Daily News from New York, New York • 117

rr. r. 2 I 7 I'M NOT I MEANWHILeI) QUITE A BIT ABOUT LOOK AT ASKING WHAT HAppENED NAT?) T. I'P SAY. IT This 5 NOT PtWNG YOU JO g'Wuf OUT WE If-ISw X7" VFT? rr'S STAY.

OUR0EAL 1r-rrlC PDNT Buy THE 7 rVLZ- Vf JSs i' ljft Sam Elliott: h' Too long I -I Hi js I WANT MTSFOFn HAND IT lifii 1 TO REPORT A PHONE" yoUjJ TO ME, LK'W 1 1 OUT OF ORDEfc- lffe lgp5 fjjSSVE NIGHT WL xr i By ERNEST LEOGRANDE Wit Keep 9 em Kiching Once again the threat of doom hangs over good old Radio City Music Hall, but of course it can't be permitted to go under. As in the past, some life-saving solution has to be delivered. The threat is that the American Guild of Variety Artists may pull a strike to get more money for the Rockettes and the Music Hall says it couldn't survive a strike, with business being the way it is. State mediator Vincent McDonnell is meeting with both sides to work it out. Not that the Music Hall would turn into a shell without Rockettes and PG movies.

It could be rented out for other enterprises, but New York City needs it as it is. The Music Hall movie-stage show for years has been good for MOVIES By JERRY OSTER THE RETURN OF THE TALL BLOND MAN WITH ONE BLACK SHOE No rating. At the D. W. Griffith.

THE MAKERS of "The Return of the Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe" admit at the outset to the impossibility of their undertaking: they spend a good five minutes recapitulating the plot of "The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe." "T.B.M." was about a fellow selected at random to serve as a pawn in a squabble among some French espionage bureau-crats. "T.R.O.T. T.B.M." is about the continued efforts of the desk jockeys to improve their positions by making the hapless fellow seem a super agent. But without at least a grey memory of the first movie, the second takes so long to make sense that it misspends much of its humor on routines that bewilder rather than amuse. When the seauel finaily frees itself of its obligations to its predecessor, it becomes bemus- a laugh if -'t to talk about it in the sun MOVIES By KATHLEEN CARROLL LIFEGUARD Rated PG.

At Loews State 2 ajid Tower East. HE HAS A year round tan and the bulging biceps that go with the job. Women, especially nubile young teenagers, consider him a sex god. They constantly flirt with him. Even he admits, "the hours are good, and the working conditions are fantastic." No one could blame Rick for liking his work but, really: should a 32-year-old be life-guarding when even Annette Funicello has thrown in the "Beach Party" towel The answer is, unfortunately, yes.

And after listening to the slow-witted, water-logged responses of this aging beach-boy in "Lifeguard," it's clear he's lucky to have a job at all. There's something extremely pathetic about an overgrown jock who clings to his high-school yearbook as if it's the first and only book he's read since graduation. One can't help but share his father's exasperation. "I still wonder," admits his old man at the dinner table, "what you're to be when you grow up." Chances are Rick will be dull. There's no disguising the fact he's headed in that direction.

But director Daniel Petrie does try, resorting to wistfully romantic shots of waves pounding against the shore, accompanied by tearful love songs from Paul Williams, who dashed out lyrics like "our love may all wash away." Petrie tries to make the film as poignant as he can, but he's such an uninspired director he might as well be building casbles in the sand. As the lifeguard who cannot resist the pull of the waves (even when offered a real money-making career opportunity as a Porsche salesman), Sam Elliott has a kind of weary diprnity that is genuinely appealing. ALL YCU CAN DRINK Any xtindard Drink or Cocktail BONELESS SIRLOIN STEAK Potatoes Coffet CONTINUOUS DANCING AND ENTERTAINMENT 10.95 PLUS 1.95 MUSIC CHARGE Served 6 PM to 2 AM 2 DAYS 1DENISE DARCEL LAST a square pla to go, but how many enduri tourist attractions like it in this city can you name? The Empire State Building? The Statue of Liberty? They're a couple of other spjts considered fodder for the out-of-towners, but if they ever closed their doors this city's romantic heritage would be infinitely poorer. Radio City Music Hall's entertainment has traded on being squeaky-clean, a state considered anathema to the sophisticate, but something has to be an antidote for the creeping sleaze strangling midtown today and a chorus line of non-nude dancers after a family flick sounds like good medicine. It would be ironic for the Music Hall to collapse inside now 1 re Pierre She's four times brighter.

