Rambling Rose.

THE AMERICAN cinema today is a cheerless place for anyone seeking quality. When the products are not obvious children's movies, they are children's movies disguised by super-budgets, with Arnold Schwarzenegger saving the future or Kevin Costner redeeming the past. Or else they are sappy and sickening, like Mary Agnes Donoghue's Paradise, or worse, the mindless attitudinizing of the Cannes Grand Prize winner, Barton Fink, by the Coen brothers, those scavengers and refurbishers of other people's offal, which they serve up as art.

On such a scene, it is inspiriting to welcome even an imperfect yet in many ways alive and pulsating little film such as Rambling Rose, which Martha Coolidge has made from Calder Willingham's script based on his own novella. The book, I suspect, may be tougher, but even the screenplay contains enough elements of Southern Gothic, that bone-deep quaintness that can amuse, unnerve, charm, and, finally, bemuse. This is the story of Rose, an exotic-looking young woman who arrives as servant to a Deep Southern family from an even Deeper South, where she seems to have gotten knee-deep into trouble with men. For her employers, the kindly Hillyers, she resolves to be on her very best behavior, which proves just sufficient to throw the entire family, if not the whole town, into first-class dithers. Well, the younger Hillyer children, Waskie and Doll Baby, can handle it, with only intermittent outbursts of voyeuristic glee. But Daddy, a once impoverished fellow who married a rich woman working on a nebulous master's degree for Columbia University, and who now runs the hotel her family left her, can barely cope with it, narrowly escaping the girl's prompt and thorough infatuation with him. The worst thing he can call Rose, however, is the touchingly off-center "nincompoop."

Mother, who is hard of hearing and soft of heart (she disconnects her hearing aid whenever she is working on her thesis and, as Daddy puts it, "lost in the fourth dimension"), is Rose's staunch supporter, and will hear nothing, which is easy enough for her, and see nothing, which is difficult for anyone, against the girl. She prevents Daddy from firing Rose even when the bushes around the house fill up with pining suitors or satiated ones whose postcoital fun has been cut short when their noises awakened the household and they had to leap out of her window naked as jaybirds, as the charmingly illogical Southern phrase has it.

Most keenly affected by Rose's presence, though, is Buddy, the 13-yearold eldest Hillyer kid, possessed of considerable, mostly lurid imagination, precocious smarts, and a cruel streak-clearly an authorial alter ego. His burgeoning sexual appetites are partially indulged by Rose, who, however, saves her body for the town's eligible blades, and her heart for the elusive Mr. Right, whom she seeks by trial and not unpleasurable error. Daddy (Robert Duvall), Buddy (Lukas Haas), and especially Mother (Diane Ladd) are so well and controlledly acted that the comedy spins like a top with-in defiance of physical laws-increasing rather than diminishing energy. As a Yankee doctor, Kevin Conway contributes a wholly exaggerated performance, but even that does not dampen the centrifugal fun.

What does impair the film is a totally inept prologue and epilogue, in which the now grown-up Buddy, played with insufferable smarminess by John Heard (once a good actor), comes back to visit his widowed Daddy to find out also what has become of Rose. These sequences are highly unconvincing, with even Duvall's performance thrown off by the corny writing and direction. Too bad that Miss Coolidge allowed her otherwise winning film to lose its grip and go as limp as a dying limpet.

Johnny E. Jensen's cinematography tries too hard to look sun-burnished and earth-saturated: all those ambers and ochers get to be a bit unrelenting. Although conventional, Elmer Bernstein's score is apposite enough. But what might have been the film's biggest problem proves no sweat. The rather beanpole and hatchet-faced Laura Dern-proclaimed a beauty by tasteless reviewers possibly further blinded by her genealogy-is not one to make a population's gonads go hogwild. But she manages a good accent, gets into the spirit of things, and, with her not overgenerous thespian endowment nevertheless falling into the required slot, carries off the central role more than acceptably.