Show Business: Clint, Brits And Kids at Cannes

Clint Eastwood stood in front of the Hotel du Cap's Eden Roc restaurant and surveyed this fairy-tale domain. As Bird, his bebop bio-pic of Jazzman Charlie Parker, was unspooling a few miles down the Riviera at the 41st Cannes Film Festival, Eastwood reminisced about the small indignities that beset a larger- than-life movie hero. On a trip to Cannes in 1985, his sponsors had set him up in a portside yacht near the Palais des Festivals. But the yacht's ceilings were too low to accommodate his 6-ft. 4-in. frame, even when he stooped, and Hollywood's most statesmanlike hunk endured a week's worth of cricked neck. Such are the sacrifices that art exacts in a Cote d'Azur Disneyland.

Dirty Harry is no complainer. He is genial with strangers, patient with the press. And in a movie-mad country where the names of directors like Sydney Pollack and Carl Dreyer appear on the tiles of France's favorite TV game show, La Roue de la Fortune, Eastwood the auteur is an imposing ambassador for American star quality. It so happens that the film he brought to Cannes, which he directed but does not appear in, is no great shakes. It meanders like a 2- hr. 43-min. sax solo by one of Parker's lesser disciples, and it never quite explains how Parker enriched the language of sound. Still, the film was well received, and Bird was expected to win one of the top prizes. Instead, the Palme d'Or went to the Danish film Pelle the Conqueror, and Bird was given lesser awards for its sound track and its lead actor, Forest Whitaker. Eastwood dutifully mounted the Palais stage, and though he stood tall, his dignity was stooped. The ceiling of expectations for his film was too high, the reward for lending his easy magnetism to Cannes too low.

Dignity is a luxury during the Cannes fortnight. It rubs shoulders with outrage and excess, as film folk hawk their wares in the world's largest annual secular convocation. At the Palais, moviegoers must dress formally for the evening screenings; at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, a porno star who is also a member of the Italian Parliament performs a sex act with a stuffed animal. The cafes percolate with erudite analyses of Marcel Ophuls's 4 1/2-hr. documentary / on Klaus Barbie, while back at the Eden Roc, Producer Edward Pressman discusses his new movie about Claus von Bulow, to star Klaus Maria Brandauer. You'll pay dearly for a Perrier at Cannes's Hotel Majestic bar, then more dearly still if you don't carry your wallet in a chastity belt. A plague of burglaries and purse snatchings stoked delicious horror stories. Did you hear? Patricia Hearst almost had her Rolex swiped right off her wrist!

The purloined heiress was in town to promote Paul Schrader's oneiric docudrama about one of the century's most notorious kidnapings. Like Bird, Patty Hearst fails to explain a controversial public life. Rather, it displays her ordeal in the stark, uninflected images of a catatonic's nightmare. Natasha Richardson is nifty as Hearst, who came to Cannes to praise Schrader for creating something more complex than a "sex-and-guns-and-rock-'n'-roll epic." But the film could have used more of all three. By denying Patty Hearst a point of view, Schrader has taken a mug shot instead of a moving picture.