THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, the film directed by Paul Newman adapted from Paul Zindel's play, takes a typically fifties subject--a middle-aged widow trapped in a ghetto of emotional frustration--and dresses it up in typically fifties sentiment. The movie is a plea for the Blanche du Bois and Amandas of the world, victims of rat-racing commercial America. The American Theater has wallowed under a deluge of such stuff for 20 years; the dialogue sounds like a rerun William Inge or Tennessee Williams, and the movie watches like a Blue Monday.

Beatrice (Joanne Woodward) once a clown-of-the-party, has become the party's debris, wasted and neglected. Her house is a pigsty, her yard cluttered with junk; one daughter, Ruth (Roberta Wallach), is an epileptic teenager, one, Mathilde (Newman's daughter), lost to her out of a love for biology. With slatternly hair and frowsy bathrobe, Beatrice drags out her days on too much coffee and too many cigarettes, reading the want ads and trying to sell dance tickets on the phone. She wisecracks non-stop to waylay despair, but her sense of humor has gone sour and grates on even her daughters.

The movie opens with Beatrice's grimace at a department store mirror while she dons a platinum curled wig. She makes a garish picture--an aging belle whose talent for mimicry has twisted into selfmockery. She feeds on pipe dreams to bolster her comedy, but even these pile up to taunt her selfdeception.

In the end, Beatrice's best intentions fall flat. Mathilde has won a science contest for her experiment with man-in-the-moon marigolds, and Beatrice is to appear on the stage with her at the award ceremony. But it is not until the audience is dispersing that Beatrice staggers in. Drunk, dressed like a hallucination out of the thirties, she makes a grand entrance, first paralyzing, then galling the entire assembly. Watery-eyed she chokes, "Mathilde, my heart is full," and her daughter winces in shame.

THE PROBLEM with the movie is that it belabors Beatrice's misery without explaining it. Hers is the same struggle as Willie Loman's, but Zindel writes as if he were too cool to identify the cultural forces Miller unveiled. Zindel's tottering steps toward social analysis stop at a symbolism laid on so thick that it is embarassing. Take, for instance, Mathilde's fascination with radioactive half-life, the dominant metaphor for Beatrice's disintegration; or Beatrice's boarder, a vegetable corpse of a woman, with palsied hands, lips curled in like a death grip, and big blind eyes that lear a reminder of isolation. These are the tools of Williams's memory mood plays, a manipulative sentimentalism masquerading as moral realism.

As could be expected, Beatrice is morbidly hungry for a man, though she hated the one she had and the only one she ever really loved was her father. Her problem is neurotic, but Zindel warps it into cultural dimensions it doesn't deserve. When her brother-in-law refuses to lend her the capital she needs to open up a tea shop and "get back on the map," Zindel would like to brand Darwinian America as the villain, but in spite of himself all the dramatic evidence points to Beatrice herself. She pits a tough exterior against ghetto inertia, but Zindel is noncommital about the reasons for her vulnerability. She does deserve some sympathy, but his drooling pathos has taken the bite out of Beatrice's stiff upper lip and made it soggy.

Paul Newman may share Zindel's concern, but he has the taste to screen out Zindel's effulgences. The camera follows Beatrice unobtrusively and manages to watch her with sympathy. Lighting the film in greenish blues gives touch rather than drip to the melancholy forced by the heavy language of the play. Unfortunately, Newman is a prisoner of his material. It is Zindel's tiresome play that sends the movie floundering in sentimental squalor.