A TOUCH OF `MAGIC'; HEAVENLY ROMANCES GET KISS OF APPROVAL.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Few things make a more attractive movie couple than romance and magic. They complement each other like popcorn and real butter. After all, we go to the movies to see and feel; supernatural love stories guarantee powerful emotions and visions of things we'll never have in real life.

Unlike a lot of other marriages you can name, this match works on more than just a theoretical basis. Consider how many movies from Hollywood's golden age involving love with (or at least facilitated by) the proper ghost, spellcaster, angel or mythic being still enchant audiences generations after they were made.

Whether comic or dramatic or both, ``Death Takes a Holiday'' (1934), ``Wuthering Heights'' (1939), ``Here Comes Mr. Jordan'' (1941), ``I Married a Witch'' (1942), ``A Guy Named Joe'' (1943), ``Heaven Can Wait'' (1943), ``Blithe Spirit'' (1945), ``Stairway to Heaven'' (1946), ``The Bishop's Wife'' (1947), ``The Ghost and Mrs. Muir'' (1947), ``Portrait of Jennie'' (1948) and ``Bell, Book and Candle'' (1958) have all cast decades-long spells on movie lovers.

Movie makers, too. Rene Clair's antic trick comedy ``I Married a Witch'' provided the template for the popular '60s TV sitcom ``Bewitched.'' Warren Beatty's 1978 dead-jock-returns-to-Earth hit ``Heaven Can Wait'' was a remake of ``Mr. Jordan'' (not, interestingly, of Ernst Lubitsch's 1943 ``Heaven Can Wait,'' a charmer about a ladies' man whose indiscretions don't necessarily doom him to eternal damnation - a theme you'd expect Beatty to appreciate).

Steven Spielberg remade ``Guy Named Joe'' as ``Always'' in 1989; ``Bishop's Wife'' was reborn as the Denzel Washington-Whitney Houston ``The Preacher's Wife'' two years ago; and ``Death Takes a Holiday,'' in which the Grim Reaper assumes human form to find out what makes people tick and discovers that it's love, will be resurrected next month as a Brad Pitt vehicle, ``Meet Joe Black.''

Obviously, fantastic romance bewitches imaginations as well as hearts. But, oddly, this obviously viable subgenre hasn't engaged that most reliable measure of movie love - producers' copycat instinct - since the 1940s. Think of it: One good slasher film instigates a dozen dreadful knockoffs within two years. How many ``Star Wars'' clones assailed us in the '80s? Fifty? One hundred?

Yet every time a supernatural love story does well - and they have a remarkably good track record, with such moderate-to-blockbuster hits as ``Splash,'' ``The Witches of Eastwick,'' ``Ghost,'' ``Forever Young'' and ``Michael'' in the last two decades - it's years before Hollywood attempts to repeat the commercial success.

This year being the exception.

``This genre has the best track record of commerciality that there is,'' says Stephen Simon, a producer of ``What Dreams May Come,'' the Robin Williams afterlife love story that opened to a sturdy $15.8 million last weekend. ``They just don't make enough of them. The industry has a rich tradition of making these films; however, only one or two a year.''

Obviously, some of the genre's success has to do with its relatively few entries. If more fantasy romances were made, we'd inevitably have more bad dates like ``My Stepmother Is an Alien'' and last year's hardly heavenly ``A Life Less Ordinary,'' a pistol-packin' angel amour that even Cameron Diaz's magical charisma couldn't save.

But this year's batch, at least so far, glows with the flush of connection. The angel-meets-surgeon weeper ``City of Angels,'' itself based on the more cerebral German masterpiece ``Wings of Desire,'' was the most popular movie of the spring and has been perched celestially atop the video rental charts for the better part of a month.

``Joe Black,'' meanwhile, is reportedly wowing preview audiences. And on Friday, ``Practical Magic'' materializes, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as two witch sisters who bond around an ancient curse that dooms any men they fall in love with.

