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Saturday, June 30. 1981 Philadelphia Inquirer Film: 'Cannonball' sequel is simply loaded with stars r7 HJJ Review CANNONBALL RUN Produced by Albert S. Ruddy, directed by Hal Needham, written by Hal Needham, Albert S. Ruddy and Harvey Miller, photography by Nick McLean, music by Al Capps, and distributed by Warner running time: 1 hour, 38 mins.w J. McClure Burt Reynolds Victor Oom OeLuise Veronica Shirley MacLaine Fenderbaum Sammy Daws Jr.

Blake Dean Martin Sheik Jamie Farr Parents' guide: PG (seminudity, profanity) Ity Rick Lyman Inquirer Movie Critic It's hard to believe, but Hal Need-ham's hillbilly smash-'em-ups keep getting junkier, no matter how many stars-of-yesteryear he crams behind the wheel. It doesn't seem as if he's even frying to be a director anymore. Burt Reynolds, who says Needham is a friend, has now made six movies with him. Combined, the last three 1980's Smofcey and the Bandit II, 1981's The Cannonball Run and last summer's Stroker Ace are a study in the painful degeneration of a bad idea. Slroker was one of the most spectacular bombs of the decade.

The pair's latest atrocity is the tawdry, star-studded Cannonball Run II. It's supposed to be about another cross-country auto race, but that pretense is dropped quickly. There can't be but one or Iwo minutes of actual racing in the whole movie. What it's really about is cameo bits by the kind of "stars" you're likely to see on the dais at a celebrity roast silly, little vignettes featuring the likes of Telly Savalas, Jamie Farr, Ricardo Montalban, Susan Anton, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Foster Brooks, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors and Frank Sinatra (playing himself as though he were a god). No one emerges unhumiliated, but the leader on the humiliation hit parade has got to be Doug McClure.

Once one of the biggest stars on network television, McClure is reduced to playing a slave to Jamie Farr's Arabian sheik. "Why do you have a blond, blue-eyed slave?" Montalban asks Farr. "lie was a famous actor in America, but he hasn't had a series in seven years," Farr answers. Then they slap him around a little. The star of The Virginian getting slapped around by Jamie Farr.

It's medieval! A close second is Shirley MacLaine. Right after her career-affirming Academy Award for Terms oj Endearment, she appears as a randy chorus girl who impersonates a nun to coerce Reynolds and Dom DeLuise into Dub Taylor (right) stops Dom MacLaine and Marilu Henner for speeding in 'Cannonball Run II' DeLuise, Burt Reynolds, Shirley Luise, who looks as though he had swallowed a dozen bowling balls. If Cannonball Run 11 is more amusing than Stroker Ace and it is it's only because you can appreciate its vulgarity in a state of open-mouthed, morbid fascination: Sammy Davis Jr. dressed up as a harem Hollywood's swim star emerges from her years behind the scenes t. I I I girl a crotchety Dean Martin getting romantic with a 20-year-old Shirley MacLaine ripping off a nun's habit to reveal three-inch heels and ultra-tight shorts.

When DeLuise does a belly-dancing number that arouses Charles Nelson Reilly, it's almost too scummy to Williams enjoyed being a private person, not having to talk to reporters, being out of the spotlight. Thomas Woodward, who teaches at a Bel-Air preparatory school, moved in with her. At the time, Susie was pregnant with young Tommy, now 13 months old. (All three of Williams' children are by her second husband, Ben Gage, who worked in radio.) Her lawyer is her oldest son, Ben who was an Ail-American water polo player. Her second son, Kim, 33, is a musician, and Susie is at home.

Williams grew up in southwest Los Angeles and learned to swim in the Pacific at the age of 8. Later, she would win national championships. She completed a year at the University of Southern California, but the family was not well off and she had to go to work. On her first job she was discovered by Billy Rose, who put her in his Aquacade, and from there it was a relatively easy jump to MGM. She was to have competed in three events in the 1940 Olympics in Helsinki, but World War II canceled the Games.

That year she met and married her first husband, who was a medical resident. Once, during the MGM years, she told an interviewer that she couldn't sing or act and that her movies were put together out of scraps. "I was so smart-aleck in those days," she said. "But the actual fact of the matter is, you're picked up to do something v. nil? rlCy giving her a free ride to Broadway.

Already, MacLaine is trying to disavow the movie, saying she only did it because it would be "fun." Too late. At least, MacLaine gets to play kissy-face with Reynolds. Poor Marilu Henner is forced to pretend that she is romantically attracted to De If? at Cypress Gardens, 19S3 be true. There should be a Hall of Sleaze for bits like that. If Needham really is Reynolds' friend, they need to sit down together very soon and come to an agreement, for their mutual preservation, never to collaborate on another movie.

