Daily News from New York, New York • 169

20 Friday FRIDAY MOVIES er, 'Lassiter' A foggy naval drama By HARRY HAUN LE CRABE TAMBOUR. With Jesn Rochctort, Jacques Oufltho. Directed by Pierre SchoendoerHer. At the Public. Runnlnf time: 2 hours.

No ratine. LASSITER. With Tom Selleck, Jane Seymour. Directed by Hour Young. At the Criterion Center, the Manhattan, RKO Mth Bay Cinema and Loews t3rd St.

ftunnlna time: 1 hour, 40 minute. Rated R. lOLITICAL-SCIENCE majors ywywywwe; "eawenawayy -T-i-y va keT- it. i 7t i 'i LP with a specialty in latter-day French colonialism should get Tom Selleck and Lauren Hutton: a seduction was ordered 17 Tl ASSITER," a so-called sus-f pense thriller starring the tall, L3 dark and handsome Tom Selleck, has such a numbing effect on the brain it probably should have been called "Lassitude." The movie shows promise for about 10 minutes or so. The London 1939 setting is suitably glamorous.

The women, who include Jane Seymour as the hero's loyal girlfriend and Lauren Hutton as a wonderfully wicked German spy, are extremely decorative. Selleck, in his vaguely defined role as a nimble cat burglar who is blackmailed by Scotland Yard into stealing $10 million worth of uncut gems from the heavily-guarded German embassy, looks terrific in a tuxedo, but a little silly when wrapped up in the German Mata art's pink, feather-trimmed dressing gown. For once, the Scotland Yard inspector fails to behave in a gentlemanly fashion. In fact, he's a mean bully of a Cockney "copper" (played with great relish by Bob Hoskins) who intends to kill the American-born jewel thief if the Nazis don't polish him off first rather than have the pleasure of seeing pant rake like James Bond. Hutton has a jolly old time, though, sinking her teeth into the role of the German cocaine-sniffing hussy who positively gloats over her own lack of moral character.

The role of Lassiter required the same tongue-in-cheek approach, but Selleck tends to lumber through the movie like a genial giant who has all the high spirits of a department store mannequin. When a collection of antique cars proves to be more exciting to watch than the leading man, you know a movie is in serious trouble. Kathleen Carroll him rot in prison on a trumped-up charge. The nicest guy in the movie, believe it or not, is a timid FBI man, played very nicely by Joe Regalbuto, who shrinks in terror at the thought of violence. So why is "Lassiter" such a dull movie? For one thing, it obviously needed a more imaginative director than Roger Young, somebody who could, at least, keep things moving.

David Taylor's script is also at fault, for Lassiter, the Selleck character, is, frankly, just an amiable bore when he should and could have been a flip a huge charge from "Le Crabe Tambour," a 1977 naval drama which drops its leaden anchor today at the Public Theater. The rest of us must proceed at our own peril. And peril it is, for this impenetrable profusion of France's post-World War II military maneuverings demands such a thorough understanding of the turf that it tends to sentence the uninitiated to two hours in the dunce's corner. Pierre Schoendoerffer, who directed and adapted the film from his own novel, conspires to keep us there too, compounding the confusion with eccentric editing that litters the storyline with disorienting flashbacks and flashforwards. At no time are you certain where he is or why.

Apathy sets in early. What plot there is seems to be a character-study of the title enigma, a war-loving adventurer who staggers and dashes around Indochina, Brittany, Algeria and Newfoundland. He is remembered at these ports-of-call, in various ways, by three men aboard an escort vessel monitoring the North Atlantic fishing fleet Regrettably, their collective recall illuminates little and Jacques Perrin's title performance tells us even less. From the evidence presented so parsimoniously here, "Le Crabe Tambour" could well be a seafaring cross of "Lawrence of Arabia" and "The Lone Ranger." Under such befuddling circumstances, performances are impossible to appraise; two of them translated into Cesars (French Oscars): Jean Rochef ort's unyielding stoicism, as the vessel's cancer-doomed captain, and Jacques Dufilho's more shaded portrayal of his chief engineer. Odile Versois and Aurore Clement add, fleetingly, a few feminine touches in a film that's predominantly male-driven.

