Frankie and Johnny.

TERRENCE McNALLY's play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune was a slightly specious but not unlikable piece about the awkward, fumbling mating of a waitress and a short-order cook. For the movies, McNally had to open up his play and deintellectualize it; not that it was very highbrow to begin with. Most of the opera and music stuff had to go; "Clair de lune," with which Johnny woos Frankie, was allowed to survive, albeit not in the title. It is amazing that MeNally was even permitted to be his own adapter, an assignment of which he acquitted himself with skill, though it must have hurt to cut some of his favorite things. On the other hand, he was able to write in a homosexual neighbor of Frankie's and his boyfriend, stuff that he is equally fond of.

With two superstars, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, in the leads, a slick ex-television director at the helm, some pretty fancy production values, and all sorts of extra characters and plot elements thrown in, the Clair-deluneless Frankie & Johnny (that trendy ampersand again!) is a very different, but still surprisingly palatable, kettle of fish. We have known McNally as the writer of clever, even bitchy comedies (I'm not complaining; they were funny even when, on occasion, I was the butt of their jokes), but we have not known him as the canny updater of the vintage screwball comedies. If McNally is allowed to continue in this mode he is much more sophisticated than those writers, some uncredited, who concocted Garry Marshall's previous directorial hit, Pretty Woman-we all stand to be enriched.

Of course, there is some cheating here on Marshall's part. Johnny ought to be played by a younger and less well-known actor than Pacino. There is something a bit topheavy about the star's presence and performance. Johnny, now with a prison past, broods a bit too much; when, with supposed lightheartedness but actual dogged determination, he showers Frankie with amorous declarations and advances, it begins to look more like harassment than whimsy and young love. The gaze with which Pacino fixes the object of his desire is perilously close to that with which a Rod Steiger or Anthony Hopkins mesmerizes his intended victim; and the growls with which Pacino registers passion are not that far removed from those with which the cavemen in The Quest for Fire approached their females from the rear.

Michelle Pfeiffer is one of the prettiest actresses around, and casting her as a hashhouse waitress in New York, where she might readily have come to make it on the stage (as, in real life, she did), is a rather extreme example of cinematic license. Yet so serious an actress has Miss Pfeiffer become that she allows her clothes, her hairdo, her makeup everything about her-to be toned down to ordinariness. That alone, however, wouldn't do it if her performance did not corroborate Frankie's unremarkableness. The script provides her with two previous unhappy involvements to justify her intense aloofness and sexual reluctance, but even that somewhat tired ploy wouldn't help much if Miss Pfeiffer's acting did not display hitherto only hinted-at depths.

There is sturdy supporting work from Hector Elizondo, Nathan Lane, and, above all, Kate Nelligan, who here abandons the genteel roles she has been known for and plays Coraa trashy, randy fellow waitress of Frankie's-with a great deal of gusto and suasion. As the farcical sadsack among the waitresses, Jane Morris lays it on a bit too thick, but no doubt that is what the director wanted. Note the triteness with which he directs the sequences of love in bloom, where he shoots Frankie and Johnny's feet in closeup, with New York's pigeons weaving between them-or is it the feet weaving between the pigeons? Either way, it's cloying. But the proof of the pudding is that you really root for these two to make it together-almost as much as you would root for a Mirabell and Millamant in a good stage production of The Way of the World. And the way of our world it is, give or take an occasional phony touch. Take the cute way, when Frankie finally consents, in which the lovers brush and brush their teeth as Frankie negotiates a tough and wary compact-again rather like Millamant. The brushing goes on and on; attacked this robustiously, gums might succumb as easily to oral hygiene as to gross neglect.