Film Too ‘Technical’

“They get into the technical (stuff); how wonderful this shot is, or that special effect. They don’t show the humanity of the people anymore, like they did in the Spencer Tracy movies.”

So laments Frederic Forrest, the veteran character actor and Oscar nominee (for “The Rose”) about these newfangled movies that tend to favor hardware over heart.

The gravelly voiced actor hails his new movie, “Valentino Returns,” as a throwback to the days when movies put a lump in your throat. Forrest plays a philandering ‘50s lounge singer whose wife abruptly leaves him and whose teen-age son has just obtained a sparkling new pink Cadillac, which he takes out to find adventure, romance and sex--but only finds trouble.

Forrest, having been directed by the likes of Francis Coppola, Costa-Gavras and Arthur Penn, did wage the occasional battle with first-time director Peter Hoffman on this project.

“We fought a lot, and I was kind of hard on him, but I had to tell him the actor’s viewpoint,” says Forrest, while stressing that Hoffman showed growth throughout the shoot. “He’d been to film school and so forth, he didn’t know the acting experience as well as someone who had come out of the Actors Studio, but he handled it very well.”

Forrest is finishing up his stint on “The Two Jakes,” which “Joker” Jack Nicholson directs and stars. Forrest, God help him, was on the set the day after Nicholson’s beloved Los Angeles Lakers were swept clean away by the Detroit Pistons.

“Awww, Jack was OK,” said Forrest, who once sauntered up to Nicholson, hoping to enlighten him with a Lakers-Pistons update.

“Don’t mention it, you snake,” says Forrest, affecting an impeccable imitation of Nicholson, “talk to me later, ‘cause I taped it.”