MORE THAN BUBBLEGUM OUT THERE

All around us are descriptions of the young crowd’s summer movies, which are about as substantial as a coat of suntan oil and as slick. They do no permanent damage, they don’t stain the sheets, but they tend not to linger overlong in the memory, either.

Yet not all this summer’s films will be bubble-headed bubblegum stuff. There will be movies out there for the rest of us before the fall. Based on what I’ve been able to see in advance, what was at the Berlin Film Festival and on the track record of some of the writers, directors and producers who will have summer releases, here’s a speculative tip sheet:

Look for a significant collection of films from England: in particular, “Wetherby,” “Dance With a Stranger” and “Insignificance,” with “Bullshot Crummond” as a contribution on the much lighter side.

Currently, we’ve gotten two quite different kinds of British films: large scale, prestigious pictures, made with an eye on the international market (“A Passage to India,” “The Killing Fields”) and smaller-scale ones (frequently by writer-directors, many of whom are also playwrights) that are quite defiantly indigenous (“The Ploughman’s Lunch,” “A Private Function”) and don’t go out of their way to explain to us a detail of political background or a bit of peculiarly British humor.

To American audiences, both kinds of films are a bonus. Although they may represent the high and low ends of a budget, both are impeccably produced, the material from which most of them are drawn is thought-provoking, and they are concerned with ideas . That last alone separates the English output from the sad fare that most of the domestic studios have been churning out for you and me--and not only in the summertime. It’s the bottom line of what happens when studios are looked upon as profit centers (and little more) for large American corporations that have almost no understanding of the art of film, who do little to encourage the unusual or the “unproven” and who are content with endless variations of safe, popular fare.

To begin at the top of the British fare, look for “Wetherby,” by celebrated British playwright David Hare (“Plenty,” “A Map of the World”), co-first-prize winner for best film at the Berlin festival. To say that this is Hare’s feature-film directing debut is accurate but not the whole story--it ignores a background in serious dramatic features for television that have obviously honed a very special talent. Set in a small Yorkshire village today, the film is about the very English trait of repressing sexuality and emotion and the violent consequences that can result. It is a tour-de-force by Vanessa Redgrave, who makes her character so warmly and intelligently sensual that you suspect the role was created with her in mind. In future years, we may also remember “Wetherby” as our first look at Joely Richardson, who plays Redgrave (her real-life mother) as a teen-ager.

There is also a new Nicolas Roeg film this summer, and like news of a new John Huston film, that is never a dull prospect. “Insignificance” is made from a bright, speculative play by British playwright Terry Johnson about fame, idols and what does or does not lie concealed behind famous facades. Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joe McCarthy are the characters--perhaps. The actors are definitely Teresa Russell, Michael Emil, Gary Busey and Tony Curtis, and you can at least be assured of a rattling good talk on your way home in the car.

Next we should have “Dance With a Stranger,” directed by Mike Newell from a screenplay by Shelagh Delaney based on one of Britain’s great crimes of passion. Newell has been able to evoke the constricted malaise that was the 1950s with deadly accuracy, and he has drawn an electrifying performance from Miranda Richardson (unrelated to the previous Richardsons) as bar hostess Ruth Ellis. Rupert Everett is the chiseled-profile upper-class cad she loves so obsessively.

If you were a fan of “Bullshot Crummond”--that blithe parody played in farce tempo--from any of its stage appearances, the good news is that it has been filmed in England in plummy surroundings with its key original cast (Ron House, Diz White, Alan Shearman) intact. There is no bad news to that announcement.

To move on to the hunches: There is a new John Huston film, “Prizzi’s Honor,” which he has directed from Richard Condon’s labyrinthine novel of love and deceit. The story might be called “Romeo and Juliet in the Mafia”; its lovers are Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner, with Anjelica Huston as Maerose Prizzi, the last third of the triangle. Huston films are rarely inconsequential (give or take a “Victory” or so), and this one may be one of his strongest.

The summer will also bring back the Western, with Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider” the first out of the chute, and Lawrence Kasdan’s “Silverado” following at the end of July. You can feel all Hollywood watching these trial balloons; there may be a rush to the claims office (i.e., the Writers Guild) with a plethora of new titles to register if these two succeed.

Ron Howard’s newest, “Cocoon,” may be one of the summer crossovers, with an appeal for both young and older audiences like his last film, “Splash.” At the very least, a list of its core of central actors--Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, Maureen Stapleton and Wilfred Brimley, Don Ameche and Gwen Verdon, Jack Gilford and Herta Ware--suggest that someone making films recognizes life after 40. (Steve Guttenberg and Tahnee Welch are also involved.) “Life affirming” was the phrase used to describe “Cocoon,” but it you might try it anyway.

Franc Roddam, whose “Quadrophenia” was savage, astute and horrifying as you saw the political climate in England reflected in its young people, has done another sort of horror story: the Frankenstein legend. In “The Bride,” Baron von Frankenstein will be Sting, whose non-musical career was launched in ‘Quadrophenia” (and almost done in by “Dune”), and Jennifer Beals is a creature of the Baron’s own making. This one may be interesting.

If you want a contrast to the high school and college kid idiocies flooding the screens, take a look at the young adults of “1918.” Although these characters are barely out of their teens or into their early 20s, they bear the burdens of adulthood in a very different era--World War I America. This is Horton Foote’s adaptation of his own muted play set in a small Texas town reeling both from war losses and the infamous influenza epidemic that swept the nation. Matthew Broderick, as the pleasantly feckless son of the family, is the film’s best-known name.

“Sylvia” is a film based on the life of New Zealand-born Sylvia Ashton-Warner, who wrote the exceptional book “Teacher,” about her iconoclastic methods of teaching reading, beginning with Maori children. Michael Firth directed.

And changing the mood entirely will be “The Lift,” a mystery/suspense film from Holland so agonizingly taut I could only whimper through it. Guaranteed to do for elevators what “Psycho” did for showers.

About as far away as you can get from tepid summer fare are films--all of them as yet unpreviewed--by some of the cinema world’s most provocative directors: Dusan Makavejev, Jean-Luc Godard, Marco Bellochio and Satyajit Ray.

Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale star in “Emperor Henry IV,” which Marco Bellochio has adapted from Pirandello’s “Henry IV.” Another of Pirandello’s elegant suppositions, this one upon madness and society, the presence of Bellochio, who with “Leap into the Void” has also questioned just those themes, should be exciting.

Eric Roberts stars in Dusan Makavejev’s “The Coca-Cola Kid,” a light comedy set in Australia with Greta Scacchi as his co-star, and Jean-Luc Godard has “The Detective” with Johnny Hallyday, Nathalie Baye and Jean-Pierre Leaud in “a simple but offbeat love story “ or, in Godard’s description, “A man loves a woman who leaves him.”

Finally, the project that writer-director Satyajit Ray had intended for his first film in the late 1940s, his adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Home and the World.” Described as a love story set against the crisis of the 1905 partition of Bengal and the first waves of terrorism, it stars Victor Banerjee (Academy Award nominee for “A Passage to India”) and, in his 12th film for Ray, Soumitra Chatterjee.

The hope is, of course, that the summer fare from such producers as Steven Spielberg, and directors of the quality of John Boorman, Michael Ritchie, James Bridges, Joe Dante and Richard Donner, will be movies for all of us--not just work to appeal to the summer’s mob of teen-agers. We need some sign that American films have begun to turn themselves around from the disastrous course they have been on so far this year. It’s been one of the most profoundly depressing five months within moviegoing memory.