Revel Without a Cause

By RICHARD CORLISS

FOOTLOOSE Directed by Herbert Ross; Screenplay by Dean Pitchford

The Footloose audience settles into its seats only to find it cannot sit down; the opening music and images just will not allow it. Here are a couple of dozen happy dancing feet moving irresistibly to a pounding Kenny Loggins raver that finds its inspiration in every let's-rock anthem from Rebel Rouser to Devil with the Blue Dress On. "You can fly if you'll only cut loose,/ Footloose,/ Kick off your Sunday shoes." Any viewer with a pulse rate above 25 will be bound to do the same.

This infectious credit sequence is the work of Wayne Fitzgerald and David Oliver, who lent similar magic to the title song from Nine to Five. The rest of Footloose is directed by Herbert Ross, and while it displays spasms of finger-popping vigor, the movie never lives up to--or survives--those first few minutes. Partly this arises from the picture's design. Though it is being marketed with the now familiar multi-media blitz, Footloose means to imitate Flashdance only in its box-office success. Ross and Screenwriter-Songwriter Dean Pitchford have set their sights much higher. The basic plot--Rebel Without a Cause crossed with the old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musicals in which somebody always shouted, "Hey, kids, let's put the show on right here!"--is buttressed with motifs on book burning, mid-life crisis, AWOL parents, fatal car crashes, drug enforcement and Bible Belt vigilantism. That is a lot of weight for a slender teen pic to carry, and this one sinks under the load.

The sleepy farm town of Beaumont is about as hip as Brigadoon. Stoked by the hellfire-and-tarnation sermons of the starchy Rev. Shaw Moore (John Lithgow), the locals have outlawed dancing. Enter Ren (Kevin Bacon), a city boy with radical ideas about popular music: he likes it. Will Ren win over the Rev.'s wil lowy daughter (Lori Singer)? Will Ren and his pal Willard (Christopher Penn) beat up the town's five toughest punks in a roadside brawl? Will he be able to put the show on right here? You get plenty of time for your three guesses: 106 minutes, discouragingly few of which surrender themselves to the rough ecstasy of rock 'n' roll.

The film loses itself in so many internal contradictions one is tempted to call it Screwloose. The minister forbids his daughter to listen to rock, but he permits her to wear the clothes of a big-city hooker, a hairdo befitting a glitzy country songstress, 6 lbs. of Maybelline and no bra. The kids in Beaumont have been denied dancing for five years, yet they are as slick as the regulars on Soul Train. Gaffes like these were of little moment in Flashdance; its preposterous story was soft-focused into a modern fable. It matters here, where the young and the middleaged, the traditional Hollywood film and the MTV feature, the music and the dialogue collide instead of merging in a pop apotheosis.

When Footloose cuts loose, it can beguile. The "production numbers" (especially a snazzy Deniece Williams song, Let's Hear It for the Boy) borrow smartly from the MTV style: fender-level camera, bright-as-Day-Glo lighting, crisply syncopated editing, fashion-photo compositions. Lori Singer fits into these compositions smoothly: her cheerleader face is ironized by dramatic blue eyes and a succulent mouth open to any proposition. Kevin Bacon may never be the cynosure of all female libidos, as he is characterized here, but he is a smart and appealing young actor. Too smart, perhaps, like the rest of the film. Footloose loses itself in intelligent ambition when it might more wisely have obeyed a simple musical imperative: Let's dance! --By Richard Corliss