_By the time you read this The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag will already have shot its box-office load and will be on its way to video stores and hour-of-the-wolf cable slots. This lame little comedy was filmed in Oxford, Mississippi, an apparently charming town which gives this movie its claim to authenticity—it makes the cardboard characters and situations look even more artificial. What, you wonder, are they doing in a place that looks as if it should be inhabited by real people? Betty Lou is the type of picture critics learn to dispose of in a few paragraphs and put out of their minds. I could too, if only it didn't seem not much worse than plenty of other recent pictures that are doing a fast business and even getting good reviews, pictures like Wayne’s World, Housesitter, Sister Act, A League of Their Own. These movies offer a good performance or two (Kathy Najimy and Mary Wickes in Sister Act; Tom Hanks in League), and an occasional snappy scene (Steve Martin singing “Toora Loora Looral” in Housesitter). But your anger over the wasted evenings watching them soon enough gives way to that drab, depressed feeling that can overtake those of us who go to movies eager to be surprised and delighted.

But among serious moviegoers right now, expectations aren't very high. It seems like too much—a jinx—to hope for something to be good. It's almost enough now for a movie to be merely watchable, or to have a plot that makes basic sense. Even a disappointment like Raising Cain, Brian De Palma’s alternately intricate and ludicrous return to the thriller form—where what he’s going after is maddeningly unclear—is something of a relief. At least De Palma is trying something new, and the movie holds your interest. It’s almost unbelievable when a sharp, intelligent, adult movie like White Men Can’t Jump becomes a hit. I kept my eyes on that movie’s grosses week after week, certain that its commercial bubble was about to burst. That’s an appalling thing for a critic to admit, because what it means, I’m afraid, is that my faith in the mass audience’s ability to recognize good, popular movies is eroding. Which isn’t to say that the audience is stupid. Stupidity has never been the reason people get suckered by bad, manipulative movies (just look at all the intellectualizations devised to defend The Silence of the Lambs or Cape Fear). But it’s fair to say that audiences’ expectations of what movies should be are radically different from what they were fifteen or even ten years ago, and in some perverse way, The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag, which doesn’t have a prayer of being a hit, exposes something of those expectations.

The movie is an attempted gloss on a screwball comedy by people who haven’t comprehended the basic conventions of the genre. The director, Allan Moyle, sees Betty Lou (Penelope Ann Miller) as another shy rebel similar to the heroes of his last two pictures, Times Square and Pump Up the Volume. Neither picture was very good, but each tapped into rock culture’s desire to offend stuffy propriety. Those movies understood the immature, but still satisfying, exhilaration the protagonists took in the shock tactics they used to get themselves noticed. Moyle shellacs Betty Lou with his hip gloss—which here amounts to a fetish for funky kitsch—as if a screwball comedy would just be too conventional without it, but he doesn’t understand that at the heart of all good screwball comedies is the nonconformist bent on upsetting the established order. (Someone should explain that to Frank Oz, too. In Housesitter, Goldie Hawn’s character uses her pathological lying to become part of small-town conformity, not to knock the stuffing out of it.)

Betty Lou is a mousy librarian (is there any other kind in the movies?), and the gun in her handbag is the discarded weapon from the motel murder of a two-bit crook that her cop husband (Eric Thal) is investigating. (Her pooch discovers the gun on a riverbank.) She’s already fuming that her husband passed up their anniversary dinner to work on the case, and when he won’t even take the phone call she makes to tell him about finding the gun, she blows her top. She storms into a department-store ladies’ room, pulls out the gun, and poses in front of the mirror, fantasizing about talking tough. When the gun goes off, Betty Lou is found out and hauled into the station. Sitting there listening to her husband argue with his commanding officer—the c.o. demanding to know how she got the gun if she wasn’t shacking up with the sleazy, blackmailing victim; hubby claiming she couldn’t possibly be anyone’s lover, let alone a killer—Betty Lou decides to rattle her husband’s ideas of just what she’s capable of by confessing to the murder.

