Weekend Entertainment Guide

MOVIES . . . THE DEVIL'S OWN: Brad Pitts Frankie McGuire is an assassin for an unnamed group of Northern Irish terrorists sent to America to evade the British secret service, whose noose is beginning to tighten around him. Given an assumed name and occupation, he enters the country, and the home of Harrison Fords Tom OMeara, as an ordinary immigrant needing a sponsor. Since Tom is a New York City cop of unquestionable honesty, Frankies cover is perfect. The script (by David Aaron Cohen, Vincent Patrick and Kevin Jarre) is good about not making too much of this relationship, subtly foreshadowing the betrayal that must come, but allowing these figures room to draw normal human breath. "Pitt and the script cheat a little with his character, not investing him with quite the fanatical glitter a political gunman ought to exhibit," says TIME's Richard Schickel. "But you have to balance that against the reality of Fords workno one half-suppresses, half-reveals strong feelings better than he doesand director Alan J. Pakulas analogous strengths. Pakula develops his story patiently, without letting its tensions unravel. At a moment when everyone is saying the studios have lost the knack for making solid, broadly appealing entertainments, 'The Devils Own' suggests the skill may only be mislaid. Of course, it helps when you hire grownups to do the job." BOOKS . . . JOHN WAYNE'S AMERICA: In his new history, (Simon & Schuster; 380 pages; $26) Gary Wills imagines that the the fact that John Wayne still tops polls asking us to identify our favorite movie stars some 18 years after his death must tell us something about the soul of post-modern America. And perhaps it does, says TIME's Richard Schickel. "But by the end of his confused and digressive meditation this usually mordant cultural historian looks rather like a second heavy in a Wayne western--rubbing his jaw and spitting dust as the Dukes shade strides off toward the horizon, as impervious to academic analysis as he was to a bad mans six-shooter." Wills thinks Wayne remains a psychic presence for us because he embodied the frontiersmans virtues, a free man ranging a free and open land, the rot of the cities, the ambiguities of an intricately developed society well lost. But the description is stale and does not suit Wayne the way it does quieter, more mysterious figures like Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott. For the Duke was only intermittently like them--in The Big Trail, his first starring role, or in the starkly iconographic Hondo, which Wills unaccountably fails to mention. Mostly his character was not a man escaping civilization and its discontents but one bringing them to the wilderness. Discounting the many B-westerns he made in his early days, he played more military men, lawmen and empire builders than he did freelance saddle tramps. "Waynes imposing physical presence and the cranky large-heartedness he conveyed on screen, implicitly romanticized dutifulness," notes Schickel. "When he died in 1979 most of us no longer found the idea or the ideal of the frontier very useful. Our culture ceased to celebrate people who bound their lives to the defense of simple, personal moralities such as Wayne embodied. But that, even liberals, deploring his reactionary politics, found they missed. Waynes legend, his apparent immortality, the sources of which keep eluding Wills, derive from that curiously haunting sense of loss."