Before it's too late. you never dreamed about, that you never yearned for, and then all of a sudden you're in that atmosphere where everyone's so very talented the Spencer Tracys, the Ingrid Bergmans. That lot!" She shook her head, as if still registering disbelief that she had been a part of all that. But for seven years, in the '40s and '50s, she had been in the Top 10 box-office list. She seen her old films on television id when she was on a Mediterranean cruise to recover from Lamas' death.

"1 look at that girl, and I like her. I can see why she became popular with audiences. There was an unassuming quality about her She was certainly wholesome. "I wouldn't want to be a young actress in films now," Williams continued. "I think of Barbra Streisand in comparison, and what she did with Yentl.

She has to buy the story, has to convince llsaac Bashevisl Singer that she's the one to play it, she does an absolutely spectacular job and for some reason she's passed over at the Oscars which was wrong Now she's got to start all over again with the next project from scratch. "We had that studio with cotton-batting walls. While we were shooting the next film, they were cutting the one you had just finished and somebody in a wonderful little office was writing the next one." Suddenly she interrupted herself, in a star's tone of voice: "Now, do ask me something about my swimmingl tape, because it's very important. Going back over the past I get that feeling of fatigue sometimes. Nostalgia is not my number." outka started thinking about the sneezing syndrome when he took his 4-week-old daughter outside last summer and she sneezed twice.

His father and brother, but not his mother, also have the sneeze reflex. Peroutka believes a child has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the reflex from a sneezing parent. He found, at the Hopkins neurology department, that one-third of the scientists have the reflex and that most of them could name relatives similarly afflicted. national reputation as a criminal psychologist. After a congressional committee chastised television executives in 1968 for the portrayal of violence in their programming, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) launched a re-examination of Its code of practices.

The industry group retained Heller and a Temple colleague, the late Samuel Polsky, as outside experts on criminal violence. While working on the revision of the NAB code, they met Alfred R. Schneider, now vice president of policy and standards for ABC. In 1970, Schneider recruited both to review potentially troublesome material for the network and advise ABC on Its handling of sensitive topics. Heller said his insight into sexuality was drawn largely from the practice of psychotherapy.

Until several years ago, he maintained a large private practice as a therapist. More recently, however, he has trimmed his caseload and is wrapping up the treatment of a few remaining clients. Over the last several years, Heller has suffered substantial hearing loss. To a therapist, whose art relies so heavily upon the nuance of the spoken word, the debilitation is as devastating as arthritis to a pianist. "Whoever wrote that script is a stinker," he said.

A reflex to sneeze in the sun WILLIAMS, from 1-C Games for the first time an event she quietly worked for. Ard along with all of this activity, she's an executive with New Century Productions, taking her husband's place "like Muriel Humphrey stepping into her husband's Senate seat" and her first project involves working on a film to star Lamas' son, Lorenzo, of Falcon Crest fame. She says she has no regrets about those years behind the scenes. She enjoyed being "a private person," not having to talk "to people like you about what I think and feel, having to reveal parts of myself. Getting to leave the spotlight 22 years earlier, when you're 22 years younger." Reminded that she chose a different path during the burgeoning women's movement, she replied: "You know, for every woman who feels liberated by those books and theories, there are probably five who are so glad to stay home and take care of their husbands.

There are many of us who have worked hard for many years, and I call it the fruits of your labor to have somebody who wants you exclusively to himself. Lamas and Williams were married in a civil ceremony in Marbella in the south of Spain in 1962, then lived in Spain and in Rome for several years. learned kitchen Spanish and Italian I could buy the grocer ies. They remarried in a church ceremony here seven years later. "He was terrific.

Look at that pic ture of the two of us, she said, pointing to the mantel. "That's when we made Dangerous When Wet to gether in 19S2. The humor, the fun and the chemistry! He was free, but I wasn't, so we went our separate ways in spite of all that chemistry. Then we met again on a television special in 1960 in Cypress Gardens. He had married and separated, I was divorced.