_That's not a not a bad premise for a comedy, but it’s as far as Grace Cary Bickley’s script (her first) gets. Betty Lou becomes the town celebrity with everyone eager to get a gander at her. She obliges her new reputation by shearing her long hair to a (unflattering) bob, and trading her floral print dresses for red leather and black velvet but the transformation isn’t anything more than a costume change, because Miller plays Betty Lou just as meekly after her confession. You can’t believe for a minute that the cops would buy the fumbling explanations she comes up with during interrogation. For the plot to work, Betty Lou would have to find a way to talk her way out of the rap without sacrificing what’s supposed to be her newfound sexy confidence, as well as to outfox the mob boss (William Forsythe) who’s convinced she now has the tape the dead man was using to blackmail him. And it would seem logical to have Betty Lou, an avid reader drawn to mysteries and historical romances, be a good storyteller herself, and a confident liar instead of a transparent one. But the movie is so badly constructed that it seems to have been made by people suffering from short-term memory loss. Each terrible scene seems to bear no connection to the ones surrounding it.

_Betty Lou’s continuing timidity, for instance, is a peculiarity for a movie trying to come off as a feminist self-actualization parable (the movie’s been outfitted with all the accoutrements, including a Thelma and Louise-style roadhouse where our heroine gets to let down what’s left of her hair). Miller has some good moments early on where her meekness is so cheery-apologetic that it’s right on target (after an argument with a crabby supermarket cashier, she blithely presses a handbill for a library fundraiser on the woman), but when it comes time for Betty Lou to stand up for herself, you want Miller to stop nervously popping her eyes and biting her lower lip, and find a little grit. (Is this really the actress whose line readings were so dreamy-soft and whip-cracking sharp in The Freshman?) To be fair, nobody could pull off groaners like having to choke on a first cigarette. And all the women in the cast come off as simps, including Alfre Woodard as Betty Lou’s lawyer, whose role consists of stiffening her back and yelling “Lawsuit!” when anybody looks at her sideways, and Julianne James as Betty Lou’s neurotic sister. If I hadn’t seen James’s witty, stylish performance in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (as Annabella Sciorra’s best friend, the sacrificial independent woman), I’d assume she was nothing more than a mass of meant-to-be-adorable tics.

_Compounding all that is Allan Moyle’s direction. Sitting through the film is like watching someone on downers take target practice: just sit back in your seat and watch the jokes wobble past the side of a barn. He doesn’t take even basic care with scenes. After arguing with that cashier, Betty Lou prances out of the supermarket without paying or picking up her groceries, and nobody notices. Toward the end, when she goes to the bad guy’s warehouse hideout (conveniently accessible, since no sentries are posted outside), she’s rescued by her husband (another example of how far her transformation doesn’t go) and they enjoy a long embrace while Alfre Woodward, the one Betty Lou went there to save, remains tied to a chair, corpses strewn around her feet.

Director Moyle’s work here recalls the (mercifully) brief, bubble-headed heyday of Susan Seidelman whose comedies (Desperately Seeking Susan, Making Mr. Right, Cookie) were similar hip kitsch fests. Like Ms. Seidelman, Moyle doesn’t seem to feel any obligation to make the movie plausible, even on the level of confection. It’s as if he were saying, “Hey, what’s the big deal? We all know movies are fake anyway, right?” And in some way, today’s audiences seem to be saying the same thing.

It’s often condescendingly assumed that audiences of the Thirties and Forties really believed that life could be like the movies they saw. They didn’t, of course, but I think we can assume that they wanted movies to be believable within the parameters of the world those movies created. And we can see, by watching some of that era’s screwball comedies, tough no-nonsense gangster films, and socially conscious melodramas, that their tastes were fairly sophisticated and unsentimental as well, and that they, as well as the men who ran movie studios, expected directors and writers to adhere to certain essential principles of logic and coherence.

