ROMANTIC IMAGE OF BIG-SCREEN LOVER GETS KISS OF DEATH

In a recent column, I lamented the passing of the Big-Screen Kiss and the decline of the leading man--evidenced by the lack of glamour of such current stars as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mickey Rourke--and attributed part of the problem to the fact that candidates no longer have to pass security at the old studios for screen tests.

The guards used to tell the ugly ones to go around to the service entrance.

Some people agreed with me, some didn’t. That’s the way it is. You could say Ronald Reagan sleeps a lot and somebody would deny it. (“How can anybody sleep with Sam Donaldson yelling at him?”)

Miriam Paschal, of Canoga Park, not only disagreed with the points I made about leading men, the kiss and so on, but suggested I wasn’t even on the right subject.

“First, let’s define our terms, because it’s useless to have a discussion without doing that,” Paschal wrote, then went on to quote the definition of romance from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary as “a tale in verse written in medieval times based chiefly on legend, chivalric love and adventure, or the supernatural.”

Armed with that, Paschal said that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Predator”--a vein-opening adventure movie that became a hit for reasons buried deep in the psyche of adolescent children--is, by definition, romantic because it is about both adventure and the supernatural.

That is the first definition of romance in Webster’s Third, all right. The pertinent one to me--”a love, love affair, or marriage of a romantic nature”--is buried all the way down in definition 4a, which raises questions about Webster’s staff. But it’s there, so for anybody who thought I was complaining about Hollywood turning its back on Chaucer, it is the first act of physical love--namely, the kiss, with lips as big as rowboats--that I miss most in movies.

An example. Last year, during a very bad movie called “About Last Night,” Rob Lowe and Demi Moore were shown making passionate love as part of a rock video interlude that was inserted for no apparent reason other than to help sell the film’s sound-track album.

Modern merchandising is definitely one of the problems. Music used to be written to enhance romantic moments in movies. Now they write in whatever they need to help sell a film’s music.

To the actors’ credit, the sex in “About Last Night” was better than the song. But think about the scene in “Vertigo” where James Stewart and Kim Novak kiss while the camera spins around them and Bernard Herrmann’s score surrounds them with volts of sexual electricity.

“Movie kisses today resemble drilling for oil,” wrote Melody Suppes, of Palos Verdes. “Kissing on TV makes you laugh out loud! It’s arm-wrestling with lips!”

Even those few actors attempting to carry on in the grand tradition of the big-screen kiss are sloppy at it. No one has ever shown more enthusiasm than Richard (Vacuum Lips) Gere working with Debra Winger in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” but any of the old-time stars could have gotten the job done without getting Winger’s nose wet.

Suppes pointed out that Fred Astaire, who was not exactly the physical ideal of women moviegoers in his day, was nonetheless the epitome of the romantic leading man. She recalled a scene from “Silk Stockings” in which Astaire reaches his arm around Cyd Charisse, who is seated on the floor next to him. It’s a romantic moment that Suppes says always “curls my toes.”

“With one smooth, fluid, romantic gesture, Fred Astaire leans down to slip his arm around her waist (to) raise her to her feet and tug her forward till she has fallen to his chest and into his arms. . . . ‘I love the look of you, the lure of you; I’d love to make a tour of you,’ he sings.”

It’s not Mickey Rourke giving an ice cube a real tour of Kim Basinger in “9 1/2 Weeks,” or Dennis Hopper stuffing a wad of the title cloth in Isabella Rossellini’s mouth in “Blue Velvet.” But it plays.

Paschal said that in bemoaning the missing idealism of the ‘30s-’50s, I am out of step with the times.

“Don’t you realize that the demands of filmgoers today reflect the attitudes that are a direct result of the social revolution of the ‘60s?,” she asked.

I’m not sure. I don’t want to say anything bad about the social revolution of the ‘60s. It was a lot of fun. So were the movies then, and in the early ‘70s. In the last 10 years, the general run of movies has been so bad--just on a storytelling basis, forget romance--that I’m more inclined to think the people running the studios are out of step.

Someone else mentioned that big-screen romance has become an endangered turn-on because of the demographic swing in moviegoing audiences. The movies in the era of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power and Cary Grant were made for family viewing and carefully crafted to work on two levels.

Mom and Dad could indulge themselves in the romantic fantasy while the kids clung to the adventure. With the parents home watching TV, there’s no need for film makers to waste screen time on romance, and with advances in makeup and special effects, adventure has been taken to new heights.

That explains what happened to movies. Now, if someone can just come up with an excuse for TV.