Sidney Lumet has said of Daniel, his version of the Rosenberg spy trial and the trauma suffered by the children of the executed 'traitors', that his primary interest was not the politics but "who pays for commitment, what are the costs of passion, how many generations does it carry on?" Running on Empty is another version of that scenario, a completely fictional treatment of the themes which Daniel (and E.L. Doctorow's original novel, The Book of Daniel) explored through a transparently fictional account of the Rosenberg case. Perhaps it is not so much a remake as a continuation: the parents in this film, played by Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti, whose involvement in an act of sabotage during the Vietnam War has made them political exiles within their own country, have picked up from where Daniel was left off, tentatively involving himself in the Vietnam demonstrations as a way of restoring himself and reclaiming his parents' passion.

Implicitly, then, the answer to "how many generations does it carry on?" is that it could be as long-running a family saga as one liked, with the actual content of the political issues becoming less essential to the drama and more the vehicle on which the family conflict rides. In this respect, Running on Empty already seems a diminution of Daniel on two counts: because it is completely fictional, the political cases it is arguing from are more generalised, and more easily manipulated to serve tidy dramatic ends (politics vs. self-realisation); and because the growing pains of Danny Pope are disassociated from the political turmoil, the growing pains, in which his parents were once involved, the solution is also more tidily, and sentimentally. inevitable. The scenario of Danny's need to separate from a loving but peculiarly over-protective and closeting family would be no different if the peculiar family circumstances involved, say, intense religious convictions. Which is not quite the same as the plight of Daniel, who had already been forcibly separated from his parents and needed to reclaim them and their sense of conviction, in the process facing painful questions not so much about their guilt or innocence of spying but about the punitive extremes to which society-would go, because of their beliefs, to put them in that either/or situation (the book's speculations about the possibilities of dissent being rather more gloomy than the film's).

The Popes, on the other hand, are clearly guilty of something separate from their beliefs. They inadvertently caused serious injury while making their political gesture, and so their hounding ever since has a criminal as well as a political basis, making their action seem, if not wholly reprehensible, at least misguided and reckless. The aura of regret about their political past extends to the scene of Annie Pope's reunion with her father, and her tearfully asking him to take Danny into the shelter of a life which she once spurned, while political action in the present is more or less summed up in the bank-heist fantasies of L.M. Kit Carson's Gus. Annie's rejection of the latter as a "forty-one-year-old infant still playing with guns" even suggests that the political aspects are just the props in a double drama of identity formation and growing up. Just as Danny must escape from the huis clos of life on the run in order to become his own man, his parents' misfortune is that they can never escape that life (and in one drunk scene, the otherwise unwavering Arthur Pope demonstrates that their constant reshuffling of appearance, home and identity has left him with his own problems of selfhood).

But against the liberal wistfulness of the film, its regret for the lost and perhaps fruitless causes of yesteryear, its domestic drama - a drama of the political life, if not of politics - remains engaging and effective. If there is nothing new in the situation of adolescent self-determination vs. family ties, Lumet and screenwriter Naomi Foner have adeptly explored it in terms of the 'red diaper baby' syndrome, with a nice balance of sympathies on both sides. Danny Pope's identity crisis never seems as acute as one might expect from the strange, self-denying circumstances of his life, and some of the best lines in adolescent angst go to Martha Plimpton as his putative girlfriend (she anticipates becoming a writer and going to live in New York, then returning home for Christmas and everyone being excessively polite). On the other side, Judd Hirsch gives uncaricatured weight to the unreconstructed radical, forbidding his son to attend a school musical recital because it is both dangerous and "bourgeois crap" and, in the film's best scene, stage-managing his wife's basic but joyous birthday party, for which all presents have to be either found or made, an economy measure which also avoids the taint of bourgeois consumerism.
Richard Combs

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Sidney Lumet is one of the only surviving political filmmakers in American cinema. Lumet began his career at the height of McCarthyism. In the Thirties, he recalls attending a single Communist party meeting, and was asked to leave after he pointed out that Soviet society was not classless because the artists lived better than the masses. Yet Lumet had a particularly close shave with the blacklist via the informal "Red Papers." In retrospect, 12 Angry Men was a definitive rebuttal to the lynch mob hysteria of the McCarthy Period and his 1960 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending added a postscript. The Fugitive Kind foreshadowed the turmoil of the South in the Sixties. Far from being well-meaning liberal-humanist melodramas, along, with Fail Safe and The Pawnbroker, these films are sophisticated ideological critiques of post-war American society, shot through with an emotionally potent and socially acute leftism that did not sacrifice dramatic situation and acting performance. It is for the latter that he was initially hailed in the early Sixties as heir to Elia Kazan, as he himself agrees.

Lumet's output, in terms of quality and quantity, is phenomenal - 38 films in 30 years. He looks to be a workaholic and a perfectionist with hands-on control of everything that goes into a film, from the choice of lens to the design of sets, from where the teamsters park their trucks on location to the selection of a sound effect in the mix.

Scathingly dismissive of auteurism Lumet might nevertheless be one of its prime American exemplars, if not consistently at a thematic level, then certainly at a formal one. His specific shaping of the look and style of each film is at once very dependent on regular collaborators, notably cinematographers Andrzej Bartkowiak and Boris Kaufman, and yet rigorously conceptualized at a thematic level by Lumet himself in pre-production. For instance, the sky was never shown in Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon was shot with only natural available light, The Morning After was saturated in bright, garish primary color, and so on.