The rarely-seea ambience of "Le Crabe Tambour" notably a near-documentary view of fishing life in the frozen North hats been strikingly captured by Raoul Coutard, but to no avail. Such a vivid backdrop is lost on a film where the foreground never emerges from political fog. fracSkifSr. is Continued from page 5 "Big Deal on Madonna Street." Italian director Mario Monicelli's robustly funny caper movie. But, while Monicelli's would-be robbers were instantly lovable, Malle's street people who hang out in San Francisco's Mission District, which looks like a Hollywood set decorator's fantasy of poverty row are mainly tiresome.

For what ifs worth, they include a curiously cheerful unemployed bachelor (Donald his tiny, but loyal sidekick (Wallace Shawn); a good-hearted ex pimp (Larry Riley); a lamebrained Southern cracker (played by Sean Pen who looks painfully homely with bleached' Monde hair; a sex-hungry meter maid (played amusingly problem with "Crackers" is not the actors, who do the best they can with a script that is as half-baked as the gang's robbery scheme, but the fact that the action is limited to one dreary location, resulting in a movie that is as hopelessly static as a poorly filmed stage play. True, Shawn provides some desperately needed relief from the tedium of this eomedy. Living up to his character's name Turtle Shawn reacts to everything at half -speed, his face slowly brightening up when someone mentions the possibility of food, for Turtle is not at all slow when it comes to his dining habits. During the course of the movie, he slurps down a disgusting mixture of tacos, corn flakes and canned soup. Later he succumbs to a tempting dish cat food only to gorge himself finally on a tasty gold fish and an overcooked salmon.

Even so, trying to perk up "Crackers is about as futile a task as beating a dead fish. Kathleen Carroll Sean Penn serenades Tasla Vatenza by Christine Baranski). and a hot-tempered Mexican immigrant (Trinidad: SUvaX Sutherland is such an obviously classy gvy that he seems merely uncomfortable as the hard-luck leader of this gang of misfits. But the main The be-all and end-all of things (MM By LIZ HITTERS PORN thki. ui vol ii wii.

3 rHEN YOU THINK of a Den. do vou I I picture a Parker or a Cross or a Mont Blanc Diplomat? Which one embodies everything the word "pen" means? And to how many people? Questions of this kind can cause endless (and fruitless) discussions with philosophers, chums Co 5 IS they are. The authors feel that the one quality all these objects share is that no one can imagine any item being improved upon. This doesn't mean, they say, that these things are the it only means that they are, in the end, immutable. Okay, the quintessential cocktail is the martini, just as Ivory is the ultimate bar soap, and peanut butter and jelly is the be-all, end-all all-American sandwich.

The same goes for Campbell's tomato soup, Monopoly, the Louisville Slugger and the Goodyear Blimp. Cornfeld and Edwards are deft apologists, explain their stands very wittily and give cogent histories of the items involved. For example, in dealing with the absolute pen: "if you have only one life to sign away, for self-pity's sake do the deed with a tool (the Mont Blanc) worthy of the moment, significant from its howitzer shell heft to its profound blackness. But what if all you've got is a ball-point? Should it be a Scripto, or a Bic? Get together with some chums and chew it out FRIDAY DCGEIG and co-workers. Still, Betty Cornfeld (an ex-quiz show writer) and Owen Edwards (now executive editor of American Photographer) have staked out American culture and come up with a variety of objects with which there are almost no arguments.

Their glossy trade paperback QUINTESSENCE: The Quality of Having It (Crown. $12.95) is filled with luscious black-and-white photographs of things that ultimately express exactly what ii 1 IV I VMxrtU naming the immutable in American "Quintessence" culture.