LOW-BUDGET MOVIE FARE: LESS IS MORE

“Money isn’t everything” is probably the great unlearned lesson of all time. If King Midas had only bothered to say, “I got my health; that’s enough,” how different his life might have been.

The idea that all a movie needs is a very large budget has been proved true about as often as Andy Devine used to get the girl. Yet, as Jack Valenti admitted a few weeks ago, the average cost of a Hollywood studio movie last year went beyond $16 million, and that was before a dime had been spent for prints, advertising or distribution.

The number of those big-ticket flicks to turn a profit will prove to be very small. But the cry, always, is that “it only takes one,” which is what tapped-out gamblers have been saying for years, even as they take scissors to the fray on their cuffs.

What is true is that the self-righteous film lover lies in wait for the nice little film that proves once again that money isn’t everything. And the nice little film still comes along just often enough to make the point.

“3 Men and a Cradle,” Coline Serreau’s warm-hearted little farce-fantasy from France cannot have cost a lot of francs, but it is a small, sentimental enchantment that I suspect will pay off far better than roulette.

Her tale of three swinging Parisian bachelors trying to diaper a leaky infant at one end and feed it 3 a.m. bottles at the other is a cleverly engineered comedy. But it rests upon and builds upon a kind of growing tripartite paternal love that is wonderful to watch.

The gents are demoralized when Mama arrives to reclaim her daughter, and even a return to sex and games is no consolation for them (a heretical notion not frequent in recent films).

Rob Nilsson’s “On the Edge” is a hugely different film, resembling “3 Men and a Cradle” only in that the creative passion was obviously larger than the budget (which would not, I suspect, have been enough to underwrite a single battle scene in “North and South”).

But the film is a labor of love, or obsession. Bruce Dern as a distance runner returning out of a troubled past to compete in the annual Dipsea race up and down Mt. Tamalpais brings a sense of personal commitment to the story that gives “On the Edge” an emotional credibility that is always rare in movies.

Dern, who calculates with some precision that he has run 105,000 miles since he took it up 40 years ago (at the age of 9), is a man who looks transcendently happy even as you imagine his lungs feel like furnaces and his legs have a numb life of their own. He ran 400 miles in the making of “On the Edge.”

The scenery on the Mill Valley-Stinson Beach run (the race is called something else for the purposes of the movie) is stunning. But more important is the film’s unmatched power to convey that this is what distance running is really like and this is why people feel almost mystical about it.

(Dern did ultra-running, 50 miles at a clip, as to San Diego over a weekend, to assuage his career frustrations during the ‘60s. He still does up to six miles a day.)

“On the Edge” may never be a wide-audience success like “3 Men and a Cradle,” but it resonates with care and authenticity, and its emotional finish, suggesting that the camaraderie of the sport is as important as winning, is very affecting.

Not all little pictures are inexpensive, or successful. The new Sissy Spacek film, “Violets Are Blue,” has to have cost six to 10 times at least what either of the others cost. It has a well-observed feeling of place (Ocean City, Md.). But something went awry in the personal dynamics.

I found myself remembering “Blume in Love,” in which the sympathetic charm of Marsha Mason as the other woman quite confused the intended screen relationship between George Segal and Susan Anspach as his ex-wife. The chemistries didn’t mix quite right.

In “Violets Are Blue,” the appeal of Bonnie Bedelia as Kevin Kline’s wife is so strong that her presence dominates the screen even when she’s not on it. Spacek, intended to be the strong and sympathetic center of the film, a woman paying the price for opting for career over love, emerges less as victim than as homewrecker.

Despite some apparent reediting, and despite Spacek’s attractive pre-existing image from “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Missing” and much else, it is a very uncomfortable outing.

But it remains true that in film, less can be more, price is no guarantee of anything, and intimacy is still one of the qualities the very large screen delivers very well indeed.