Daniel Mangin

Will “Field of Dreams” see you through a midlife crisis? Can “Groundhog Day” help you visualize your way out of a rut? What with America’s penchant for quick fixes, one can’t help but look askance at a recipe for personal evolution incorporating a pastime as popular as movie watching. But what goes by the name “video work” and “cinema therapy” is not without precedent. Aristotle, after all, theorized that tragic plays have the capacity to purify the spirit and aid us in coping with those aspects of life that cannot be reconciled by rational thought. Applying the concept in the 20th century, psychoanalytic critics have postulated that films, because of their dreamlike quality, transmit ideas through emotion rather than intellect, in some cases neutralizing the instinct to repress. One illustration of this: Some people will cry buckets over a sentimental movie but rarely in real life, even under duress.

Cline, now semi-retired, describes video watching as an “immersive experience involving sound, sight and a positive outcome.” He says “Films show how problem solving can be accomplished, and since many movies are fairly true to life, the situations often closely mirror a client’s. I think ‘Stepmom’ is the best film I’ve ever seen about how a parent can handle his or her death for a child. A therapist could also use ‘Stepmom’ to illustrate the anger that takes place between birth and stepparents and how this can undermine any children involved. If I had people fussing and feuding over a kid I’d demand they see ‘Stepmom’ and ask each of them which character is most like you.”

Another recent film about parent-child relationships Cline gives two thumbs up is “Life Is Beautiful”: “The father makes being in a concentration camp a game, and the child survives the situation quite well. It’s a psychiatric truth that kids handle situations about as well as the adults around them do.”

Cline isn’t aware of any studies tracking the effects of video watching in a therapeutic setting but says he doesn’t need research to know this works. “With some things you just have to say they’re obvious and you don’t need hard proof. You just know if you get a client to watch a particular movie and the person ‘gets’ what’s going on, you’ll be able to make some progress.”

As with any treatment that shows promise, some proponents of video healing make extravagant claims. Gary Solomon, a psychotherapist and the author of “The Motion Picture Prescription,” a video guide top-heavy with simplistic works like “Beaches” and “Rocky,” goes so far as to propose that “prison and jail administrators can show movies to the inmates that will change the way they think, feel and do things for the rest of their lives.” Cathie Glenn Sturdevant, author of “The Laugh & Cry Movie Guide,” would probably whip up the cons a batch of Jiffy Pop: “The touch, smell, and taste of popcorn on our fingers and in our mouths in conjunction with the sights and sounds of a film can open the doorway to a whole new realm of energizing possibilities,” she writes in her book.

That the “The Mummy” or “Phantom Menace” — with or without popcorn — might alter a person’s mental-health status seems beyond dubious, but before dismissing the healing potential of commercial cinema entirely, consider the case of Norman Cousins. The late author and editor wrote famously in his book “Anatomy of an Illness” about watching humorous films as part of his recovery from what had been diagnosed as terminal cancer. He found that “ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.” Sturdevant concludes in “Laugh & Cry” that Cousins “cured himself of a life-threatening illness by laughing at Marx Brothers movies,” but this simplifies the matter: They were one component of a regimen that included vitamin C, dietary changes and other responses. Cousins’ experience does hint, however, that beyond elevating mood, watching movies can, in tandem with psychotherapy or other treatments, be worthwhile.

The key component in video work is dialogue, says John Hesley, a psychotherapist who co-wrote “Rent Two Films and Lets Talk in the Morning” with his wife, Jan, a social worker. The Hesleys both express skepticism that viewing even the most emotion- or thought-provoking film will in itself bring about significant change. “Think about it,” says John. “Films have been out there a long time. If any unmediated healing was going to happen it would have already. Someone has to help draw out the emotions. If friends or family members talk about a film together, something positive could happen, connections being made to how a situation depicted in a film relates to something in real life. But you cant just jot down quick and easy ways to make a particular film ‘work’ and have that accomplish much.” Written for therapists, the Hesleys’ tome is the best of several with lists of films dealing with issues such as aging, death and parent-child relationships. Like the two guides mentioned above, it favors conventional works.

“The emphasis on popular films is partly because we only wanted to recommend films people could get at their local Blockbuster store,” responds John when teased for giving the trifling divorce movie “Bye Bye Love” a full write-up but supplying only a few sentences of commentary about the more complex Ingmar Bergman film “Scenes From a Marriage.” “But there are other reasons. HMOs today only allow patients from six to 10 visits — 80 percent of my clients are covered by HMOs — so you can’t spend too much time trying to set up a film or explain it. You need to deal in headlines. You get into a discussion of character, then move on to something relevant in the client’s life. Film is just a catalyst, to get to more substantive issues. And frankly, most of our clients wouldn’t sit through ‘Scenes From a Marriage.’”

