COMMENTARY : Hollywood’s Feel-Good Fantasies : Long a staple of the movie business, tales of improbable romance appeal to emotions that may be imprinted on our genes

It is a sign of the times that when a movie without heavy artillery, a high body count, a zillion bucks worth of special effects or a year of advance publicity does well at the box office, we think of it as a “sleeper.” We’re shocked--slapped awake--by the realization that there remains a huge audience for movies that don’t yell in your face and bite your ears, but actually take the time to win you over and lull you into a . . . relationship.

The two big sleepers of 1990--”Pretty Woman” and “Ghost”--are neither original nor particularly well-made movies, but they have filled marketplace voids, proving to anyone in Hollywood who has been paying attention that relatively inexpensive romantic fantasies can be as productive at the box office as the most expensive fantasy adventure, and that males do not necessarily dominate American moviegoing habits.

Director Jerry Zucker’s “Ghost,” the sleeper of the moment, is both seductive and opportunistic. It opened at a time when women, and men who like to go to movies with women, were famished for some gentle, romantic counterprogramming. After a while, the Big Bang movies like “RoboCop 2” and “Die Hard 2” begin to feel like mental date rape; as soon as the lights go down, they’re pawing at you like bands of drunken Cossacks. The only emotions they are capable of producing are those you get from a thrill ride, or a mugging--exhilaration, anxiety, maybe a touch of revulsion when it’s all over.

“Ghost,” like the escapist 1930s Hollywood movies it resembles, succeeds by targeting a completely different set of emotions, and hitting them. The movie is by no means an intellectual exercise; the story, about the spirit of a murder victim who sticks around to protect his lover from the same fate, requires as much suspension of disbelief as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s trip to Mars in “Total Recall.” But it starts from a more familiar set of circumstances, and it touches on romantic notions that are as old as consensual sex.

‘Til death us do part? Well, that’s tough enough for couples who live full lives. But what if death comes too soon, and unfairly? If the love doesn’t immediately vanish, why should the spirit? And if the spirit is there, how does it behave? What can it do? Can the here and the after be joined? Can the lovers meet in the margins between life and death?

Such questions have been the fuel of romanticists throughout literary history, and because of the medium’s particular advantages, the romantic ghost theme has been a mainstay of motion pictures.

In most of these fantasies, ghosts are naturally equipped with wisdom (spell: hindsight) that they didn’t have in life, and their restlessness is caused by the need to resolve some lingering real-world problem. In last winter’s “Always,” Richard Dreyfuss played a daredevil firefighting pilot who stuck around after his death to free girlfriend Holly Hunter from a life of mourning and to give her the ghostly advice she needed to get through the kind of aerial danger that killed him.

It is evidence of the limits of the romantic ghost story that “Ghost” seems like a remake of “Always,” which was itself a remake of 1943’s “A Guy Named Joe.” In “Ghost,” Patrick Swayze plays a banker who dies in what appears to be a random street crime, then gets a divine reprieve while he assists his lover (Demi Moore). He’s going to have to report to heaven soon, but not until the end of the third act. Until then, he has to get by on savvy invisibility.

In both movies, the couples are separated before the big dope can utter the words “I love you.” And in both, the spirits are exasperated to witness attempts by other men to seduce their grieving women. The big difference between “Ghost” and “Always”--the reason one works and the other failed--is that in “Ghost,” there is a device through which the lovers can communicate.

The device is a monstrous thematic cheat--Swayze lucks into an encounter with a psychic (Whoopi Goldberg) who can hear his voice--but the payoff for the audience is so great, the scam is forgiven. That is the very definition of “suspension of disbelief”; people will invest in anything if the emotional dividends are there.

Without some direct contact between the ghost and his girlfriend, “Always” left us with little more than frustration and sadness, not exactly the feelings we expect from a love story. In “Ghost,” the moment of reunion is--for those unreformed, uncynical romantics in the audience--not only an exquisite opportunity to fill a couple of hankies, but the whole point of the exercise. The character with whom we identify is not the ghost, but the woman left behind. His attempts to be heard and felt, to have an impact on the physical world, are funny and engaging, but for the movie to really work, all three characters--the spirit, the girlfriend and the audience--have to share that moment together.

There were no otherworldly elements for “Pretty Woman” to overcome. Its task was much greater. It’s a fairy tale reset in one of the seamiest possible contexts. The prince is a ruthless financial shark who preys on distressed companies; the princess is a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute who, while thoughtful enough to carry an assortment of party-favor condoms, will hop in a car with any trick who stops on her corner.

The hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold is as much a staple of Hollywood as winsome ghosts, but Julia Roberts’ hooker here comes equipped with much more--a good heart, to be sure, but also innate intelligence, deep compassion, charm, humor and the ability--when coiffed and dressed by Rodeo Drive--to strike as rich and graceful an image as Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn.

On the surface, “Pretty Woman” seems a retelling of “Pygmalion,” the upgrading of a street urchin to high society, but it is a much bigger fantasy than that. Henry Higgins, after all, had six months to whip Liza Doolittle into linguistic and social shape; Richard Gere’s Edward Lewis takes Roberts’ Vivian Ward from gum-smacking, stiletto-heeled tart to femme d’elegance in a matter of days. On the scale of man-made miracles, it’s right up there with Moses parting the Red Sea.

The film succeeds because of its implausibility, not despite it. Fairy tales were conceived as devices to sort out good and evil for children and to idealize romance. If kids were started out in life with episodes of “Roseanne” or “Married . . . With Children” and told that’s what they have to look forward to, the future would be bleak indeed. While we can argue the psychological pluses and minuses of fairy tales and the unrealistic expectations they breed, they’ve been absorbed so deeply into the human consciousness, they may be printed on our genes.

In any case, the fantasy of instant redemption and storybook love lurks in most of us. Even though women know that kissing a frog is more apt to leave a slimy residue on their lips than produce a prince, and men know that sneaking into bedchambers to kiss sleeping beauties will usually result in jail time, the fantasies still make us feel good.

The success of these films is often confusing, especially to men. Another Richard Gere film, “An Officer and a Gentleman,” was a huge success nearly a decade ago, a fact that was inconceivable to those of us who took it literally.

In that story, as in “Pretty Woman,” Gere played a man whose ruthlessness was spawned by his background and whose ability to overcome it was provided by the woman he eventually rescues from a dead-end life. The film’s final scene, where Gere strolls into a bag factory, scoops his woman up in his arms and marches out to the cheers of her co-workers seemed a blaspheme to the women’s movement. Yet, many women who had long been liberated from the someday-my-prince-will-come fantasy in their own lives bought into that deliberately improbable ending.

It is a thin line that is often drawn between reality and fantasy, and the fact that viewers don’t always get over the line explains the wide divergence of opinion on such films as “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Pretty Woman” and “Ghost.” You’re either in on the fantasy, emotionally, or the movie will seem as sticky as spilled Coke.

There’s a scene from another movie that draws the critical distinction between our desire for fantasy and the realities of our own personalities. In “Tootsie,” Jessica Lange, as a depressed TV actress, confides to Dustin Hoffman, in drag as her friend and colleague, that she sometimes dreams of meeting a man who will cut through all the small-talk seduction and simply announce his desire to take her to bed. The next night, he runs into her at a party and--without her being able to recognize him--cuts through the small-talk seduction and tells her he’d like to take her to bed. Infuriated by the insult, she throws a drink his face.

It was, after all, a fantasy-- hers , not his. By trying to fulfill it, he merely took it away. What he should have done was ask her to a movie.