"He said after his divorce from Arlene Dahll, 'Let me take you away from all And I said, 'Away from all what? I'm a movie But Lamas convinced her, telling her that she had never "seen the crowned heads of Europe" or experienced "international, marvelous travel," had never been "on her own." When Lamas became ill, Williams' daughter Susie and son-in-law, al and behavioral realities of adolescent sexual unfolding." In addressing the facts of life on TV, "silence is a sexual message, too," one that is "inexcusable." The same approach applies to the portrayal of extramarital affairs. Depictions of adult promiscuity "glamorized as glib, alternative lifestyles for the masses require strong, responsible counterbalance of convincing storyline developments that portray human consequences." As a result of his involvement with the criminal-justice system, Heller is particularly harsh on TV program-' mers who treat prostitution in a light-hearted manner, as though it was like the distilling of moonshine. This is no simple cottage Industry that stretches the definition of free enterprise, he writes. It is a self-destructive phenomena that frequently stems from incestuous psychological shaping and cruel recruitment. TV dramas dealing with prostitution "must portray that, too," he writes, "and should not depict prostitutes merely as happy, attractive and sophisticated young ladies selling their taffy at the seashore." Homosexuality, he notes, "is now encountered with increasing openness among persons in virtually every walk of life." As a result, gay men and women should be portrayed In another Busby Berkeley spectacular, 'Easy to filmed ABC adviser writes his own script for handling sex on TV In his book of guidelines for the network, Dr.

Melvin S. Heller, a psychiatrist and a professor at Temple, pushes for more realism and sensitivity in the portrayal of sex on television. Chicojo Tribune Stephen Peroutka, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has documented the photic sneeze reflex. When he emerges from a dim interior into bright light, he sneezes twice. Peroutka theorizes that the reflex is a protective response, to keep people from staring at the sun.

Science 84 says the scientist has studied the reflex, first described in 1964 by a Massachusetts psychiatrist, and found that it is hereditary. Per on TV as multidimensional persons. "There is probably no greater sexual problem in America today than the failure of sexual love to bind and heal the bruises and contentions of marital life, Heller advises. Therefore, divorce and separation should "not be shown as an easy option leven in childless marriagel but as a broken contract and failed commitment, with all of its shattered promises." All of this advice looks great on paper, but is difficult to translate into actual, maturely developed scripts, Heller observed. "There are damn few Paddy Chayefskys writing today." His biggest problem, he said, results from not being called upon early enough in the production process and having to deal with flawed but nearly finished projects.

Heller's unusual involvement with TV programming is an outgrowth of his long experience with the criminal-justice system and his "academic hobby" the study of law. Much of his psychiatric practice for more than 30 years has entailed the evaluation and treatment of criminal offenders. As director of the division of forensic psychiatry at Temple, he frequently has been asked to advise courts, attorneys and penal institutions. Along the way, he developed a HELLER, from 1-C with meaning. "This is by no means a Gettysburg address about sex," Heller noted.

"But what can you do in 40 double-spaced pages?" Plenty. Even Heller's occasional humorous observations are loaded with insight. "Once shame was invented," he notes sparely, "Ithel Broadcast Standards and Practices (department! was inevitable." Heller begins with the observation lhat there are no longer any recipes for acceptable and unacceptable program fare. "When is a depicted kiss to be counted as sexual, and when is it not?" he asks. "Things that are not sexual to some may have substantial sexual connotations to others." He points out that "as in real life, circumstances and contexts, rather than content alone, most often make the difference." Therefore, he says, judgments about the content of TV programming can only be made on a case-by-case basis.

He sees his job as stating a set of clear reasons for making editing decisions reasons that "are free trom hidden agendas of personal preference or secret policy." For example, he gives the following rationale for barring depiction of intercourse on TV: Matters that are treated privately in the home ought to be portrayed the same way on TV. graphic, is also permissible if it "is not unduly ogled or otherwise exaggerated for the audience." For a sequence showing full frontal nudity in Roots, Heller advised ABC to keep the characters motionless, pan the camera and avoid closeups. Nudity in art does not require editing as long as the entire work is shown as the artist depicted it, "not focusing the camera unduly on the sexual parts alone." In all programming involving sexual storylines, Heller advises full portrayal of the "prospects, risks and consequences of sexual behavior." "Entertainment programs which glibly depict teenage sex without clearly presenting its moral and emotional consequences are catcgori-' cally unacceptable," he writes. But TV "should not withhold from teenagers a fuller picture of the emotion "Once we understand the pains to which most parents go in order to keep their own sexual behavior from being observed or even heard by their children," he writes, "it's not hard to understand how much parents would resent seeing the very same acts being depicted by others on TV in front of the very same children." What about showing couples in bed afterward? "Much better than during," he advises. The underlying principle is the same: In real life, "little children see their parents in bed quite frequently." Some instances of nudity are acceptable as well.

Infant nudity is perfectly proper on TV, he said. "Any adult with really big problems over infant nudity isn't fit to change a diaper." Tribal nudity, a la National Geo.