“There is a danger you run with more powerful films,” he adds. “You don’t always know where they’re going to lead. ‘Scenes From a Marriage,’ if assigned inappropriately, could end up pushing a couple toward an unnecessary divorce. We can’t possibly know all the hot-button associations a particular client might make even with a film we’ve used before. So if we err with our suggestions, it’s on the side of caution, especially because with our book we’re making them for people we’ve never met.” Things can even go wrong with clients seen face to face, John acknowledges. “I had a woman whose son was going to prison. I had her watch ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ because I wanted her to see that although prison is a bleak situation there’s always hope and that the human spirit is resilient. The truth is it backfired. All she came away with was ‘Oh my God, my son’s going to be raped or beaten to death.’”

The points the Hesleys make about sticking to the mainstream are well taken, and they undoubtedly know what clicks with their clients. If there are two general criticisms that can be leveled about video guides to date, though, it’s the narrow range of selections and the willingness of authors to include works they admit are of little artistic merit merely because the films address a particular topic. The inclusion of the cloying “Dying Young” in one guide is all the more vexing because though it’s about death, nobody dies, reportedly because test audiences objected to that.

One can’t help but wonder if in some cases films that upended a patient’s expectations — thematically and even aesthetically — might be more efficacious. The therapeutic process itself requires patients to challenge their paradigms, something many of the films recommended, though by no means all, do gently if at all. There’s a danger in making things too tough on a client, but it’s likely possible to make things too simple. Indeed, some artists believe it’s only when confronted by new forms and formats that new ways of seeing or seeing oneself come about. This may be overstating the case, but much of popular cinema follows a trajectory so familiar that psychically it mightn’t be all that much of a call to action. A film like Fellini’s “8 1/2″ wouldn’t be for everyone, but might for some people suffering a crisis of confidence open more doors than titles like “Rocky” or “Field of Dreams.” No book I came across even mentions “8 1/2,” which comes to some of the same conclusions as the other two films but via a more introspective and provocative route.

As video work becomes more widespread — the Hesleys recently made a presentation to 150 or so clinicians, most of whom already use video in their practices — therapists might do well to team up with film scholars or cinéastes to fashion a broader palette. In the meantime, New York University’s medical school has made a good start with a brief yet varied film/video database that lists everything from Hollywood titles like “Awakenings” and “The Doctor” to art-house fare like “Antonia’s Line” and “Vanya on 42nd Street.” The university’s faculty uses the videos to acquaint future doctors with situations they or their patients might encounter, but many of the videos would be equally helpful for therapists or people seeking help on their own.

A few months ago I recommended “Marvin’s Room,” one of the database’s more mainstream works, to a close friend who’s his mother’s primary caregiver. Completely paralyzed for the past five years, she’s had senile dementia for more than a decade, and the enormity of attending to her day after day had finally gotten to him. A doctor he’d seen only twice diagnosed him as suffering from depression and prescribed Prozac, but my friend is wary of taking drugs, and reflecting on his circumstances we both wondered if he was depressed or simply exhausted. My friend isn’t the type to consider therapy but really was distressed, so I hoped that “Marvin’s Room,” in which Diane Keaton sacrifices two decades of the prime of her life to care for her ailing father, might provide a new perspective.

The database review describes Keaton’s character as “a model of loving care.” The film’s key achievement, though — in artistic terms in addition to any therapeutic benefits — is the way it portrays the Zenlike beauty of Keaton’s selfless behavior. Her sacrifice is indeed a great one, but it’s clear the experience enriches her as well. As with Foster Cline’s client who watched “The Miracle Worker,” the results were discernible if not spectacular and required some post-viewing discussion. My friend, who lives in a different city than I, mulled over the film’s message for a few weeks, occasionally holding the bottle of Prozac in his hand, he told me later, trying to decide whether he’d really changed his outlook or needed the pills. He ended up not taking the pills, and that he’d undergone a minor transformation was transparent when I saw him next, not only in his improved attitude but also in the serenity with which he attended to his mother. Though “Marvin’s Room” by no means cured him of depression, by his account it was indeed a catalyst: “I know nothing has changed about my situation and it still gets me down, but I do have a different relationship to it, and for that I give part of the credit to watching ‘Marvin’s Room.’”

The movies have been taking it on the chin these days for supposedly inciting violence and otherwise contaminating society’s values. Lawsuits against “Natural Born Killers” and “The Basketball Diaries” accuse their creators of providing road maps to killers. The issues are more complex than the suits suggest, but that a court is hearing the cases at all is a recognition that there is some interplay between film messages and the conscious and unconscious mind. If movies are capable of doing great harm, though, it stands to reason they possess the potential to heal as well.

As Kate Buford points out in her absorbing new biography of the actor, Lancaster, who was born in 1913 and died in 1994, had the makings of a star: broad shoulders, a chiseled face, brilliant blue eyes, defiantly wayward hair and an iconic smile — much mimicked by impersonators during his heyday — that he called “The Grin.” Though he was a big man, he moved with grace on-screen, thanks to years of touring as a circus acrobat. David O. Selznick, the legendary producer of “Gone With the Wind,” had the chance to put him under contract in the mid-1940s but declined. Following the paradigm of Hollywood’s golden age, Selznick looked for personality types he could showcase in a series of similar roles, and he’d already signed one ravishing hunk, Guy Madison (a star remembered these days only by fey folk of a certain vintage). Who needed another?