Amidst the mushiness of Eighties filmmaking with its televisual vocabulary and zoom lens aesthetics, Lumet is one of the few filmmakers who commands the medium and understands form and style. He carries an aesthetic torch that goes back to the height of Hollywood classicism in the Fifties (12 Angry Men) and yet is responsive to sleek Eighties modernism (best exemplified in the stark minimalist narrative and visual formalism of Prince of the City). Long dismissed as a director alternating between portentous play-adaptions and underreaching political dramas, by Andrew Sarris on the one hand, and Pauline Kael on the other, his critical cachet is inversely proportional to his filmmaking talent. Ask any filmmaker.

The key to Lumet's talent is his having been originally an actor. He was born in 1924, his parents were in theater, and he began acting for stage and radio as a child - in fact, he was a child member of the Group Theater. (Lumet had a copy of Elia Kazan's autobiography on his desk.) During World War II, he was in the signal corps in the Far East, as a film cameraman. On his return to New York. he formed his own theater group and studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighbourhood Playhouse. (Meisner's very practical and specifics-oriented technique is one of Lumet's formative influences.)

In the early Fifties, he began to work for CBS in the heyday of live TV. It was a baptism of fire and taught him his craft - the ability to work very fast and yet obtain high quality results. Lumet, Franklin Schaffner (who directed the original 12 Angry Men for TV), John Frankenheimer (Lumet's successor helming the You Are There show), and Arthur Penn together constitute a Fifties New York new wave generated by TV and shaped by leftist politics and method acting. Lumet reflects that perhaps he and his generation of film directors were thus seen as upstarts by the old guard of classical Hollywood. Fitting, now that his generation looks doubtfully at Eighties filmmakers who have cut their teeth on the anything-goes aesthetic incoherence of music video and commercials.

After the prestige success of the early part of the decade, in the second half of the Sixties Lumet went on an international trajectory, making films in France, North Africa, Italy, England and Sweden. It was a period of consolidation and transition. Lumet moved away from black and white classicism (that started to go modernist with The Pawnbroker), to a fluid, mosaic style of gritty urban alienation and psychological detail: The Anderson Tapes, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. It culminated in 1976's Network, which confirmed the mature Lumet style.

Ironically, Network's defeat by Rocky for the Best Film Oscar marks the end of Seventies mainstream film's period of modernism; the tide turned back toward the bankrupt, emotionally fake triumphalism and reductive soap opera sentiments that Stallone has come to embody. Lumet never looked back, and so spent some time out in the box-office cold, almost up until his and frequent collaborator, screenwriter Jay Presson Allen's The Morning After. A determindly commercial excursion into Jagged Edge territory (and his first film shot in L.A.), a year later it reads perversely like an ironic critique of the Reaganite Eighties, just as Prince of the City now seems to be more about the movie business than law and order. Lumet chuckles at the idea.

Among still unrealized projects are Malcolm X, a David Mamet script which Lumet believes has been difficult to finance because it is "too radical," and a film about TV evangelism that foreshadowed the Jim Bakker/PTL scandal by several years.

For avowedly political filmmakers the Eighties has been a tough decade - look at the stalling of Arthur Penn, Michael Ritchie, and Robert Altman. But somehow, against the grain, Lumet has done some of his best work - Prince of the City and Daniel - in this period, and even something as flawed as Power is still better than most everything else surrounding it.

So why does Running on Empty surface now, at the end of a decade that has attempted to obliterate, coerce or marginalize the politics and culture of the late Sixties? Is it merely because the film's surface appeal (a coming of age story with River Phoenix as an Eighties teen son of Sixties radicals) is unthreatening and marketable? Or is it because demographics has made the Sixties hip again?

The Big Chill was the self-satisfied expression of a generation that time forgot, living proof that instant history could be converted into instant nostalgia - with a little help from the people who thought they were changing the system from within, but were actually being swallowed whole. By contrast, Running on Empty's ideological project is a rehabilitation of Sixties values and objectives.

Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play two Sixties radicals living permanently underground since sabotaging an MIT napalm lab in 1970. Forced to raise their two sons under a life of false identities and enforced marginality, they aren't waving but drowning. They've transmitted their Sixties values intact to their kids but now they're going everywhere and nowhere, in a state of continuous transition. Their paralysis is emblematic of the inadequacy of Sixties' values in the Eighties, of the political exhaustion of a generation that tried to unite pleasure and politics and was scared off by the economic crises of the Seventies.

Their 17-year-old son Danny (River Phoenix) is tired of living in limbo and longs for stability and the opportunity to pursue a career in classical music (Hirsch wishes he'd get hip and listen to more rock 'n' roll). He's also in love with a girl (Martha Plimpton) at his new school whose parents are the kind of stuffy, Norman Rockwell types that seem to populate small towns in Movieworld. Naturally she adores Danny's mellow, groovy parents, while Danny sees a mentor in her father, the music teacher (complete with bow-tie, natch). The film's script is based on a succession of expectation-reversals of this kind, since it's Danny's story and he's used to a life based on centripedal motion.

