LONG AND MIDLER STRIKE IT RICH WITH ‘FORTUNE’

It’s a long way to come for a movie, but by some good fortune of my own I caught up with Shelley Long and Bette Midler in “Outrageous Fortune” at a crowded screening in the Ziegfeld Theater here.

I don’t remember hearing quite the same raucous, continuous laughter since the first screening of “The Odd Couple” many a year ago.

Some of the dialogue would curl Harold Robbins’ remaining hair, and since the script of “Outrageous Fortune” was written by a demonstrably talented young woman named Leslie Dixon, it is fair to say that some kind of gender-blind linguistic parity exists now and forever.

Yet context is everything. It seemed to me that the raunchy explicitness of the talk, startling as some of it is, retains a curious kind of innocence, like Mae West’s sexy joshing of sex or like those burlesque show sketches that made sex a laughing matter by taking the postures of courtship to such preposterous lengths.

Burlesque found a lot of its humor in borrowing and mocking the euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations and double-entendres by which sex was cloaked (and made to seem the dirtier) in an earlier time. Let it be said for “Outrageous Fortune” that the entendres are as singular as they get and the innuendoes would fell a horse.

What can be seen and heard is that there is something oddly cleansing about forthright language when it is blurted en route, as for example amid the wild and non-stop action of “Outrageous Fortune.”

Watching Long and Midler become pals as they tussle over a vile seducer who has done them both wrong, it occurred to me yet again how actors must lie in wait for the perfect role the way surfers bob in wait for the perfect wave.

You can work a lot and win fame and fortune, but somewhere out there is that one role that fits like the crown to your very own kingdom, or queendom.

The Bette Midler of the silver screen has been excellent, never more so than in her heavily dramatic role in “The Rose.” But until now, I think, she has never had a character part to match, or to evoke, the full, rampant, strutting, curse-the-torpedoes, raise-the-drawbridge-I’m-comin’-through majesty of her concert persona.

She is a life-force, a one-woman parade, an irresistible object. Yet even in the farcical precincts of “Outrageous Fortune,” she can give you a moment of quiet concern and vulnerability that in the context of the film is just as startling as the truck-stop language.

Shelley Long has also left no doubt, in films like “Irreconcilable Differences” and “The Money Pit” and on television’s estimable “Cheers,” that she is a comedienne of intelligence, high style and attractiveness. What is now even more evident than before is that she has the most eloquent eyes in town and a vocabulary of wordless responses unmatched since the silents.

She does the Double Take, the Slow Burn, the Dawning Realization, the Rising Gorge, the Birth of Love, the Triumphant Smirk and the ever-popular Feigned Innocence, all with a wide range of shadings between--not least the Crafty Scheme, revealed as a glint in narrowed eyes. She manages all this, and with an allure that works both plain and rumpled.

The women tend to obscure everyone else in sight, but Peter Coyote carries on bravely, and delivers an ambiguity--good guy/bad guy--that is the engine which drives the plot.

Directors must also lie in wait for the perfect script. Arthur Hiller, who created an earlier gem of continuous comedy--both physical and characterful--in “Silver Streak,” has struck it rich again. He delivers the full measure of Leslie Dixon’s ceaselessly eventful script and the unfettered energy of those two actresses who, in their outrageous misalliance are, of course, perfectly matched.