That point was made more clearly in the three-hour 1973 TV drama “The Missiles of October” than it is in “Thirteen Days.” With Kevin Costner co-producing and costarring as Kennedy advisor Kenneth P. O’Donnell, it’s a thoroughly bland and mediocre movie about the Cuban missile crisis. Yet it’s a cunning piece of Kennedy hagiography.

Of course, those who judge presidencies by tangible accomplishments have never adequately reckoned with the long-range influence of Kennedy’s emphasis on public service and vigor. Still, when advance reviews of “Thirteen Days” declare that the movie offers a welcome contrast to today’s putatively phony and disingenuous leaders, you have to ponder how we weigh our public characters. As a nation, we’re being drawn into a knee-jerk lionization of Camelot and trivialization of our current president. Kennedy may have had his name on the cover of “Profiles of Courage,” but that doesn’t mean he always acted like one — it doesn’t even mean he wrote the book, which has been ascribed in part to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., James MacGregor Burns, Allan Nevins and Theodore Sorensen. (At least Al Gore was the author of his bestseller.)

All the talk we’ve been hearing about “The Greatest Generation,” with its stress on wartime sacrifice, carries overtones of yearning for a time when “men were men.” I fear that what makes JFK the perfect president to wax nostalgic over in the new millennium isn’t his wit or eloquence, or the highest planes of his idealism, but his camera savvy and his readiness to look death in the eye. In “Thirteen Days,” he and his inner circle judge Adlai Stevenson’s berating of the Soviet Union at the United Nations as if they were rooting for their side on “Crossfire.” And though “Thirteen Days” pits JFK against hawks who want to order airstrikes on Cuba immediately, the net result is to celebrate him as a strategist of the new frontier of nuclear brinkmanship. The war hero of “PT 109″ becomes a warrior for peace.

How can one not be drawn into a story with torn-from-the-transcript dialogue like Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay telling Kennedy, “You’re in a pretty bad fix,” and Kennedy replying, “Well, maybe you haven’t noticed you’re in it with me”? (This exchange is the crux of the trailer.) At its best, “Thirteen Days” shows that a compromise between martial power and negotiation can be as dramatic as extremism. But the movie is too intent on sweeping us up in the spell of JFK’s charisma. As a consequence, the selling of the crucial Kennedy-sponsored consensus — the widespread acceptance of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s idea to blockade Cuba instead of bomb it — lacks the requisite barreling momentum.

The smartest move of writer David Self (“The Haunting”) and director Roger Donaldson (“No Way Out”) is to dramatize how JFK and his attorney general brother, Robert, keep abreast of their dueling advisors and of their forces in the street, the water and the air. The president and/or his men pressure a newspaper editor to call off a story, insist that JFK alone has the right to trigger any kind of naval fire and even command American spy pilots to avoid being shot — implying that they should lie to their superiors if they are fired at so the rabid American military won’t retaliate. (That last bit is fiction.) In “Thirteen Days,” these decisions are an integral part of JFK’s plan to defuse impending catastrophe, as crucial as any high-level discussion of how to handle Nikita Khrushchev. Far better than the film’s embarrassingly familiar stock footage of mushroom clouds or school kids practicing duck-and-cover routines, this dual focus allows Donaldson to cut away from talking heads and to suggest the earth-shattering military might that JFK struggles to hold in check.

Unlike earlier versions of the saga, “Thirteen Days” incorporates that dread concept of script committees, “the human side.” Instead of “You’ll never believe how close we came,” the ad line could be “This time it’s personal.” The hinge to this part of the story is the character of O’Donnell, a college buddy of Robert Kennedy’s, now a special assistant to the president with an expertise in gauging the political impact of policy. O’Donnell’s function is to bring a warts-and-all perspective to the furrowed-brow spectacle of Bruce Greenwood’s JFK and Steven Culp’s RFK. But seeing the Kennedys through O’Donnell’s eyes in effect elevates their stature; every show of self-doubt or vulnerability makes them more engaging. At the movie’s most explicit and annoying, this ersatz humanizing results in scenes like Culp’s competitive Bobby complaining about always being called the ruthless, brilliant one. Briefly, the Kennedy brothers come off as the Smothers Brothers.