An author's insight

Alice Hoffman, on whose novel ``Practical Magic'' is based, sees a very sound psychological basis for the magical romance's ongoing appeal. ``I think that's the reality of the situation,'' she says, only half joking. ``I think that love and the supernatural are intertwined. Everybody's always looking for an explanation, from why do you fall in love with one person instead of another to why does your best friend fall in love with someone who you think is an idiot.

``Movies like this are trying to make sense out of a situation that makes no sense, basically.''

As might be expected, Hollywood types have a rather more elevated view of these films.

``I love the aspect of keeping an open mind to things you can't explain, in terms of love,'' says ``Practical'' star Bullock. ``It's such a hard thing for us to connect because we're so vulnerable, but everyone strives for it. Life is so ... hard, if we don't have something that goes beyond our realm of thinking and logical deduction, you just say, `Why be on this Earth?' ''

This quasi-religious take on a situation as old as human consciousness indicates why a concentration of these films is coming together just before the millennium, a date many people associate with mystical significance and the hope of a new, more loving era. Even TV's ``Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' (based on a movie), initially an action-packed satire of high school horrors, has recently evolved into a Romeo-Juliet-relationship-with-a-bloodsucker thing.

``I think the pendulum has swung away from cynicism,'' says ``Practical'' producer Denise Di Novi. ``I don't know where it comes from exactly, but it's part of human nature to want to believe that love is the most powerful force in the world. There are times when we're too beat up to possibly believe it as a culture, and there are times when we're hanging onto it for dear life. I think that we're in the latter period right now.''

Emotion ... and issues

There is, arguably, more of a consciousness-raising strain running through this year's crop of magical romances than has been the rule in previous incarnations.

Sure, ``Death Takes a Holiday'' and ``Stairway to Heaven,'' in which a downed airman argued before a celestial court that his time on Earth was ended too soon, dealt with metaphysical issues. And Lubitsch's ``Heaven Can Wait,'' though primarily a droll and sophisticated comedy, makes a rare and profound pitch for cosmic forgiveness.

But those films were still primarily about couples connecting across emotional as well as supernatural gulfs, every bit as much as ``Ghost'' and ``Splash'' and ``Mrs. Muir'' and all the rest were.

This year's movies, however, devote a good deal of time to other issues. ``City of Angels'' and ``What Dreams'' are almost spiritual mirror images of one another. One is about a heavenly creature's discovery of earthly joys and pains, while the other focuses on deceased mortals' efforts to make their ways through a fantastic afterlife.

And ``Practical Magic'' is as much about sisterhood empowering than it is about finding Mr. Right.

``One of the reasons why I wrote the book was because I didn't have a sister, and I wanted to experience what that was like,'' Hoffman reveals. ``That kind of kinship, which is almost mystical, when you just know someone needs you or is going to call you on the phone, that's something very rarely seen in films.''

Despite their other concerns, though, the new batch of magical romances doesn't stray far from the tried-and-true fantasy that love makes the world - and any other worlds you'd care to imagine - go 'round.

``When you tell a love story that transcends death, whether or not an individual in the audience believes that love could really, physically expand beyond death, what you're saying as a metaphor is that love is more important than death,'' explains Ron Bass, who scripted ``What Dreams May Come'' from a novel by Richard Matheson - author of the time-travel romance ``Somewhere in Time'' that inspired a passionately adored cult movie. ``It is a more important fact about us that we are capable of love than that we die.''

Back on Earth, Aidan Quinn boils the genre's appeal down to the basics.

``People are starved for a little magic in their lives,'' says the actor, who plays Bullock's love interest in ``Practical Magic.'' ``When I met my wife, corny as it sounds, I think we were meant to meet. I think a lot of people believe that, and it's nice to see that played out in a dramatic context.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) `MAGIC' IN THE AIR

Filmgoers bewitched by supernatural romances

(2) Sandra Bullock, left, and Nicole Kidman star in ``Practical Magic.''

(3) With some supernatural help, Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore's love transcends death in 1990's ``Ghost.''