THE NAME GAME

“Flower Belle! What a euphonious appellation! Easy on the ears and a banquet for the eyes!”

--Mae West and W.C. Fields

“My Little Chickadee”

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This fall, when Romeo’s Juliet asks “What’s in a name?” once more on movie screens, audiences will be forgiven if they snicker.

In most scripts these days, everything is in a name--as writers sum up their characters’ personalities with a sense of predestination that would make John Calvin proud.

Consider Warren Justice. With a name like that, you’d have no choice but become a journalistic crusader for truth, as Robert Redford’s character did in “Up Close and Personal.” (Just as inevitably, you’d be destined to fall for a hotshot reporter named Tally Atwater.)

Or take Sherman Klump. What future could lie ahead but that of an overweight, unloved scientist--also known as “The Nutty Professor”?

Welcome to a movie tradition as old as squeaky seats--the art of telegraphing your character with a name that’s just a little too perfect for real life.

In the last few months alone, we’ve had such credibility benders as nut-case villain Brigadier Francis Xavier Hummel in “The Rock,” alien-spotting everyman Zane Zaminsky in “The Arrival,” and deceitful attorney Martin Vail in “Primal Fear.”

. . . Not to mention a man on the run (Stephen Baldwin) named Dodge (“Fled”), a hit-woman named Charly Baltimore (Geena Davis) in “The Long Kiss Goodnight”) and a return visit from Kurt Russell as Snake Pliskin (“Escape From L.A.”).

“It’s horrible trying to strike some balance between a memorable name and an outlandish one,” says screenwriter Lem Dobbs--who turned to reality for his hero, in “Kafka.” “The tendency sometimes is to go overboard.”

Even movies’ top practitioners can occasionally go too far. Remember Tom Cruise’s renegade race car driver Cole Trickle (coined by Robert Towne) in “Days of Thunder”? Or phone-tapping surveillance expert Harry Caull in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation”?

Even a name as commonplace as Harry can take on its own movie code meaning. “In the 1970s, it was the name you used to indicate a character was world-weary,” observes Dobbs, citing “Dirty Harry,” “Harry in Your Pocket,” “Harry and Tonto,” and Harry Gondorf, the con man played by Paul Newman in “The Sting.”

(Newman hasn’t been just wild about playing Harrys, as in “The Secret War of Harry Frigg.” He’s also had an obsessive fondness for more bizarre “H” names: Hud, Hombre, Cool Hand Luke, and Lew Harper--changed for Newman from the original Lew Archer.)

And Harry isn’t the only plausible name co-opted into a movie cliche.

“If a script’s hero is named Jack--as it is in every other movie now--the unavoidable conclusion is that the scriptwriter is a moron,” gripes Dobbs. “I think it started when every actor wanted to be Jack Nicholson--it suggested the character has that cool, roguish, rascally movie-star glamour Nicholson brought to his roles.” Keanu Reeves (“Speed”) and Robin Williams (what else?--”Jack”) are just two recent examples; Reeves even goes one better in the current “Feeling Minnesota,” playing a cool, roguish rascal named . . . Jjaks.

Earth may have its share of criminals named George--but onscreen, that name guarantees a pure-hearted good guy like George Bailey (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) or George Malley (“Phenomenon”). Alas, it also means George will be shamefully put upon by his small-town neighbors, then embraced by them just before it’s too late.

Comedies have been movies’ most fertile ground for elaborate tip-off names. Few did it better than W. C. Fields, whose Dickensian scripting in “The Bank Dick” gave us drunkard Egbert Souse, idiot son-in-law Og Ogilvy and bank inspector J. Pinkerton Snoopington. Preston Sturges’ “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” depicts the sexual misadventures of one Emily Kockenlocker (take that, Hays Code!), while “Animal House’s” frat brats fought the venal Dean Wormer. (And don’t forget “Blazing Saddles’ ” Hedley Lamarr and Lily von Shtupp.)

The heroines of spy movies could fill an entire Calendar section with the likes of Holly Goodhead (“Moonraker”) and Lovey Kravesit (“The Silencers”).

Names in science-fiction films seem subtle by comparison: Who better to glide through time than Marty McFly in “Back to the Future”? Or go alone through the galaxy than Han Solo?

A few outlandish names come from the strangest place of all: real life, as filmmakers pay homage to other filmmakers.

In director Hal Hartley’s latest, “Flirt,” a “Mr. Ozu” plays obvious tribute to late movie director Yasujiro Ozu, while in the 1972 exploitation flick “Boxcar Bertha” director Martin Scorsese dubbed two of his characters “Michael Powell” and “Emeric Pressburger.”

They’re the names of two of his heroes, the makers of “The Red Shoes” and other British classics.

In realistic dramas, “What you try to do is hide associations down far enough so people don’t see them but feel them,” notes writer Paul Schrader. For “Taxi Driver’s” Travis Bickle, Schrader “wanted one word that was poetic and one that was harsh and vulgar. Travis sort of meant ‘travel,’ since he drove the cab, and Bickle is the unpleasant sounding name, reminiscent of that old series ‘The Bickersons.’ ”

Towne’s screenplay for “Chinatown” overflows with juicy mouthfuls, like detective J. J. Gittes and millionaire Noah Cross--a villain of literally Biblical proportions. (His daughter, Evelyn, also has a name with faint Old Testament echoes.)

“Sometimes when you have a lot of characters, you get desperate,” says Dobbs. “I wrote a script about mercenaries. You don’t want to name 17 different people--you have to make it readable for idiots. So I gave them nicknames based on English schools--Westminster, Eaton, Harrow. Most of the people who read it won’t have a clue, but it’s also a code for the people who’ll find it amusing.”

For 1976’s “Obsession,” Schrader named his various policemen characters “after different brands of cheese. Brie, Camembert, Edam were the cops, but Brian [De Palma] didn’t think it was very funny!”

Schrader’s cheese police seem almost restrained compared to some examples today. Appearingthis fall in a multiplex near you: Dosmo the hit man (played by Danny Aiello in “2 Days in the Valley”), Becky Foxx (Teri Hatcher, playing a slinky young skier in “2 Days”), mobster Jules Flamingo (Gregory Hines, “Mad Dog Time”) and Michael Douglas’ character in “The Ghost and the Darkness,” a marksman/hunter named Remington.

But a name’s larger-than-life flavor doesn’t mean it won’t be just what the drama ordered.

“Watch ‘The Wild Bunch,’ ” observes Dobbs. “Every name is great. Pike Bishop. Lyle and Tector Gorch! How can you beat it?”