The shrewdest aspect of the JFK-RFK-O’Donnell nexus is that O’Donnell’s home life can serve as the Life magazine version of the Kennedy saga without raising questions of whitewashing. (There is one dewy shot of the president looking out the window, worriedly, at Jackie and their children.) An Irish Catholic with a pretty wife and a brood of kids, O’Donnell exudes the robust domesticity of the Kennedy mystique in a way that JFK no longer can, after four decades of exposés.

Despite Costner’s bizarrely broad Boston accent, which he tires of and loses midway through, he relaxes into the role of second banana. He doesn’t give the performance of the movie — that would be Greenwood’s elegantly underplayed JFK — but he does intensify the material with his alternating pushiness and mulishness and his old-fashioned masculinity. O’Donnell, a fierce political loyalist, is so secure in his allegiance that he’s unafraid of going toe-to-toe with Jackie, or with Jack. Audiences respond to the film’s pedestrian, sturdy portrait of co-workers sounding off and fooling around and regrouping for a common cause — just as they do when watching the infinitely more skillful and entertaining (and even more enlightening) “The West Wing.”

But if O’Donnell helps ground the film, he also leads the filmmakers to follow him when, temporarily angst-ridden, he leaves the White House to watch his son play football. For the movie, it’s a terrible third-down decision: We lose track of the main action during a crucial period, as the Kennedy group struggles to make sense of contradictory telegrams from Khrushchev.

Then again, the moviemakers organize this film’s entire 150-minute length less around the chess game with the Kremlin than around an us-against-them melodrama of the Kennedy camp vs. everyone else. The moviemakers’ view of the others could be summarized in the line “There are no wise old men.” They reduce the more rigid Cold Warriors to a blur of uptight Pentagon and State Department types. These ultra-white men in suits and uniforms growl about father Joe Kennedy’s espousal of appeasement before World War II, and theorize as to whether weakness runs in the Kennedy family. Most of the real work gets done with a series of handoffs from Jack to Bobby or O’Donnell, along with an occasional assist by Dylan Baker’s McNamara. “Impress me,” Jack orders his brother. Bobby does his best to live up to the command, whether brainstorming without Jack at Excomm, a special executive committee of the National Security Council, or having a critical meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

The rest of the characters are treated according to how they measure up in a Kennedy-centric universe. Early on, our U.N. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, puckishly calls himself a coward for suggesting that the United States swap its Jupiter missiles in Turkey for Khrushchev’s missiles in Cuba. The Kennedys ultimately agree to the swap as part of a deal — with the proviso that it not be publicized. No one picks up on the irony of the tough-as-nails Kennedys following “weak” Stevenson’s lead. Although O’Donnell is dovish toward Stevenson, the kitchen cabinet’s question of whether Stevenson has world-class cojones mucks up the staging and editing of his crowd-pleasing confrontation with the Soviets at the U.N. Donaldson keeps cutting to the TV watchers in Washington, who voice first doubt, then approval; it’s like a bad backstage musical in which the director chops the big number into pieces to include the action in the wings.

TV’s “The Missiles of October” may have been a four-square production, full of accents as pronounced as Costner’s, but at least it had the guts to concentrate on the moves and countermoves with Moscow (making Khrushchev himself, not O’Donnell, the third main character). “Thirteen Days” provides such a hazy impression of what’s going on back in the USSR that when RFK seals his deal with Dobrynin, it’s as if a compact has been made by an international goodwill group. Indeed, when O’Donnell describes himself to Dobrynin’s attaché as “the friend,” I thought he meant not just a friend of Bobby Kennedy’s but also of well-meaning people everywhere. For a moment you wonder why, with so much liberality on both sides, the crisis erupted in the first place.

“The Missiles of October” also assumed that the audience could keep track of a dozen or so divergent voices. Baker’s McNamara has a dynamic moment when he browbeats the Navy’s chief of operations, but “Thirteen Days” is pretty much a three-man show. At the apex of this triangle is Greenwood’s JFK, who’s not afraid to appear diffident or irresolute in the eyes of the cocksure and the trigger-happy. Greenwood knows that just one wince when Jack lowers himself into a chair will announce his back pain more loudly than any bleat or bellow, and that the occasional ruminative glance will make his sparks of anger come off as incendiary.