Selznick’s rejection was actually a stroke of luck — one of many — for Lancaster. He hooked up with Harold Hecht, an agent who accurately gauged the social and economic forces transforming the motion-picture business after World War II. Within a few years, not only had Hecht helped engineer Lancaster’s superstardom (Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA, also played a key role), Hecht and Lancaster had become the producers of “Marty,” “Trapeze” (Lancaster’s homage to his circus days) and other hits. In the 1950s and early 1960s their company was the most successful independent outfit distributing through United Artists.

Lancaster, Buford writes, regarded his star persona, packaged in giddily overplayed roles like the hucksters in “The Rainmaker” and “Elmer Gantry,” as “one big commodity.” Because he produced many of his films, he could select parts that would expand his craft (he admitted he had a narrow range when he started) and allow him to examine personal and political issues. (He was a lifelong liberal.) Buford’s subtitle, “An American Life,” reflects her thesis that his best American films chart “the arc of postwar mainstream American life,” forming “a coherent story with chapters and themes.”

“Atlantic City,” one of the most memorable of these chapters, finds the star still growing as an actor late in his career. Lancaster plays Lou Pasco, an aging low-level gangster with delusions of grandeur who becomes infatuated with an oyster shucker (Susan Sarandon) with daydreams of her own. Sarandon, interviewed for the book, recalls Lancaster as at first seeing his character through a pre-feminist prism. It was, she says, “very, very difficult” for him to understand that her character gave herself to his; the actor “saw it as him pretty much taking her clothes off and taking her.” (His inability to comprehend the role reversal is surprising given a female friend’s reminiscence, earlier in the book, of women chasing after the youthful Lancaster “with mattresses on their backs.”) With coaxing from Sarandon, and presumably from the film’s director, Louis Malle, the actor turned in a supremely graceful performance — absent Sarandon’s anecdote, I might have called it instinctive — in which the woman set the tone for the lovemaking.

As for his real-life romantic exploits, Lancaster was generally discreet; the spiciest tidbits in Buford’s book, such as his passionate liaison with Shelley Winters, come from others who have written or contributed to tell-all accounts. The actor once said he couldn’t imagine anyone writing a biography of him because it might be too boring, and he would have been right had Buford not wisely chosen to focus on his work. The sections about his family life after he became a star border on the tedious — he philandered, his wife was an alcoholic and his kids had the typical problems of affluent children growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. But Buford keeps these discussions to a minimum.

This well-researched book’s only major flaws — and they’re by no means catastrophic — are the author’s tendency to repeat herself, particularly about her subject’s beauty, and to overstate her case. To drive home a point about Lancaster’s on-screen dynamism, for example, she describes him as never stopping “to lean against anything” in a film until the 1980 “Atlantic City.” It’s hard to imagine a late-1940s Hollywood director not taking advantage of Lancaster’s pinup potential by propping him against some scenery, which indeed happens in two of his first three pictures.

Buford nonetheless succeeds in her primary goal of tracing the relationship between Lancaster’s art and his life. Such a connection might seem like a given, but as Sidney Poitier tells her, “When you see substance in an actor’s work, it isn’t always necessarily there in the unfolding of his personality. In Burt’s case, what I saw on the screen … were the things I became familiar with off the screen.” If he’s right, Lancaster’s films may well constitute the actor’s best biography. But Buford’s admirable chronicle supplies the back story.

According to Buford, Lancaster probed the important personal and political themes of his life and era through his films. Sometimes he took the position he believed in; at other times he played his own devil’s advocate. The following movies, which contain some of his most important performances, also mark key points in his on- and off-camera biography:

The Killers (1946)

The “Citizen Kane” of film noir, which takes off from the story by Ernest Hemingway, recounts the circumstances leading up to the murder of Ole “Swede” Anderson (Lancaster), a lug double-crossed by Ava Gardner and a male confederate in a payroll heist. It was one of several early roles in which the actor played a fool for love.

Criss Cross (1949)

Yvonne De Carlo double-crosses Lancaster so many times he gets dizzy in this silly but effective noir with a bushel of atmospheric Los Angeles location shots. As an actor he’s still inexperienced, but when he flashes his dazzling teeth or gets in the clinch with De Carlo, he’s unmistakably a Hollywood star.

From Here to Eternity (1953)

Lancaster, as Sgt. Milton Warden, plays with fire in the form of Deborah Kerr, the wife of his commanding officer, in the film version of James Jones’ bestselling novel. It’s set on the eve of the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, and foamy white waves bathe Kerr and Lancaster as they make love on the beach in one of 1950s cinema’s most torrid (and most famous) scenes.

Vera Cruz (1954)

A sneering, leering, swaggering Lancaster bonds with Gary Cooper as they attempt to highjack gold in Robert Aldrich’s wry western. The satire had disaster written all over it during production but turned out, deservedly, to be a hit.