_Today, for all the research the studios boast about doing to discover what audiences will respond to, nobody’s asking whether scripts make any sense. In Sister Act, nobody asks why Whoopi Goldberg, hiding out in a convent after witnessing a mob hit, is allowed to lead the choir to such prominence that her face is splashed all over national television. Didn’t the cops in charge of the case give any instructions to keep her secluded? What probably happened is that someone came up with the money scene—Whoopi leading a choir of boogeying nuns in choral arrangements of “I Will Follow Him” and “My Guy”—realized that it could sell the movie in trailers and TV ads, and didn’t even notice, or care, that it made nonsense of the premise. In the same way, studios don’t hesitate to order a new ending shot if preview audiences decide they don’t like the one a director has chosen (which was rumored to be the case, by the way, with Betty Lou).

The story of A League of Their Own at least hangs together, but was there no one around to suggest to the director Penny Marshall that, in a story about women who were treated more like cheesecake than athletes, it was inappropriate to include so many jokes about ugly women? With all of the feminist ire directed at movies these days, how did this one escape? Were feminists reluctant to criticize it because it was directed by a woman and dealt with a forgotten episode involving women? If Marshall were simply staying true to the social conventions of the Forties there’d be nothing to criticize. But there’s no awareness on her part of what her characters give up by conforming to the Forties idea of how women should behave. We’re not supposed to mind that the team’s pitcher forgets about her amazing abilities when marriage beckons because, the movie says, marriage is the best that a homely girl like her can hope for. And when Geena Davis decides not to act on her attraction to Tom Hanks, there’s no indication if her decision to stay true to her soldier husband causes her any doubt.

_In Single White Female, Bridget Fonda discovers that her boyfriend has been murdered in his apartment by her wacko roommate (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Leigh tries to justify herself by saying, “He came in my mouth and then said he’d beat the shit out of me if I told you”—why doesn’t Fonda ask, “And just how did you happen to be there?” Is it because she’s realized she’s dealing with a nutcase? If so, Fonda is the slowest person in the theater: the audience realizes it from the moment Leigh—with her voice somewhere between the nasal and the glottal, her eyes peering suspiciously from beneath her blunt, institutional-cut bangs—first comes on the screen. And they’d still realize it if the ads for the movie hadn’t told them what to expect. Movie ads might once have tipped off the audiences that a character was a psychotic waiting to crack but they let the movies themselves show it happen. Barbet Schroeder, the director of Single White Female, can’t let Leigh’s awkwardness charm us and make us feel protective, the way Hitchcock made us feel protective of Norman Bates. Today, if any thriller did seduce us into liking a character it later revealed to be a villain, audiences might resent having to deal with that moral ambiguity; now they want their movies exactly as the studio execs want them: entirely predictable.

It’s easy enough to see how the values of the Reagan/Bush era extend to thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Fatal Attraction, where the villains are single, independent, sexually free women out to destroy the family. What isn’t so obvious is how that attempt to preserve traditional values, which of course means rejecting the unexpected, extends to the conventions of thrillers. Everything is laid out in advance so that the modern audience is insulated against the jolts audiences used to go to thrillers for (and the tingle of a good thriller is one of the most purely sensual pleasures the movies have to offer). It’s as if the people who once got huffy about Brian De Palma’s thrillers had body-snatched the people who made those movies hits. Yet people come out of Single White Female, the climax of which is as brutal as anything they’d encounter at a slasher movie, and they aren’t offended because all the shocks have been telegraphed, and thus neutralized. So when Bridget Fonda explains that the elevator door of her creaky old Gothic apartment building has to be slammed shut with the aid of a screwdriver, the audience laughs in anticipation of the screwdriver’s eventual use as a weapon. They’re not laughing, as audiences once would have, at the clumsy obviousness of the set-up, but as a way to reassure themselves. They can brace themselves, the same way they can brace themselves for the inevitable killing of the happy, tail-wagging puppy that Leigh brings home.

_Modern audiences are as attuned to the conventions of today’s movies as Thirties audiences were to the conventions of their movies. The difference is that today, cliches and cannibalism and stupidity are the norm. The laughter at Single White Female may tell you the audience knows it’s being set up but it doesn’t mean that they won’t come out chattering about the “fun” spookhouse ride they’ve just been on. Today’s audience doesn’t know movies can be anything but mechanical, obvious blockbusters, and they aren’t likely to find out. Repertory houses are limited to cities and college towns (and even in those places, the future of many is in doubt) and I wouldn’t want to wager on the depth of selection found at most of this country’s video stores. There is an entire audience now for whom renting a “classic” means picking up Rain Man or Dances With Wolves or, for the ones with really long memories, An Officer and A Gentleman.

