Daily News from New York, New York • 93

1. fe a. A r-V; ls -V 5a andtheti hostage chewing, bubbly, gum, enjoying the chaos." And the local rednecks, "bring. Tou Jean frosted pink lipstick take Polaroids' of fqgjtivet and offer baby presents along the wild ride to glory. As the mood of the film grows grimmer, the characters grow more optimistic -in their sweetness and determination, until the audience is numb with suspense.

Spielberg plays out his action in moving vehicles, roadside barbecue stands, snow-cone drive-ins, gas stations and the small-town main streets of Texas towns that are dots on an Esso map to most of us, fusing The Sugarland Express with realism, and orchestrating the vast pieces of movement like sections of a concerto. There is no suggestion of the booms and overhead lights and studio-sealed color that bathes out the reality in most Hollywood movies. And Vilmos Zsigmond's camera work is awesome. Muchof the film's success depends on Lou Jean, whose job is to make the audience sympathize with her maternal objectives. Goldie Hawn makes a turkey dinner of the role, breathing and transmitting local color in every observed physical mannerism.

Running for cover in the gunfire, clutching her trading stamps, pounding her hair into place with curlers for the final showdown, or watching a Road Runnner cartoon with no sound through the window of a mobile trailer house like a satisfied child on Christmas, she is the perfect embodiment of the kind of backwoods sex kitten Eudora Welty writes about. There is never a dull moment in The Sugarland Express, but Goldie Hawn's new maturity as an actress of many dimensions is what makes the trip most worth taking. Harmless confection Conrack (flagship theaters) is a harmless confection about a Southern schoolteacher trying to bring the joy of life to a poverty-stricken island off the coast of South Carolina. The deprived black children don't know the alphabet, can't count to 10, think the Civil War was fought between the Germans and the Japanese, and never heard of George Washington or Willie Mays. The black principal wants to teach them to be tough in a white man's world.

Conroy (or Conrack, as the kids call him) wants to teach them pride, substituting friendship for the expected thump on the head. The black kids show some surprising humor in return. "YouH be readin' Playboy next week," he says. "I sure hope it's got more to it than this," grumpily replies a hard-head. The film turns slickly sentimental toward the end, and I'm not sure what it's point of view is (or even if it has any).

When Conrack gets fired, what are we supposed to do, take up a collection for South Carolina? Still, Jon Voight is absolutely terrific. His performance is so full of electricity and dignified energy as he demonstrates how learning can be fun, that we are willing to forgive the film's occasional syrup. He embraces life, reflects its mysteries and rejects its cruelties in a stirring tour de force performance that lights up the screen with humor and sincerity. A highly winning entertainment. Godie Hawn Grows Up In 'Sugarland Express' THE rise of Goldie Hawn has been an agreeable thing to witness.

She has gone from inept one-liner3 on "Laugh-In" to one of the screen's most exciting and cherished presences in a relatively short time, and she has done it with concentration and dedication to her craft. In Cactus Flower, her first film, she was a listless chickadee who played every scene like a birdseed commercial, and I remember writing at the time that "maybe those wide-eyed stares and pregrnant pauses work on television, but if Miss Hawn is to nave any kind of future in movies, she needs to learn something about the rudimentary techniques necessary to sustain a comic scene without putting the audience to sleep." (Perhaps I was too harsh; bad as she was, it is important to remember that she was directed in Cactus Flower by Gene Saks, which is something like being run over by the Metro-liner). It took a real director with the brilliance and skill of a Richard Brooks to first expose the raw materials Miss Hawn obviously had to work with all along in the marvelous caper film, $. And the promise was fulfilled in Butterflies Are Free. Now, in The Sugarland Express, Goldie Hawn emerges a fully-sculptured screen goddess in the Marilyn Monroe tradition, rueful and explosive, tender and wacky and wonderful.

The metamorphosis is thrilling. Woof for crooks The Sugarland Express (National, Cinema II) is a lyrical, funny, sometimes tragic film that will undoubtedly disturb and provoke a great number of people who still think movies should not exonerate or deify crooks. We root for the crooks in this film, because like Badlauds and Thieves Like Us, The Sugarland Express deals in the nuances and details of their lives and shows them as victims of their own lack of opportunity in an uncaring nd illiterate social system. They are real people, not hoods with machine guns in their violin cases, just like all the other real people we grew up with and went to school with and moved away from we built our lives in other directions. There Is honesty and candor in the dumbness with which they wandered away from the straight and narrow path, but their self-righteousness is just as sincere.

Based on a true incident in 1969, the film is about Lou Jean, a simple-minded Texas girl who is a kind of kissing kin to Cheri in Bus Stop. While she's Goldie Hawn stars in "The Sugarland Express." been doing time for petty crimes, her husband Clovis, a red-haired hick with nothing on his mind but pleasing Lou Jean, has been a convict himself. Now he's serving out his last four months in a prerelease prison farm, counting the days until he can rejoin Lou Jean and their new baby and live a regular life in William Inge country- Trouble is, the Texas adoption board had taken the baby away and placed it in a foster home and Lou Jean can't wait four months to get it back. So she breaks him out of jail, kidnaps a state trooper, hijacks a police car, and crosses Texas to reclaim the baby, attracting road blocks, helicopters with search lights, vigilantes and local redneck snipers, and every cop in Texas along the way. A bright, energetic young director named Steven Spielberg has managed to tell this story by detailing the emotions and comic hangups of not only the criminal parents but the Texas police and the admiring public that makes celebrities of them all, in terms that are simultaneously bleak, beautiful and hilarious.

Out of a situation that is half-tragedy, half-road movie, Spielberg has squeezed a lot of comic invention. With the minutes of their lives ticking away and a cordon of police squad cars lined up on the highway behind them, Lou Jean finds time to squabble over gas station Gold Stamps. The young highway patrolman they kidnap (inventively played by Michael Sacks, who was so good in Slaughterhouse Five) exchanges family photos, cheerfully shares their fried chicken in handcuffs, even reads their news coverage aloud. The state troopers are as dumb and as human as the hijackers EASTER'S UEKV rv SPECIAL AT 1L 01 6 COMPLETE EASTER DINNER 3f $7.31 (3 magnificent choices) Everything from soup to fruit included. Children under 12 half price Our famous ala carte dinners also available.

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