A Well-Worn Road

ASCINEMANIACS SAY, there are films, and there are movies. Brian G Hutton's High Road to China is a movie. If you don't ask anything of it, you won't be disappointed.

You've seen this movie before, but that's all right-- you liked it the first time It's the one about the strong-willed girl who seeks the help of a cynical mercenary. At the end they fall in love, and you leave the theater smiling.

The plot is simple young, fabulously wealthy, wildly extravagant and supposedly beautiful Eve Tozer (Bess Armstrong) stops doing the Charleston on Istanbul tabletops long enough to learn that she has 12 days to lind her long lost father. Should she fail to exhibit him in a British court in that time he will be declared dead, and the company fortune will devolve upon daddy's evil partner Bentik (Robert Morlev) The prospect propels her into a harrowing two-week adventure in which hundreds of extras die and she herself narrowly escapes a dozen terrible ends. Along for the ride is Patrick O'Malley (Tom Selleck) the World War I vet who gives flying lessons when not seducing hall the local female population, and his trusty mechanic. Stiuts Jack Weston) Eve needs him and his two biplanes to track down eccentric papa.

With its embarrassingly weak premise, the manhunt is clearly little more than the director's excuse for these two youngsters to cavort through Asia, right wrongs, meet exotic people, and fall in love in spite of themselves. The movie could have been written by a studio committee pasting together successful pieces of past movies.

Jon Cleary, on whose book the movie is based, evidently enjoyed It Happened One Night, but director Hutton is not Frank Capra any more than Selleck and Armstrong are Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert 'Tom "Magnum P.I." Sellect, sex symbol for the '80s, performs convincingly as O'Malley. conveying more emotion than one might think possible with his macho, mustachioed, chiselled face. Armstrong does not fare quite so well, occasionally dredging up memories of high-school drama productions.

But even when she and Selleck are at their best, their characters trap them; the unflappable flapper and the hard-bitten ex-ace with a heart of gold never grow beyond stereotypes. Eve can that only dance and break hearts, but she can stunt-fly and shoot as well as the war veteran. (Mercifully, no one ever actually says, "Just like a man!," but it's the insinuation that counts.) O'Malley, for his part, can not only drink and seduce woman, but he can stunt-fly and shoot almost as well as Eve. As the mercenary-who's-really-a-nice-gay-in-the-end, he has a long pedigree in cinema history. If his propellers could only zoom him into hyperspace he could be Han Solo.

O'MALLEY'S PLANES only make it as for as Asia. The first stop is Afghanistan, Eve's father's last known destination. In the wilds of Afghanistan our trio encounters its first foreign culture, a rebel horde intent on driving out the British. (This, incidentally, makes the action hard to date precisely: Afghanistan won its independence in 1919, but the Charleston did not become popular overseas until the mid-20's.) Typical barbarians, they sing ethnic songs, dance wildly, offer to buy Eve, and delight in killing Enlishmen.(Never mind that the Afghans were nationalists fighting for liberation.) No tears, then, when O'Malley bombs half the camp out of existence while escaping. Or, as old man Tozer says after they find him in China. "There's battles gotta be fought. Maybe this is one of'em."

Every so often something is funny on purpose. When shooting her way out of the Afghan camp, for instance, Eve is stopped by the young prince who loves her. She levels her gun at him, but he stands firm and opens his shirt, exposing his chest as a target. All Eve can do is mutter "Men" and run off. Robert Morley as the deranged businessman Bentik also keeps the movie from taking itself too seriously, camping up his malice and insulting his manservant. And the 12-year-old in all of us giggles at serial stunts and big battles from which the heroes emerge safely. The viewer's grin on leaving is partly habit--you're supposed to like movies like this. If you absolutely loved Raiders of the Lost Ark, see High Road to China. On second thought, see Raiders again. Seth A. Tucker