Cinema: Well, Hello Molly Ringwald!

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Andie Walsh has it tough. At her mid-'80s high school, the setting for Pretty in Pink, the rich kids cut the unrich with cold shoulders and easy slurs. It is the Sharks vs. the Jets all over again; this time the weapons are not switchblades but attitude. Andie (Molly Ringwald) is a "poor girl" pursued by a freaky-geeky boy pal, whose devotion drives her bats, and in love with a rich boy who may not be strong enough to declare his finer feelings and risk his friends' derision. So who comforts Andie? Why, her dear dilapidated dad. He's no Judge Hardy, but he can be counted on to give sympathy and take pity. And yes, love will find Andie Walsh, at the senior prom of her dreams.

Welcome to the '80s, the retro Time Warp that tosses all previous decades in a Cuisinart and purees them into The Latest Thing. We are the '30s gone hip, the '40s with leaner muscles, the '50s in Reeboks, the '60s with no sweat. And if movies are the gilded reflection of American popular culture, then a half-century of movies about teenagers traces a curious evolution of the adolescent spirit. The Andy Hardy series gave us romance without passion. The James Dean movies of the '50s offered passion without pleasure. In the "beach-party" pictures of the early '60s, teenagers got pleasure but no sex; and in the recent gross-outs of Porky's and its progeny, kids found sex without commitment. Decades passed, and movie teenagers never grew up, they just grew hornier. Were these flawless bodies and voracious libidos the true mirrors of teen age? Or did kids, even those looking for wish fulfillment in the dark, want movies that shed a little light on their own lives?

With the three films they made together, Molly Ringwald and Writer- Producer-Director John Hughes showed teenagers that rose-tinted light. Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) and this spring's hit Pretty in Pink succeed because they are about the kids who go see them--not the locker-room sadists, lubricious cheerleaders and barons of barf who populate the Porky's films, but teendom's silent majority of average, middle-class suburban kids.

The "Molly trilogy" mines the emotional convulsions that make every teenager feel he or she is the first lonely explorer on the dark side of the moon. Hughes is 36, but he provides no adult's-eye view of teen problems. Instead, he gets spookily in sync with the swooning narcissism of adolescence: that teachers are torturers, that parents are sweet but don't quite understand, that friends and lovers are two distinct species, one domestic, one alien, that I feel all these things I can never express, that there must be someone out there who will love me to pieces. Hughes give teens what they want in life and movies: romance, passion, pleasure, commitment--and a little sex. His pictures are like teen psychotherapy with a guaranteed happy ending.