Commentary : Are We Supposed to Like These People? : There are more sleazy characters in the movies today than at any time since the ‘30s. But as people worry about crime, do they really want to see it on screen--even in critics’ favorites?

For the price of a movie ticket . . .

You can spend a couple of hours with a sociopathic madman with a Robin Hood complex. Watch him order the killings of, oh, maybe 70 or 80 guys, and rub a few out himself, then finance a hospital for the poor in his neighborhood and show his affectionate side by fondling his lawyer’s breasts in a subway train.

Or, you can drop in on an opportunistic Texas drifter who is having delirious sex with a used-car-lot owner’s wife while casually planning a bank heist down the street. He isn’t such a bad guy, though; when he discovers that a young friend is being blackmailed, he will kill the blackmailer, make it look like a suicide and then pin the bank job on the corpse.

Or, meet a hollow-eyed ex-boxer who--despite having the shuffle, stubble and apparent scent of someone living in a storm drain--manages a torrid affair with a gorgeous widow who cuts him in on a lucrative kidnaping scheme. He’s not such a bad guy, either; when the kidnaped child falls into a diabetic coma, he will kill the doctor who once supported him and steal his insulin.

Robin Hood (Christopher Walken), the Sexy Drifter (Don Johnson) and the Dimwitted Boxer (Jason Patric) are the central figures of Abel Ferrara’s “King of New York,” Dennis Hopper’s “The Hot Spot” and James Foley’s “After Dark, My Sweet,” respectively, and they’re not the only unsavory protagonists that moviegoers--living in a time when encounters with crime and violence are daily possibilities--are declining to spend their time and money on.

* In Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” Ray Liotta is a soulless hood whose career goes from pubescent gangland go-fer to coke-addicted Mafia lieutenant to FBI snitch. In the final scene, he’s a federally protected witness living in a suburb griping about being a schnook like the rest of us.

* In the Coen brothers’ mobster fairy tale “Miller’s Crossing,” Gabriel Byrne is a Mafia prince having an affair with a moll who is also his boss’s mistress.

* In Michael Cimino’s “Desperate Hours,” Mickey Rourke plays an escaped convict terrorizing a suburban family whose patriarch turns out to be as slimy a weasel as he is.

* In David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Nicolas Cage is a paroled killer with an Elvis Presley fetish and a will so weak that he says yes to the first geek with black teeth who invites him along on a bank job.

* In Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace,” Sean Penn is an undercover cop who suffers an attack of conscience for betraying a boyhood buddy who has grown into a full-fledged societal abscess.

More is on the way. Peter Medak’s “The Krays” will give us an intimate family portrait of twin brothers who, in real life, became London’s most lethal siblings. Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters” will focus on a mother and son whose love for each other is overwhelmed by their love for the con.

And, of course, Francis Coppola will bring back the enterprising Corleone family in “The Godfather, Part III.”

We may have to go all the way back to the earliest days of talking pictures to find a greater splurge of bad-guy heroes and their thrill-seeking babes. Back to the days of “Little Caesar,” “Public Enemy” and “Scarface,” when Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and Paul Muni rose to stardom snarling over the bodies of their victims.

But unlike that earlier period, when gangsters became more popular with moviegoers than cowboys, the current crop is playing to often empty theaters. “GoodFellas” has been easily the most successful of the bunch, but considering its high profile and the fact that it is one of the most critically-praised major studio movies of the last decade, its $33 million in grosses hardly qualifies it as a major hit. And some of the others--”State of Grace,” “The Hot Spot,” “After Dark, My Sweet”--won’t do $3 million.

The failure of these films to ignite broad interest cannot be laid off on audiences having grown sick of sex and violence. Violence has been worth millions in “Die Hard 2,” “Total Recall” and the current Steven Seagal hit, “Marked for Death”--films with conventional heroes who, no matter how cartoonish or woodenly portrayed, are putting the scum on the run. And sex has had something to do with the success of “Pretty Woman,” “Ghost” and the current down-and-dirty “White Palace.”