Danny's rejection of his parents' way of life is not a rejection of their values however. We're never left feeling this film is an epitaph for the Sixties, or a bash-the-hippies exercise, because it's ultimately about the durability and relevance of Sixties values, and the political struggle they imply - at the level of personal relations. Progressive politics are situated in the characters' lived experience, which is itself an ideological realm. That's just another way of saying that personal relationships are political. The family is the basic unit of the economic and political apparatus. To begin to disengage the family from this institutionalism, and for a new set of family relations to develop, is practically impossible - unless the family's normal relationship to society is altered. Which is precisely the case in Running on Empty, albeit with a certain suspension of disbelief.

If the family in Empty is trapped in a pattern of relations - patriarchal, based on subordination and denial - that are impossible to erase, despite the transformation of the surface conditions of family life, then at least the film affords the possibility of politically meaningful struggle being worked out in that context. Hirsch may be paternalistic, but his family's central governing principle is skepticism, and the lifestyle he has led them into only functions via a doctrine of questioning "natural" perceptions and searching for the symptoms of a normally hidden but definable order - ie., in the first scene, Danny's view of an ordinary suburban street reveals the undercover FBI agents surrounding the house.

S.L: If you're brought up in a New York, Jewish, left-wing background, a Depression baby, being brought up in Thirties, I think it's almost automatic. It's just woven into you, warp and woof. There is no separation. And so, I guess, that's why it's there in so many pictures.

In Running on Empty, the twist is that the idea of questioning authority is turned back on the Sixties children, who now 'rule' their own families.

I never thought of it in terms of a reversal of Arthur's [Judd Hirsch] basic political position, where he started as one thing but became another. It always struck me that his tight controlling of the family was because he was so unsure about the life he had led them into. He thought of his control as a kind of discipline without which they were all going to collapse, but he was holding onto himself more than anything else. Well, at one point, in that last scene with the girl, the kid says, "He needs us to hold him up."

For my politics, I don't think he's justified. I'm very touched by his politics, because that is really running on empty. Oh, boy, is that hopeless. He's never going to reach anybody and he's not reachable. And he's isolated, he's not the Red Brigade, he's not a terrorist in that sense. It is hopeless for him and others like him, because this is a country without a left wing. Europe has a left wing, England has a left wing. Even Russia has a right wing. We don't. We've got variations on the center, with some very right-wing people.

Do you consider yourself left-wing? Is Running on Empty a left-wing film?

I think it's a left-wing film. I'm not nearly as left-wing as it's possible to be now. I don't know where that would be in the political spectrum in America. I was a Jackson supporter during the primaries, but will happily vote for Dukakis.

That was a deliberate choice. I wanted no false melodrama, I didn't want a sense of the pursuit, that their lives are liable to be wrecked any moment, and they could be dragged off in chains and so on. None of that. It's a very calm movie, deliberately calm, no substitution of energy to hop things up. It's there in the score. It's very important to be honest about what's going on with these people. In that sense the damage has been done.

Even further back. I picked a town, that I wanted to be super-idealized, clean, not a speck of dirt in the street. The high school was so perfect - the classes look as if there's never been a moment of adolescent pain in them. Everything - from the son Danny's point of view - is ideal as anything he's ever gotten. Finally, of course, it is ironic, that what he sees as this perfect little refuge is something that his girlf-riend, Lorna, finds totally stultifying.

When you've had exposure over a long period, it's assumed. It was never in the script, we were never tempted to it, but it springs alive when Gus [L. M. Kit Carson, former underground film-maker and screenwriter] comes into the picture. That's where the politics got so mixed up with the fucking.

It's over. That's the main thing. We shot a final scene between him and Arthur, in which Arthur gets into his truck and finds Gus wounded. And Gus says 'You've got to shelter me, you've got to take me home with you.' Arthur says 'No. I can't. My family comes first. I can't expose them to this.' And after they have a sort of sentimental reconciliation, Gus crawls off to the bushes wounded.

I cut the scene, because the original intention was to provide the motivating moment for Arthur to realize that he's got to let his son go - what's he going to do, open him up to a life of running? When I saw that the transition could be made without it, just between Arthur and Danny, I cut the scene. Otherwise, I thought it would sentimentalize the mood.

Tell me about the title, Running on Empty.

It's that state of loss of energy, which is as critical a thing as can happen in your life, and we all have it. You just get worn down finally, from continual fights. It's a fight to get the picture done, it's a fight to cast the picture properly, it's a fight when they change the cut on you. For directors who don't have final cut, I'm fortunate, I do have final cut, but it took me a long time to get it - I don't know how they survive. Then you start with the advertising and the distribution. There are very few people in movies who do their job well. Most distributing companies do not do their job well.

Only if you come off a big hit. You'd never get any contractual control. That they simply will not give. You may have final cut in terms of the artistic product, but they will never give you control of advertising. That I know. But usually what happens is that if you've come off a big hit, they're very anxious to keep a good working relationship with you, so they listen to you and may even try to accommodate you to some degree. But it's only a question of that kind of muscle. And you certainly never have any legal rights to it. [Prior to this interview, Lumet put in a call to the New Jersey film commission in an effort to send a message to Congressman Peter Rodino (D., New Jersey) regarding the upcoming colorization-busting bill: "This guy Rodino is getting all the pressure from a lot of Democrat backers, like Jack Valenti and the theater owners and so on, who are backing Ted Turner, because they deal with him financially all the time. Colorization doesn't mean a damn thing to them. And so we'll do the only thing we can, which is to try to hit them in the pocketbook. I won't shoot in Jersey if Rodino goes against us. It's the only pressure I've got. It's a lot of money we're talking about. I once sat down with the mayor's Office for Motion Pictures and TV in New York, and we figured out just from my pictures, I brought about $400-450 million into the New York City economy. Woody Allen shot his last picture in Jersey. I shot Running on Empty in Jersey. And I could have shot it in Long Island ..."] So it's that continual struggle, struggle that just exhausts you finally. Whenever I get tired, I kind of refuel for a little while. But some people don't. And they get exhausted and fall by the wayside.