If only the filmmakers had had the same instincts. Synthesizing more revisionist material would have enlarged, not undercut, this movie’s presentation of President Kennedy. Making the audience (and Kennedy himself) more aware of his previous failings with Khrushchev, or acknowledging his administration’s ongoing vendetta with Castro, would have made Kennedy’s resistance to airstrikes or to another invasion of Cuba the position of a man who has evolved as a statesman. Greenwood is great at looking thoughtful, but even amid the Cuban missile crisis, the movie doesn’t give him (or us) enough to back up that look. “Thirteen Days,” like a cable news channel, wins an undeservedly high interest level because of what it covers, not how well it covers it.

Although for decades “It’s a Wonderful Life” popped up promiscuously on local stations across the country, the NBC network now owns broadcast rights and presents it annually during prime time — this year, from 8 to 11 p.m. EST on Saturday. Of course, carping at a film that compels this much allegiance is tantamount to burning the flag. “It’s a Wonderful Life” probably is the most affecting Christmas movie ever made. But the Christmas movie genre comprises some tricky, drippy pictures — and the influence of “It’s a Wonderful Life” has helped keep it that way. Since nostalgia and renewal are keynotes of the season, here’s a reevaluation of yuletide’s movie mainstays — the “Wonderful,” the “Miracles,” the “Carols” and the “Story” — all presented with faith, hope and even a dab of charity.

For a Christmas film, the plot of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — a guardian angel named Clarence saves a bankrupt building-and-loan company president from suicide — is de rigueur. After all, Christmas is the movie season when three spirits and a ghost transform a skinflint businessman into the best Christian in London (“A Christmas Carol”), or Santa Claus teaches a rationalistic New York mother and daughter the importance of faith and imagination (“Miracle on 34th Street”), or two hot young entertainers, motivated by residual World War II patriotism, stage a show at their retired general’s Vermont inn to put him back on his financial feet (“White Christmas”).

James Agee, as usual, got “It’s a Wonderful Life” down right when he wrote, “Often, in its pile-driving emotional exuberance, it outrages, insults, or at least accosts without introduction, the cooler and more responsible parts of the mind; it is nevertheless recommended.”

How you react may depend on how you approach seeing it. I first watched it 35 years ago on late-night TV — during the summer, not the Christmas season. I felt appreciative of its virtues, generous toward its faults and protective of the film as a whole. But soon after, the reputation of Capra’s lovable little movie began to snowball, thanks to the devotion of Steven Spielberg and his fellow movie brats. As an American institution, it became tiresome. Back in the mid-’60s, when Pauline Kael put together a nifty list of films for children, “It’s a Wonderful Life” held the spot between “Ivanhoe” and “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” But when Kael compiled “5001 Nights at the Movies” two decades later, the best she had to say was that “in its own slurpy, bittersweet way, the picture is well done.”

For me, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a wholesome analogue to those tacky exploitation comedies that make me feel guilty in the morning — though in this case, I don’t feel guilty until after New Year’s. The film is Capra’s attempt to do a Dickensian fable in mid-20th century America, and his theme is the same one George Orwell found in Charles Dickens: “If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.” James Stewart gives a signature performance as George Bailey, the small-town good guy who can’t rise in the world because he’s too busy giving a shoulder up to everyone else. This lenient, generous home financier galls the town Scrooge, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), who hates Bailey not only because Bailey’s low-cost suburban developments threaten the value of his own tenement holdings but also because the Bailey family has the two things Potter lacks: humanity and friends.

When Bailey’s drunken uncle inadvertently drops a crucial sum of money into Potter’s lap, the villain immediately moves to destroy the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Arriving on Christmas Eve and right before the homecoming of Bailey’s war-hero brother, the crisis precipitates Bailey’s attempt at suicide — which Clarence, his guardian angel, halts.

