MOVIES : Death Takes This Holiday : Films about dying have normally been taboo for box-office-conscious studios. So what’s with all these movies about death during this holiday movie season? Don’t worry, some predict the trend will be short-lived.

Get out your handkerchiefs, moviegoers.

Here’s public relations man Bob Jones (Michael Keaton in “My Life”), who has been told he has inoperable cancer and may never get to see the child his wife is carrying. There’s corporate lawyer Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia”) baring his AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. And Debra Winger once again in a hospital bed--as writer Joy Gresham in “Shadowlands.”

The time for holiday merrymaking may fast be approaching, but Hollywood seems to be in a less-than-festive state of mind. From a cluster of studio releases this season one might easily wonder if death is the latest industry obsession.

Like Columbia Pictures’ “My Life” and TriStar’s “Philadelphia,” Savoy’s “Shadowlands” will expose us to life-threatening illness. The film is based on the true story of the late-in-life marriage of author C. S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) to a woman who discovers she has cancer. Also tackling weighty questions of mortality is the Warner Bros. feature “Fearless,” starring Jeff Bridges as an architect and airplane crash survivor who feels alienated from his friends and family because of his close brush with death.

With the Holocaust film “Schindler’s List” and the Vietnam epic “Heaven and Earth,” both arriving in December, this promises to be one of the more sober-minded collections of holiday movies in a long time.

Death and disease are not exactly great selling points, however, so it is not surprising that much is being made of how “life-affirming” these films are. Although the trailer for “My Life” is straightforward, print ads for the picture show two hands reaching for each other--an adult’s and a baby’s--with no mention of cancer. The trailer for “Shadowlands” is similarly silent on the subject of Gresham’s illness.

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Contemporary Hollywood movies serve up no end of violent deaths, often more cartoon-like than realistic. But slower forms of dying have not generally been in vogue since the 1930s and ‘40s, when beautiful heroines succumbed to fatal illness in such classic tear-jerkers as “Camille” (1937) and “Dark Victory” (1939).

In recent years, with some notable exceptions, it has mostly been left to television to show us sickbeds, doctors’ examining rooms and radiation treatment units. The success of “Love Story” (1970) and “Terms of Endearment” (1983) notwithstanding, cancer has generally been regarded as too commercially risky for the big screen. (The hugely popular 1971 made-for-television movie “Brian’s Song,” based on a true story of a Chicago Bears football player’s losing battle with the disease, was released theatrically but was quickly withdrawn because its audience had already seen it on television.)

When movie themes seem to reverberate off one another, the explanation is just as likely to lie in coincidence as in the Zeitgeist . Nevertheless, film critics and other Hollywood observers attribute the rekindled interest in dying primarily to the disproportionate effect of AIDS on the creative community. Other factors include the aging of the baby boomer filmmaking and moviegoing populations, heightened efforts to court adult female audiences and even the recession.

“In the last 10 years the movie community has known a lot of people who died from AIDS, and a lot of people under the age of 40 have had to encounter more death than most people would have at their age,” said David Thomson, author of a recent Film Comment article on “Death and Its Details.” “That has introduced them to the subject of mourning, and it’s not too surprising to see them try to play it out on the screen.”

To Times reviewer Peter Rainer, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, movies such as the current “My Life” and “Fearless” are an extension of a trend that began with the 1991 films “The Doctor” and “Regarding Henry,” both of which were about successful professional men suddenly confronted with illness.

“That was a kind of cover for the results of the recession,” Rainer said. “The recession has brought all these yuppie achievers low, and the way to handle all this dramatically was to sock it to them in a way that made them discover their humanity and realize that life wasn’t all about condos and limos.”

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The ravages of illness are depicted more realistically in today’s movies than in the past, when a poor medical prognosis was not allowed to mar the beauty (or even the makeup) of Bette Davis in “Dark Victory” or Ali McGraw in “Love Story.” For the most part, however, the uplifting message is the same as it was when the spoiled socialite played by Davis learned she had less than a year left. The “important thing,” her doctor and future husband (George Brent) advised her, is “to live our lives so we can meet death whenever it comes--beautifully and finely.”

Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel argues that films such as “Dark Victory” were actually more concerned with romantic love than dying, with terminal illness serving as a means of separating the lovers at the end of the movie. “Contrary to popular opinion, romance is about not being able to be together,” he said.

Even when they are not downright dishonest about death, feature films seldom capture the experience of watching someone die, several critics pointed out.

“It’s messy and horrible and ugly, and terrible things happen when people die, like relatives turn on you,” said David Ehrenstein, former film critic for the Advocate. “These are things people don’t want to talk about in life, much less in movies.”

Movies about dying “are all essentially reassuring, aren’t they?” Schickel said. “(They’re saying) ‘Oh, it won’t be so bad. You’ve got to go out with your lipstick on, your hair nicely coiffed, and people standing around saying nice things.’ . . . The chaos of dying is something I haven’t seen in movies.”

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Although its portrayal of mortal illness may seem silly today, “Dark Victory,” along with the play and movie “Our Town,” had an “enormous” influence on Bruce Joel Rubin, the director and writer of “My Life.” Rubin said he was particularly struck with how Davis “became ennobled by the process (of dying).” The ordeal of cancer has a similar transformative effect on Keaton’s character in “My Life.”

Rubin, an acknowledged hypochondriac, said he came up with the idea for “My Life” after awakening one night with a stomachache so severe he concluded he must be terminally ill. (He does not recall, however, whether the pain was caused by a Mexican dinner, as Columbia’s production notes state.)

“I lay there in bed, trying to deal with the fact that I was dying. I thought about my young children, and said, ‘If I were to die, what would they know about me. . . ?’ I decided that a video of me just talking about my life would be a gift that I could leave to them,” Rubin recalled. “And so, as I lay there trying to imagine this video, what started coming through was ‘This is a great idea for a movie.’ ”

Once “Ghost” (1990), for which Rubin wrote the screenplay, became a hit, selling his “My Life” script was a snap, he said.

“I think much of ‘Ghost’s’ success is based on the fact that it was a very emotional movie at a time when nobody was making emotional movies,” he said. Patrick Swayze plays a murdered stockbroker who manages to prevent his wife from falling victim to the same people who killed him. Some critics believe that “Ghost” struck a chord because it offered the reassuring fantasy that our loved ones can protect us even after they die.

Rubin, who sees “My Life” as “the sequel to ‘Ghost’ in an emotional way,” was philosophical about the likelihood that many critics might regard his new movie as mawkish.

“There are people who will be angry with me for taking them on this journey,” the 50-year-old director said. “Their lives are not about emotion; their lives are about thinking.”

Indeed, some reviews of “My Life” have excoriated Rubin for his New Age take on dying.

“In its relentless Hollywoodization of what in most people’s lives would be an agonizing situation, this film actually makes death look like a negligible price to pay for the spiritual wealth gained by opening up and becoming a caring human being,” wrote Times film critic Kenneth Turan.

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Frank Perry’s new movie “On the Bridge” bears a number of similarities to “My Life.” We also quickly learn that the protagonist has been handed a grim prognosis--in this case advanced prostate cancer. Like Bob Jones in “My Life,” he has decided to make a videotape and seek help outside the traditional medical Establishment. And he too finds that having cancer has enhanced his life.

When his oncologist gives him an encouraging report (which turns out to be wrong), the cancer patient in “On the Bridge” says he would willingly repeat the experience of living with terminal cancer for a year “because of the extent to which it changed my life and the way it changed how I was dealing with things. . . . I know I’m not out of the woods, but being in the woods was wonderful for me.”

But “On the Bridge,” which had a short run last month at a New York art house, drew rave reviews, perhaps because Perry, whose directing credits include “David and Lisa” (1962) and “Diary of a Mad Housewife” (1970), is telling his own story in documentary form.

