Contradictions of Casting--a Puzzlement : Movies: Superstars offer one set of problems, unknowns another.

Up to its last reel, “Stanley and Iris” was a very promising film. It centered on an important issue (adult illiteracy); it carried an authentic sense of blue-collar urban America; it featured two of the biggest stars in the business, Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro. It sank with hardly a ripple.

Despite the charismatic presence of Paul Newman in a fine performance, “Blaze” flickered out disappointingly.

At the other end of the issue “Mountains of the Moon,” an impressively scaled historical epic with two exciting but unknown actors in the two major roles, has not found the audiences you would have thought it deserved and might get.

As the late king of Siam might have observed, it’s a puzzlement.

What the evidence says, and it is part of the risk in a high-risk business, is that stars cannot save a picture audiences don’t want to see. But casting unknowns means that a movie had better have a very strong and appealing script.

The plus of casting stars is their bankability. The money people are willing to lend money on the strength of the stars’ visibility and track records. The real risk is that the stars carry with them all the baggage of their previous performances and, perhaps more important, of all their publicity.

The charge against Jane Fonda, having nothing to do with her present or past politics, was simply that she is by now too well known as a super-successful careerist to be persuasive as an oppressed assembly line worker in a bakery. And De Niro, although he has been at home in blue-collar country much of his career, was also thought to be too successful to pass muster as a well-spoken cafeteria drudge who is also illiterate.

(There is evidence that some adult illiterates develop considerable speaking skills to help hide their illiteracy, but it’s a footnote point.)

It’s the miracle of star acting that audiences willingly suspend their disbeliefs to accept Dustin Hoffman as an autistic savant, for example, or Meryl Streep as an Australian housewife or Tom Cruise as a rage-filled paraplegic. But when that suspension of disbelief doesn’t happen--and it may well have nothing do with the acting as acting--there is hell to pay in the accounting department.

It may well be that the customers didn’t give two hoots about Gov. Earl Long and the fetching stripper who came into his life, and it didn’t make any difference who enacted him. It may be, to some degree, that Paul Newman has been Northern urban so often that red galluses and a corn-pone accent only reveal the actor acting.

That, finally, is the real challenge, to conceal all the artifices of which the movies are built. When a movie works, the acting as acting is invisible; music, photography and all the rest become, as it were, merely inevitable, and the surrender to the dream is total. When it doesn’t work, you’re watching a movie and you know it.

In certain instances, like John Waters’ current “Cry-Baby,” knowing it’s an outrageous camp on the movies is the whole idea, and the frenetic joke is its own pleasure. But when you’re meant to be there , in Waterbury or Louisiana, and you aren’t, quite, it’s a problem.

There is an irony in speculating that “Mountains of the Moon” might have been a more substantial box-office success with star actors in its two key roles. Patrick Bergin and Iain Glen were splendid as the explorers Richard Burton and John Speke, and they almost certainly have conspicuous careers ahead of them. (There is a further irony in that their admirers will then want to look back and see “Mountains of the Moon” again.)

Despite the spectacular African scenery, the robust drama, the high emotions and the evident passion director Bob Rafelson brought to the project, its historical basis is not widely known and without the “holler” of star names, an exceptional film has had hard going.

It’s a further complication, but true to say, that the presence of Tom Cruise and his pre-existing image as one of the sexiest young stars around was an immeasurable help to “Born on the Fourth of July.” His performance, one of the best of any year, was an almost total departure from his image, although the glimpses of the handsome young Cruise as the pre-Vietnam Ron Kovic heightened the tragedy of the later Kovic in his wheelchair.

The relentless intensity of the film made it a grueling experience; it would I’m sure have been an even harder sell without the lure of Cruise as being not just young and appealing but self-effacingly brilliant.

Daniel Day-Lewis had had the beginnings of a fine career before “My Left Foot,” with memorable roles in “Room With a View,” “My Beautiful Laundrette” and a superb leading part in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” But in “My Left Foot” he was unrecognizable, as unknown as a known actor has been since John Hurt was the Elephant Man. The fiery and uncompromised nature of his portrayal of Christy Brown generated the word of mouth that made it a star-creating role and led to that thunderous, spontaneous standing ovation at the Academy Awards.

What seems finally true is that there are virtually no stars the customers will go to see in anything these days. Eddie Murphy perhaps. Which actress? Who else? Stars will generally enhance the success of a successful script (Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams”). Relative unknowns can enhance the charm of a successful script (the players in “sex, lies, and videotape” and “Mystic Pizza”) and may become stars in the process.

But if there are puzzlements about casting, and there surely are, the iron law, unrusted since it was announced early in the 17th Century, is still that the play’s the thing.