Like in Running on Empty?

Yeah. And it's not out of a loss of belief. That sort of thing happens usually very early, if it's going to happen, and then it isn't really fatigue, it's corruption. But the Sixties generation succeeded at something very romantic. And then when it all didn't go their way, they ran out of gas. Certainly politically they did. First came exhaustion and then a refusal to re-engage.

I had ambivalent feelings. I had tremendous admiration for something that was uniquely achieved, which was the stopping of a major war without overthrowing our own government in a revolution - which is I think maybe historically the first time it's ever happened. Because it was a young movement, and coincided with the normal adolescent revolt, it also revolted against its own father, which was the old Left. And laughed at it, dismissed it. What little it knew of it. Didn't even bother really to learn about it to any great extent.

All the anti-war movement knew about the Old Left were some generalized things about the Communist party. But there's a hell of a lot more in the history of the Left in the United States than the Communist party. That's a fairly recent development. The agrarian and labor movements at the end of the 19th century were wonderfully moving, touching things, and of great importance. And by cutting themselves off from the Left, they made themselves a one-action generation. The war, but after that nothing - those people grew up, a lot of them voted for Reagan.

Absolutely not. In fact, I felt that the societal elements were rather naive and laughable. I'm just not thrilled by a rock 'n' roll drug culture. It doesn't seem to be enormously contributive to a way of living. It's a great way of enjoyment, but it has nothing to do with what one does about economics, about sociology, about very important forces in our lives.

The Sixties "rebels" united with the blacks and then abandoned them. As soon as blacks got secure enough to say fuck off, they got frightened and did fuck off. Instead of fighting it out on an ideological ground and refusing to be pushed away no matter what, which is what I think the behavior should have been. So as a social movement within the United States, I think there was very little contribution. There was a tremendous international contribution in the sense of stopping the war.

The only lasting influence was the black liberation, which came about largely through the efforts of blacks themselves, and mostly among southern whites. You'll find that most black people involved in the civil rights struggle had far more confidence in the change in white behavior in the south than they did in white behavior in the north. That was largely black-achieved, black-led, and white-supported at the beginning, but as soon as the situation got a little sticky they pulled in their horns. God knows, it's as racially a divided country now ....

Absolutely. I was in Rome when King was shot, and then I was in London when Bobby Kennedy was shot, and I had a picture to do in Sweden, but I had seriously been considering settling in Europe to work, and decided then that I couldn't, that I really did belong here, and came back.

No. I never feel that. As far as I can see, art has never changed anything. It's wonderful to have around, but we're sort of like terrific camp followers. Life develops and then we make some sort of reflection of it. I don't think we're ever in the forefront of anything. [Lumet's one foray into documentary was the 1970 King: A Film Record ... Montgomery to Memphis, directed with Joseph L. Mankiewicz.]

In Daniel. the stark, harsh visual presentation of the Sixties is set against a nostalgic, warm Thirties. That seems to be against the received wisdom about the golden era of the Sixties.

In Daniel, the golden era was the Thirties, clearly, and the parents' generation. And that wasn't a political commentary on my part, that wasn't intended to say I felt this way about the Left in the Thirties and that way about the Left in the Sixties. It came about really because, from a creative point of view, the story of Daniel - I'm not talking about its meaning - is that a boy sets out to try to find out why his sister really died. What killed her. Emotionally. And, therefore, everything emotionally associated with the Sixties, I felt should be treated in a very distant way, rather than an emotional way.

And we even break the fourth wall - every once in a while Daniel stops and talks to us directly on camera. We broke it to that degree.

I never understood it. I never did that consciously. I realized that's what I was doing after I'd done a large number of movies. Especially as I got more tired of realism and felt that I wanted to get greater stylization in the work. And therefore the point of view - Whose picture is it? - became a much more trenchant question for me.

Some of your recent films seem as though they're conventional narratives but aren't at all, because they're so often elliptical. Like Prince of the City.

I don't like technique to show. I think it's an interruption for an audience, it certainly is for me: when I see the wheels working, that's when I cut out. But that doesn't mean that I'm against stylization. But I want it to be done with such subtlety, that you can't see it happening. Prince of the City seems like a completely naturalistic movie. It is highly stylized. The only one I ever knew who really spotted it and could talk to me about it in great detail was Akira Kurosawa.

When he came over to the United States, we got along famously, because I think he's the greatest living director in movies and maybe that has ever lived, and he liked my work. So right away that was a good basis for a friendship. And he talked to me at great length about it, because it would take another director or possibly a cameraman to see the subtle levels of stylization in that - and very extreme. They finally wound up very extreme, but they were introduced over such a gradual period of time that you don't realize how highly stylized that movie is.

Apart from Prince of the City, Daniel, and Running on Empty, what films mean the most to you?

The Seagull, Long Day's Journey into Night, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Fugitive Kind. It's hard to tell about 12 Angry Men because it was the first one. Not many have been initiated by me.

