Daily News from New York, New York • 106

CO Heroes hob ana orave-Dur contuse to I ENRY WINKLER makes his Kf break for freedom in Heroes, cutting loose those chains that bind, trying to leave The Fonz 03 50 Ad isappointing 'First Love' find commitments in the mud puddle of the new morality, but the movie has all the "gee whiz" incredulity of saddle-. oxford musicals like Good News, it's June Allyson and Van Johnson with condoms. After giggling through a Mozart concert together, Elgin and Caroline experience the joys of sex, but Mozart seems like more fun. Caroline has this hangup, see. After her father committed suicide in her doll house, she turned to older men.

Elgin can't wash away his horror with a nectar soda. After she comes back to him, he can never trust her again. First love didn't work out, but maybe second love wilL Who wrote this sasparilla symphony, you might well ask Elino Glyn? No. A talented, bright and sophisticated young writer named Jane Hitchcock, who proves she has an easy feel for the way people talk. Like her first film.

Our Time, this one exposes the heartbreak of young people forced to solve emotional crises before they are mature enough to act wisely. But Ms. Hitchcock has had an appalling run of bad luck with directors. Joan Darling has spent too much time in television. In cleaning up First Love for general audiences, she's tried to blend raunchy dialogue and frank sex with rated idealism.

The result is a movie that careens about like an unhinged scenic railway. As long as the charactes keep their character developments between the sheets. First Love has an authentic ring to its voice. Every time Elgin and Caroline face the society at large, the movie collapses. It's a commendable attempt to reverse the boy-girl roles of traditional pulp movie fiction: This time it's the boy who feels cheated by the sexual promiscuity of the girl, instead of the other way around.

But it doesn't work, because they boy is so angelic and uptight he seems submental. William Katt, a scarecrow of Wheaties skin and Shirley Temple hair, is no match for Susan Dey, a pale peony of a girl who can act with incredible split-second changes of mood. She's so sophisticated, the movie looks like Marilyn Chambers seducing Harold Teen. ONSTEAD OF the trashy Cat Stevens music, they should have used Cole Porter's "I Loved Him" as a theme: "I loved him. but he didn't love meI wanted him but he didn't want methen the gods who nurse this universe indulged in another whimNow he loves me but I don't love him." That's what this frail, sentimental lollipop of a movie is about, but the song tells the whole story better in eight bars.

The best reason for seeing First Love is Beverly D'Angelo, who plays a lovable Little Lulu of a campus tart whose men walk through her heart like soldiers marching through Corregi-dor. Miss D'Angelo steals every scene she's in and builds a bonfire in the audience's memory, establishing a first love with the viewer that threatens to become an epidemic As a brain-damaged Vietnam veteran who escapes from a veterans' hospital with $1,000 of his buddies' money to start a worm farm in Califor- nia, Winkler tries to infuse Heroes with I some of the heart and free spirit of One 5 Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but you I can't make a character out of silly 3 putty, and the screenwriter (James i Carabatsos) forgot to fill in with flesh I and blood. The result looks like The Fonz swallowed a Jack Nicholson pill. Heroes is the first in what promises to be an extended season of dossiers on tortured survivors of "bombing with honor." I doubt that it will be the best, although its intentions are noble. The attempt is to show the problems that await boys who fought in a war they I didn't understand when they return home to a nation of civilians who didn't know they had gone away in the first place.

The Robert De Niro character in I Taxi Driver worked out his problems violence; the Henry Winkler character in Heroes uses warmth and humor to mask his despair. This makes for a more lovable role for The Fonz, but it wreaks havoc on the -film, which can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama. After breaking up a recruiting office on Times Square, Winkler escapes the doctors trying wearily to deal with his "reality reacclimation" in a white doc- tor's uniform, setting the tone for Marx Bros, frenzy early. At the Port Autaer- ity bus terminal, further madness ensues when Winkler encounters Sally Field, who is running away to Kansas City to escape her fiance. Winkler wrecks a diner with his worms, she spends her last $300 to get him out of trouble and pay for the damage and they somehow end up with another i crazy veteran on a rabbit farm." Everyone drinks beer and self-indulges a lot, with time out for a drag- strip race, beatings, muggings, and a I bashful motel-room encounter designed to drive the females in the audience wild with maternal compassion.