Trapeze (1956)

Lancaster pays tribute to his days in the circus. As a broken-down trapeze artist, he trains Tony Curtis in a difficult routine. A ’50s-style misogyny infuses this film, in which a woman (Gina Lollobrigida) comes between the two male stars.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

They don’t come any meaner than J.J. Hunsecker, a gossip columnist who preys on publicist Tony Curtis’ lust for fame and money. Lancaster’s company produced “Sweet Smell,” a bomb when it was released but now considered a classic.

Elmer Gantry (1960)

Lancaster won a best-actor Oscar for his performance as Sinclair Lewis’ jive-talking religious revivalist. He’s a little over the top, but the film still packs a mild punch as a cautionary tale about cynics who manipulate people’s religious faith to make a buck.

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

This film about a convict who becomes an expert on birds, writes Buford, is “Lancaster’s great expression of hope and freedom of the spirit, his secular bow to the Christian idea of redemption he had been brought up with.”

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963)

Lancaster plays the aristocratic Prince Salina in Luchino Visconti’s pageant about the unification of Italy. Part history, part timeless visual poetry, this is one of the finest postwar Italian films. The actor and director got off to a rocky start as collaborators but eventually came to respect each other greatly.

The Swimmer (1968)

Middle-aged and conflicted, Lancaster swims home via his New England neighbors’ swimming pools in a de facto prequel to “The Ice Storm,” based on a John Cheever story. Cheever wrote of Lancaster, “He’s very sexy and commanding in the girl scenes but half the time he looks as if he were going to cry which is just right for the part.”

Ulzana’s Raid (1972)

Lancaster portrays an experienced scout who advises a greenhorn cavalry leader on a mission to capture a bloodthirsty Apache chief, in a western that contemplated America’s past to shed light on the Vietnam War, then still in progress.

Go Tell the Spartans (1978)

This subtle, troubling drama, set just before the mid-1960s troop buildup began, is among the best Vietnam War pictures ever made. The subject is how America got into Vietnam; this time Lancaster plays a world-weary military advisor. As in “Ulzana’s Raid,” blind imperialism and an inability to perceive the world on any but American terms doom a small, isolated combat force.

Atlantic City (1980)

Lancaster was never more endearing than in Malle’s film about an aging, two-bit gangster who gets involved in a drug caper and falls for Sarandon. He’s so superb as a man desperate to believe in a past he was too ineffectual to make happen that he’s convincing even when he recites lines as preposterous as “The Atlantic Ocean was something then. Yeah, you should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days.”

The plot, lighter than a swirl of John Paul Mitchell’s mousse, centers on Crawford Mackenzie (Ferguson), a gay Scottish hairstylist who thinks he’s been invited to an international competition in Los Angeles. The talented but naive newcomer treks across the Atlantic with a British television crew, only to discover that the form letter he received entitles him merely to be a “guest observer.” Oops. After he bestows an impromptu makeover on a loopy but powerful publicist (played by Frances Fisher), she vows to help him secure the requisite HAG (Hairdressers of America Guild) card. Thwarting the duo at every turn are the contest’s snooty organizer (Mary McCormack), who only traffics in superstar stylists, and the reigning champion (David Rasche), a pseudo-Nordic boor with the oafish name of Stig Ludwiggssen.

It’s hard to tell whether the bubbly spirit of “The Big Tease” derives more from the lead character or the blast Ferguson’s having in his first starring role in a feature. Either way, the giddy mood partially compensates for the forced and underdeveloped patches in the script he and Sacha Gervasi wrote. So, too, do the performances of cast members like Fisher, who makes her stereotypical publicist-to-the-stars vulnerable, even sweet. “The Big Tease” doesn’t adhere strictly to the mock-documentary format, but the posse of celebrities playing themselves — including models Kylie Bax and Veronica Webb and stylist John Paul DeJoria (aka, John Paul Mitchell) — adds an appropriate real-life touch. (And if only unwittingly, the appearance of “Baywatch” star David Hasselhoff presents the film’s deepest philosophical conundrum: Is a bad actor capable of acting poorly?)

Crawford, supremely confident in his tonsorial abilities, maintains a relentlessly upbeat perspective in the face of multiple catastrophes. In one of the few instances in which the script elevates the acting rather than vice versa, he faces the Century Plaza Hotel’s skittish manager, played by Larry Miller, who’s demanding payment Crawford can’t make. The manager vacillates between firmness and neurosis, slowly losing his cool, confessing no end of troubles that he finally blames on the time his “uncle inserted his finger into my anus when I was a kid.” (It’s all in the timing, which Miller pulls off superbly.)

Despite the manager’s meltdown, Crawford gets booted from his fancy digs. But with the title character of “Braveheart” as his model — it wasn’t clear to me if the filmmakers had picked up on that picture’s homo-unfriendly overtones, not that it matters — the intrepid haircutter carries on. And on and on. As with any life-of-the-party type who refuses to give it a rest, Crawford’s prattling produces fewer chuckles as “The Big Tease” unfolds. And like their protagonist, Ferguson and Gervasi spend too much time patting themselves on the back for being clever — time that would have been better spent honing the humor. Too often, they’re content to suggest a scene’s comic potential rather than actualize it.

