A SUMMER OF SYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS

The thing about freshman survey courses is that they leave your memory stuck with odd, useless burrs of learning, like pant legs after a walk through tall grass. Ec. 1 gave me David Riccardo, an early 19th-Century political economist, and his iron law of wages.

What the iron law of wages is I don’t remember; a pant leg will hold only so much. But the idea of an iron law sticks with me, and it has occurred to me often that the iron law of movies is you had better have someone in view with whom the audience can sympathize strongly.

A sympathetic character, or two, or several, isn’t quite all a film needs, but you’re playing a dangerous game if you try to get along without him or her or them.

“Innerspace,” a summer movie I found a diversionary treat, is at heart a symphony of special effects, an unabashed renewing of the central ploy of “Fantastic Voyage,” that molecular romp with Raquel Welch from 1966.

The Joe Dante film is a high foolishness with no lurking message that could be detected without an electron microscope, except possibly that there are villains in all sizes, which is not exactly hold-the-press news.

But Martin Short and Dennis Quaid are very engaging young actors and, without having to believe in their quandary for two seconds, you can work up a nice, warming sympathy for their emotional states.

Short in particular is the latest in the movies’ long line of likable losers who win in the end on the strength of their enduring innocence. If he can avoid the excesses of calculated nebbishness, otherwise known as shtick, that Chevy Chase and others have learned to unlearn from television, Short has a terrific future.

Robert Benton’s “Nadine” appears not to be knocking everybody dead at the box office, which is a little surprising because Jeff Bridges is one of the most attractive leading men around, even when, as in “Jagged Edge,” he is a person of ambiguous virtue.

His co-star, Kim Basinger, is the moment’s steamiest sex symbol, but she is here displaying other excellent gifts as a characterful comedian.

There may be disappointment that Basinger is not singing a few tunes from the Marquis de Sade songbook, but she and Bridges are both very watchable and enjoyable, which would seem to contradict my iron law of film making. But I think the trouble may lie in a discrepancy between potentially sympathetic characters and a story which doesn’t invite the kind of willing surrender of disbelief you give to “Innerspace.”

“Nadine” is a curiously silly little film of farcical plot and slapstick inventions, indubitably Texan in its atmosphere but superficial and trivial beside the keen and knowing examinations of regional characters Benton has done before, from “Bonnie and Clyde” to “Places in the Heart.”

“Nadine” couldn’t be more expertly done, and Basinger does show new dimensions of wit. But by its tone, “Nadine” becomes a film to be amused by (which I was) rather than involved in. There is sympathy at hand, but it really has no place to go.

But consider the new arrival from England, “Wish You Were Here,” as a triumph of sympathy amid unlovely if often darkly funny events. Although not spelled out as such, it is a kind of prequel to “Personal Services,” which was released earlier this year and starred Rita Walters as a lightly fictionalized version of a colorful, contemporary London madam, Cynthia Payne.

In “Wish You Were Here,” the teen-ager who would grow up to become a madam is played by a previously unknown 16-year-old named Emily Lloyd, who has been justly celebrated in these pages by both Sheila Benson and Roderick Mann.

Written by David Leland, who also wrote “Personal Services,” “Wish You Were Here” is at heart grim stuff, the making of a prostitute. The ingredients include a loving and unhappy mother who dies young, a cold, oppressive and hypocritical father and a provincial life with a suffocatingly low ceiling.

Young Lloyd is in rebellion early, at first only vocally--shouting litanies of naughty words. Later she’s an exhibitionist and then promiscuous, although the sadness of the sex is that it is at the start so obviously a search for caring warmth from somebody, anybody. Beneath the mask of arrogant, plain-spoken toughness is a fragility that is very affecting to see.

It’s impossible to imagine what Emily Lloyd can do for an encore, having begun with perfection. The weird mixture of innocence and premature cynicism, raucous laughter and mute sadness, defeat and affirmation that Leland wrote into the character are all there in Lloyd’s performance, to be seen and felt and regarded with deep and sympathetic affection.

“Wish You Were Here” predicts “Personal Services” as few sequels have been predicted. The two will be interesting to see in sequence. The measure of the sympathy Lloyd commands is that snap moral judgments are impossible to make on the woman the character became.