If you're looking for the normal gunslamming, Dirty Harry with a .44 magnum taking aim at the streets of San Francisco, you won't find it in Bronco Billy. What you will find is a hard luck story--with a plot as an excuse for satire.

And mixed in with all the corn, of course, are a few good laughs. At one point, when the perfectually prissy and platinum (Sondra Locke) cuddles up to Bronco Billy in the back of his trailer, Eastwood gets all soft and sentimental and tells the story of his life. He went on the road, it turns out, after he went to jail. And he went to jail, it turns out, because he tried to kill somebody.

"I caught my wife in bed with my best friend," Billy explains to a wide-eyed Lily.

"What did you do to him?" Lily asks.

"I shot her."

Fame

Directed by Alan J. Parker

At the Paris

WHAT IF a writer lured you into a tantalizing, suggestive paragraph, and abruptly ended it?

And then led you into another, only to end that one, too?

And continued to do so for two hours?

Alan J. Parker leads us along an analogous cinematic path in Fame. Despite inherently interesting material and an alluring score by Michael Gore, Fame is mired in an endless series of camera pans and scenes that beg a batch of questions. Parker leaves his audience hanging--for two hours--drawing us into his den with upbeat music and rousing clips of rhythmic, euphoric chaos. But characters rarely develop, and when they do, their plight and the plot remain exasperatingly unresolved.

The drama teacher at High School for the Performing Arts tells the freshman class they will need three things to make it: a strong technique, a good agent, and a thick skin. By the time graduation rolls around, the oncenaive wunderkinder have developed the latter. At its center, Fame is really a monument to modern-day egoism. What has the Me Generation wrought at PA? A bunch of conceited, albeit talented, immortality-seekers who think of nothing but themselves.

From Manhattan, the South Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn the raw come to audition. Some have been sheltered, some have been hardened. But four years later, in the film's well-orchestrated finale, they join together to sing:

...I toast to my own reunion When I will be one with the stars And in time, and in time We will all be stars