Up to this point, Heroes is a cross between Easy Rider and It Happened One Night. Suddenly it turns into stark melodrama as Winkler finally reaches i. California to discover his partner in the worm farm was killed back in Vietnam, i It's something he knew all along and the audience is torn between anger that the film had kept the information from them and disgust at having to sit through so many time-wasting shenanigans to get the big news. The final few frames seem cut from some totally different film. So much of Heroes is fragmented Freud that the heavy emoting at the end, when true love conquers the phan-5 toms of war and a psychotic is saved by I the tenderness of a woman's kiss, seems to be an act of desperation.

It comes too late to save the scrap that went M0i Henry Winkler in in the arms of the law before, and I went away wondering if they made up the script as they went along. Henry Winkler has undeniable charm, but I wouldn't advise him to cancel his Fonz contract hastily. He isn't ready for Hamlet. Sally Field is fast developing a reputation for stepping in to save other people's movies. She has so much energy and freshness that her every intuitive move seems to grow cozily out of the moment.

She is a skillful and endearing actress. Somebody should do something about giving her decent work in scripts that deserve her. This is the third good-hearted rag doll role she's played in a year. It's time she grew whiskers. First Love is a violets-and-violins college soap opera about unrequited love on campus that makes its students seem like dazed pterodactyls.

"Love is what feels good," says the jock next door, but moonstruck Elgin (William Katt) is holding out for something special. "You're old-fashioned," says some-thing in a towel who climbs into his dormitory window from the fire escape. But Elgin is waiting for ereamy-com-plexioned, fawn-eyed Caroline (Susan Dey), the only girl dn front of whom he can stand naked and say "I love you." Before they can get the Debussy up to full volume, Elgin wins Caroline's heart with a bound copy of Madame Bovary, and the audience is likely to be checking out the next feature time for Linda Lovelace For President. The students in First Love talk about Cosmopolitan magazine, so I guess it's supposed to be a contemporary view of idealistic kids trying to FRDDAV'S WDZ WINTERGREEN FOR PRESIDENT 5. Speaking of vice presidents, what venerable character actor played that role in the 1939 Frank Capra screen classic, "Mr.

Smith Goes to 6. What New York City political bigwig was played on film by Bob Hope in 1957, and in a Broadway musical in 1969 by Frank Gorshin? 7. Another musical, another mayor: Who created the part of LaGuardia in the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning show, "Fiorello!" 8. On screen in 1942, he was "The Mayor of 44th St." In real life, he was a U.S. senator from California in 1964.

What was his name? 9. "That's a joke, son!" was a favorite line for what comical southern senator played by Kenny Delmar on the Fred Allen radio show? 10. Ralph Bellamy played the role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in "Sunrise at Campobello" on stage (1958) and on screen (1960). Who were the actresses who played his wife Eleanor in the two versions? (Answers on page 15) A CZ- 1 By MONTY ARNOLD We hope the following salute to politics and poli- ticians iviU keep you diverted as you wait in line to cast your ballot. Good luck on the quiz and may the best wan win.

1. What English actor played a Roman senator In the 1960 movie, "Spartacus," and a U.S. senator in 1962's "Advise and Consent?" 2. In election year 1964, what actor on screen was the President in "Fail-Safe," and a presidential contender in "The Best 3. Who wrote the novel, "The Mayor of Caster- 4.

Everyone remembers John P. Wintergreen, who ran for President in the Gershwins' 1931 musical, "Of Thee I Sing." But what was the name of Wintergreen's vice presidential running mate? JfontJ Arnold is a member of the staff of the Theater Collection at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. -Tfa-tteket: WHliam Gaxton (I.) and Victor Moore..