Magnificent McGovern

SPOTLIGHT

Elizabeth McGovern has the cheeky softness o.f a sultry infant. She looks as if she takes her naps in a mink-lined crib. Bom in Illinois and raised in California, McGovern was but a wee pudding when Robert Redford cast her to play Timothy Hutton's sweetie in Ordinary People. (She read for him while still a student at Juilliard.) She then poured her milky youth into the ugly jug that was Ragtime, bobbed like a balloon on a string through the airy intellectualities of Lovesick, and stepped shyly in her Buster Brown shoes through Racing with the Moon, where she skinny-dipped with Sean Penn (and the water looked cold). Only once did she seem completely lost—in Sergio Leone's Once upon a Time in America, a beautiful, doomed, orbiting way-back machine that left her drifting bereft for stardust decades. McGovern now has two movies on the launchpad. In The Bedroom Window, she plays a Baltimore cocktail waitress who schlepps drinks at a place called Edgar's, named after Edgar Allan Poe and filled with tell-tale hearts. A Hitchcockian he-dun-it, The Bedroom Window also stars Steve Guttenberg, who's Ramboized the jolly body he had in Diner, and Isabelle Huppert, who seems to have gotten on the wrong plane. More solidly afoot is Native Son, an adaptation of Richard Wright's great novel about Bigger Thomas gone amok. McGovern plays a young woman who has dinner with Bigger (Victor Love), then is accidentally slain. "One hot date, that's it," says McGovern, whose fate in Native Son marks her "debut death" on-screen. Was it a difficult scene to play? "Death was easy," says McGovern with a piece-of-cake pop to her voice. Asked if Native Son will stir the heated fuss that The Color Purple did (especially in the depiction of brute black men), McGovern replies, "Not a doubt in my mind." But it's not a fuss that she fears. "Even if it fails, I'll be glad to have made the effort," she says of Native Son. If there's righteous trouble in the caldron, let it boil.

JAMES WOLCOTT