“When I started (making the film) in a way it was like therapy,” said Perry, who learned he had cancer in 1990. “I just thought (his experiences were) worth recording on film. I had no idea whether anyone would look at it, or indeed that we’d ever complete a movie.”

Leo Braudy, who teaches film at USC, believes that critics favor documentaries dealing with terminal illness over fictional treatments because “the documentary form seems to ensure you against being manipulated because it actually happened. But on the other hand, documentary can be so painful that you don’t want to watch that, either.”

No doubt because Perry has outlasted his original prognosis, “On the Bridge” is not a harrowing experience, which is sometimes the case with “Silverlake Life: The View From Here,” a documentary made by Tom Joslin and his lover of 22 years, Mark Massi, as both were dying of AIDS. Widely praised for its unsparing depiction of the disease, the film was released theatrically this year and aired on public television.

The ordeal of AIDS has been portrayed in at least two other recent “video diaries”: “The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter,” made by Peter Jepson-Young, a Canadian physician, and “Blue,” by British filmmaker Derek Jarman (“Caravaggio”), in which voices and sound effects are heard over a blue--but otherwise empty--screen.

AIDS is also the subject of the hit French film “Savage Nights” (“Les Nuits Sauvages”), opening here Jan. 28. Cyril Collard directed and stars in the film, which is based on his autobiographical novel of the same name and traces several months in the life of Jean, a young bisexual cameraman who is HIV-positive.

Demonstrating that certain themes are cross-cultural, living with the threat of AIDS makes Jean’s life more meaningful, turning him into a less passive and more sensitive individual. Collard died just three days before his movie swept the Cesar Awards, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, in March.

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While AIDS is scarcely a new theme for independent filmmakers, it has been shunned until now by major studios. The long-awaited “Philadelphia,” directed by Jonathan Demme and opening in limited release on Dec. 22, will be the first studio picture to deal directly with the disease, as well as the first since the 1982 “Making Love” to tell a story centering on a gay man. Attorney Beckett (Hanks) has been fired by his firm, allegedly for misplacing a file. Certain he has been sacked because he has AIDS, however, he sues the partners for wrongful termination. Denzel Washington portrays a personal injury lawyer who, though uneasy around gays, eventually agrees to take his case.

“Philadelphia” is being marketed as a fast-paced courtroom drama with a universal message about tolerance. But since Beckett has an incurable disease, “he has to confront some larger issues. . . . He has to go on to something even bigger than winning back your reputation,” said screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, who also uses the word journey to describe what happens to his lead character.

In one emotional scene that nearly did not make it into the film because it made some studio executives uncomfortable, according to the screenwriter, Beckett reveals his feelings about his mortality by interpreting an aria from the 19th-Century opera “Andrea Chenier,” sung by Maria Callas.

“He is facing the possibility of his death, how it moves and frightens him,” Nyswaner said. “This is the only way he can say it.”

Just how much of the disease’s progression to show became the subject of much discussion, and the film’s ending was revised several times.

“We were struggling to pay tribute to the hope that gets people through their day. . . . We had to find a way to tell the whole story without leaving people with the feeling they were depressed, that this was an unhappy moviegoing experience,” Nyswaner said.

Audience reaction will, of course, determine whether “Philadelphia” unleashes a spate of films about AIDS and whether the terminal illness boomlet becomes a genuine trend. “My Life,” which opened last weekend, was off to a promising start, with $6.3 million on 800 screens through Tuesday.

Despite the glowing reviews, the public stayed away from “On the Bridge” when it played in New York. Asserting that American audiences are afraid to confront the unpleasantness of death, Perry predicted that the studio films are not likely to fare much better.

“I don’t think any of (the films) are going to make any money, and therefore, applying the great golden yardstick, I think the cycle will not be long-lived,” he said. “It’s the nature of the subject. People don’t want to see it.”