Pierre Richard and Mireille Dare: undercovers agent ing enough, though never anything to write home about. The movie's biggest pleasure is its competent cast particularly Jean Rochefort and Michel Duchaussoy, as the contending bureaucrats, and Jean Carmet, as the' Tall Blond's neighbor who, when he comes on a kitchen full of spies with drawn guns, commiserates with his friend for having to bring work home from the office. Pierre Richard, as the spy in snite of himself, plays his part so broadly that he's out of synch with these other actors, who know to the centimeter how much an eyebrow need be raised in order to communicate. The end of the movie, which was directed by Yves Robprf-. sets the stage, I'm afraid, for a sequel.

GOOSE CHASE At Columbia 2. rowed, but some of it is new the best bit being a scene in which Richard and Jane Bir-kin escape a fire set by their adversaries by sharing a scuba tank in a bathtub, which, when the fire burns out, nfrched on its plumbing on what was the second floor of a house. Jerry Os' pr HELLO. ABBEY. Ireni's Abbey Theater will begin a six-week tour of the U.S.

Nov. 8, it's the first American tovr since 1938. Three of those weeks will be spent at the Brooklyn Academy of Music presenting Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars" with Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack and another play yet to be selected. This is the 50th anniversary of the first presentation of "The Plough and the Stars." No specific dates have been set jet for the Brooklyn run. Li Li THE WILD No ratings.

(OF THE two comedies starring Pierre Richard that opened here yesterday sending historians into a dither), "The Wild Goose Chae" is the funnier again, no thanks to Richard, to whom a pratfall is a subtle gesture. The humor in this case is that of writer-director Claude Ziti, who dreamed up vn inventive plot and staged it with considerable flair and zest. The film, very briefly, is aSo-'t the efforts of an inept officer to retrieve the ittn of a saf deposit box is incj ijptterco caused o. stol It is a picture in which everyone winds up chasing everyone else wth more zeal than purpose through a train, a ferry boat, around a fhnr.ter jn wiicri a transvestite is in progress. Much of the business is bor that the exterior has been scrubbed clean, its first freshening up since 1932.

Like other Rockefeller Center buildings it had gotten grimier and grimier, but sand-blasting, traditional cleaning method for buildings, had been considered unwise since it might cause structural weakness. Then somebody thought of water and scrubbing this spring. It worked. Windows on the World in the World Trade Center may be the most "in" place in town right now, but sentiment lends strength to the Empire State Observatory, even though the cuisine there is hot dogs and pizza. The tower, seen against the night sky, is even more romantic now that red, white and blue lights are illuminating it for the bicentennial summer.

The Statue of Liberty, too, is ablaze with new glory with intensified illumination, four times brighter than before, first seen July 4. Of course vou have to observe that from a distance, because trips to the Statue, on Liberty Island, are only possible during the day. Now, since the end of May, there's been a side trip possible to a new tourist attraction, Ellis Island. You take a. Circle Line boat from Battery Park to the Statue and transfer to-another boat for the Ellis hop and an hoar's guided tour.

If these institutions are corn, long live corn. It smells better than garbage. mm 'aiurmii" THE CALENDAR wmmmmmmmmammmmmm Empire State Observatory open 9:30 a.m. to midnight, $1.70 and 85 cents (children under 12). Boats to Liberty Island $1.50 and 50 cents (under 12); to Ellis Island, $1.25 for all.

Days only. Minimum admission to Radio City Music Hall $3.25. Coming up Wednesday: "Swashbuckler (movie) and "La Fantaisie du Cirque" (stage). Sounds ideal..