RADIO FREE ‘NAM

Entering the cobalt-blue and Chinese-red garishness of Jimmy Wah’s Bar, U.S. servicemen Robin Williams and Forest Whitaker rate shrieks of welcome from the eponymous, swivel-hipped proprietor, played by Cu Ba Nguyen. Showing the GIs to a window table, Nguyen asks conspiratorially if there’s been “any movement on the Donald O’Connor thing,” a reference to his fruitless, three-year quest for nude photos of the actor.

But before the subject can be explored further, Williams glimpses beautiful Chintara Sukapatana passing in the street--and bolts. “It’s just damn good to know I can love again,” he says. “And now that I know that, there are a few other things I’d like to try.”

In many ways this is another variation on a scene from the hundreds of service comedies from “What Price Glory?” (WW I) to Donald O’Connor’s own guys-and-geishas “Cry for Happy” (WW II) to “MASH” (Korean conflict).

But it’s also different, because we’re on the set of “Good Morning, Vietnam,” the first film to find any humor in the “police actions” that dominated American headlines and cut up the American psyche between 1963 and 1975. For the $14-million project that Barry Levinson (“Diner,” “Tin Men”) is directing for Christmas release by Touchstone/Disney, production designer Roy Walker transformed Bangkok into Saigon, as he did for “The Killing Fields.”

“Vietnam--serious!” pronounced Levinson, sopping wet after a morning of shooting in 100-degree-plus heat. “Vietnam means soldiers fighting, it’s a bad war, a negative war. That’s why, when I first heard about this script (by Mitch Markowitz), I thought I didn’t want to do it. Then I read it and I went, ‘Oh my God, how naive, how narrow-minded I am, in a sense.’ Because there are always many, many kinds of moods and emotions that are at play in war and in peace. You have tragedy in peace and you have humor at times in war.

“You forget that the thing spanned 12 years and there was an everyday life that went on that didn’t relate directly to the soldiers fighting. There were people who lived here, there were Vietnamese who had lives and went about their business, went to school and ran shops and interrelated in a very ordinary way with the soldiers.

“So we’ve just moved the camera from there to here, to ask: Who were these people? What were they doing? What were some soldiers doing that didn’t even go out there? What, for instance, were soldiers doing that worked on the radio?”

The film presents Williams as real-life Armed Forces Radio deejay Adrian Cronauer, whose elongated “Goooood morning, Vietnam” sign-on was heard in “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon.”

The movie takes considerable liberties with Cronauer’s experiences. But it uses his known iconoclasm as the jumping-off point for a series of broadcasts that precipitate a conflict with Army brass. And it takes advantage of his known presence in Saigon in 1965, when the U.S. presence was still comparatively small and the city was regarded as the Paris of the Orient, to propel him into relationships with the Chintara character and her brother.

Probably the wildest, most irreverent moments occur in the broadcasts. Cronauer gives voice to the average unsophisticated GI’s response to an alien culture while spoofing the official double-speak. (There’s a scurrilous mock interview between Cronauer-Williams and Richard Nixon, based on a real Cronauer broadcast, though spliced together from tapes of the President’s voice.)

The broadcasts, said Larry Brezner, who is Williams’ manager, developer of the script and co-producer, provide the actor with “his first logical, motivated film showcase” for the mad monologuizing in which he has excelled in other formats.

And the other producer, Mark Johnson, said the teaser trailer now in theaters that shows Williams in quipster deejay mode is the first step in introducing a possibly resistant public to the notion of “Vietnam funny.”

Ironically, the broadcasts are the most troubling aspect of the film for Williams: “That’ll be the fine line. How funny can you get without . . . I don’t want to bust up some (veteran’s) memories up, I don’t want to mock.”

Less threatening are the scenes in which he interacts with other noncoms. Not only is bureaucracy always a safe target, but this material also places him within an ensemble context. And Levinson has perfected the art of directing male ensembles.

Said Williams: “He picks faces that maybe even Fellini would go, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ ”

“More real” is what Robin Williams said his scenes in the Vietnamese community have become in the four years that he and Larry Brezner have been involved in the project. Though they inspire conflict-of-two-cultures comedy, the Vietnamese characters have become “more full-figured and, unlike the Vietnamese in most any film I can think of, neither victims nor villains.”

One of them is revealed to be a Viet Cong terrorist--”who speaks ,” said Brezner, “and we hear what a terrorist has to say”--and this revelation brings reality home to Williams. By this point in the story, that reality is also being reinforced visually by the increased American presence in the streets of Saigon.

Williams’ desire to perform realistically in the scenes with the Vietnamese was behind his decision not to meet with the real Cronauer before playing him: “I think I’m putting more of myself into (this character) than into anything I’ve ever done before.”

In fact, his performance in these scenes amounts to psychodrama as a reflection of the cultural adjustment Williams has had to make and the restraint he’s had to cultivate while on location in Thailand.

“You learn very quickly that jokes about the royal family and about religion are out,” he said. “The royal family is massively respected and I’m fascinated by Thai Buddhism, which implies that you take responsibility because you’re coming back. If you put people on hold,” the irrepressible actor yielded to the temptation to joke, “you come back as a William Morris agent.”

Getting serious again: “And there’s the dichotomy between the delicacy of Thai dancing and Thai boxing, which is one of the most brutal sports. And between Patpong (site of sex shows usually associated with the Tijuana and Havana of yesteryear and of countless ‘massage’ parlors) and this incredible respect for women.”

“It’s not,” said Williams, “like going back each night to your house in Westwood and saying, ‘Hey, I understand. ‘ This forces you to get out among another language and another people and not have it all together, to realize that they may be laughing at you--just like the movie.”