‘ROXANNE’ HAS ITS HEART IN AN INTELLIGENT PLACE

There was an interview with Anne Bancroft once that contained one of the most inadvertently revealing glimpses into a marriage I can remember. She said that when she hears the sound of her husband Mel Brooks’ car in the driveway, she thinks, “Great! Now the fun begins.”

And I also remembered another story attributed to the Bancroft/Brooks menage: They’d been having a brisk family set-to, and he put his hand on her arm. Quivering with an actress’ indignation, she is supposed to have said, “Don’t you touch me. My body is my instrument!!”

To which Brooks’ is supposed to have replied, interestedly, “Yeah? Let’s hear it play ‘Melancholy Baby,’ ” a remark that ended the hostilities in a fit of giggles.

Now all of this may or may not be true. I hope it is, because it’s not only a great retort, it’s a great example of one of the most saving qualities in any relationship: a wild and generous sense of humor.

Both these stories popped into my head as I watched “Roxanne” for a second time. It is a movie crammed with marvelous qualities: generosity, invention, an up-to-date romanticism and an enveloping beauty, but its niftiest qualities by far are its intelligence and its humor.

As many readers may know by now, in Steve Martin’s reworking of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Daryl Hannah plays a 1980s Roxanne to Martin’s Cyrano, now called C.D. Bales, the fire chief in a small, magically idyllic ski-resort town. At a point near the movie’s end, the two are having one whale of a fight, which finishes on her porch in the gathering dark.

“You get out!!” she says to him, fiercely.

“I am out,” he says, just as adamantly. “You get in!!”

Now there is just enough of the absurd in that exchange to suggest that life together for these two might have some Brooks/Bancroft echoes of its own--briskly funny brouhahas. As reinvented by Martin and lyrically directed by Australian Fred Schepisi, this Cyrano and Roxanne are a bright and outspoken pair. And they begin their romance from a rare point in contemporary movies: Each one admires the working of the other’s mind.

Not that bodies are exempt from the equation; each one is capable of being dazzled by outward appearances as well--C.D. by Roxanne’s lioness’ looks, Roxanne by the rugged exterior of Chris, the new man at the fire station. She mistakes his paralytic shyness for the reserve of a man who holds a little something back, while we know that Chris will turn out to have something less interesting than kapok between his ears. (In the meantime, we can see as plainly as the nose on his face that C.D. is a rare blend of agility, athleticism and a nicely inquiring mind--if only one looks beyond that nose.)

Roxanne, an astronomer, clearly yearns for parity in a relationship; she’s hungry for a man she can share things with and whom she can learn from. And when C.D. even contemplates the idea of writing letters to woo her for another man, it’s because of the challenge she presents. As he says, “For Roxanne you need something . . . startling. Something so deeply felt, so direct that it would make her incapable of being reasonable.”

The movie makers have, in fact, built in a parallel to Rostand’s plumed and velveted aristocrats: “Roxanne’s” privileged class are its smart people. Not soulless wisecrackers or glib mouthers-off--those exist in the movie only to be deftly punctured--but people for whom the world in all its astonishing forms and variety holds an infinite fascination. People who talk and read and look at the stars and speculate. What a pleasant thesis for a mass-market American movie, the snakebite kit for the killer notion that material success at any price is the name of the game we’re all playing.

In Martin’s canny adaptation, however, he’s created a new character to smooth out the intellectual inequities. Rick Rossovich’s rough-hewn Chris is so in awe of Roxanne that he’s a simpleton in her presence. But Chris--just as he is, a guy who is knocked out by the redwoods (“I just like to go there and be “) and who mentions the meat sandwich he invariably takes for this communion--sounds worldly wise to Sandy, the pert bartender who has aspirations of dealing blackjack in Vegas. In turn, Sandy is someone who won’t poach on another woman’s territory, another relative rarity as movies go.

“Roxanne’s” surroundings go a long way toward creating the idea that bright is beautiful. This British Columbia town of Nelson, standing in for an Aspen-like ski town in July, has been lit and decorated so that it glows with homeyness and reassurance. It has white frame houses, convivial front porches, a sense of almost enchanted timelessness and warmth. C.D.’s house is a magpie’s nest of interests, crammed with books on every subject from seashells to carpentry, with the Chagall print that he will write about so seductively over his fireplace and the Chicago Manual of Style on top of his desk.

Martin is even clear-eyed enough to suggest that these idyllic-looking retreats where the ski bum is king can be something of a trap for someone whose interests extend beyond the tips of his ski poles. As he sees the newly arrived Roxanne for the first time one evening, doe-naked and locked out of her summer-rental house, there’s an exchange between the two on the subject of irony. C.D. comments that, living in a place “where people ski topless while smoking dope, irony is sort of wasted,” and he’s become tired of being its only practitioner.

We probably shouldn’t be surprised at this tack from Martin as a writer; most of his films have had a springboard that could only be called philosophical. In “The Man With Two Brains,” he wooed a disembodied cerebrum, and in “All of Me” he became entangled in a literal mind-body split. More than one reviewer has noted that he was a philosophy major in college, after all. What gives “Roxanne” its zing is that both Martin’s loose-limbed, authoritative physicality and his un-show-offy mental dexterity are combined so sweetly and so successfully.

Although the heart of the story is still C.D.’s struggles to be seen for the wonder he is, there’s a suspicion that the Roxannes of today’s world may have their work cut out for them as well. Imagine, prizing romance above all, preferring a fully rounded man to one whose development stops at his shoulders. As we walked out of the theater in Westwood, a Chris-clone was grumbling to his buddy: “I wouldn’t want a girl with an attitude like that.” Hang in there, Roxanne. Nobody said it would be easy, but “Roxanne” shows us its infinite rewards.