The idea of being worn down and straying from your own ideals comes up in the difference between Al Pacino in Serpico and Treat Williams in Prince of the City.

Right. But Danny, the Treat Williams character, thought he could manipulate. He thought, 'Okay, they think they're using me. I'm going to use them.' They were very different men in that sense. Both in reality and in the movies that we did about them.

Serpico was a professional rebel. He happened to be a cop. He was a romantic, essentially. Danny, in Prince of the City, isn't that. Hardly. He's very realistic, but when you're an SIU - Special Investigations Unit - detective, you think you are on top of the world, that you can handle anything.

I am constantly amazed by the fact that these men can exist at all. It's the most extraordinary job in the world. It's such a peculiar job: where you are, living in a society that promotes freedom, and you're a cop, and the first thing you say is, 'Oh, no you don't. You're the first line of reality.

I once did a picture in London with Sean Connery called The Offence. It was a failure, but it's a very interesting movie, about the line between the most psychotic criminal possible - the child molester - and a policeman. The line was not that distinct, not in terms of behavior. The emotional identification between them, however, was so enormous that they understood each other totally. So all of those elements come into it. In Prince of the City, he's a tremendous egotist, the actual guy.

He loved it.

Not at all. I wanted him to like it. He is bright enough not to want to be played by Robert Redford - he wanted an honest portrayal of it. That's his greatest vindication, in fact.

The Depression. As simple as that. None of you can imagine now, but we were a country then of, I think about 130 million. We had 12 or 13 million unemployed. That's one out of every ten people. So you can imagine what proportion of the working force that was. Because women weren't working. And veterans demonstrating in Washington encamped on the Potomac River and the army coming in and burning their camps down. And demonstrations - literally about food, not to mention a job - and police coming along with horses and riding people down. It was a volatile situation. If I'm not mistaken, in 1920 Eugene Debs got I don't know how many million votes in the presidential election. He was a socialist. The radio station in New York City, WEVD, is for Eugene V. Debs.

Both. My father, not my mother. But largely a witness, and also because I was a child actor. I was in the New York theater - I was therefore opened up to a great many experiences. I was in a play at one point, called The Eternal Road in 1936 and '37, and it was a gigantic production and many of the young kids in that play were going off to Spain to fight with the Lincoln Brigade.

Daniel's Thirties sequences seemed to be a very personal attempt to recreate your own childhood.

Absolutely true. In the camp sequence, where the Communist Party speaker is speaking, the clothes and so on, the choice of that house, the way the little boy was dressed, the poultry store downstairs ...

Not at all. Painful. But rich. Only those of us who lived through it and survived it came out with something that provided us with something very positive over the rest of our lives.

No, because the nature of it is that you push forward inch by inch. If you look at American history, you'll see that about every 30 years or so there's an enormously progressive president, and there's an enormously progressive time in the country. But a very short time. Usually centered about a president. And then he lasts for four years or eight years or something like that, and the remaining 22 years is just trying to push it back where it came from. Thomas Jefferson in the beginning of the 19th century, then Andrew Jackson in 1832, Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In a certain sense, certainly domestically, Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. Then Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Kennedy in 1960 and I think we're coming up on it again.

That kind of cyclical optimism, though, runs against the thesis of Power, which saw the political process as terminally compromised and false.

Well, there's a whole new ballgame now. And I have no idea where it s going to go, and I don't think anybody does, and I don't know whether anybody's even judging it yet or trying to estimate its impact. That is what's happened since television began, because television really has taken over our lives, from the mid-Seventies on, when we first had a generation that had never lived without television. Which is what Network's about. And that does frighten me. It doesn't dishearten me, but, boy, it scares the shit out of me. Because the nature of human experience is shifting rapidly, rapidly.

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I approached the screening with considerable skepticism. Movies about the 60s are often just plain bad. They arise out of a production process that is beholden to big-time political power brokers, conglomerates, banks, and southern drive-in chains. And in the not-all-that-ancient 60s, civil war was tearing through the nation - it would require some heavy special effects to make heroes out of Sheriff Bull Connor, L.B.J., Tricky Dick Nixon, Richard Daley, Judge Julius J. Hoffman, General Waste-more-land, and the cops who beat up and shot at kids. The folks in the streets, despite their faults, were taking big risks for ideals such as justice and peace. The best of us zeroed in on the System, and it's that same System that decides how the controversial 60s gets presented.

Since I was so much a part of it then and am probably just as politically active today, thousands regard me as a kind of walking 60s library. Every day, I'm asked about events, especially by the young, who seem to be on some wild scavenger hunt to discover the 60s. I'm on one, too. I gobble up every movie and resurrected album and read all the books.

Most of it is revisionist trash. Its hard to fault the writing and acting in Return of the Secaucus Seven and The Big Chill, but, typically, they screw up 60s politics. Even though youth rebellion has always been a common movie theme, Hollywood quarantines real controversy. Movie rebels want the right to throw up or dance on a car hood, but have you seen anyone daring enough to burn his draft card? Real youth rebellion is still too hot for the silver screen; it's safer to look back nostalgically, regretting mistakes and realizing how grown-up we've become.

Platoon made a breakthrough in terms of showing what happened in Vietnam, but Hollywood has yet to show us what happened here. Running on Empty certainly doesn't. The politics, in those rare moments when they're actually discussed, are cliche-ridden to the point of embarrassment - spoiling what might have been, without any politics at all, a decent story about holding a family together in a society where values and relationships are badly disintegrating.

