Only the Lonely.

WHEN did we catch on that movies were really worse than ever? Was it only yesterday? Or a few years ago? Or back when they came up with the slogan that they were better than ever? Or are we all just incurable laudatores tempori acti, mindlessly exalting time past? I don't have the exact answer, but I do know that good movies, American or foreign, are these days in a class with the teeth of hens, and those fowls seem more edentate than ever.

Take as a typical example Only the Lonely, whose very title is doggerel, an earsore. Written and directed by Chris Columbus, a product of Steven Spielberg's Pandora's box, it is clearly meant to be for both old and young, funny yet also serious, entertainment that also provides a lesson. It is indeed all of those things on the lowest, most dishonest and stupid level. And it gets a highly favorable review in our newspaper of supposed record, the New York Times.

It is the story of Danny, a nice IrishAmerican cop, whom everyone on his beat, as the opening sequence makes perspicuous, simply loves. He seems to enjoy his work, which is seldom more demanding or perilous than driving, with his oversexed partner, some harmlessly droll malefactors to the hoosegow. He has two problems in life. One, explicit and the hinge of the plot; the other, implicit and barely alluded to. The first, then, is that he lives with his formidable widowed mother, Rose, who keeps him a baby: immature, cringing, bullied, enslaved. Hers. And she is one of those nasty Irish Catholics full of every prejudice that condition is allegedly heir to, and well disliked by all but the nice gardener who lives downstairs and hopelessly loves her, only to be despised by Rose because he is Greek and is, for the same reason, ineluctably named Nick.

The more skirted problem is that Danny is hugely, monstrously fat. And his mother encourages him to eat like a whole stableful of horses, and remain fat and bypassed by other women: calories are a mother's best friend. After all, who else would take her to her weekly bingo sessions even while he yearns for a baseball game? Certainly not his married brother, Patrick, who plans to relocate Danny and Rose in Florida, and be rid of all responsibility to Mum.

But when Doyle, a friendly old bachelor and drinking companion at the local pub, dies without having much to show for his life, the Italian-American undertaker's daughter appears at the funeral. Theresa is a shy, homely young woman, a wallflower in aspect and anaphrodisiac calling: she cosmeticizes the dead, trying, imaginatively, to make them look as much as possible like the movie star they most resembled, to which end she uses freeze frames on her VCR as her model. Danny and Theresa exchange one wistful glance, and a carpe diem kind of light goes on in his head.

When, an inveterate Jonah with the ladies, he asks Theresa out on a date, Danny begins by offering her a multiple choice of excuses for turning him down: you have to wash your hair, have your legs waxed, baby-sit for a relative, and some half-dozen more. All she needs do is check one. But she doesn't, and they have a date, over Rose's strenuous disapproval. Especially after Rose learns that the girl is Italian, even half Sicilian, which means everything of Danny's she may touch must be wiped twice. The reference is to the evening picnic he takes her on in Comiskey Park (the locale is Chicago), where they eat and drink on the middle of the diamond while a nice old black man who runs the electronic scoreboards puts on a lumiere sans son show for them. Before you (and 1) dissolve in all this goo, let's take a breather. Danny may be the most obese cop in the world (do they allow that, by the way?), but he is played by the public's darling, Johh Candy. Not mine, however. Aside from not being a fatty lover, I find the actor, with his close-set eyes, dishonest-baby face, and faintly imbecile look when trying to be dear, deeply distasteful. Ally Sheedy, however, as Theresa, is charming, attractive, alert-looking, anything but the loser she is supposed to be; so, right here, the film is flagrantly cheating. The worst indictment of Theresa that Rose comes up with is to call her flat-chested to her face, or to her chest, which, despite clever costuming, is manifestly gibbous. As for Rose's nastiness, tyranny, and name-calling, it is all rather subArchie Bunker; let's face it, she is pretty much a paper termagant.

But back to our story. After the second date, Theresa is only too eager to spend the night with Danny, and what with Rose away and not supposed to return till late tomorrow, the affair is happily consummated. We are mercifully spared the least glimpse of maiden and hippo in bed (here adult viewers, even more than children, are the beneficiaries of self-censorship), but Rose returns early, and frantic stratagems are required to sneak Theresa out unseen; Danny's girth for once comes in handy as a shield to hide behind. Concealed, Theresa hears Rose refer to her as a dago.

Nevertheless, before we know it, wedding bells are in the offing, until, at a prenuptial ceremony, Rose makes a speech stopping everything. But, with astonishing rhetoric, she revokes her exordium with a prompt palinode, and everyone breathes easy. Then, however, everything goes haywire anyway, but you don't want details, do you? At film's end, just as Danny and Rose are being bundled off to St. Pete by brother Patrick, Danny learns that Theresa is on the New Yorkbound train in search of a longdreamt-of career as a show-biz makeup artist. Another light goes on in Danny's rather underlit head, and, as a cop, he heads off the train at the pass, as it were, orders all the passengers out of it, then corners Theresa with a renewed marriage proposal. Again he trots out the multiple-choice rejections for her, omitting only one: that he is a gross, weak, hag-ridden, bloated behemoth who has let Theresa down repeatedly, and will doubtless go on doing so, Rose or no Rose.

Which reminds me of a running gag I forgot to mention. Danny keeps having these fantasies, acted out on screen, of Rose being raped, murdered, or worse because he failed to walk her home from somewhere, and reproaching him with a dying zinger. At such times he drops everything and rushes to the nearest phone to check up on her. Well now, as Theresa is saying yes, we see Rose on the Florida plane, and next to her, to her surprise and wrath, the amorous Nick, on whom Danny bestowed his ticket. But when some swarthy, sinister, and heavily armed hijackers attempt to commandeer the aircraft, who should disarm and subdue them but Nick and Rose, the future playmates of St. Pete?

I am not sure whether this scene represents Danny's final, liberating fantasy or something more. But what matter? Only the Lonely is clearly the yearly, monthly, weekly fantasy Hollywood unleashes, unredeemed by a trace of genuine empathy, insight, style, or wit. Miss Sheedy gives a finely shaded performance, too intelligent for its ambiance; Maureen O'Hara, her five-alarm hair unquenched, gutters on beneath it as Rose; Anthony Quinn, as Nick, supplies the dying gasps-or outtakes-of Zorba; and Milo O'Shea provides Danny with an according-to-Hoyle foil as Doyle. John Candy, though, is less than dandy, a piece of dead meat pounding the beat of Chris Columbus's bankrupt imagination. Only the Lonely is not just a bust, it's the pits. n The Europeans have troubles of their own. They are still, now and then, trying to make adult movies, but they seem to be losing the knack-perhaps under the steamroller of Americanization that grinds on, making American pictures by far the most popular wherever the U.S.A. is still Utopia, which, truth to tell, is pretty nearly everywhere. As a result, the current European formula is to make films that still have touches that murmur Art, but surround them with a stew that comfortingly burbles Commerce.