Babylon Is Not So Far

It was a familiar role for South Korea's favorite movie lovers, handsome Choi Moo Ryong, 34, and beautiful Kim Ji Mi, 24, who had co-starred in no fewer than 50 films. But this time the plot was straight improvisation, and strictly off-camera. When the Seoul public prosecutor reviewed their performance, he clapped them into prison on charges of adultery.

Adultery is a criminal offense in many parts of the world,* but arrests are rare, particularly where famous figures are involved. Choi was the Rock Hudson of Korea, idol of the pigtail set. Kim was once called by a Korean movie critic "the sweetest-looking girl in the free world." Both were married, to others.

Last March they were on location in Hong Kong, and the resulting affair blazed through Korea's hot summer. Kim quietly divorced her husband, a director, a month ago. But Choi's wife, a Korean actress, brought charges of adultery. Still fired by the puritan zeal that Korea's new rulers made fashionable after their May 1961 coup, the prosecutor sent the pair off to Seoul's grim Sodaemun Prison in handcuffs. The news was a shocking disappointment to their fans. "Their immorality only evokes Hollywood," wrote one angry reader to a Seoul paper. "The helplessly corrupt Babylon of moviemaking, we've always thought, was so far away from us."

Last week Choi's wife suddenly dropped the charges, agreed to accept their four children and a lump sum of $31,000 in alimony. Wan and unsmiling, the lovers emerged from prison. Kim hurried off to a hospital, complaining of "low blood pressure." Choi read an Orientally opaque statement saying the two would "now reconsider relations." In the meantime, because Korean stars are paid only $2,500 a film for their assembly-line endeavors, both are planning to sell their houses so that they can pay off Mrs. Choi.

* In the U.S., 45 states have such laws: Arkansas, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee are without them. In New York, for example, adultery is punishable by a six-month jail term and/or a $250 fine. But the laws are rarely invoked. In 1948, a year chosen for study, only 267 arrests were made in the whole country and of these, 242 were in Boston.

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