MOVIE REVIEW : A Sweet ‘Pickle’ With a Split Personality : Paul Mazursky’s latest film goes in about four directions and would have benefited from more Hollywood satire.

The silliest major studio movies are sometimes great financial successes, and Paul Mazursky’s new movie, “The Pickle” (citywide), is about the raw pain of making these big dopey crowd-catchers. Mazursky’s picture is not really a success--it’s too scattered to completely win its audience--but there are funny, sexy things in it.

In “The Pickle,” we’re treated to the spectacle of silly movie making as corporate policy, travesty-manufacturing on a grand scale. The movie’s antihero, Harry Stone (played by Danny Aiello), is a maverick expatriate American filmmaker who takes on a project he loathes in order to satisfy his huge tax and alimony bill, and to break his string of three box-office flops. Once he does, he’s hooked.

Like a man drowning in kitsch, Harry turns to booze, cigars and sex--with his 20-ish mistress (Clotilde Courau) and ex-wife (Dyan Cannon)--to cauterize his self-hatred. Everywhere he goes, on the dreaded day of the movie’s New York debut, people keep greeting him with the cringe-making litany, “Good luck on ‘The Pickle!’ ” It’s suggested that the whole process of making grotesquely infantile movies--in this case a musical science-fiction epic about farm kids from Kansas blasting into space on a gigantic pickle-shaped spaceship--can rot its director’s soul, drive him to near-suicide.

“The Pickle” is a strange movie, split in about four different ways. Part of it, the part we could use more of, is Hollywood satire. Part of it is another bright bicoastal Mazursky sex comedy. Part of it jarringly displays a kind of male menopausal anguish. And part of it is tender reminiscence: Harry’s return to his old haunts, to his mother Yetta (Shelley Winters) and his buddies (including Mazursky as a projectionist from the old bunch), and to black-and-white memories of his Brooklyn boyhood, in a neighborhood that has become a crime-ridden ghetto.

The satire is what the audience probably connects to easiest, and what, after “The Player,” they most want to see: a bright take on Hollywood fluffery. The movie-within-a-movie “Pickle” itself--shot in mock-Spielberg style with a cast that includes Ally Sheedy, Griffin Dunne and Little Richard--is sumptuously elaborate spoofing. And, when Barry Miller comes on as the skinny, fey studio chief Ronnie Liebowitz, surrounded in his office by huge phallic cacti and waving his hands ecstatically as he describes “The Pickle’s” high concept (“Rob Lowe! And Molly Ringwald! Soaring into space on a giant pickle!”), he’s pulling off a great goofy comic turn, a paroxysm of corporate giddiness.

Miller energizes the movie, just as Aiello’s Harry Stone swerves it toward melancholy. Aiello projects such primal innocence and likability that he can make us forget, briefly, what a self-absorbed schmuck Harry is, how badly he treats everyone--especially his lovers and ex-lovers. Mazursky underlines this, though Harry is the character he may identify with, that he once considered playing. At one point, he has Harry stare out of his limousine at a homeless beggar, a man with real problems; it still can’t snap the auteur from his funk.

Mazursky has said that Harry’s model may be an American movie maverick in Paris like Samuel Fuller. But there’s another possible inspiration, ex- expatriate Robert Altman--who, in “The Player” had no trouble skewering all the Hollywood pretensions that Mazursky pricks a little and dances away from. That’s the main problem with “The Pickle” (MPAA-rated R, for language and sensuality). It starts to get acid and then turns sweet, and its funny-nasty side is overwhelmed. The sweetness can’t compensate. By the end, the audience may really want Harry to suffer, because he’s earned it, and that may be the reason the climax--a Spielberg-Fellini deus ex machina --is so unsatisfactory.

As in all Mazursky movies, this one has its delights, its cargo of laughs, jazzy goofball lyricism, bicoastal Angst. Mazursky loves New York like few other directors. He puts real exultancy in the Manhattan street scenes and he gets a sense of cold sweat in expense-account splendor in the hurly-burly of Harry’s Plaza suite contretemps. Even so, there’s almost, at times, a hint of directorial restlessness: a sense that Mazursky, like Harry, might rather be somewhere else. The movie tries to form a rapprochement with the prison of kitsch movie-making, when, like “The Player,” it might have been better off sawing away at those million-dollar bars.

‘The Pickle’

Danny Aiello: Harry Stone

Dyan Cannon: Ellen Stone

Clotilde Coureau: Francoise

Shelley Winters: Yetta

A Columbia Pictures presentation. Director/Producer/Screenplay Paul Mazursky. Executive producer Patrick McCormick. Cinematographer Fred Murphy. Editor/Co-producer Stuart Pappe. Costumes Albert Wolsky. Music Michel Legrand. Production design James Bissell. Art director Christopher Burian-Mohr. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (Language, sensuality).