Robert Altman’s The Player made a running gag out of the studios’ desire for new movies to be jerry-built compilations of recent hits, and as you watch a block of coming attractions in a crowded theater, you often hear the audience identifying the sources of each picture advertised. That doesn’t mean that, a few months later, they won’t be lined up to see the new rip-offs. More likely, they’ll already have memorized the movie’s tag lines, and they’ll be talking about its big scene, which has been made familiar to them through bombardment advertising. And when they get into the movie and hear those lines and see that scene, they’ll respond as if someone were holding up a cue card, or the way crowds at concerts do when the band plays its new single. It’s even probable that, at a movie doing big business, the audience will guess that a sequel is already in the works. So they’ll have about as much reason to have a stake in the movie’s outcome as splatter fans once had to believe that Jason or Freddy were really dead. (When Willem Dafoe’s Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, he was only doing what movie executives have practiced for about ten years.)

_Of course, audiences are still capable of being gulled. But it’s possible now for audiences to eat movies up and not believe a bite, though the fantasy persists that the mass audience is so ignorant they can’t distinguish between movies and real life (the way people once insisted that audiences watched Rambo as if it were an expose of what the government did to Vietnam POWs). The rowdy laughter, however, that greets the contrivances of some of today’s big hit movies dispels that notion.

The last decade of movies have effected audiences, perhaps irrevocably, by collectively lowering expectations. Today’s movie audience, whose average age is fifteen, has grown up knowing nothing but disjointed, unbelievable pictures. We may have reached a point where the phrase “popular entertainment”—which once meant, at least in its best and formerly popular sense, a well-crafted, coherent, reasonably intelligent, and maybe even adult movie—has outlived its usefulness. That type of popular entertainment is now a minority taste.

Reviewing The Last Picture Show in 1971, in the midst of what she later called “a legendary period in movies,” Pauline Kael wrote, “And though it’s marvelous to have pictures like [Picture Show] for everyone to enjoy, most of the talented people don’t work that way, and can’t make that kind of movie.” But what was a mainstream movie twenty-one years ago seems almost impossibly daring today. It’s impossible to believe that a movie so adult could find so wide an audience. Intelligent adult pictures haven’t completely vanished. Just in the past few years we’ve had Bull Durham, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Russia House, Dead Again, The Fisher King, The Commitments. But the grosses of the most successful of these movies were, by Hollywood standards, only “modest.” It’s no longer enough for a movie to recoup its costs and turn a profit; if it doesn’t make at least $100 million, the studios will use it as evidence that it’s not the type of thing audiences want, and by that standard they’re right; these pictures are barely a blip on the screen. If we were to adjust for twenty years of inflation and compare the grosses of these films to the grosses of The Last Picture Show and other films of that era, like Cabaret, Straw Dogs, Klute, Fiddler on the Roof, we’d be able to see just how the adult audience has fallen off. Even $100 million isn’t enough anymore. Batman Returns (a mess but still the best of the recent blockbusters) will eventually pull in between $150 and $200 million worldwide, and Warners considers it a disappointment because it didn’t repeat its $33 million opening weekend. Audiences aren’t even going to entertaining, silly comedies like The Freshman, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, I Love You to Death, Switching Channels, and The Butcher’s Wife, movies whose predeccesors are the reason the Thirties and Forties have a reputation as the golden era of screen comedy.

It’s fine for Steven Spielberg, being interviewed on “60 Minutes,” to reassure us that smaller pictures will come back because, by the turn of the century, the costs of big-budget blockbusters will have become prohibitively high. But then what? Where are the filmmakers who will know how to make them or the audiences that will know how to respond to them, or, for that matter, the critics who will know how to recognize them?

