HOW PLAY GETS `BENT' INTO FILM.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

A movie about the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals had to be made. Too bad it was made into ``Bent.''

Adapted by Martin Sherman from his acclaimed play, the film starts off with rich, decadent atmosphere but gradually, inexorably minimalizes itself down into ... a filmed play. If you think moving rocks back and forth is tiresome - and that's most of the action in the film's second half - imagine how much fun moving rocks with occasional breaks for sadistic torture and spoken-word auto-eroticism is.

Worked on stage. Migraine-inducing on screen.

Clive Owen plays Berlin party guy Max. It's another orgy night at Greta's - a massive, ruined power station turned into a omnisexual drag-rave venue presided over by Mick Jagger, swinging on a trapeze and singing in hose and crimson evening gown - where Max catches the eye of a cute Brownshirt. This makes Max's boyfriend Rudy (Brian Webber) jealous, but the triangulated lovers, like their hundreds of fellow revelers, soon have bigger problems.

It's the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler's blackshirted SS decimated their rivals, the gay-led SA. The morning after, Gestapo thugs come for Max's new conquest, slit his throat, and drive Max and Rudy underground. They're eventually caught and put on a train to Dachau, where Rudy is singled out for death. Though he's tried to help his troublesome partner throughout their flight, Max resolves to deny his orientation and proves it by helping to beat the doomed Rudy.

At the concentration camp, Max opts for a yellow star rather than a pink triangle in the belief that Jewish prisoners are treated better than gay ones. That's when he draws the rock-moving gig, designed (like a good, absurdist stage gimmick should) to drive him mad.

But Max somehow conspires to get Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), a pink triangle guy and proud of it, on his team. They fall in love, of course, though it's forbidden. They make love, though they can't touch. Max learns to care about more than surviving, although Horst's ongoing complaints about Max's failure to come out under the dire circumstances aren't exactly endearing.

In fact, the fine moral distinction between being persecuted for who you are or being persecuted for what you are plays rather blurry on the big screen. The story's point, of course, is that you should be proud and honest either way. It's a vital message in a world where prejudice and hatred still marches in the jackboots of ideology.

Yet it's a point that director Sean Mathias, the stage wiz behind ``Bent's'' original London production and the recent Broadway hit ``Indiscretions,'' makes both overobvious and overbearing here. Meanwhile, his stark staging comes dangerously close to reducing the suffering of millions to one star-crossed couple's shared agony; a few more extras, with their extra personal tragedies, would have added the expanded texture a play-to-screen adaptation inevitably requires (and that a setting as monstrous as a death camp demands).

Performances are uniformly solid and impassioned; Ian McKellan, who was the first to play Max on stage, even has a wonderful cameo as an aging, careful fop. And, of course, anything that calls attention to this often-overlooked aspect of the Holocaust deserves praise for just doing that.

But it also deserves to be done as effectively as possible.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Bent'' (NC-17; violence, nudity, sex, drug use).

The stars: Lothaire Bluteau, Clive Owen, Brian Webber, Ian McKellan and Mick Jagger.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Sean Mathias. Written by Martin Sherman, based on his play. Produced by Michael Solinger and Dixie Linder. Released by MGM.

Running time: One hour, 44 minutes.

Playing: Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino; Laemmle Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Goldwyn Pavilion, West Los Angeles.

Our rating: Two Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Max (Clive Owen, left) forms a powerful bond with fellow Dachau prisoner Horst (Lothaire Bluteau) in ``Bent.''