Bubble, Bubble, Fizzle and Stumble : About chemistry: some have it, some don’t--why?

Chemistry. Political parties have fallen because of it. Think Japan. Presidential candidates have been defeated because they “lacked” it. Think Dukakis. It’s a buzzword, an easy out, a press agent’s delight, a press secretary’s nightmare.

And though it seems to have held sway in the movies forever, the movies on this summer’s screens seem to absolutely bubble with it. Or fizzle for the lack of it.

So, what is it? Is it purely sexual? Two feral stars, attracting each other with the inevitability of the old Black and White Scotty dog magnets? Or is it a great script and smart actors? Neither? Both? Can it be faked? Can it be created? Inquiring minds want to know.

A quick look at some of the notable high-chemistry combinations should give us a few clues:

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. William Powell and Myrna Loy. Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine. Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, and Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx.

OK. Here we have stars who were/were not/never could be/possibly were/or absolutely were fatally attracted to each other. And others who absolutely could not stand the sight of one another. And until we read about it afterwards, the on-screen results could have fooled anyone.

So, it’s safe to say that for screen chemistry to exist you don’t need off-screen attraction, pleasant as it may be for the participants. You do need what the Italians call a certain tensione that charges the air around these characters until it’s as palpable as ozone. But that exists between Caine and Connery as plainly as it seems to between, say Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. It’s there between the lines, which brings up the next point.

You may notice that up there, acting as our surrogates, most of our chemistry-full couples have had memorable things to say to one another. From this you might quite sensibly believe that a good part of the chemical equation comes from the printed page. And with great lines and a canny director, even a warring couple or an actor with contempt for his co-star, or an actress who hates every inch of her partner can fool us all. Believe it.

Chemistry can also be individual; sometimes great chemistry is an introduction waiting to be made. There are actors now who supply more than half of a pair--Barbra Streisand, Sean Connery, Tom Hanks, Cher, Harrison Ford, Bette Midler, James Garner, Nick Nolte among them. The trick becomes pairing them with just the right element to make the necessary explosion. For misfires, see Allison Doody (“Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”) with either Ford or Connery; Ford with Helen Mirren in “Mosquito Coast,” or Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver in “Ghostbusters II,” where the mutual tepidity was a dead stand-off.

Lack of chemistry comes from a certain inertness. The bones, the planes, every crucial physical requirement is there, but a certain spark is missing, a feistiness, a tensile strength, a suggestion (frequently false) of intelligence simmering somewhere there behind the eyes. Humor . How many glossy photographs have been cranked out over the years of stunning creatures who were beautiful but numb. Won’t work. Never has. Meanwhile, our imagination is caught by some off-beat configuration with a suggestion of the devil lurking somewhere: Shirley MacLaine. Claude Rains. Humphrey Bogart. Jack Lemmon. (With our worldwide fascination with beauty, odds are that the mold-breakers will be men more

often than women.)

So where are the possessors of the hottest-working chemistries right now? Spread over a range of films, from expensive extravaganzas such as “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” to mini-budgeted charmers such as “sex, lies and videotape.” And, like some of the great combinations of the past, they’re not all entwined lovers, they’re buddies (Mel Gibson and Danny Glover) or even family (Sean Connery and Harrison Ford). A few are relatively new to mass audiences: Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal; Andie MacDowell and James Spader. And then there’s Tom Hanks and his dewlapped, slobbering co-star “Hooch,” a.k.a. Beasley.

Which brings up another point. Get an inventive editor and a few thousand feet of reaction shots and you can sometimes create chemistry: Bob Hoskins and Roger Rabbit, Diane Keaton and those tiny charmers in “Baby Boom,” Hanks and “Hooch.” Each of these actors brings a monstrous amount of charisma, star quality, bedrock likability or whatever you want to call it to the equation. They carry their own chemistry with them. Team that with a malleable co-star, an adorable baby, a rubber-faced rabbit, a hilariously funny-ugly dog, and you can build something from virtually nothing . . . except an actor’s heroic effort.

What do our summer’s wonders have? Well, the ones who will be “discovered” in their movies have the bolstering of intriguing screenplays behind them: Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, scrapping, wrangling, finding friendship before they find love, but always, always with that tensione lurking. That would be Nora Ephron’s script and Rob Reiner’s affable direction of “When Harry Met Sally . . . “

The chemistry between the luminous Andie MacDowell and the preternaturally interesting James Spader in “sex, lies and videotape” comes partly from the fascination of their subject: love, sex, and the mess we’re currently making of both, and partly from drawn-out delicacy and innuendo of their scenes together. Their characters are many-layered: she is a sexually somnolent wife, he is an enigmatic rolling stone, emotionally guarded, verbally candid and probing. In the hands of writer-director Steven Soderbergh, this combination virtually mesmerizes audiences.

Over on the action front, the scripts range from the serviceable (“Indiana Jones”) to the appalling (“Lethal Weapon 2”), but it doesn’t dim the personal chemistry in the least. Connery and Ford, Gibson and Glover, by a miracle of timing, affability, experience and humor, shoulder their films and carry them with the ease of a knapsack. And when you consider the sheer silliness of what Gibson and Glover are up to, that’s no small accomplishment. Somehow, we become involved with these men, we believe their fraudulent, sitcom families, their improbable pasts, everything their writers want us to, purely because of the sparks generated between these two deeply likable men, with perhaps an edge of affection toward Glover.

What is it that we wish for these miraculous people with their ineffable chemistry? I suspect it’s something quite simple. We want their love affairs, their friendships, their family relationships to work . Or if they must end in death or separation, let it be a sacrifice for a cause, like “Casablanca” or a raging, four-handkerchief cry like “Wuthering Heights” or “Terms of Endearment.” Death is an acceptable ending; ennui is not. The notion that Scarlett’s flouncing or Nick Charles’ incipient alcoholism or Charley Partanna’s thudding stupidity finally wore out Rhett or Nora or Maerose is not what anyone wants to know. That they can find a little closer to home.

From our chemistry majors, we want greater proof of fidelity than we see around us, a well-balanced formula for eternal devotion, if only for an hour or two, on a movie screen.