Another Chance to Get ‘Right’

One of the arts of film is the art of bringing them to market, and it is not the least of the cinematic arts, either. The fate of a film rests partly on its merits and its appeal to audiences and partly on how it is opened.

Some choices are easy. You don’t open “Batman” in an art house and wait for word of mouth. You open it on more than 2,000 screens simultaneously, with all the advertising and publicity you can afford. If you bomb, you bomb big, but there’s no other way to go. If you hit, as “Batman” has, the excitement feeds on itself, like a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

There are other films that need time, and the support of that mysterious networking of positive opinion called word of mouth. After a while, critics are not really surprised by the commercial success of films they disliked, or the failure at the box office of artful films they liked. It’s just that the failures are painful, especially when you feel the trouble was in the marketing: the timing of the release or the size of it.

“Harold and Maude,” that magnificently bizarre tale of an early May-late December love affair, was a classic example of bad timing. It opened in the Christmas glut of the big guys and got buried. Later it was revived in the Northwest by a subdistributor who had loved it, and it grew like a climbing rose until it now ranks with “Potemkin” and “Red River” for permanence.

The sadness is that not many of the good little films get such a chance at big-screen reincarnation. Sudden death, and a shrunken afterlife on cassettes, is the prevailing rule.

But there are exceptions. Randal Kleiser’s nice little romantic comedy, “Getting It Right,” is returning Friday on two screens, each in a multiplex cinema. It opened fairly wide originally and came and went with indecent speed, particularly in Los Angeles.

Kleiser is an American whose thesis film at USC, about a family visit to a senile grandmother in a rest home and a young man’s memories of her best years, was so expert and touching that it propelled him into studio work. He did “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” for television, “Grease” and “Blue Lagoon” among other features.

But “Getting It Right” is essentially an English film, adapted by the British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard from her novel. It centers on the awkward romance of two fetching innocents (Jesse Birdsall and Jane Horrocks) but is memorable for lesser but hugely characterful turns by Helena Bonham Carter, Sir John Gielgud, Peter Cook, Shirley Ann Field (“Alfie”) and Lynn Redgrave.

Redgrave, a long way from “Georgy Girl,” plays a sad, wealthy woman whose money is not enough to hold the man she loves and who is becoming an embittered survivor. It is an extremely affecting performance, part of the film’s sharp edge of observance. At the end Kleiser, who directed as well as produced (with Jonathan Krane), pays a visual homage to “Georgy Girl.”

Why “Getting It Right” did not fare better in first release is not certain. The word of mouth was generally positive, but it didn’t have much time to percolate. And, with its little-known principals, it was not an easy film to holler about. It is also, I suppose, the prototypal “nice little film,” which generally has to pray for nice little audiences.

Now, at least, there is a second chance for the word of mouth to catch up.

The videocassette does give orphan films--the ones that didn’t find their customers in first release--another shot at it. Stephanie Edwards of television’s “LA in the Morning” was remarking the other day that she and her husband had rented Francis Coppola’s “Tucker,” had loved it and wondered why audiences had stayed away.

There’s no answer to that, either, except that it opened, unavoidably, in the very dark shadow of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which preempted not only the principal review space but the feature columns as well.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe man-loves-car will never get within range of boy-meets-girl. Then again, maybe “Tucker” too should come back to a couple of screens and let word of mouth have its slow but fateful say.