_Despite its superfluous final half-hour and its dreadful source material, The Prince of Tides was a solidly-made piece of popular entertainment done in an accomplished, emotionally satisfying, conventional style. And Nick Nolte gave, hands down, the best performance I saw last year. But most serious critics dismissed it as an empty tearjerker, or used their space discussing the ethics of Barbara Streisand’s character, a psychiatrist, sleeping with her patient’s brother (as if criticism meant turning your column into “Oprah”). A few weeks later, the movie was overshadowed by Streisand’s being slighted for a Best Director nomination. It’s true the virtues of her direction are all old-fashioned, but when most directors can’t even tell a story, the virtues of competence, professionalism, and construction, and the refusal to descend to the sort of manipulation of movies like Ordinary People and Terms of Endearment, are not paltry things.

The critics are to thank for winning a reprieve for Carl Franklin’s gritty B-noir One False Move, after its distributor, IRS, wanted to shelve it. Good reviews (nota- bly from Siskel and Ebert—nobody’s all bad) prompted IRS to open the film regionally at art houses and small independent theaters (it played New York’s prestigious Film Forum), where it actually managed to find something of an audience. And Bill Paxton as the small-town sheriff who gets in over his head when he goes after a vicious pair of L.A. killers, combines the kick of a crazed mule with the open-faced, raw-boned appeal of classic American movie heroes. Paxton gives the sort of perfor- mance that makes an actor a star (some- thing his performances in Near Dark and Pass the Ammo should have already seen to). It might seem churlish to gripe when critics and audiences are able to save a good movie from oblivion. But there’s something very wrong when a tightly made crime film needs art-house bookings for people to know it’s around, though it’s not hard to see why. If your standard of action movies is the likes of Lethal Weapon 3, what do you make of a film with no car chases, no explosions, no buddy-buddy repartee, a film that’s driven by characters and plot instead of mayhem and pyrotechnics?

_I'm not so pessimistic that I think we’ll never see good movies again. They may appear less frequently and not stay around very long when they do, but good work does manage to get done (though the odds against it are growing all the time). There are plenty of established and promising directors around, and an astounding number of good actors. And there are sporadic signs of life, like the deliciously nasty comedy Death Becomes Her and, surprisingly, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. That last movie is a large, self-conscious genre Western that nevertheless is an honest, and subversive, treatment of the sort of revenge fantasies that Eastwood has been peddling for years. It’s an honorable, intelligent piece of work.

_What worries me, though, is just whom that good work will be made for. There are still plenty of good movies that get dumped on the market by studios that have no faith in them (as Touchstone showed with John Boorman’s marvelous Where the Heart Is), but it’s no longer wise to assume that audiences aren’t going to good movies because they haven’t heard about them. They’re not going to pictures like The Russia House or Dead Again or The Commitments because, after years of obvious, incoherent movies held together by bombast and special effects, they don’t know how to watch something that requires them to process a narrative and become involved with the growth of characters, a movie that doesn’t reveal everything at once. It’s like asking someone raised on the lowest form of trash fiction to comprehend Dickens or, for that matter, P.G. Wodehouse, or Raymond Chandler.

But it’s easy, too easy, to be contemptuous of that audience. The industry deserves much of the blame for bringing popular movies so low and teaching people to settle for so little. But those of us who began going to the movies because they offered so much more than what the current popular audience has learned to settle for, may feel that a wedge has been driven between us and that new larger audience we long to be a part of. Movies may function for some as a private obsession, but surely one of the traits that attracted us to them in the first place was the sudden solidarity we’re sometimes able to feel in a room full of strangers. Now, we’re more aware than ever that the audience really is full of strangers.

_Video hasn’t done away with movies, as was predicted in the early Eighties, but the isolation of video watching has become an apt metaphor for how isolated some of us feel from the majority of moviegoers. In recent years, caring about the movies has come to resemble the old question asked of critics, “If you were stranded on a desert island, what one movie would you want to have with you?” For some of us, watching one terrific movie after another play to empty theaters is as close to being marooned on a desert island as we’ll ever get. Those few others among the deserted rows who are responding in kind start to look like lifelines to the mainland.