The angel’s entrance would come as a shock if the film weren’t framed with a discussion — among God, St. Joseph and the seraph — of Bailey’s earthly life. Capra etches Bailey’s frustrations in a hepped-up, occasionally cute, but realistic style; when Clarence appears, it’s as if Mother Goose had come to finish a novel started by Midwestern bard Booth Tarkington. In an influential 1962 essay, the movie’s brilliant champion, critic William Pechter, suggested that this angel ex machina and the incessant spunk and thump of the moviemaking reveal the despair beneath Capra’s belief in goodwill.

But I think Capra the showman simply wanted to push his story’s conflicts to their most dramatic extremes. Bedford Falls, at the start of the film, is an ode to a small-town America that no longer is and possibly never was. When Clarence shows George Bailey what Bedford Falls would be like if he’d never been born (for starters, it would be renamed Pottersville), it’s a nightmare of crassness and cynicism. Bailey learns that his continued existence will preserve the virtue of an entire town.

Bailey begins as a victim and ends up a hero; he attracts sympathy the way golf courses do lightning. Without the energy and veracity of the film’s first third, “It’s a Wonderful Life” would drown in mawkishness and preaching. But there’s extraordinary stuff in that first 45 minutes. Bailey’s boyhood scenes are the best in the movie — they arouse the empathy of even the most hard-boiled viewer. He loses the use of an ear because he dives into an icy pond to save his kid brother’s life. Later, a drunken employer slaps him hard on his bad ear. All of us probably remember our first encounters with misfortune and injustice. Capra captures the agony of those incidents with honesty and acuteness.

Luckily, thanks to Stewart, the adult Bailey is richly, unassertively humane, and less of a drag than he is as written. The star streaks his warmth and enthusiasm with anger, ambition and temperament. What Stewart projects from his core is that Bailey is a reluctant rube; his fury at being provincial puts an unexpected edge on Capra’s corniness. There’s genuine emotion in the coyly avid courtship between Bailey and the girl who idolizes him (played with sexiness and strength by Donna Reed).

For a film that places a premium on simplicity, the technique is exceedingly busy. When Capra stages a prom, there isn’t a slow moment on the high school dance floor. Though the director always wanted to celebrate down-home virtues, he couldn’t have felt them in his bones. If you slog through his celebratory autobiography, “The Name Above the Title,” what sticks in your mind is not any particular code of behavior but Capra’s mechanical curiosity and drive. The suggestions of depth in “It’s a Wonderful Life” remain suggestions; Capra’s cleverness lubricates a conventional morality play, balancing the sentiment with fun. The simpler style of a John Ford might have allowed more stubborn arbitrariness to seep into the characters, more accidents into the incidents.

Ultimately, Capra’s moralism beats you down. His Scrooge — Potter — doesn’t have a change of heart. And that shift in perspective doesn’t just signal a variation on Dickens’ theme, but alters its comic-dramatic scope and moral dimension. Dickens’ stroke of genius was to dramatize the resurrection possible in the least wonderful life.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “A Christmas Carol” “owes much of its hilarity to the fact of it being a tale of winter, and a very wintry winter.” Dickens puts dead center the barren December landscape of Scrooge’s soul — which paradoxically makes his story more exciting, more humorous and even more comforting than Capra’s.

The contrast of Scrooge’s gruel causes Dickens’ Christmastide pleasures to seem infinitely inviting: lavish food and drink, toasty family reunions, even genteel flirtations amid games of blindman’s buff. The spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come stress the importance of generosity and kindness year-round. No organized religion can be found to turn off nonbelievers in this story. What Dickens calls for is fellow feeling, right on earth. His combination of high-mindedness and heartiness, of social realism and aesthetic gaiety, suffuses the fabric and texture of the story. Gusto clings to every detail, like the boy-size turkey that Scrooge buys for the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner.

In his entry in “You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe,” John Irving, an inspired follower of Dickens, notes, “Each Christmas, we are assaulted with a new carol; indeed, we’re fortunate if all we see is the delightful Alastair Sim.”

