ONCE AGAIN, THE OLD CRISSCROSS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

A SWEET, AUTUMNAL melancholy makes ``Man on the Train'' a minor but lovely hybrid: a bank heist movie that's really the tale of an unlikely friendship.

It's the latest in French director Patrice Leconte's unrecognizable Hitchcock homages. If ``Monsieur Hier'' was a gloss on ``Rear Window,'' ``The Hairdresser's Husband'' a jollier ``Vertigo'' and ``Girl on the Bridge'' a more psycho-sexualized ``To Catch a Thief,'' this job is a kinder, gentler interpretation of ``Strangers on a Train's'' criminality transfer theme.

To pull it off, Leconte has hit upon a bizarre but felicitous casting coup involving two longtime, but worlds apart, Gallic icons: respected, versatile acting giant Jean Rochefort and rebel rocker Johnny Hallyday.

We first encounter the latter, weary with migraine and clad in fringed leather, disembarking a train in a windblown provincial village (although the setting is contemporary, hints of old Westerns kick around throughout the proceedings). His name is Milan, and indeed he is a veteran knock-over artist, in town for the proverbial last score.

But that's on Saturday. For the next couple of days, Milan has to lay low while surreptitiously assembling his gang of inept cronies. Luckily - although it doesn't seem that way to him at first - Milan quickly meets Rochefort's chattering retired poetry teacher Manesquier, who invites the dangerous-looking stranger to his cluttered, tumble-down family mansion.

Thrilled to have any regular company (both men have been wifeless for most of their adulthood), Manesquier babbles all kinds of nonsense to his taciturn guest. But as the eventless days go by, Milan comes to value his host's attention. More important, Manesquier's dull, sedentary life of literary pursuits and comfy slippers begins to look very good to the tough but tottering outlaw.

For his part, Manesquier imagines himself deeper and deeper into Milan's thrilling bandit existence. He, too, has an important appointment on Saturday - with a heart surgeon - and can't help but be thinking about everything he may have missed.

With wit, dignity and utterly different approaches, the two leads lure us well inside their characters and bring real zest to their mutually enriching relationship. Fussy without ever being prissy, Rochefort lends Manesquier a civilized joie de vivre informed by the proper amount of desperation that results from blooming too late. The still craggily handsome Hallyday, who's been appearing off-and-on in films since Clouzot's ``Diabolique'' back in his schoolboy days, finds shadings of patience, absurd humor and hard-bitten dreaminess that ease the fading hard fellow's agony.

Leconte gets a little too cute and obvious with the material at times, but for the most part he lets his actors play out a subtle dance of soul death with delicacy and unique intelligence. We should all age so honestly, and with whatever grace honesty permits us to retain, as the men of ``Man on the Train.''

MAN ON THE TRAIN - Two stars

(R: violence, language)

Starring: Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday.

Director: Patrice Leconte.

Running time: 1 hr. 30 min.

Playing: Royal, West L.A.; Cecchi Gori Fine Arts, Beverly Hills; South Coast Village 3, Costa Mesa.

In a nutshell: Touching and amusing French character study in which two very different, aging men bond and exchange fantasies about living one another's lives.

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Photo:

Jean Rochefort, left, plays a sedate man who begins to envy the outlaw life of his guest (Johnny Hallyday), and vice versa, in director Patrice Leconte's ``Man on the Train.''