Blue Sky

Long before his death in 1991, director Tony Richardson's career had al­ready died. Thirty years ago, he was riding high on the cinematic waves of the British invasion with the enormous success of Tom Jones, as well as the dubious controversies sur­rounding his film version of The Loved One. Richardson was totally fab — for at least a whole 15 minutes. But there's an old saying that "all glory is but fleeting," and Richardson's fame had the fleetest feet imaginable. By the end of the 1970s, Richardson was a prime contender to be a question in "Trivial Pursuit."

Remembering this rapid rise and fall is one of the few things that makes Blue Sky, Richardson's last film, almost worth watching. Filmed in 1991, before Richardson began to succumb to the effects of AIDS, Blue Sky stands as the inadvertent summation of a directing career that was often wasted on pop cultural conceits that were more short-lived than the Nehru jacket. Parts of Blue Sky play almost as if Richardson wanted to be a serious filmmaker again. But the effort was too little, too late, in a career that had stum­bled more often than a one-legged line dancer.

Blue Sky's main plot combines sex with nuclear politics. Set in the pre-test ban treaty days of 1962, the movie focuses on Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Lange as an army couple whose lives are roughly divided be­tween atomic explosions and marital fall-out. Jones plays a military scientist whose job is to measure a re­gion's radiation levels after test bombs are detonated in it. But most­ly, he spends his time trying to keep up with his wife's numerous affairs. Lange is one of those fantasy wom­en favored by filmmakers, one part man-eating tigress and one part child-like bride. Unfortunately for Jones, his character is supposed to be attracted to both parts, which leaves him playing the sensitive sap role.

Especially when they arrive at his new base. Lange begins a fling with the base commander (Powers Boothe) almost immediately, while hubby is stuck at ground zero in Nevada. Unable to deal with Lange's affair, Jones tackles the se­crecy cloaking the army's nuclear contamination of the local civilian population.

Unfortunately, the thermody­namics of the two stories never mesh — and Richardson falters one last time.