Irving is right: The best big-screen “Christmas Carol” is the 1951 British production starring Sim as Scrooge, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and written by Noel Langley (who co-wrote “The Wizard of Oz”). It’s true to Dickens’ brusque theatricality. For all the joyousness and pathos of the sights the ghosts show Scrooge, he’s never allowed to linger over them. The spirits force him onto an emotional whirligig that doesn’t stop until Christmas Eve is over. His giddy recognition of his change rings in delightful concert with the chimes that sound on Christmas morning.

The actor playing Scrooge sets the pitch of every “Christmas Carol,” and Sim in this version is tiptop and irrepressible. Comically grotesque at the beginning and infectiously silly at the end, his performance is a stylish caricature of a man who exacts passionate satisfaction from tightness and meanness. When he sees his ex-partner Marley’s ghost, he looks more afraid of having his evening ruined and his smallness revealed than of the specter. Though kids laugh at Sim’s vicious glee and the way he masticates his lines, they hate his Scrooge until he is transformed. Sim’s cleverness and panache amuse adults throughout.

The film contains one soaring, lyrical moment reminiscent of John Huston’s great “The Dead.” In Dickens, when Scrooge attends his neglected nephew’s Christmas party, the man’s wife, whom Scrooge has shunned, sings a “simple air” that melts his heart. In this movie, the simple air is “Barbara Allen” — a song that the movie’s composer, Richard Addinsell, has already linked with Scrooge’s frail, beloved sister. The shifts of expression in Sim’s face and the melancholy pull of the ballad turn the scene into a tour de force of plaintiveness.

While the British movie chronicles Scrooge’s gradual hardening and gold lust and consequent loss of sentiment and romance, the 1938 MGM production gives its fullest attention to such frivolities as street sliding. The studio’s smooth, plush blandness muffles the story’s vitality. This version takes a giant leap from Scrooge’s youth to his miserhood: Producer Joseph Mankiewicz must have calculated that American audiences wouldn’t accept Scrooge as an eligible young man. Hugo Butler’s script (directed by Edwin Marin) leaves out many of Dickens’ stirring sermons, such as the Spirit of Christmas Present’s description of the two emaciated children hiding under his robes: “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy.” Maybe MGM thought Depression audiences would reverse the Spirit’s priorities.

The people who come through here for Dickens are the costume designers. Reginald Owen is an uninspired Scrooge, but his pinched pants and tight waistcoat force him into a hunchbacked, bowlegged crouch; he has an amusing profile, like a grasshopper in fancy dress. But you’ll find more fervent expressions of Christmas spirit not just in the Sim “Christmas Carol” but in movies derived from Dickens’ masterworks that aren’t Christmas specific: David Lean’s “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist,” Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” Alberto Cavalcanti’s “Nicholas Nickleby,” Noel Langley’s “The Pickwick Papers” (yes, the same Noel Langley who adapted Sim’s Scrooge) and the David Selznick-Jack Conway production of “A Tale of Two Cities.” Each draws on Dickens’ comedic or melodramatic zing and satiric inventiveness — and, often, his blend of moral uplift and social outrage.

With “Miracle on 34th Street,” we’re back in Capra territory. The original is another piece of late-’40s Hollywood whimsy, written and directed by Capra’s friend George Seaton. The miracle is that the real Kris Kringle has taken a job at Macy’s as Santa Claus. Seaton uses this premise to establish a toddler-level debate between imagination, in the form of Santa (Edmund Gwenn), and stern reason, represented mostly by Macy’s promotion director (Maureen O’Hara). When imagination wins, you wonder why it never took root in any of the moviemakers.

The film criticizes department store materialism while praising Santa for delighting hordes of kids with gifts. It holds Christian faith above pragmatism, but confirms Santa’s identity in a court of law. And though O’Hara’s daughter (8-year-old Natalie Wood) learns that faith is its own reward, she achieves certain belief only when Santa gives her what she wants for Christmas — a house on Long Island. (In the flop 1994 remake, Richard Attenborough is Santa while Mara Wilson assumes Wood’s part and Elizabeth Perkins takes O’Hara’s; the biggest difference between the two is that Macy’s is now the fictional Cole’s.)

