes of Murphy, prowling the stage in duds of black and blue (just like his comedy), can wear thin when the text of his sermon is the cupidity of women and the stupidity of men. Richard Pryor, Murphy's stand- up role model, earned his right to obscene rage. In the younger, middle- class comic, anger seems a petulant pose. Like any sham evangelist, he can entertain without convincing. And even in this ragged turn, a viewer can do with Murphy's comedy what Murphy complains most women want to do with his immense fortune: take half.

For a sweet seasonal gift, take all of Moonstruck, the most beguiling romantic comedy this side of Broadcast News. Strains of Dean Martin's That's Amore -- "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie" -- fill the Brooklyn night. A full moon illuminates Loretta Castorini (Cher) and all her family. Everybody falls in love. Her father (Vincent Gardenia), who claims he can't fall asleep because "it's too much like death," slinks out for a bit of tart on the side. Loretta's mother (Olympia Dukakis) dines furtively with a professor (John Mahoney) who keeps striking out with his prettiest students. "I'm too old for you," Mother tells the prof, to which he gives the eternal male response: "I'm too old for me. That's my predicament." And Loretta, just engaged to an agreeable loser (Danny Aiello), is seduced by her fiance's one-handed brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage). He has no illusions about love. "We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die," he observes with hangdog intensity. "Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!" Who could refuse?

In outline, Moonstruck might seem an offer anyone could refuse. The Italo- American characters and mannerisms are familiar from several Martin Scorsese movies and a hundred lowbrow sitcoms. But Screenwriter John Patrick Shanley has an ear that confounds cliche and a plot that is both devious and inevitable. As photographed by David Watkin (Out of Africa), Moonstruck is as pristine and fanciful as Lady and the Tramp. As directed by Norman Jewison (A Soldier's Story), it moves with the crack of sexual friction. Jewison has also put together a terrific ensemble of actors. Cher, rag-dolled up in heavy Sicilian eyebrows, relaxes into her most engaging movie role. And Cage has a great time segueing from Stanley Kowalski, absentmindedly scratching himself with his prosthesis, into a Brooklyn Barrymore. Moonstruck proves there is life in movie comedy yet. Enough, at least, to survive till next Christmas.