The director, Kevin Allen (whose only previous directorial effort was “Twin Town”), doesn’t help much, either. He’s just as apt to punctuate a scene by having Ferguson toss an “Aren’t I cute?” look at the camera as to put it anywhere interesting. Allen does, though, love swish-pans and jump cuts, which if occasionally irrational add a certain vigor to the transitions.

Given its title, “The Big Tease” focuses less on the salon world than one might imagine. Los Angeles itself is the real joke — as if that hasn’t been done a million times. L.A. generates new fodder for satire almost daily, but the revelations in “The Big Tease” are strictly retreads: Limo drivers proffering head shots and pitching scripts. Power lunches (not one, but two). Snobby receptionists, P.R. hacks, agents, hairdressers. (OK, but just because it’s true doesn’t make it original.)

The climactic if clichi-riddled competition almost salvages “The Big Tease.” The dueling specialists — you get one guess whether Crawford wheedled his way into the event — concoct four outlandish coifs. But though the hair imagery is entertaining enough, even this sequence lumbers when it should be frolicking, and when it finally kicks into gear it’s more hyperactive than inspired.

As with the rest of the film, the scene’s enough of a lark to make one wish the filmmakers hadn’t been so sloppy — or, since ersatz viriti appears to have been the objective, that they’d been more calculatedly sloppy. As for the foolproof pitch, “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Shampoo” and “Rocky” may have been the theory, but — at the risk of getting too cute myself — “The Big Tease” ends up tasting like refried “Bean,” that other pale tale about a Brit out of water in L.A.

This story’s heartwarming side happened off-screen. Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, the co-writers and co-directors of “Sugar Town,” scripted it in less than two weeks, shot it in three and set up financing with relative ease. @ la Mickey and Judy, they persuaded friends to donate their houses as sets and contribute their talents for lower-than-usual fees. The film’s unvarnished look only adds to its charm.

Things on-screen go less swimmingly, as a cast headed by Ally Sheedy, Rosanna Arquette, Beverly D’Angelo and musicians John Taylor (Duran Duran), Michael Des Barres (Power Station) and Martin Kemp (Spandau Ballet) enacts scenarios worthy of the VH1 series “Behind the Music.” A talentless youngster steals, sleeps and steamrolls her way into the big time. To cut an album, a producer lies, strings people along and even turns to pimping. Faded ’80s rock titans go contempo with godawful “fusion soul.” A sexy vocalist attempts to seduce a session man away from his wife, who is eight months pregnant. And his newly reformed junkie of a brother … well, you get the idea. When it isn’t reconstituting tales of rock-world woe, “Sugar Town” samples from “All About Eve,” “Nashville” and a previous Anders-Voss collaboration, “Border Radio,” a grainy, low-budget, fictional snapshot of the late-1980s Los Angeles punk scene. (The co-directors apparently love mocking the notion of “seminal” all-male bands.)

The story’s so familiar and the clichis about Los Angeles so careworn, if merrily rendered, that after a short while only my admiration for Anders’ “Gas Food Lodging,” about a mother and her two daughters living in a trailer in New Mexico, kept me from squirming in my seat. (“Mi Vida Loca,” about Chicana gangs in Los Angeles, and “Grace of My Heart,” inspired by the songwriting career of Carole King, are two of Anders’ less fully realized, though still affecting, efforts.) Voss’ films, such as “Baja” (Molly Ringwald on the lam in Mexico) and “Amnesia” (adultery leads to amnesia and sex slavery), are the very things that give “edgy” a bad name. But despite the attention given Anders for her contributions to “Sugar Town,” Voss seems to have the upper hand here.

After its manic opening sequences, though, the film slips into an appealing groove. Anders blends her real-life observations into fictive action in a way no other American director — except perhaps Henry Jaglom — does. “Sugar Town” may be a lark and its characters essentially stereotypes, but they end up being more substantial than the material suggests they’ll be. An added bonus is that most of them are in their 30s and 40s. Unlike the inhabitants of many of this summer’s movies, their underlying dilemmas are more pressing than getting laid for the first time.

Not that they’re any more grown-up about handling said dilemmas. Sheedy’s character, a successful production designer, is a font of New Age psychobabble about relationships. Needless to say she’s got a miserable track record in dating. That one sympathizes at all with this airhead is a tribute to Sheedy’s earnest playing of the role and Anders’ skill at revealing the psychic nuances of women who aren’t necessarily deep or intellectual. Likewise with the male characters, even when they’re acting like dicks — or thinking with them — they invariably rise above caricature. Des Barres, for instance, plays a haggard-looking rocker who’s ever on the make for nubile flesh. He’s ridiculous, but in a nice twist his comeuppance winds up being his entree to more mature (and satisfying) sexual relations.