Then there’s “White Christmas,” a flagon of flat eggnog served up by old Hollywood hands, including director Michael Curtiz at his least adept. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are Army buddies who use their postwar nightclub act to bail their general, now retired, out of debt. They even ship their entire old regiment to his Vermont inn. Apparently, in 1954, audiences were already nostalgic for the purposefulness and unity of the Second World War. In the course of rehearsals, Crosby and Kaye fall in love with a sister act — Crosby with singer Rosemary Clooney, Kaye with dancer Vera-Ellen. Kaye is wasted, but Clooney’s slightly husky voice blends well with Crosby’s husked one.

“White Christmas” was the first film to use the big-screen process called VistaVision — which must have given theater audiences enormous views of Vera-Ellen’s legs. The movie has the overstuffed ambience of hard-sell ’50s productions; even the lighting is too rich, with reds and greens that would look better on upscale Tannenbaum ornaments.

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Perhaps in reaction to such plush ostentation, video renters and TV audiences have catapulted the cheerfully ragged “A Christmas Story” (1983) into the holiday-film stratosphere of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol.” Indeed, if you’re at home Friday at 11 a.m. PST or 2 p.m. EST, you can see it once again on TBS. This adaptation of Jean Shepherd’s memoirlike novel “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” was the first movie that director (and co-producer and co-writer) Bob Clark made after “Porky’s” and “Porky’s II: The Next Day.” It’s not as big a leap as you might expect. When I interviewed him in 1982, Clark told me he thought the key to “Porky’s” was that “the whole movie springs from the notion that if 17-year-old boys have their sexuality repressed, outlandish behavior results.” Just substitute “if 9-year-old boys have their natural aggressiveness repressed” in the previous sentence and you have “A Christmas Story.”

Round-faced, bespectacled Ralphie sets his Christmas gift hopes on a 200-shot carbine action Red Ryder air rifle — a BB gun. Much of the action revolves around the obstacles to his getting his wish, from the wisdom held by mother and schoolmarm alike that he’ll take his eye out with it to his near paralysis in the lap of a gruff department store Santa. Peter Billingsley was born to play Ralphie: Even at his most relaxed, his expression is wide-eyed. He’s the ideal camera subject for a director like Clark, who aims to bring exuberance to the obvious.

Our hero’s home in frigid Hohman, Ind., circa 1940 (duplicated in Cleveland, circa ’83), afflicted with a sputtering furnace and rampaging hounds from the hill folk next door, supplies Clark with a setting that suits his penchant for hyperbole. Shepherd provides archetypal incidents, from a tongue frozen on a flagpole to Ralphie’s first walloping of a bully (a creep named Scott — pronounced Scut — Farcus, who has yellow eyes), that fulfill Clark’s desire to tap folkloric roots.

Clark admitted to me in our interview that he knew “the ratio of broadly farcical elements to reality will vary” from filmmaker to filmmaker. “Mel Brooks might be 6-to-1,” he said, “‘Animal House’ 4-to-1, Woody Allen 2-to-1. ‘Porky’s’ is probably only one-and-a-half-to-1.” He applies the same ratio to “A Christmas Story.” But here he has actors like Melinda Dillon and Darren McGavin, as Ralphie’s mom and dad, who enter right into Clark’s preferred mode of gritty slapstick, especially when McGavin wins “electric sex” in a contest: a lamp in the shape of a female leg.

“A Christmas Story” is so full of high jinks that I often wondered what it had to do with Christmas at all. Then I remembered a line from Irving’s essay on “A Christmas Carol”: “Dickens’ celebration of ghosts, and of Christmas, is but a small part of the author’s abiding faith in the innocence and magic of children; Dickens believed that his own imagination — in fact, his overall well-being — depended on the contact he kept with his childhood.” What links “A Christmas Story” and “A Christmas Carol” is Shepherd’s remark in his narration that “the entire kid year” revolves around Christmas. By the end, you can imagine Ralphie proclaiming, a bit like Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one — except for yellow-eyed Scut Farcus!”

