Midnight Run.

THERE is the well-known genre of the buddy movie, but there exists also the less-chronicled genre of what might be called the anti-buddy movie, in which persons who hate each other's guts are thrown-often even chained or handcuffed-together and forced to make the best of it. The Thirty-Mne Steps, The Defiant Ones, The African Queen are typical, though unequal, examples. So is one of my favorite films of all time, the far too little known H federale by Luciano Salce. Midnight Run is a pretty fair example of the genre-at least in the beginning.

Martin Brest, the director, is best known for what I consider a truly contemptible film, Beverly Hills Cop; here, however, in George Gallo's script, Brest has an initially appealing idea. Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro), an excop turned bounty hunter for a sleazy L.A. bailbondsman, is bringing back from New York Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin), a Mafia accountant by accident, whose boss was the very man who got Jack fired ftom the Chicago police force. Jonathan, called Jon, embezzled $15 million and gave most of it to charity; apprehended, he jumped bail and hid out in New York. When Jack tries to put him on the red-eye to L.A., Jon fakes a hysterical fit and the two are taken off the plane to continue their journey by train, bus, car, even as stowaways on a freight train. They are chased by the mob, the FBI, and another bounty hunter as double-crosses and other peripeties proliferate.

Jack is a taut, tough, impatient man who wants to make enough money to start a coffee shop; Jonathan is a basically respectable, happily married burgher on the surface, but reasonably crazy underneath. He assumes (rightly) that his former boss will have him killed once he gets to prison, and tries to befriend Jack, about whose tobacco and cholesterol ingestion he is genuinely concerned, and whom he professionally warns about the risks of the restaurant business. Jack does one slow burn as Jon gets more and more weirdly solicitous. This is fun until the movie turns into ever more relentless car chases and helicopter shootouts, whereupon most of the charm gets lost.

Nevertheless, tbe De Niro/Grodin relationship holds the interest even in the later, bokier sections of the movie. De Niro has a marvelous way of scrunching up his face into a smile of agony, as well as of exploding on the installment plan, and he somehow manages to play his part to the hilt even while faintly suggesting that he is kidding it. He oozes canniness and determination along with a lot of repressed decency, as his compact, streamlined frame races ahead on unleaded nervous energy.

Contrariwise, Grodin, though bigger, is also much softer (the actor seems to have put on considerable weight), and has a woebegone, slack-jawed look about him that can readity be heightened into noisy hysteria. Yet Grodin underplays the part, making one or two expressions and intonations leitmotifs, then subjecting them to highly suggestive variations. He is especially impressive when communicating with a bus-ticket seller by means of tiny head movements and eloquent facial play, meant to give De Niro surreptitiously the lie.

There they are, then, this not-sowild boar and this not altogether cuddly teddy bear, always figuratively and often literally handcuffed together, making funny conversation or dropping even funnier throwaway lines. Suddenly the subtext dawns on us: De Niro is the goy and Grodin the Jew; they must make a go of it if the social fabric is not to rip. An interesting idea, but underdeveloped.

BUDDYHOOD is in full swing again in John McTiernan's Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis plays an off-duty New York City policeman, John McClane, who comes to L.A. to spend the Christmas holidays with his semiestranged wife and two small children. The wife (Bonnie Bedelia) is a top executive with Nakatomi, a Japanese supercorporation, and already we wonder how such a high-positioned wife in Los Angeles could be married to a lowly cop in New York. It seems John lost her by being too macho and refusing to relocate to L.A. after she got a smashing job there. But expecting logic from this movie will get us nowhere.

Anyway, a gang of international terrorists led by a German, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, of the Royal Shakespeare Company), takes over the notquite-finished skyscraper in Century City where the only life is in the Nakatomi offices, with a Christmas party in progress; John dropped in on it straight from the airport, He manages to vanish before the terrorists notice him, and proceeds, by every conceivable strategy, to summon help, harass and confound the criminals, and occasionally pick off one or another of them in ferocious shootouts or fistfights. It is all preposterous, but mostly fun, and sometimes even exciting.

Eventually one policeman shows up -the laid-back, rotund, black Sergeant AI Powell (Reginald Veljohnson); when he finally cottons on to what is happening he becomes John's only true ally over a CB radio whereby they communicate. Meanwhile tbe Los Angeles police, commanded by a deputy chief (we must not badmouth the chief), make, in both senses of the word, bloody asses of themselves, only to be surpassed by the FBI, which takes over and provides cynical indifference to the lives of the terroris' hostages in addition to mere stupidity, in which it is not lacking either.

Meanwhile John keeps bearding the terrorists, who are really former terrorists turned murderous thieves (we mustn't offend true German terrorists, who may have an ideal or two), now after $650 million in bearer bonds that are residing in Nakatomi's sevenfold-protected safe. They have already killed the Japanese head man, which puts in charge Mrs. McClane, except that she has reverted to her maiden name (must give the feminists something to connect with); she proves worthy of her brave boss (mustn't offend the Japanese market). Bruce Willis runs around scantily clad-the attack caught him in the bathroomand several terrorists are good-looking hunks, notably the former Russian ballet dancer Alexander Godunov, McClane's most implacable and sexiest enemy (must give the nonfeminist women and homosexuals in the audience something to thrill to).

The main emotional strand in the movie, aside from one sentimental speech about his wife by McClane to Powell over the radio, is the buddyhood between whites and blacks. True, there is one black among the gangsters, but he is their supreme technocrat, a genius at breaking computer codes and a cool wit to boot (Clarence Gilyard Jr.plays him well); but black, too, is McClane's jolly, young limousine driver, who seems nosy and shiftless at first, then ends up smartly ramming the getaway car with his limo and punching out the driver. As for AI Powell, another black to starts out seemingly slow, he ends up saving the lives of Mr. and Mrs. McClane (yes, she symbolically reverts to ber married name) in a way you can pretty much guess the moment he confesses, early on, to have become incapable of shooting at anyone since he once accidentally killed a teenager.

When John and his wife emerge from that blazing inferno-though the skyscraper seems remarkably unscathed (but, then, we must not harm, only publicize, what is actually the producingcompany's new headquarters, and not more expendalble than the star, who was paid a million)-his embrace with Al, whom he finally meets face to fave, is interacial bortherhood, with with one cannot qurrelexcept for the calculated way it is presented in this altogether cynical movie.

Die Hard does have some very interesting performances, such as Alan Rickman's Guber. Many of the best hated Nazis in American movies about World War II were palyed by Britishers (a phenomenon that could use some analyzing), and Rickman sneeringly carries

on the tradition as Bruber. He is helped by his ability to contort his mouth in nmore ways than the average dentist is likely to have encountered, and by displaying the sinisterly bad teeth inhabiting so many British mouths.

The film, effectively directed and well cast, contains only one poor performance, that of Hart bochner, who greasily overacts a cowardly, coke-snorting, scheming colleague of Mrs McClane's. We also learn from Doie Hard that younger terrorist tend to wear their hair long, that terorist leadersand top Japanese executives have the same Savile Row tailors, and that one New York cop is worth about hte whole Los Angeles department-this last, expecially comforting news for us New Yorkers.

I mention the totally undistinguished Pascali's Island only because this English film is the first, to my knowledge, to perpetrate the ghastly solecism "I have often thought of you and I," uttered here by yet another leading acotr of the RSC , Ben Kingley.