A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : Off-Centerpiece : The Americanization of Cannes <i> or</i> If There Was a Mickey Rourke Film the French Might Not Mind So Much

American critics and reporters who spent most of last year’s Cannes Film Festival grumbling about the lack of good movies to write about will have to shut up and get busy writing when this year’s festival convenes at the French Riviera resort city Thursday.

Nearly one-third of the movies in the festival’s official program--seven out of 22--are American-made, a proportion that Cannes organizers privately acknowledge was prompted by the lackluster (for Americans) field a year ago. Among the U.S. films competing for the prestigious Gold Palm Award are Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” Irwin Winkler’s “Guilty by Suspicion,” Bill Duke’s “A Rage in Harlem,” David Mamet’s “Homicide” and the Coen Brothers’ latest film, “Barton Fink.”

Two other American films--Ridley Scott’s “Thelma and Louise” and Alek Keshishian’s Madonna documentary “Truth or Dare”--will have gala evening screenings out of competition.

It was unclear this week how many American stars will attend, but with Robert De Niro (from “Guilty by Suspicion”), Madonna and Whoopi Goldberg, the lone American on the Cannes jury, on hand, the French crowds and paparazzi will be actively stimulated.

The question on many festival skeptics’ minds is whether Cannes organizers already had a grand prize winner in mind when they invited Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” to the party. The 1989 jury felt the wrath of many critics for giving that year’s Gold Palm to Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape” and ignoring Lee altogether, and the outspoken Lee added his voice to the chorus of disapproval.

Roman Polanski, who is the chairman of this year’s nine-member jury, said when he took the job that politics would have no influence on his jury, adding that if anyone from the festival suggested a winner to him, he’d say the same thing he said when a festival official did suggest a winner in 1968, the last time Polanski chaired the jury: “I told him to go have a cup of coffee.”

Besides the seven American films, the 44th Cannes Film Festival, which runs through May 21, will feature new films by Japan’s Akira Kurosawa (“Rhapsody in August”), Poland’s Krzysztof Kieslowski (“The Double Life of Veronique”) and Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos (“The Suspended Leg of the Stork”).