The movie's radical couple, Annie and Arthur Pope (Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch), blew up a lab during the war because it manufactured napalm. Forced to flee underground, they took their two-year-old with them and several years later had another boy. The portrayal of underground life - from the mechanical details to the emotional strain - is painfully real. It will take a tough fugitive not to cry during certain scenes, especially Annie's heartrending reunion with her father, whom she rejected as an imperialist pig fifteen years before. Surprisingly, the story is told not from the point of view of the hunted suspects but from that of their older, now teenage son (River Phoenix), a twist that gives the movie some creative and social value. The convincing performances of Phoenix and Martha Plimpton, as his girl-friend, balance the movie's weaknesses and dead spots, among them the most boring communal dance (a la Big Chill) ever filmed. Close your eyes when the familiar refrain of Fire and Rain begins.

Naomi Foner's screenplay deals with family relationships and sex in a new and healthy way. Back in the 60s, we quickly realized the Ozzie-and-Harriet family model had to go. But what would follow? We were kids, better at reacting to a bad scene than at creating a good one. The Popes although seen by the general public in the movie as cold-blooded terrorists, are actually normal people, or better - heroes who have created a family with moral values and strong ties of love. They really relate to one another - as opposed to New Agers, for whom a consciousness-raising conference on family life would suffice. Something about the enormous pressures of surviving as a fugitive forces you to be more sensitive and honest. Going underground is too painful an experience to recommend as therapy, but on reflection, I don't know of a better way to discover your real self. Not all fugitives, of course, become more human, and the movie, with an obvious plot device, reminds us that there are bad radicals as well as good ones.

The Popes are not, as the title suggests, running on empty - they're making it on a full tank. And I would guess that Jackson Browne, who wrote the famous song - mysteriously absent from the movie - would agree.

Abbie Hoffman, cofounder of the Yippies and author of Steal This Book, lived underground from 1974 to 1980

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The movie is about the Popes, a married couple who have been underground since the 1960s, and about their children—especially Danny, who is a senior in high school and has never known any other kind of lifestyle. The Popes were involved with radical politics, and they blew up a building, and there was a janitor inside who they didn't know would be there. They've been on the run ever since, changing towns, changing names, learning how to find jobs that don't attract attention, learning to keep the kids home on the day they take the school picture.

But it's a funny thing about the past. The more you run from it, the more it's in your thoughts. And now time is catching up with this family. What, for example, is Danny (River Phoenix) going to do? He is a gifted piano player, and through one of his teachers he gets a scholarship to Juilliard. But he can't claim it unless he produces his high school transcripts—which are scattered back along his trail in many towns under many different names.

Arthur Pope (Judd Hirsch) has taken a hard line for years, and he's not ready to change it now. He believes that the family must stay together, must protect itself against the world. He's built a fortress mentality, and Danny shares it. He knows that if he comes clean and enters the school, he cannot see his family again; he'll have an FBI tail every moment. His mother, Annie (Christine Lahti), feels as if her heart will break. She has been running a long time, and she doesn't regret the sacrifices she made, but she can't bear the thought that Danny will have to sacrifice his future, just as she lost hers.

Life, in the short run, goes on. Danny makes a girlfriend (Martha Plimpton), whose father is the music teacher. They share secrets, but Danny cannot share his deepest one. This is the first time he's had a girlfriend, the first time he's allowed anyone to grow this close, and he has to learn a neat trick, the trick of learning to trust without being trustworthy. Plimpton knows something is wrong, but she doesn't know what.

The family has survived every crisis that came from the outside, every close call with the FBI, every question from a pushy neighbor. But this is a threat that's unanswerable, because it comes from within: It is no longer possible for these people to avoid questioning the very foundations on which they have built their lives. And that questioning leads to the movie's emotional high point, when the Lahti character calls up her father (Steven Hill), and arranges to meet him for lunch. Long ago, she broke his heart. She disappeared from his life for years. Now she wants her parents to take Danny so that he can go to music school. She will lose her son, just as her father lost her. It's ironic, and it's very sad, and by the end of the scene we have been through a wringer.

The movie was directed by Sidney Lumet, who made a movie called DANIEL three years ago, inspired by the children of the Rosenbergs, who were charged with spying for the Russians. That film never quite came clear on what it thought about the Rosenbergs—not about whether they were guilty or innocent, but whether they were good or bad. They were seen through so many political and historical filters that we never knew who we were looking at. RUNNING ON EMPTY doesn't make that mistake. These are people who have made a choice and are living with the consequences, and during the course of the film they will have to re-evaluate their decisions.

The family is not really political at all. Politics, ironically, have been left far behind—that kind of involvement would blow the cover of the Pope family. The film is a painful, enormously moving drama in which a choice must be made between sticking together, or breaking up and maybe fulfilling a long-delayed potential. The parents never fulfilled whatever potential they had because of their life underground. Now are they justified in asking their son to abandon his own future? And how will they do that? Push him out of the car and drive away, and trust that he will find a home, just as the dog did?

Lumet is one of the best directors at work today, and his skill here is in the way he takes a melodramatic plot and makes it real by making it specific. All of the supporting characters are convincing, especially Plimpton and her father (Ed Crowley). There is a chilling walk-on by L.M. Kit Carson as a radical friend from the old days. And there are great performances in the central roles. River Phoenix essentially carries the story; it's about him. Lahti and Hill have that shattering scene together. And Lahti and Hirsch, huddled together in bed, fearfully realizing that they may have come to a crossroads, are touching; we see how they've depended on each other. This was one of the best films of 1988.

