How Bridges Fights Boredom

By RICHARD CORLISS

Imagine Clark Gable anchoring one of Frank Capra's psychodrama parables of Americana and you get a hint of Jeff Bridges' performance in Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The roguish, can-do smile looks welded on. No boardroom backstabbing, no political malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating, punching walls and embracing people, scampering down his assembly line in pursuit of the perfect car. Like many a Capra hero, he is sworn to fight the big boys who would crush his dream. And if they do . . . well, heck, he'll just dream on.

Could anyone else play this role with the unforced authority that Bridges, 38, brings to it? Maybe, a decade ago, Jack Nicholson; he was Coppola's choice in 1977, when Tucker was on its first drawing board. But Nicholson, or virtually any other actor, would excavate demons of compulsion and desire. The Bridges version is splendidly driven, maniacally uncomplicated. The performance is also true to the prototype. The actor spent hours studying Tucker home movies; on the set, he wore the man's black pearl cuff links. "He's got it all," says Tucker's son John, 57, "in the mannerisms and the look. My father was very positive, always thinking of what came next. Jeff captures that."

It is a star-making performance in today's busiest leading-man career. The son of TV Icon Lloyd Bridges (Sea Hunt) and brother of Actor Beau (Heart Like a Wheel), Jeff made his screen debut at age four months. The Los Angeles native rolled through University High and a stint in the Coast Guard Reserve, and didn't decide to make acting a career until he had already appeared in six movies. Since then he has brightened 22 more with his surf's-up amiability and his bursts of flummoxed intensity. He has played a Texas teenager (The Last Picture Show) and a down-on-his-heels boxer (Fat City), second-string to a big ape (the 1976 King Kong), a gentle lover and a sick slasher (he was both in Jagged Edge). "I like to mix it up as much as possible," says Bridges. "It lowers my boredom level."

The steadiness of his career is matched at home. Lloyd and Dorothy Bridges celebrate their golden wedding anniversary this October; Jeff and his wife < Susan, a housewife turned associate producer, have been together since 1975. They live with their three daughters in Santa Monica and on a ranch in Montana. "What's so terrific about our marriage is Susan's support of my work," Bridges says. "Her name should be up in the credits along with mine." After Tucker, Susan may be demanding an even bigger screen credit. The movies' most reliable leading man is about to become a white-hot Hollywood star.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles