Good Golly, Your Majesty

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Lonely (and billowy) as a cloud, Ralph Jones (John Goodman) wanders the halls of Buckingham Palace in his satin Green Bay Packers jacket. He has a problem: How can a Las Vegas lounge performer master the art of kingship after a rather silly accident has wiped out all the more logical candidates for the job? Peter O'Toole as Willingham, his private secretary, keeps humming a few bars of the right tune. But a regal song is just not one Ralph can fake.

Prickly as porcupines, Deborah and Nick Fifer (Bette Midler and Woody Allen) wander the aisles of a shopping mall that probably exceeds Ralph's palace in square footage, confessing infidelities and trying to patch up a marriage that only this morning looked as solid as the British monarchy. They are constantly distracted by the consumerism bustling around them and by a mime (Bill Irwin) who is as nosy as he is silent and maybe the most amusing thing about the film.

Both King Ralph (written and directed by David Ward) and Scenes from a Mall (directed by Paul Mazursky from a screenplay he wrote with Roger Simon) offer their stars the kind of discombobulating contexts their well-established characters need to function funnily. But curiously enough, it is the film with the more outrageously improbable premise that works best. As the man who wouldn't be King if he could help it, Goodman redeems what might have been just another high-concept comedy for the party of humanity. Despite the fact that they are working a much more subtle idea -- an attempt to resolve a private crisis in an impersonally public place -- Midler and Allen rarely attain believability, let alone sympathy, as the troubled pair of getters and spenders.

This is partly a matter of image. Goodman has become our designated Everyman, a Ralph Kramden for the '90s but without the splenetic splutter of Jackie Gleason's immortal creation. An intelligence, a sensitivity he can't quite articulate, just possibly a slight sadness, lurk behind Goodman's eyes, and they ground everything he does in reality. Midler, on the other hand, is our great show-biz floozy, and Allen personifies the anxious urban intellect. It is hard to insert their screen personas into the kind of normal, middle- class lives they are supposed to inhabit here. They require highly stylized vehicles in order to do their best work. Lacking that, neither they nor the audience knows quite what to make of these figures. Are they supposed to be the objects of satire or affection?

In other words, neither the actors nor Mazursky, whose gift for portraying middle-class muddles (Down and Out in Beverly Hills) is unquestioned, achieves the kind of confident relationship with their material that Goodman and Ward enjoy. Goodman is terrific in his big comic set pieces (notably a decorum- shattering rendition of Good Golly Miss Molly at a royal ball). But even in those he avoids the temptation to broad farce. He and Ward trust themselves to go for something sweeter and more wistful, the tone of the fabulist, and they sustain it with near perfect pitch.