SHORT-TERM SMILES FROM ‘EAGLES’

In the dear days when I spent much of my life in the dark, reviewing films, it struck me more than once that I was enjoying a luxury which I then unavoidably compromised for everybody else.

I tried hard to know as little as possible about a film before I saw it. It’s what’s up front that counts, I thought then--and still think. Forget rumors and reputations, hype and hysteria. Watch as innocently as you can.

I remember sitting alone in a room at Warners for a screening of a film called “Taxi Driver.” It was a last-minute arrangement, for reasons that now escape me. Viewing Martin Scorsese’s film was all the more wrenching an experience because I had no notion where the driver was going: how horrendous the events were going to get (no matter how thrilling the artistry was).

But then came my review and all the others, and no one who knew anything about movies at all could thereafter be totally unaware of the shocks and horrors awaiting them in Scorsese’s tour de noir with Robert De Niro’s grinning, stalking psychotic.

Forewarned was forearmed, of course, but it was also true that some of the edge had been burred off the shocks. There may have been a heightened expectation as well, of course, if the readers believed the raves; reviews at their best give eloquent reasons for seeing tough films, as they do for avoiding the bad ones.

These days, amazingly, almost all films seem to be batting .500, however they fare at the box office. Reviews divide yay and nay, right down the middle or close to it: a gem of diversion or a crime against creativity, take your pick.

I went to see “Legal Eagles” the other night, knowing almost scene by scene what it was about (now I can read reviews again), but not knowing what to expect. I came away understanding exactly what both the pros and the cons were going on about, but glad I’d seen Ivan Reitman’s film all the same.

“Legal Eagles” is very much a film of the moment, a big, bright, glossy, escapist summertime entertainment. By another summer or two, I would expect to retain only the vaguest memories of it, unlike “Adam’s Rib,” the earlier legal comedy with which this one is being frequently and unfavorably compared.

Tracy and Hepburn were, well, Tracy and Hepburn, and the script Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin wrote for “Adam’s Rib” was a non-stop battle of wits, a verbal cannonading that paused for wonderful bits of business but did not rely on physical events for its excitements. It was, largely, tell, not show.

Yet Robert Redford and Debra Winger are an uncommonly attractive teaming. I wish Reitman and his scriptwriters Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. had given Winger one really big romantic scene in which she could unbutton or unloose her special croaky charm, vamping Mr. R. out of his loafers possibly.

It seems wasteful that for her big solo she is alone, gorging herself to invite sleep and forget her new and disruptive crush. I suspect I’m not alone in thinking of Winger as an even less inhibited Jean Arthur. Like the splendid Miss Arthur, she is a mesmerizing mix of resilience and tenderness.

Redford, who began his career in light comedy, is very expert indeed. The boyish good looks of yesteryear have grown more characterful, world-used and even scruffy, and seem the more appealing for all that.

Like James Garner, Redford has made understatement an art form. The double takes, which are really only one-and-a-half takes, and the fleeting grimaces are pleasingly subtle. He has a nice feeling for the line between the amusingly foolish and the overdone absurd.

“Legal Eagles” is by design a film of plot and effects rather than of character. It is said to have cost more than $30 million, which seems staggering, although multi-story fires, megaton explosions, car chases and luxury sets don’t come cheap.

If it was expensive, it looks expensive; I don’t think there’s any feeling of being short-changed. The real complaint is that the costs were unnecessary. In the end “Legal Eagles” succeeds, as films usually do if they succeed at all, as a film of characters--attractive and sympathetic characters.

It is the charm of Redford and Winger together and, to a lesser degree, of Daryl Hannah as the ambiguous creature between them, that gives “Legal Eagles” its appeal, not the conflagrations.

Although there are murmurs that “Legal Eagles” has a serious side, as being about fraud in the art world, I think there is no need to attend with notebook in hand. On that basis, “E.T.” was about the battle between AT&T; and Sprint for his long-distance trade. Art is a plot device; we come away no wiser about Mark Rothko’s estate than before--and so, indeed, what. (My only regret is that Terence Stamp as the crooked art dealer didn’t hang around a bit more. He was appealingly nasty.)

In the end, films have to be judged by what they intended to do. It is possible to wish they intended more, more often, and it is easy to be wistful about the classic establishing models, like “Adam’s Rib.” I certainly do, and am. But overplotted and underquipped as it is, “Legal Eagles” evokes some smiles on a summer’s night.