Sleepless in Seattle.

IS the woman's picture still a reputable genre? At a time when women have just about achieved equality with men, does the two-hand-kerchief movie still make sense? Back in 1939, Leo McCarey, with the help of such able scenarists as Delmar Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart, turned a story by Mildred Cram and himself into a directorial triumph. Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne enacted it to sheer tear-jerking perfection, spicing the weepy sentimentality with healthy dollops of wit, and out came one of the most romatic love stories in screen history, Lov affair. It was one of my 14-year-old self's favorite Hollywood movies, right up there with Wuthering Heights and Drak Victory.

Since Hollywood can never leave well enough alone, the picture had to be remande in 1957 in not quite glorious Eastmancolor, updated and expanded from 89 minutes to a soggier 114. The writers were again daves and McCarey, with the latter again directing. The stars, this time, were Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, and shade less romantic, but for those like Nora Ephron, too young to have known the original version, sublime. With Sleepless in Seattle, Miss Ephron has, fairly shamelessly, endeavored to direct a kind of variation on that film, producing a Nineties equivalent with the same mixture of laughter and tears, side-splitting and eye-wetting. A very, very little of it comes off, but a great deal merely looks retro, manipulative, contrived -- an exploitation of the soft center that presumably lurks under the toughest feminist carapace, and that putatively thrives in the newly sensitized male bosom.

Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks), a charming young Chicago architect, has just lost his beloved wife, Maggie. He is inconsolable, far more so than his sweet but practical eight-year-old son, Jonah (Ross Malinger). Sam moves to Seattle, to start afresh, away from haunting memories. He settles into a well-appointed house by the water, and obtains a comparably desirable job. But Maggie (Carey Lowell) haunts him even there, and the cannot so much as go out on a date. It promises to be a very bleak Christmas, so Jonah calls up a pohne-in show run by a phony woman therapist -- Dr. Marcia, as she likes to be called -- and tells her about his dad's plight. Soon she gets Sam on the phone and coaxes out of him an confession of how much he mises his dead wife. Jeff Arch, who wrote the arch story on which he, David S. Ward, and Nora Ephron based their screenplay, probably thinks that Sam's platitudes are enchanting, and so manifestly do two thousand women who send pronto. letters and marriage proposals pronto.

Meanwhile back in Baltimore, there is Annie Reed, a feature writer for the Baltimore Sun, who hears that broadcast. She is engaged to and living with Walter (Bill Pullman), a nice enuogh fellow, though abounding in assorted allergies. But once she hears how wonderfully Sam is in touch with his emotions, she is a goner. Her eyes fill with tears, her heart wit overgrown puppy love, and she practically drives off the road. Her yearning for him grows, and finally she too writes a letter that a friend forwards to Sam, whom Dr. Marcia has dubbed Sleepless in Seattle. It is, however, Jonah, not Sleepless, who screens the love mail that is still coming in, and Annie's cuning missive, mostly about baseball, grabs him. Pretty soon Jonah is telling Sleepless that this is the wife for him, and the mother that he, Jonah, must have.

I could go into a recital of the various cutesy devices Miss Ephron & Co. come up with to bring Annie and Sleepless together, as well as of the tricksy devices with which they come up to keep them apart. Annie, it seems, is the sort of person who'll travel three thousand miles to Seattle, only not to have the guts to accost Sleepless and son, by whom she is, from a safe distance, entranced. And Sleepless and distance, entraced. And falling in love--even without knowing that she is the Annie who homered her way into Jonah's heart--is the sort of person who'll say a tougue-tied, smitten hello to her, and, upon getting back an equally love-sick hello, let the beloved run away. True, he has been halfheartedly involved with Victoria (Barbara Garrick), a young woman who guffaws so ghoulishly at every unfunny thing he says as to make the angels weep. Still, even this Rabelaisian rictus proves enough to drive a preposterous wedge between Sleepless and his Dream Come True!

So the movie spends most of its slumberous hundred minutes on keeping Sleepless and Annie sundered, and it is hapless little Jonah who must resort to a stratagem, as hazardous as it is unbelievable, to bring the predestined lovers together in the last reel--on top of the Empire State Building where else? The entire picture is a collection of nauseating quotations from and references to An Affair to Remember, both visual and verbal. And as it wiggles on, it becomes a pre-coitus interruptus of gigantic dimensions.

If it has any bearing on reality -- which the film proudly and repeatedly denies--Annie could very happily marry Walter, a decent fellow who takes rejection with touching magnanimity. But no, Sleepless and Feckless must finally take each other by the hand to the sound of Jimmy Durante croaking out "Make Someone Happy," and go off together with eight-year-old Reckless to stop being sleepless-in Seattle, or Baltimore, or Timbuctoo, for all anyone not partial to cutesypoo, but also amazingly smartass, soap operas cares. Perhaps a sequel, Smartass in Smyrna, in indicated.

Of all movie genres, none is more alien to me than the technological thriller. I mean the kind of film whose excitement depends largely on computers, fax machines, surveillance devices, and other technological wonders suited two action mechanistic, characters robotic, dialogue jargon, and villainy thrive. This is neither the old film noir the old-fashioned melodrama in which people were still people, however corrupt, and not mere adjuncts to diabolically cunning machines that rule the world.