Olivier overshadows Merle Oberon, who plays the capricious, moody Cathy. She lacks originality and spark. Still, moment by moment, she displays enough conviction and sensitivity to make Wyler’s stylized conceptions work. The close-ups of Oberon’s febrile eyes — when she dreams she’s seeing Heathcliff and then realizes that she is seeing him — bring the movie to fever pitch. Alfred Newman never scored a movie with more suppleness and eloquence: His plaintive theme for Cathy whistles on the wind. The screenplay doesn’t try to encompass Brontë’s violent extremes. But Wyler and Olivier succeed in imbuing Brontë’s blasphemy — Heathcliff’s renunciation of any power that denies his love — with both a turbulent, demonic undertow and the ennobling feelings of heroic tragedy.

Geraldine Fitzgerald is note-perfect as the silly yet determined Isabella, Cathy’s sister-in-law and Heathcliff’s wife. On the DVD she contributes a frank and funny interview, depicting Wyler as the exhausting taskmaster of a turbulent set and Olivier as the “only actor I knew who was completely unafraid” — both to convey the unvarnished truth of his character and to give controversial advice. She was occasionally furious at him, but now appreciates his honesty and instinct. Counseling Fitzgerald on how Isabella should approach Heathcliff as a prospective lover, Olivier said, “The virgin presents the pelvis, and the mother the womb.” In sum, Fitzgerald says, “Wuthering Heights” was “the kind of picture you just get through — and then it turns out afterwards it was something very special.”

But instead of the controversial, unpredictable Peckinpah, Warner Bros. assigned John Boorman, the prodigiously talented British director who a few years before had made “Point Blank.” Judging from the documentary program on this DVD, Dickey never recovered from his disappointment. He doesn’t mention Peckinpah, but on the evidence of “The Dangerous World of Deliverance” it’s clear that Dickey and Boorman didn’t share an easy rapport.

The documentary makers emphasize Dickey as the key creator of the work. They punch home that the issues of men testing themselves in nature are rooted in Dickey’s life and are part of his creative wellspring; in the documentary we see Dickey wielding bow and arrows as expertly as Burt Reynolds does in the film. Dickey becomes as much a natural force for Boorman to contend with as the cliffs and rapids on location.

From the proof of the film itself, Boorman endured — and prevailed. First released in 1972, “Deliverance” came back into vogue in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when Iron Johns of every variety were crusading into the wilderness to bond and to seek their authentic selves. The movie’s aura is augmented by Dickey’s cameo as a sheriff in this tale of four middle-class Georgians canoeing down the untamed, soon-to-be-dammed Cahulawassee River.

Boorman presents their quest as high macho adventure and nightmare. Under the guidance of a blustery outdoorsman named Lewis (Burt Reynolds), the mild-mannered, pipe-smoking Ed (Jon Voight) proves himself in rites of violence. One of their companions is raped, and the other killed. The novel depicts the wild river trip as an enrichment for Lewis and Ed, despite the dire consequences for the affable Bobby (Ned Beatty) and the sane, gentle Drew (Ronny Cox).

Unlike the book, the picture is never celebratory: It cleaves to a spooky, neutral tone. The simultaneous attractiveness and destructiveness of taking extreme action is the point of the film. This is one survival drama that’s both gut-clutching and mesmerizing. Boorman; his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond; and his editor, Tom Priestley, capture the spring of a canoe when the current snags it, the terror of a vertiginous drop, the eerie stillness of a gorge. They achieve poetic precision even when the men are shooting rapids. The movie has a mysterious beauty, like a landscape that changes drastically when night falls.

Always superb at serious play, Crowe deadpans his way through his boardroom presentation while we see him in Chechnya, hanging from a helicopter by his fingertips. In general, Crowe is never more there on-screen than when a script gives him some wiggle room, allowing him to suggest a distance between what he says with his eyes and with his mouth. It’s his constant potential for righteous fury, mischief and unexpected sensitivity that makes him so magnetic. “Proof of Life” plops him down in a ruthless, rootless milieu that tests his wits and mettle.

Crowe’s character has to be as direct in his connections to his client as he is wary of his employers and slippery with his antagonists. It’s an oscillating line for Crowe to toe — and he does it without tripping once. When his character approaches the distraught and angry Ryan, he convinces her to trust him without hesitation. She does — and we do, too.

