Sally Bowles Again

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE GIRL FROM PETROVKA

Directed by ROBERT ELLIS MILLER Screenplay by SCOTT and CHRIS BRYANT

The Girl from Petrovka is a direct descendant of Sally Bowles and Holly Golightly--another kooky waif, whom withdrawn writers find irresistible. Such girls are no better than they should be but--in show biz, anyway--are widely believed to make up with their innocent high spirits what they lack in common sense and stability. In this case, the gamine is played by the ubiquitous Goldie Hawn. The author, whom convention dictates must reluctantly fall for her despite bouts of reformist palaver and exasperation, is played by Hal Holbrook.

The setting is back-lot Moscow. The plot, based on a novel by George Feifer, employs the sort of people who trade in hard currencies and Western jazz records on the famous black market there in a vain effort to relieve the pervading drabness. The thought that the secret police may be crashing round the edges of an East-meets-West romance adds the faintest imaginable flavor of suspense to this bowl of borsch. Actually, the only thing to be said for the locale is that when the Russians find people behaving as tiresomely as Miss Hawn, they haul them into court, charge them with parasitism, and sentence them to stiff terms in Siberia. Americans probably ought to have some similar punishment for people who make movies that celebrate such figures--without really making up their minds whether to do so humorously, romantically or tragically, thus ending in an uninflected middle. They ought to do a little extra time for involving in the mess actors as gifted as Holbrook and Supporting Players Anthony Hopkins and Gregoire Aslan. -Richard Schickel

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