The Big Winners at Cannes : Movies: Madonna drives the media hordes wild--not a pretty sight. But her ‘Truth or Dare’ cleans up at box office.

If there’s a book written about the 44th Cannes Film Festival, which wrapped up here Monday night, the title would have to be “Indecent Overexposure.” Subtitle: “In Bed With Madonna.”

From the opening bell of this combination film/publicity orgy, Madonna has been the center of attention, the role she was apparently born to play. She was here ostensibly to continue the promotional blitz started last month in the United States for the opening of Alex Keshishian’s documentary “Truth or Dare,” but she stuck around for more than a week, causing near riots among paparazzi attempting to track her every move.

It was not a pretty sight. Not only did the pop star bring out the worst in the photo hordes, but she had American movie critics kneeling at her feet. At a party hosted by “Truth or Dare” foreign distributor Dino De Laurentiis, Madonna sat in a cordoned-off area while VIPs--including some of America’s most prominent critics--were escorted to her for an audience.

Calling Madonna indecently overexposed is, of course, redundant. That’s her act. In the United States, Miramax Films cleverly built a TV ad campaign around that fact, having Madonna mock the whole notion by looking into the camera and asking, “Do you think I’m overexposed?”

Obviously, she’s not. While Madonna was bewitching this Continent, “Truth or Dare” was grossing $4.3 million during its first week at home and will soon pass “Woodstock” as the most commercial documentary ever made. Her behavior in candid footage in “Truth or Dare” may come across as vulgar and low-brow, but she’s a genius at selling that image: In the garbled psychology of pop culture she may qualify as the media’s first slut savant.

Even before being personally corrupted by Madonna here, the American press fell in step with “Truth or Dare.” It got almost unanimously good reviews, and Madonna seemed to be everywhere acting the wild thing the documentary from her Blond Ambition Tour promotes.

In Cannes, she added to her image by doing a Marilyn Monroe turn on the steps of the Palais du Festival, pausing during her entrance for the “Truth or Dare” premiere to fling open her Madame Butterfly cape and taunt the photographers with a shimmering glimpse of her white satin bra and girdle. It was the Photo Opportunity of the Century, but it raised hell with security.

“I didn’t know she was going to do that,” said Miramax Films’ Harvey Weinstein, who was in Madonna’s entourage that night. “When she showed them her underwear, or whatever that was, the barricades came down and the screening was over.”

Police, fearing a photographers’ riot, sealed off the Palais, and those guests who weren’t already in didn’t get in, including the closest friends of Madonna, De Laurentiis and Miramax.

“When we got inside, there were 10 rows of empty seats,” said Weinstein. “We saw Eddie Murphy stuck in the crowd and managed to pull him in, but no one else got in.”

Early in the festival, veterans were saying they hadn’t seen as much fuss over a star in Cannes since a visit by flesh-in-cinema pioneer Brigitte Bardot nearly four decades ago. Now, they say Madonna is the all-time champ. Imagine what will happen if she ever comes back as a movie star.

Meanwhile, other things did go on during the 12-day festival. The 17 pictures competing for the Golden Palm added up to a mediocre field, but it was a vast improvement over a year ago. All five American films were well-received, including the two--Irwin Winkler’s “Guilty by Suspicion” and Bill Duke’s “A Rage in Harlem”--that had already opened to lukewarm business at home.

Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” was the biggest favorite among the American movies, but the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink,” which won the Golden Palm, and David Mamet’s opening night “Homicide” also got strong reactions at both press and premiere screenings.

A major subtext of the American presence was the show of support for films by black directors. Eddie Murphy, who has taken a lot of heat for not being more active in employing blacks in his movies, came here for the premieres of “A Rage in Harlem” and “Jungle Fever” and joined Spike Lee at the press screening of 23-year-old John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood,” a powerful first film about black gangs in Los Angeles. “Boyz N the Hood” was an official selection of the satellite Un Certain Regard program.

“A Rage in Harlem,” which has grossed just $7 million during its first 17 days in release in the United States, has been one of the most popular films here with audiences, helping Miramax Films sell it to foreign markets. Miramax’s Weinstein said he got $1 million for rights in Italy, and $500,000 for Japan. “Those are astounding numbers for an all-black film,” he said.

The reaction to “A Rage in Harlem” in Cannes, where the only black faces in the audience belonged to the cast and director, has persuaded Weinstein to get creative about bringing white audiences to the movie at home. He said that the exit polls on “Harlem” in the United States have shown the highest positive response of any Miramax film but that the audiences are 90% black.

“White audiences in the U.S. just don’t want to see an all-black movie,” Weinstein said. “I have friends in New York, including young filmmakers, who won’t go to it. If you want to see prejudice at work, make an all-black movie.”

Weinstein said he’s considering booking “A Rage in Harlem” in some American art houses to try to generate word-of-mouth among whites. He’s even thinking of asking Duke to edit out some of the violence and change the title: “Maybe we’ll call it ‘A Good Time in Harlem’ ” he said, “so they’ll know it’s a comedy.”

The fear among the black film community, Weinstein said, is that the failure of “Rage” to cross over to the white audience will hinder future financing of black films--that investors will insist on writing major white characters into the scripts.

“The Black Filmmakers Foundation is being very supportive and at the same time kicking my ass to make sure that I do everything I can for this film,” Weinstein said, “so I’m going to go out trying.”

One of the most interesting films shown here outside the main competition was John Berry’s “A Captive in the Land,” adapted from James Aldridge’s novel about two men--an American (Sam Waterston) and a Russian (Alexander Potapov)--stranded in the Arctic. The film is the first U.S.-Soviet co-production in more than a decade, filmed in Moscow studios and on location in the Arctic.

It is the first movie in nearly a decade by Berry, the 74-year-old blacklisted American director who served as the model for Robert De Niro’s character in Irwin Winkler’s “Guilty by Suspicion.” Berry expatriated to Paris in 1950 to avoid an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee and, with the exception of a nine-year stint in New York, has lived in France ever since.

The philosophical Cold War debate between communism and capitalism that kept the American and Russian characters busy through much of the novel is a minor part of the movie, which went into production long after the thaw, and the film plays much more as a wilderness adventure.

That may enhance its chances of getting major distribution in the United States, where politics is currently blacklisted as a commercial topic.