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The AD in Backstage proclaimed, "Actors, get work in commercials." Christine Lahti read this ad two years after she had come to New York, determined to be an actress and always uphold her personal and artistic standards. She was 25 years old, serious, stubborn, and intense. She had studied with Uta Hagen and worked in off-off-Broadway productions. Her dreams revolved around playing Shaw and Ibsen and all the great women's parts. But her life revolved around waitressing in restaurants frequented by upwardly mobile young men who wore loafers without socks.

During the day, she made the rounds of casting calls and agents' offices, a ritual she was not masochistic enough to enjoy. She was, she was told, too tall, too strong, too strange, too much like a gypsy; she should change her hair, dress differently, have her nose done. Two years of these disheartening critiques had led to no work at all. "So I decided to answer the ad in Backstage," she recalls, "since I realized that waitressing isn't all it's cracked up to be."

The man who interviewed her was encouraging and took a few head shots of her to show to two directors who were his friends. The next day he called her back to the office. He had a national commercial for her, he said. She was in credulous. "Where do I audition?" she asked. "There is no audition," he said. "I showed my friends your pictures, and you've got it." She understood what he was saying: the commercial was hers if she slept with his friends. She started to leave. "Listen," he said, "you'd better do something. You have no connections, you're not that pretty, and you're not that special."

She was crying, but she faced him. "You're wrong," she said.

CHRISTINE LAHTI TODAY IS entitled to the satisfaction reserved for those whose lonely faith has been confirmed. For now, at 38, she is acknowledged as an actress whose abilities outshine her success, making her something of a rarity in a business where reputation and rewards often exceed talent.

"She picked the right thing to do with herself," says A1 Pacino, who gave Lahti her first film break, in ...And Justice For All (1979). "She's doing the thing she should be doing."

Her eerily naturalistic performances have provoked comparisons with Meryl Streep. "Their screen qualities are entirely different," says Sidney Lumet, Lahti's director in Running On Empty, "but I suppose people say that when they see that amount of talent available so easily, so un-neurotically." But while Streep has been reproached for delivering mannered performances Lahti's style, which she has defined as "a non-style," never betrays that she is acting.

In creating her roles, she ferrets out her characters' contradictions, illuminating the tender places in seemingly invulnerable contemporary women. Lahti herself is intriguing because she is every bit as contradictory as any woman she has played.

By turns handsome, plain, and pretty, she has a strong face softened by girlish dimples. A serious actress who allows that she is at times too serious, she loves the stylized work of Noel Coward as much as she loves the freedom of improvisation. A militant individualist, she has always worried about other people's opinions.

Her most profound contradictions, however concern her work and are founded in the familiar conflict between commerce and art. She wants for example, to be in a hit movie, yet she chose a role in Running On Empty, a film apt to appeal to a limited audience, over one in a comedy with strong commercial potential.

"I was filled with indecisiveness, but there was no comparison in quality," she says. "As much as I ranted and raved and pulled my hair out about the decision, there was no choice."

Yet inherent in that lack of choice are more contradictions, for while she is genuinely uninterested in being rich and famous, she cares deeply about the opportunities that being rich and famous afford, and those come only from making films that reach a wider audience.

"The problem," she says, "is that the good scripts go to five actresses who are on the A list. I want those scripts to come to me. And I don't see why I'm not - in all modesty - given the same opportunities as those five."

'The reason is really so simple and depressing," says Lumet. "I've said it to Christine, and I've said it to every first-rate actor I've ever worked with: success is pegged to $60-million-or $70-million-grossers. The fact is, you're better off being adequate in a smash-hit picture than you are being brilliant in a flop."

"She can be doing exquisite work," Pacino agrees, "and if a movie doesn't become very popular, then somehow it doesn't rate as much for getting parts. But if she's in one movie that's a hit, that's usually the thing, isn't it? And that can happen anytime."

EVER SINCE SHE WAS A CHILD, Lahti has known she wanted to be an actress. Even then her choice of profession seemed appropriate, for as the third child in a family of six, she had to vie for attention, and she obtained it by being so dramatic and expressive that her family called her Sarah Bernhardt.

Her father was a surgeon, and her mother a health-care worker who gave up her job to raise her children in an all-white suburb of Detroit, where the families were real-life replicas of the one in Father Knows Best, but with trust funds. It was also a community in which women were appreciated for their looks and their complacency.

In 1968 she enrolled as a drama major at the University of Michigan. The more she studied acting, the more daunted she became by the possibility that she was too unconventional to get work. That feeling persisted until she saw Richard Dreyfuss in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. "He used his uniqueness. He was a little guy, and he just celebrated it. I was really inspired by that."

A few months later, she came to New York. It was 1973. As she struggled to enter a profession that valued a woman's appearance no less than did the Michigan community she had fled, she began to understand feminism and the pride and anger that accompany it. "I felt that as a professional woman I had a lot to prove, and that was part of the reason I didn't want to go the sex-object route. I was determined to be respected."