Anders and Voss keep the tone of “Sugar Town” mostly glib, but toward the end its satiric and serious sides surface simultaneously. A husband who has nearly succumbed to temptation — “Sugar Town” seems pretty clear that women are better at fidelity than men — congratulates himself for only kissing his seductress. His wife declares that kissing is worse than fucking because it’s more intimate. The statement’s at once hyperbolic and not without a grain of truth. The contradiction hangs nicely in the air, unresolved until the film’s closing shot.

“Sugar Town” isn’t profound, but it is perceptive, and despite its earthier take on show biz the film ends up being just as sweet on its protagonists as the scrappy Rooney-Garland vehicles of yore were on theirs. Maybe it’s because the film was made on the fly, in something of the spirit of those 1930s and 1940s shows within the show. In any case it’s a pile of fun — but don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking about it a week later.

“The function of silence,” he intones with a chuckle, before pursing his lips, easing back in his plush chair and closing his eyes. Interview over.

Pause, two, three, four. Gotcha.

Such mischievous geniality accounts in large measure for the appeal of “On the Trail of Mark Twain with Peter Ustinov,” a four-hour documentary that airs on PBS beginning this week. Twain took a round-the-world trip in the late 1890s that he documented in his book “Following the Equator.” Sir Peter retraces Twain’s steps a century later and compares notes.

On its surface, “On the Trail,” a co-production of WNET in New York and Granada Television, is a lighthearted travelogue. Sir Peter bathes at a Maori communal spa, speaks about Mercedes-Benzes with a young Tibetan Buddhist who’s revered as the reincarnation of an 800-year-old deity and drops in on the personals department of a Bombay newspaper. Cumulatively, the episodes at once illustrate the lingering effects of colonialism and the tenacity of indigenous cultural conventions — India’s ancient caste system and marriage customs, for instance — in the face of both imperial domination and modernity.

In “On the Trail,” Ustinov, who for three decades has been a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), poses some larger philosophical and political questions about how we can best settle old squabbles and right past wrongs. He hints in “On the Trail” that the answer sometimes lies in accepting that the idealized precolonial past never existed — or at least that it has been irretrievably lost. And bucking the standard liberal line a bit, Ustinov suggests that a country’s attempt to “reclaim” its heritage as a way of casting off the psychological shackles of colonialism will in most cases be futile, if not also counterproductive.

Another Ustinov project in current U.S. release is “Stiff Upper Lips,” a lame parody of period British films of the Merchant-Ivory variety. He doesn’t have much to say about his featured turn as the libidinous owner of an Indian tea plantation. Fine with me, as he’s done better work — most notably in “Spartacus” and “Topkapi,” for which he won best supporting actor Oscars, and in “Billy Budd,” which he also directed and co-wrote.

Our chat at Manhattan’s Regency Hotel feels at times more like a private performance than mere conversation. Sir Peter’s never met an accent he didn’t want to tackle, and as he recounts his global journey, the opportunities for doing so are limitless.

What made Twain a great travel writer?

He was a very good journalist. He had an individual way of looking at things and he noticed everything. I don’t regard “Following the Equator” as a very good book — it’s meandering and it came out at a time when picturesque qualities were more important than the discussion of social issues. But he did say one remarkable thing, which is that there’s no square inch of the world that hasn’t been stolen. For the period, it seems to me to be the most extraordinary way of advancing a view of the world. It’s absolutely true, of course.

Twain warns an ascendant America not to follow Britain’s lead as an empire builder.

Yes, and with the U.S. the imperialism is more of an anomaly. The U.S. is by definition anticolonial, and it had every reason to be anticolonial given how it was established. But when you look at the way Hawaii was annexed or how Puerto Rico was acquired, there were so many tricks involved. And more recently with Grenada in the 1980s — they were a wonderful, innocent country and they had their adolescence taken away from them. They had to become adult overnight and they grew up in a different fashion than what they were expecting. What’s sad is that the American students [whose safety was the stated rationale for the invasion by U.S. troops] were in no possible danger.

What did you learn about the world making “On the Trail” that you didn’t already know?

One interesting thing, which I never knew, was that Fiji was never occupied by the British, but gave itself voluntarily because it had a big American debt at that time. Fiji saw what was happening to Hawaii and didn’t want to suffer the same thing. So, it gave itself to Queen Victoria, but on the condition that she pay the American debt. Years later, they wanted to remain a colony because they knew their own natural dignity didn’t make them victims of a colonial power. The British had to send a delegation out there to say, “We’re getting into trouble in the United Nations for not giving you your independence. For God’s sake, take it!” Emotionally, Fiji’s still a colony — people wearing English wigs in court and all that. They’re more royalist than the English could possibly ever be. It’s bewildering.

The attitude is somewhat different in New Zealand, where you follow a discussion among native peoples about reparation payments for fishing rights lost during the colonial period. And you drop in on a Maori man having his face tattooed in a traditional way. Did his action test your limits regarding people’s attempts to reclaim the past?

It was absolutely a nightmare watching it being done. I said to the man, “Does it hurt?” He says, “No, it’s rather like having a piece of broken glass dragged across your face.” (Laughs quizzically.) Horrifying. Then I asked him, “Why do you do this?” “It’s a statement.” “Yes, but a statement of what?” “Well, it proves that I am what I am, and in any case with this on my face I can’t get any work.” Huh? It was an eye-opener to me.

