‘TOUGH GUYS’ LAY A GILT TRIP ON ERA

What the annual Academy Awards telecast, the skein of revival cinemas, the film channels, late-night television generally and the burgeoning sales and rentals of vintage movies all confirm is that the films and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age continue to have an enormous hold on audiences of every age.

How you define the golden age is an interesting question. It certainly lasted well beyond the passing of the founding moguls and well into the time of television. The new rating system, adopted in 1968 as a symbolic confirmation of the fact that the movies no longer played to an undifferentiated mass audience, is probably a useful milestone. The ratings declared that things weren’t what they used to be, and the inference was that they probably wouldn’t be again.

And what the passage of time has done is create a fresh appreciation of the strong values, the majestic craftsmanship and the charismatic star power of the films of the golden age.

The occasional dreadful irony is that the new leadership of the major studios, whatever its vigor and financial acumen, has seemed to have little sense of the past, or of a past that predates last weekend’s grosses. For all the sharp new talents, including the often interchangeable and undifferentiated membership of the Brat Pack, it is hard to escape the feeling that a reservoir of talent (including senior directors) is being underused, just as a reservoir of audience is being neglected in the frenzied rush to get at the young.

But nothing is ever totally true, and on a couple of recent mornings I’ve gone out to watch two of the indubitable superstars of the golden age (and, happily, beyond) work together in a comedy for the new Disney (via its Touchstone Films label).

Burt Lancaster, who is 72, and Kirk Douglas, who is 69, are playing a sort of criminal odd couple in “Tough Guys.” As Harry Doyle and Archie Long, they’ve been sharing a penitentiary cell for 30 years (with a white line down the floor to separate tidiness from shambles).

Now they have been released, curiously innocent, into a world that has changed drastically (although, in the end, it may be that the more things change, etc.). Their old saloon has become a gay bar and Douglas is rehabilitated into working at a yogurt store. In their wide-brim fedoras and even wider-lapeled suits, they seem to have emerged from some place east of “White Heat.”

Their old nemesis, played by Charles Durning, still has an eye on them, and so does a mysterious assailant (Eli Wallach has replaced the late Adolph Caesar, who died even as he waited to do his first scenes).

Douglas and Lancaster have co-starred before several times, most memorably, probably, in “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957) and “Seven Days in May” (1964), but also in “I Walk Alone” (1948), “The Devil’s Disciple” (1959) and in cameos in John Huston’s “The List of Adrian Messenger” in 1964.

In 1981 they also co-starred on stage in San Francisco in “The Boys of Autumn,” in which they played Tom Sawyer (Douglas) and Huck Finn (Lancaster) looking back on their lives. “It was just too strenuous to tour with it,” Lancaster says; “I had to take a heavy fall at every performance and I couldn’t fake it.”

“It needed work,” Douglas adds, “but it was a wonderful play.” (George C. Scott and John Cullum open in it later this month on Broadway.)

“Tough Guys” was written on speculation with them in mind by a team of young Canadian writers, James Orr and James Cruickshank, who, not so incidentally, are longtime fans and, they say, have been doing Lancaster-Douglas imitations at parties for years. “We saw them together on the Oscar show a couple of years ago,” Orr says, “and we said, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s got to be.’ ”

One recent morning the unit was working in a just-abandoned branch building at 3rd and Western, where Douglas was foiling a bank robbery. In one of his unhappy meetings with the outside world, the ex-con was having trouble getting a check cashed. “ Now will you cash my check?” he inquires, having flattened the punk hold-up man.

“Perfect parts for both of us,” Douglas says. He recently had great success in reviews and ratings (outscoring “Tootsie”) with a TV film called “Amos.” “For me,” says Douglas, “a movie for television and a movie-movie are the same. It’s the subject that matters. I’m working on a new project, a subject that you couldn’t do as a movie. By now I have the luxury of choosing. I want to do what’s good to do, and what’ll be fun to do, like this one.”

On another morning, near a housing project just north of downtown Los Angeles, Douglas and Lancaster are buying a paper and meeting their very young probation officer (played by a young comic named Dana Carvey). It’s an expository scene, nothing much to see yet, but the fame of the principals has drawn a large semicircle of watchers at streetside and on the balconies.

Lancaster, who had coronary bypass surgery in 1983, says, “It’s not exactly a film of depth, but I think it’ll be very funny. And it really deals with the plight of old people in a society in which they tend to dump them and stick them off in corners.”

Producers Joe Wizan and co-producers Jana Sue Memel and Richard Hashimoto took the script to the new team at Disney who, Wizan says, bought it almost overnight. Jeff Kanew, who made hundreds of trailers and then directed “Revenge of the Nerds,” is directing “Tough Guys.”

It is forever foolhardy to guess the success of a film in progress, but it will be fascinating to see, next fall, if this starry odd couple (who will, of course, be doing one last heist in the film) finds those audiences who are far from ready to close the gates on the golden age.