THE UNSEEN SECURITY AT CANNES

Forget that gloomy image of the French Riviera as an armed camp during the Cannes Film Festival, which began its 12-day run here Thurday.

While the 12,000 festival participants were feeling the pinch of tighter security inside the Palais headquarters, life along the Croisette, the beachfront artery of this resort town, appeared to be business as usual.

The sun was out, the women’s bathing tops were off, and it was elbow-room-only for the amateur and professional photographers standing along the beach wall trying to capture the spring rites on film.

Although no one can provide a figure, there are a lot fewer Americans in Cannes this year. One Cannes tourist official estimated that as many as 20% of the Americans originally scheduled canceled following the U.S. raid on Libya four weeks ago. “We are sad that some of our American friends stayed away this year,” said Michel Bonnet, secretary general of the festival. “There are good American films here and we will miss the big American stars. But the show must go on.”

Bonnet and other French officials insist that the show is going on without extraordinary security measures being taken. It is, he said, a matter of enforcing security guidelines that have previously existed.

Most of those measures apply in the Palais, where guards are randomly picking out bags for inspection and turning away anyone without a pass. (Talking their way in has been a tradition for savvy festival freeloaders for years.)

Journalists inside are having to leave their bags at a hat-check station during press screenings. On Thursday, photographers were evicted from the press room before director Roman Polanski appeared for a press conference following the screening of his new $30-million film “Pirates.”

That policy will be reviewed on a day-to-day and conference-to-conference basis, depending on the people involved and their concern for security, said press liaison Lucius Barre.

Bonnet acknowledged that the overall 900-man Cannes security force--police and private guards--is about 25% above last year, but said that was partially due to a larger film program this year.

However, one uniformed policeman working near the Palais told The Times he was one of more than 200 members of the riot-trained CRS--France’s national police force--who were sent down from Paris.

“We’re not usually used for this kind of event,” the officer said. “We have been told to expect nothing and expect everything.”

Americans flying into Nice this week expected everything in the way of security and got almost nothing.

Several veteran American Cannes-goers said security seemed more lax this year than ever before. In fact, Times photographer Randy Leffingwell, traveling with 380 pounds of camera equipment, was passed through customs and airport security without being asked to open his baggage, show his passport or produce luggage tags.

To many of the Americans, the ease with which they were passed through the airport seemed intentional.

A lone airport official, answering the phone on France’s Ascension Day holdiay, denied that agents have been instructed to give Americans special treatment.

Bonnet said that the Nice airport, and the more popular areas of Cannes, are being watched closely by plainclothes police. There have been no threats of violence since the Libyan raid, he said, and there was no reason to expect anything to happen.

“Every year there is some kind of tension for some country here,” he said. “This year, the focus is stronger because it is America.”

ROAMIN’ AROUND: Roman Polanski’s “Pirates” opened the festival Thursday to a polite but restrained response from the journalists who got the first look at it.

“Pirates,” a high-seas comedy set for a summer release in the States, stars Walter Matthau as a 16th-Century peg-legged low-life who inspires a mutiny aboard a Spanish galleon.

Matthau is among the celebrity no-shows here, so Polanski handled most of the press conference questions himself, responding in English, French and Polish.

Polanski, who jumped bail after his 1977 Los Angeles conviction of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was treated very kindly by the press in Cannes. In fact, he had to help one journalist who broached his fugitive status by asking, “Do you plan to make any films in America?”

“If you want to ask the question and stop beating around the bush,” Polanski said, calmly, “when I go back to America, it will be to clear up my legal problems for my own peace of mind.

“I admire America as a society but I don’t intend to live there. I consider myself a European.”

BOND STOCK: If Roger Moore had anything to say about it, his successor as James Bond would be “Remington Steele” star Pierce Brosnan.

Moore, who has a home near Cannes, told a lunch companion Thursday that Ireland-born Brosnan, an Irishman, has the debonair, refined quality that Ian Fleming strived for in the books.

Bond producer Albert (Cubby) Broccoli took the usual space in front of the Carlton Hotel this year to promote the next Bond movie, whose working title is “The Living Daylights,” and the word was that the new Bond would be announced during the festival.

If the actor is named, it probably will not be Brosnan. NBC reportedly has not decided whether to renew “Steele” for another season. Until it makes that decision, Brosnan cannot commit to Bond.