More likely, people just don’t want to see movies that ask them to identify with, sympathize with or at least understand the kind of despicable characters who have turned America into an alarmed camp. A survey conducted a few years ago by USA Today revealed that almost half of Americans worry about being crime victims every day of their lives, and while the Happy News headline writers for that paper put the best face on it (“Half of Us Feel Safe”), it revealed an amazingly high quotient of fear.

Sixty years ago, families would leave their houses unlocked while they walked to the theater to see George Raft muscle some people around on the big screen. Today, it’s only a minor exaggeration to say they have to remember to set the alarm in the house, set the alarm in the car, and then hope they don’t catch a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting as they dash from the car to the theater.

The last thing they want to see when they get inside is a glorification of antisocial behavior.

Audiences flocked to films like “The Public Enemy,” “Little Caesar” and “Scarface” because they were true fantasies, stories about crimes and underworld characters that were as remote from the average American’s life as cattle rustling and range wars.

In the early ‘30s, gangster movies actually became more popular than Westerns, which to that time had been simple yarns about good people--Puritan stock--being eventually rewarded for surviving hardship and overcoming evil. For people entering the Depression, faith in the American Dream had collapsed with the crash on Wall Street; the system had failed them, and even though the central characters of some of those gangster movies were loathsome figures, they appeared to be enjoying the high life for having beaten the system. When the economy began to improve, gangster movies gave way to G-man movies, and the good guys took center stage again.

There is no economic parallel to explain Hollywood’s current fascination with evil protagonists. These movies are more the result of the confusion in an industry where consumers have grown older and less predictable. That older audience--the well-traveled Baby Boomers, in particular--are harder to attract with the kind of formulaic action films and teen comedies that dominated the ‘80s. So the People in Control have been forced, like rats in a maze, to try different paths. A couple of those paths have led to attempted revivals of film noir , which was popular in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and the gangster movie, which roared in the ‘30s and has been revisited, with sporadic success, ever since.

Americans are mad at government today too, but not for the same reasons as their parents and grandparents six decades earlier. As disgusted as we may have been with the President and Congress over the recent budget haggling, the conservative mood and general disdain for social liberalism suggest that the country is much less interested in philosophical debate than in finding a Malathion equivalent for human Medflies.

The bad-guy movies now out there range from exploitation (“King of New York,” “State of Grace”) to stylistic exercises (“Miller’s Crossing,” “Wild at Heart”) to character profiles (“The Hot Spot,” “After Dark, My Sweet”). Scorsese’s “GoodFellas” alone is an anti- crime movie, and because it is so well-crafted, it is the most disturbing of them all.

In the first half of “GoodFellas,” Scorsese draws you into his world of thugs, makes you laugh with them--even while they punch, stab and shoot a gangland rival--and appreciate their free-spending lifestyle. You can understand how a kid in their neighborhood, the Liotta character, could find them easier to root for than the pre-Steinbrenner Yankees. Then, in one jolting, horrifying moment, one of the lead characters--the funniest one--casually guns down a teen-age boy for mocking him, and their world is all too real. We are simultaneously repulsed and ashamed; guys like these aren’t funny and we should have known better.

The question is: How many people are willing to spend their days worrying about crimes and their evenings with the criminals who commit them, even if assured they will see the Best Movie of the Year? If “GoodFellas” could have been shown to audiences in 1930, the shock would have been so great, it would have scared their ancestors.

The case could be made that moviegoers aren’t even interested in seeing crime treated lightly. “Quick Change,” which featured self-adoring Bill Murray as a had-it-up-to-here New Yorker who robs a bank in a clown suit in order to escape the Big Apple, opened in mid-summer with a big marketing push and grossed only $16 million. “My Blue Heaven,” with popular Steve Martin playing a mob snitch raising hell in the suburbs where he has been relocated, cashed in for less than $23 million.

Meanwhile, the year’s most commercially successful movies featured plots where bad guys were eliminated by the score, usually by a superhuman Everyman, or where love triumphs against all odds. Where fantasies are concerned, Americans can be a generous lot. We will buy into a romance between a corporate raider and a street hooker (“Pretty Woman”), and we absolutely love the thug cops who eradicate hoods in films like “Another 48 HRS.” and “Lethal Weapon 2.”

But some subjects are just too close for comfort, and right now, if we want to see bad guys, all we have to do is look over our shoulders.