Crowe makes competence look sexy. At his best, with his combination of ironclad irony and bedrock honesty, Crowe is like an improbable blend of Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper: the cynic as nature’s nobleman.

Crowe responds to Ryan’s plea for help first as an assignment, then as a point of honor. Ryan’s husband (David Morse) has been building a dam that he hopes will better the lot of the Tecalan people. The junky flunkies of a group of guerrilla drug lords kidnap him for a hefty ransom right after he and Ryan have a foul marital spat. (She suffered a miscarriage on a previous stint in Africa; their relationship has never recovered.)

Morse’s Houston employers are teetering toward bankruptcy and have canceled their kidnapping insurance. So after Crowe comes to Morse’s rescue, his higher-ups pull him back. He returns to Tecala as a freelancer.

This initial switchback sets off a smoke-and-mirrors alarm in the audience. The director, Taylor Hackford (“Dolores Claiborne”), knows how to pace and texture melodrama, but too many things happen simply so that other things can happen. The first half hour is filled with one-note scenes geared to explain why Crowe and Morse fall out with their respective companies. Being men on their own intensifies each guy’s drama. But it takes too much sweat and tears for the film to reach its desired peak of urgency.

As Crowe begins to fall for Ryan and establishes a new team with a fellow corporate refugee, played by David Caruso, the movie becomes a blend of under-the-gun romance and guerrilla-cum-buddy movie.

Hackford and his screenwriter, Tony Gilroy (who also wrote the “Dolores Claiborne” script), put together this hybrid architecture as if with Lego blocks, one piece bluntly fixed onto another. Sometimes the pieces don’t fit, as when Pamela Reed shows up as Morse’s older sister — a rigid, wired soccer mom who views Ryan with disdain because she sees her as a do-good hippie. When a performer as gifted as Reed proves to be an irritation, you know that the movie is jangling your sensibilities, not just your nerves.

Because of the real-life, tabloid-smothered romance of Crowe and Ryan, the couple’s all-too-fleeting on-screen clinch has roused bad laughs at press screenings. Actually, the one problem with their sexual affinity is that their characters must suppress it for the sake of Morse; it only gets to seep into the film between the cracks in those Lego blocks.

As a dramatic actress, Ryan has been gaining confidence from picture to picture. I thought she brought off a difficult mix of command and vulnerability in “Courage Under Fire,” and here she’s fearlessly flaky. Dressed as eccentrically as Annie Hall, reduced to gasping every time Crowe reports a telephoned threat, she nonetheless conveys genuine emotional elasticity stretched to the breaking point. She keeps those little facial scrunches she specializes in to a minimum — and suddenly, they elicit soulful pangs in her audience.

She and Crowe have an odd, push-pull chemistry; you want them to cut out the nonsense and get together. There’s a beautiful pop-Jamesian moment when they share a glass of wine — and Caruso, doing his hyperobservant act, notices the show of intimacy.

But the material isn’t shaped for much to happen between them. Without giving anything away, all I can say is that too many movies these days are peddling the idea that sexual maturity is tantamount to resignation and compromise. In lieu of a hot courtship, I almost began to wish that the filmmakers would abandon their serious pretensions and hand Ryan a more active role in her husband’s rescue. No such luck. Crowe gets to play an update of Mr. Rick from “Casablanca” while Ryan remains the woman who also serves by standing and waiting. The consummated partnership here is between Crowe and Caruso, who wring humor from their shared intensity.

Hackford pulls out the stops in his astoundingly intricate suspense scenes, conjuring nightmare imagery from terrorists grappling down a hillside with upsetting speed, or cutting instinctually between Morse’s grueling, months-long captivity and Crowe and Ryan’s attempts to spring him.

The final action sequence, in which the Crowe-Caruso rescue team takes out Morse’s captors with military efficiency, is a model of lucid staging and editing. Crowe and Caruso plot their operation like two-fisted cartographers and enact it with thrilling dispassion. And the way Hackford stages and shoots it, you see where every bullet goes. But when the operation is over, so, really, is the movie. For all its nail-biting fusillades, it fails to score a shot to the heart.