MOVIES

This is a hard fall to label. No themes or styles prevail, except for the safe and reliable ones that have led the way before. There are films that show promise, at least on paper, but more that provoke an indifferent reaction at best. And it’s a sure thing that for those distressed by lack of imagination and blatant bottom-line thinking, this fall’s going to rain sequels. Look for The Return of the Musketeers (a less repetitious way of saying The Three Musketeers III), Halloween V, Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (just when you thought it was safe to back into the tool shed), Back to the Future II, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (a sequel in fact if not in name), and the most puzzling one of the bunch, The Gods Must Be Crazy II. Otherwise…

Remember sensitive, caring, centered guys who were looking for loving, post-machismo, two-way relationships with their significant others, and all that other New Age crap? Forget about ’em. To Too Many (20th Century Fox, October) raises an old adolescent taunt-betting a guy he can’t score-to something like an Olympic event.

Mark Harmon plays a roguishly sexy TV weatherman (which is a pretty funny notion in itself) who accepts a wager that he can’t gel engaged to three women in three months. The women are to be handpicked by the other bettor, who has put up his wife’s Picasso against the weatherman’s woodland cabin. Harmon figures the deal’s in the bag until he finds out that one woman is married, one is a head case, and one-God help him- works for the Philadelphia Eagles. But hey, a bet’s a bet. The film also stars Leslie Ann Warren (as the married one). It’s the first feature film for TV director Will McKenzie.

Brando’s back (after a nine-year absence) to star in A Dry White Season (MGA/UA, October), set in South Africa in 1976. The tale of two cultures follows the destruction of two families, one black, one white, after a formerly complacent Afrikaner (Donald Sutherland) learns the truth about the murder of two blacks who were in police custody. The film also features Susan Sarandon.

Two splendid actors, Raul Scofield and Helen Mirren, make When the Whales Came (20th Century Fox, October) interesting at first glance. The story, dealing with a curse of nature inflicted on one of the Scilly Isles, caused sufficient collective ennui in the industry’s monied community that it took the producers more than a year to fund the extremely modest budget. Scofield plays Birdman, an aged, deaf islander who befriends two young children and teaches them the reason the curse came about years earlier with the arrival of tusked whales called narwhals. The film is set in 1914, the year Europe began tearing itself to bits. The violence and stupidity in the large world may be repeated in miniature, it seems, marked by the return of the curse (and the whales) to another of the islands. Scofield can do more with a glance than many lesser actors can do with everything in their bag of tricks; his performance could be one of the highlights of the season.

The pairing of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor immediately raises hopes for Harlem Nights (Paramount, November). They play the managers of a Harlem nightclub in 1938 who get mixed up with gangsters. This combination could be the one that brings out the best in each.

At first glance Breaking In (Samuel Goldwyn Company, October) has a too-familiar look: Burt Reynolds in a comedy about an aging safecracker who passes on his secrets to a younger generation of cheeky bad guys, The jokes, the mugging, the action scenes almost spring to mind full-blown-but wait. The script is by the gifted John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lian-na, Brother From Another Planet, Eight Men Out), and the director is Bill Forsythe, who created the charming Local Hero and Gregory’s Girl. This suggests that there may be something in Reynolds’s tutelage of aspiring burglar Casey Siemaszko, and in their planning and execution of the Big Heist, that could raise it above the common fare.

Notes: Terry Jones directs fellow Monty Pythonite John Cleese and Tim Robbins in Erik the Viking (Orion, October). . .Bob Hoskins is the British Gene Hackman: whatever the surroundings, even in a misfire like Beyond the Limit, he’s good. His latest is a comedy, Heart Condition (New Line Cinema, October), with Denzel Washington (Cry Freedom) and Chloe Webb (Sid andNancy). . .and in December, Robert DeNiro is out with We’re No Angels (Paramount), which borrows at least the title, and perhaps the vaguest plot outline (convicts on a spree), from an offbeat Bogart film of the Fifties.