What are your philosophical reservations about the scheme whereby the government will provide land to people who can prove they’re at least 50 percent native Hawaiian?

That’s Bosnia. That’s Kosovo. “Is your mother Chinese?” “My mother was pure Chinese.” “Well it shows here she’s got Laotian blood.” It’s such an absurd way of doing things. Why should land be allocated in relation to the purity of your blood? This seems to me to be no different at all from ethnic cleansing.

You seem more mellow about this on camera.

One’s polite. The alarming thing is that, as usual, the quota system was a decision of Congress [in the 1920s].

What impressed you about South Africa’s establishment of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an alternative to
conducting criminal trials of people who’d committed
atrocities during apartheid?

One feels in the courtroom how very different the proceeding
is when it’s done under the chairmanship of an archbishop
[Desmond Tutu] compared to what it would be under the
chairmanship of a judge. Tutu said, “Without the truth we
can’t make a fresh start.” And by doing it the way they did,
they probably got better mileage out of these idiots. That’s
why I put South Africa at the conclusion on the show. I
really believe that if the millennium is going to work, it’s
going to be due to the ratio between how much we are allowed
to forget and how much we are incited to remember. The whole
of Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Middle East — all that is
based on incitement to remember.

Archbishop Tutu talks about it being pragmatic not to
seek retribution, but the approach was also a Christian one
– turn the other cheek, though in this case also seek some
accountability. Did you find it ironic how both sides
applied Christianity to such different ends?

When I met with Tutu I said, “I’m a little surprised that
both you and the Afrikaners took Christianity to be their
guiding light and yet your interpretation of it seems rather
different. Theirs seems to be a bit more pharisaical than
yours is in that they seem to be saying, ‘Thank you, God,
for making us different from them. But if there’s any way we
can help them, you only have to send us a signal.’ [Laughs.] Yet your form of worship is much more choreographic and symphonic.”

And he said, “You mustn’t be too hard on the Afrikaners.
They are in the position of a minority people surrounded by
a stronger majority. And because they have selfish needs,
they regard themselves as the chosen people. And after all,
it’s not the first time that this has happened,” he said
with the faintest grin. It was interesting comment because
it was taking a kind of risk and at the same time being very
perspicacious — and very generous.

Certainly more generous than Twain, who called their
forebears “profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate,
bigoted.”

Indeed. Tutu’s a delightful character. He told me, “I never
saw a light. I never thought of the church as a vocation. I
went in because I thought it was the one place where a black
boy could be on equal terms with a white one. And it was
only once I was inside that I began to believe.”

Did your meeting with the 97-year-old widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, feel as peculiar in person as it looked on camera?

I must say our visit to old Mrs. Verwoerd proved what Tutu
was saying. She came out of her house, and I put out my arm
and she searched for the arm and then the eagle had landed.
Ah, I was in such pain as these bony fingers dug into my
skin. Then she sits down. “No blacks, only whites.”

This is in Orania, the segregated area some Afrikaners are trying to develop
into a separate state?

Yes.

By contrast, Robben Island, once a notorious prison, has been so transformed that you see it as a positive metaphor for the new South Africa.
What fascinated you so much about the place?

One had doubts about the way things are going in the new
South Africa. Robben Island is a pretty island off the coast
with a wonderful view. It’s made for luxury, yet it had a
fearful penitentiary. But it’s no longer a prison; it’s a
place of pilgrimage. People go to cell No. 5, which
was Mandela’s, and they meditate and talk.

The extraordinary thing is that among the guides are people
that have settled on Robben Island for good — ex-political
prisoners, ex-criminals and ex-warders. This was a place
where savagery was encouraged. One of the punishments for
prisoners was to cover them up with sand until only their
heads were showing and then pee on them. But then political
prisoners like Mandela began cultivating little gardens and
beautifying the place. Suddenly everybody joined in,
mystified by this. Now, these disparate people are also
joining in together. Robben Island is growing into a
community based on this terrible place which by their
presence is somehow exorcised. There’s an example of
forgiving and forgetting.

Where has your work for UNICEF taken you?

The most recent mission was to Cambodia, which may be the
saddest place I’ve ever been. Cambodia, I think, is the
fault of the West, because Cambodia had more bombs dropped
on it than Vietnam. You feel like you’re flying over a
plucked chicken because the deforestation has been so
thorough. And when you get killing on that sort of scale it
brings on a habit of killing, so that in a way Pol Pot was
almost a logical follow-on to that.

The problems for children are enormous, and what makes you
furious is that you can live with acts of God, earthquakes
or natural disasters that seem inevitable. But that people
do terrible things, deliberately not foreseeing the
consequences, putting children at the age of 10 into
uniform when they enjoy playing soldiers and perverting
their natural tendencies, that’s unpardonable.

So, what makes you optimistic about the future?