Yet indigence forced her to set aside her principles and do a quaintly chauvinist commercial. "I'm about to shampoo the rug," she recalls, "in - God forbid - jeans, a kerchief, and a shirt. And I say, 'Now you don't have to shampoo your rug looking like this. Now, shampoo your rug' - and each piece of clothing flew off me, and underneath I had on a perfect polyester ensemble - 'like this, with Spray 'n' Vac, the no-scrub rug shampoo.' During the shooting I was having horrible spasms of self-recrimination, and it was fifteen takes before I could say, 'the no-scrub rug shampoo.'" But, the commercial enabled her to give up waitressing, pay for her acting classes, and continue working off-off-Broadway.

In 1977, she was cast in David Mamet's The Woods and won a Theatre World Award. By this time she was writing carefully thought-out scene breakdowns and character histories, using improvisation to explore her characters and build a subtext from their needs and secrets. This technique served her well when she began working in movies, and critics described her performances in superlatives.

After ..And Justice for All, Lahti was cast opposite Richard Dreyfuss in Whose Life Is It Anyway (1981). In the next three years, she gave fine performances on Broadway in Noel Coward's Present Laughter and on film as an alcoholic lower-class housewife in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. "Some of my best work was in that movie," Lahti recalls. "I would say maybe five people saw it."

Then, in 1984, she was cast in Swing Shift as Hazel, the best friend of Goldie Hawn's character. As written, and as directed by Jonathan Demme, the picture highlighted the relationship between Lahti and Hawn. But then Hawn recut the movie, focusing the story on herself and Kurt Russell and eliminating some of Lahti's best scenes. After Lahti saw the cut she and Hawn went to dinner. "We were still friendly, but I told her I thought she had hurt the movie a lot. She thought she was saving it and making it more commercial."

Swing Shift opened to weak reviews - and strong praise for Lahti's performance. Critics agreed that she had stolen the picture from Hawn, and she got an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe nomination, and a New York Film Critics Circle Award to prove it. The award and nominations increased her stature, yet the practical opportunities they yielded were limited to offers of more parts like Hazel, which did not interest her. And since she had believed the movie would be a significant turning point, the letdown was a fine demonstration of Pauline Kael's grim dictum: Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement.

In her next film, Just Between Friends, Lahti negotiated the nearly impossible task of being likable while having an affair with Mary Tyler Moore's husband. Again, it was said that she had stolen the movie from a popular and accomplished star. And again, the movie did not realize its apparent potential for commercial success.

Housekeeping, released last fall, had a budget of about $5 million - small by Hollywood standards - and was directed by Bill Forsyth. The project was picked up by David Puttnam, who was then head of Columbia Pictures and had produced Forsyth's Local Hero. When the film was screened for Columbia executives in the summer of 1987, Forsyth recalls, "the first reaction of everyone was that Christine's performance was potentially Oscar material and that they would work toward that." But by the fall, Puttnam was out. "With David gone, there was no push for it," says Forsyth. "If Columbia had been faithful to that idea, I'm sure they could have gotten the nomination."

In the end, Housekeeping's deficiencies as a career move only reinforced Lahti's conviction that the work itself is what matters, an attitude she applied to choosing Running on Empty, a project that intrigued her for a number of reasons. Her character, Annie Pope, a '60s radical who has lived underground for the past twenty years, was challenging for the perverse reason that she is, on the surface, more conventional than other women Lahti has played. "There's nothing really flamboyant or quirky or odd about her. What I love the most about Annie is that she really changes from the beginning to the end. I play a seemingly numbed-out person who is reborn and gets to become heroic in her own way."

She was also tantalized by the prospect of working with Lumet, who directed some of her favorite films (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Prince of the City), though she was apprehensive about his well-known penchant for working quickly. She told him, "I'm frightened by how fast you work." "Don't be," he said. "I'm not going to move on until we get it." She found him to be true to his word and willing to give her an extra take if she felt she needed it. Moreover, she says "we had two weeks of really thorough rehearsal like rehearsing a play, so I felt completely prepared when we started shooting." She did additional preparation by reading about the '60s, by seeing a documentary about the Weather Underground, and by talking to friends of two of the leading radical women of the era, Kathy Boudin and Bernadette Dohrn. Beyond that, her own college radicalism gave her a sense of kinship with Annie Pope, although, she says, "I was never as courageous or foolish as she was."

Running on Empty opens this month. Lahti doesn't expect it to be "the one" that will win her the big commercial roles. At this juncture, she says, "I have my pick of a lot of the smaller movies, and that is a wonderful place to be. So, I'm not - I'm not - unhappy. It's just that I know there's more."

Yet several paths to the chimerical "more" are obstructed by her own high standards. Her feminist views, for instance, precluded pursuit of the part of Alex in Fatal Attraction. "They were interested in me," she recalls. "I read the script and I didn't like it. It was a powerful, frightening movie, but I still think it's misogynist." She is currently looking for a good commercial comedy. "That's a conscious decision to do a movie more people will see. But even though I'm actively looking, if a serious, challenging character part came along, chances are I would take it. I'd tear my hair out first. But maybe less than before. Because I'm beginning to accept that that's who I am. And that that's what makes me happy.

"So career move, career schmoove - it's very secondary, ultimately. I think it should be more primary, but I keep taking this path that is mine."

There is, Pacino believes, genuine honor in that path. "It's the old expression: 'Who speaks of triumphs; to endure is everything,'" he says. "The fact is, she's working; the fact is, she does get parts. And the excellence, that's real. That in itself is something."