A Walk in the Clouds.

THE German idiom for abject stupidity, 'dumm wie die Nacht' (stupid as the night), has no American equivalent. Being good, democratic egalitarians, we have no paradigm for stupidity. We can be honest as the day is long, quick as a bunny, bright as a button -- but stupid as . . . what? Let me propose 'stupid as a Hollywood adaptation of a foreign film.' Stupider than that would be hard to find. Take A Walk in the Clouds, a piece of lifeless plastic made from an intensely human Italian film of 1942, which ushered in a new realism in contrast to Fascist cinema.

Alessandro Blasetti's Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds) was written by four gifted men: Cesare Zavattini, the legendary scenarist of, among other things, all of De Sica's masterpieces; Piero Tellini, who later worked with Fellini; Giuseppe Amato, himself an able director and producer; and Aldo de Benedetti, a gifted popular playwright. Blasetti was a fine and varied filmmaker who, in Pierre Leprohon's words, 'survived the Fascist era thanks to his wit and irreverence, without sinking to propaganda films.' This fountainhead film of neorealism is the story of Maria, a pretty young woman impregnated and deserted by her lover, and now returning by bus to the family farm. She is terrified of her father, and tearfully confides in the sympathetic fellow sitting next to her: Paolo, a married traveling salesman. As Georges Sadoul summarizes it, 'She persuades Paolo to go with her . . . and pretend to her father that he is her husband. He does so, hoping to leave in a few hours. But he becomes so lost in his surroundings that he spends the night. Maria's parents discover the truth but, under Paolo's eloquent pleading, forgive her, and Paolo returns to his wife and children.'

Paolo was played by Gino Cervi, one of Italy's outstanding comic and character actors; Maria was Adriana Benetti, one of the most exquisite actresses ever. The music was by Alessandro Cicognini, the Nino Rota of his day. The film progresses touchingly from sweet to bittersweet comedy, as Paolo and Maria are drawn to each other, but the young man must return to his nagging wife and kids. Everyone in the story is working-class and down-to-earth, and the action takes place, with Aristotelian rigor, within 24 hours. As Zavattini noted in his diary from that war-torn and Fascist-muzzled Italy (in Sequences from a Cinematic Life), 'A return to man, to the creature who in himself is 'all spectacle': this would liberate us.'

There is no liberation whatsoever in A Walk in the Clouds, a movie whose mental level is so low that even the title is literalized. The Italian farm has become an enormous Napa Valley vineyard owned by a wealthy transplanted Mexican, and called Las Nubes, the clouds. (Get it?) This owner is Alberto Aragon (poor Giancarlo Giannini), a shouting, bulging-eyed hothead verging on a blithering idiot. He is surrounded by a bevy of flutterily solicitous womenfolk and an army of even more faceless servants. But the real patriarch of Las Nubes is Alberto's father, Don Pedro Aragon -- a name worthy of a Spanish king -- who is none other than Cupid-playing Anthony Quinn, always four steps in an alcoholic cloud and as blusteringly lovable as all getout.

Paolo -- now Paul Sutton -- is Keanu Reeves, or perhaps his computer-activated facsimile, in a performance that cannot lay claim even to virtual reality. This Keanu clone has only two expressions, whereas the real Reeves, as is widely known, has at least three. Maria is the Mexican actress Aitana Sanchez-Guijon, who might be all right with a different script and direction. The script is by Robert Mark Kamen, a known no-talent, and Mark Miller and Harvey Weitzman, a couple of unknown ones. It is of a remarkable ineptitude: no point in it is made in less than triplicate, as if Kamen, Miller, and Weitzman each had to say the same platitude at least once. Thus Paul and Maria meet cute not once but thrice before they team up. Thus Paul, just discharged from the Army in 1945, has recurrent nightmares about the war -- at least three or four lengthy and noisy flashbacks to the most studio-made horrors to give the picture Significance, and totally unnecessary to the story at hand. Paul was also an orphan, which permits some of the nightmares to combine combat and orphanhood with the most tasteless pretentiousness.

Las Nubes is a vinous Cloud Cuckooland in which little actual work is done; it is always awash in bizarre harvest festivals and other grape-oriented saturnalia, staged and shot with the utmost unreality. Thus the estate's nubile girls dance with tucked-up skirts and bare feet as they tread out the grapes, and the camera in overhead shots records a Busby Berkeleyish choreography snaking through a gargantuan vat. Thus mariachis appear at the drop of a sombrero for all kinds of stilted serenading. Thus when a sudden cold snap hits the vineyards, fires are lit, and everybody grabs Icarus-like wings to prance through the vines and fan the heat onto them. And thus when, later on, a flash fire roughly the size of the Dresden firestorm races through Las Nubes, everyone tries to stop it in a colorful way. Paul strives to beat it out with his jacket, and Maria, fresh from bed, emulates him with the sheer jacket of her flimsy negligee -- it's a wonder she doesn't end up like Saint Joan.

The movie was produced by the terminally vulgar Zucker Brothers, and directed by Mexico's Alfonso Arau, whose sickening Like Water for Chocolate had the peons cheering on both sides of the Rio Grande. Representing a debased cinematic branch of magic realism, Arau and his equally tacky cameraman, Emanuel Lubezki, have made their American debut movie even kitschier. We get spidery, spun-sugar images, like a child's crayon drawings, the whole thing bathed in an iridescent mist to make you long for the intervention of a Haze Office. And the dialogue is commensurately saccharine: 'The heart wants what the heart wants'; 'She's like the air to me'; 'What shall we toast to?' 'To life!' These noble sentiments are spiced with condign illiteracies, e.g., 'less questions' and 'the both of you.'

Of course, there is a wrenchingly happy ending after Paul performs the heroic feat of uprooting the hallowed vine from which the Aragon vineyards sprang -- with Wagnerian bravado worthy of Siegmund pulling the sword Nothung out of the tree. From that sole surviving vine Las Nubes will rise again, and Paul, whose exaggeratedly slatternly wife (we must not miss the point) has obtained an annulment, is free to marry Maria. Ugh!