I don’t think there’s any alternative to optimism. One
skeptical German journalist said to me, “Isn’t all you try
and do for UNICEF like just like a drop of water on a hot
stove?” That’s a German expression. I said I honestly think
it’s a little better than that: “It’s a drop of water in the
ocean: It doesn’t get lost.”

Ari, the nihilist protagonist, has two solutions for every quandary in his life: rough sex and even rougher drugs. He’s the type of self-indulgent lout
audiences either find captivating or exasperating –
particularly when the entire narrative unfolds from the lout’s point of view, as it does
here. What intrigued me about Ari was the way he, like many kids his age, uses
his body to thrash out his metaphysical conflicts. During
the slightly more than 24 hours in his life the film
depicts, he gets an inkling that an easier strategy might
exist, though he’s a ways off from shifting paradigms.

“Head On,”
which has begun to pop up in U.S. art houses, was a box-office hit
in Australia — something of a surprise given its modest budget and trippy style.
Heavy doses of hand-held, choppy and swooping camerawork give the film an
edgy feel, one that’s accentuated by the contributions of editor Jill
Bilcock, who cut the equally frenetic “Romeo + Juliet.”
Kokkinos goes overboard in spots and isn’t above hot-dogging
with the camera angles, but in general the cinematography
complements Ari’s emotional state.

Kokkinos puts a specifically Greek-Australian spin on a
familiar coming-of-age tale. Everyone around Ari, especially
his family, offers the same predictable advice: Get a job.
Get married. “Then you can do whatever you want,” his
friend’s mom tells him — a stance he finds too hypocritical.
As a “wog,” or foreigner, in a Melbourne suburb, Ari doesn’t
fit in with the white majority. “They look at us and all
they see is a hairy back,” he says of Anglo girls. But his
parents and their generation — many of them political
activists in Greece during the 1970s — seem not to notice
the psychic upheaval immigration has induced in their
offspring. Lacking imagination, most of the kids opt for
what Ari derides as the marriage-mortgage compromise.

Alex Dimitriades, an Australian TV star and teen heartthrob,
plays Ari with robust impetuosity. All his sex being
metaphorical, Ari lurches into some skanky episodes, not the
least of them an Oedipal back-alley tussle with a portly
fellow his father’s age. Ari’s at first debased when he’s
forced to give head — until now, he’s only been the top
– but afterward recoups a portion of his pride by forcing
the guy to jerk him off. When his partner momentarily gets
caught up in the act’s intensity and makes a slight move to
kiss him, Ari brutally twists the man’s head away and
maintains the hold until finally shooting. Kokkinos
choreographs the scene to mirror an earlier one in which
Ari’s father attempts to seduce his son back into the enveloping
comfort of patriarchal affection during an impromptu Greek
dance they share. Both scenes emphasize the grip Ari’s
family and heritage have on him, and from the dance it’s
apparent that the ties binding him aren’t entirely negative.

What’s telling about Ari’s tryst is that whatever
self-respect he’s regained at its conclusion is on the old
terms — namely, macho one-upmanship. But the older man is paradoxically the first person to
force Ari to accept his sexual vulnerability. Given his
chemical intake, however — Ari has already shot up, smoked,
snorted various drugs and had several drinks to boot — most
of this is lost on him in the short run.

Ari has so much homosex, and is so
trashily proficient at it from the get-go, that it took a while for it to
dawn on me that “Head On” is also his coming-out story. Ari
hasn’t yet accepted being queer — the sex for him is always
about something else. Early on, he meets a white Aussie,
Sean, who sees more of Ari’s potential than Ari does himself.
Sean’s projected too far into the future — it’s hard to
learn much in a day, and Ari is a slow learner in any case –
but in their interactions lies the nucleus of his
transformation.

The themes “Head On” juggles — sexual identity, cultural
alienation, conformity, individuality — lend themselves to
didacticism. For the first hour or so Kokkinos, who’s
Greek-Australian herself, merges her philosophical
observations into the action. Toward the end, though, she
falters. In a scene that’s not in the book, Ari and his
cross-dressing friend Toula (nee Johnny), who’s been
teaching him about standing up for one’s truth, get themselves arrested while tripping.
One of the cops is a textbook
white racist. The other’s a Greek guy who’s trying to
assimilate and becomes infuriated and embarrassed by what
Toula represents as a Greek. Only the sly performance of
Paul Capsis as the sassy Toula gives any bite to the
less-than-subtle confrontation.

Its missteps and excesses aside, “Head On” is a promising
feature film debut for Kokkinos, who previously directed the
hour-long drama “Only the Brave,” about a Greek-Australian
lesbian teen’s coming out. The director puts Ari through no
end of macho paces — though nothing anywhere near as gross
as the ear surgery in “Reservoir Dogs” or the toilet scene
in “Trainspotting” — but doesn’t revel in his bravado.
She’s clearly fond of the character, even moved by his
predicament. I’d almost say she nurtures him, for despite
his fatalistic ranting that closes the film, I think she sees
a future for a boy with this much fire in him. But then, that’d be
stereotyping her, wouldn’t it?