By Rex Reed

August 19, 2001 | 8:00 p.m

For pure silliness, Woody

Allen's back in the driver's seat with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion , an affectionate wink at those noirish 1940's comedies in which a doofus like Bob Hope and a good-sport lady sidekick like Dorothy Lamour are pursued by Nazis, Oriental gumshoes and Peter Lorre. In period clothes and timeless confusion, Bob (er, Woody) plays a grungy, myopic little insurance investigator who cracks cases with tips from ex-cons, street urchins and assorted Damon Runyon rejects, and Dottie (er, Helen Hunt) is the office efficiency expert who makes his life miserable, wrecking his reputation and his filing cabinets while having an affair with the bulbous boss (Dan Aykroyd). Although the office worm and the lady automaton hate each other, they are coerced into being hypnotized by a sleazy nightclub magician dressed like a swami (the Boris Karloff role). While they're in a trance, they are given key words which, whenever spoken, return them to their somnambulistic state long enough to (1) believe they're lovers and (2) pull off a series of daring jewel robberies under hypnosis. If you've lost the thread of concentration, not to worry. The plot is as valuable to your enjoyment as a 60-year-old ration coupon for Oxydol. The real fun is watching them switch personalities. Whenever the phone rings and the swami says, "You're in the power of the Jade Scorpion," the mousy schnook and the Our Miss Brooks from hell become cat burglars whose lives intertwine in ways forced and predictable enough to make you yell "Ouch!" He finds jewels in her chic bedroom; she finds gems in his bachelor hovel; they both suspect each other, while withholding evidence from the cops and propelling the film along with insults ("Germs can't live in your bloodstream-it's too cold"). This is not Woody's sharpest writing, and his direction lulls so often that I found myself nodding off. But there are enough funny bits to make you want more. Woody wisely spares us the details of their heists and cuts to aftermath; the period style and butterscotch color of the great Zhao Fei's cinematography are not overdone; the source music is by Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller and Harry James; and there's even a sultry, amusing cameo by Charlize Theron as a dame in trouble that brings back delicious memories of Veronica Lake, Lizabeth Scott and other 40's femmes fatales . All good reasons to consider this sweetie-pie nod to the old Hope-Crosby-Lamour Road pictures a nice antidote to the contemporary idiot farces we've had this summer. Everybody involved appears to be high on rye old-fashioneds. Like Mr. Webster's dictionary, they're Morocco-bound.   O Captain! Miscast Captain! Unlike the long, flatulent and unendurable novel by Louis de Bernières on which it is based, Captain Corelli's Mandolin (now there's a title to make them line up at the malls!) does not say "The End" at the end. It would at least have been something to applaud. John ( Shakespeare in Love ) Madden's bloodcurdlingly overproduced movie-as one British critic observed when this epic flop opened in London in May, to disastrous reviews-could only be improved by scrapping the text altogether and adding a few tap-dancing penguins. You gotta love the Brits. Sometimes they say it all. This bloated mess tells the complicated-beyond-belief story of one Captain Corelli, a fun-loving, mandolin-plucking Italian army officer (played by the disastrously miscast Nicolas Cage) who is sent to the idyllic Greek island of Cephallonia during World War II. There he falls in love with a local girl (Penélope Cruz) at about the time the Germans attack. There is much sitting around the dinner table sucking olives at night, much frolicking in the Mediterranean surf by day, and much serenading by the Italian glee club in the market square before Ms. Cruz's father (John Hurt, hidden behind a white hedge of facial hair as the wise old village doctor) says, "The history of Cephallonia is earthquakes and slaughter for 2,000 years." The excitement is a long time coming, but when it arrives, the debris scatters and so do the extras. As the languid Italian invasion force (more like a Malibu beach party with land mines instead of croquet mallets) faces a full-throttle Nazi attack, there's chaos and confusion. Warships roar toward the coastline; people are executed; a woman is hanged from a tree; and the Italian Lotharios who have been romancing the local girls find themselves face down in the Greek dust, wearing their brains for berets. In the fracas, Ms. Cruz's fisherman boyfriend (Christian Bale) returns from fighting the Germans on the Albanian border and joins the Communist resistance. Mussolini surrenders. The Germans conquer. Captain Corelli rushes home to Verdi and lasagna on the Via Veneto. When he returns to Cephallonia a few years later, like a tourist revisiting an old postcard, he finds that Ms. Cruz's character has discovered women's lib and become a doctor (we know this because she's traded her sandals for a white uniform). A sappy fade suggests that the mandolin player has become the American-Italian-English Patient. Did I fail to mention that nothing in this absurd film is remotely convincing? Despite the lush cinematography-an intoxicating blur of blue ocean, gold beaches and green foliage that drips with natural beauty and unnatural production values-the movie is a dense haze of ouzo, mangled beyond salvation by a ridiculous script by South African writer Shawn Slovo ("It is a beautiful night. All we should think of is falling in love"; "When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness") and ludicrous miscasting from top to bottom. Nicolas Cage is a million miles away from the flawed urban action heroes he plays best; grappling with an accent that comes and goes like a wave, he seems to lose confidence right before your eyes. There's no chemistry between him and Ms. Cruz (whose Spanish accent saddles her with problems of her own trying to pass for Greek). When Mr. Cage is forced to look desperate, he merely looks desperate for the nearest cell phone. When he's singing the Fascist songbook with his buddies, he seems to have been parachuted in from a brauhaus on Beverly Drive. He's not alone in his discomfort. As father and daughter, Ms. Cruz and John Hurt share a crisis in suntan continuity. For a feisty piece of work, Ms. Cruz just mopes around, looking martyred in a peasant head scarf while hanging out the wash. They all seem to have scarcely been introduced before the cameras started rolling. Then there's poor Christian Bale, who has descended from an astonishing hunk (in American Psycho ) to an anguished afterthought. As Ms. Cruz's jilted lover, he wears a haystack for a beard and looks like a brawny Cephallonian Che Guevara with remote-control body odor. The only authentic Greek face and voice in the whole cast is that of the great actress Irene Papas, who brings to her scenes as Mr. Bales' mother the dark passion that is missing everywhere else. The parallels between this oafish opus and Mediterraneo -Gabriele Salvatores' 1991 film, based on a true story, of Italians stuck on an Aegean island during the war-are inevitable. But Mr. Madden's fiasco is pure Hollywood: The tangential characters are as wooden as palm trees, the stars are there for the paychecks, and the fudged love story, set against a backdrop of war, is on the same dismal par as the soap in Pearl Harbor . At a running time of more than two hours and a budget that could save the rain forests and finance the next 20 years of embryonic stem-cell research, can't they get anything right?   She Sings, She Swings Musically, Karrin Allyson-one of the best American jazz stylists-has arrived in New York from her native Kansas City in time to cool off the summer with a dreamy new CD called Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane (Concord Jazz) that goes perfectly with that cosmopolitan you've got in your hand. Rediscovering forgotten gems like "Say It (Over and Over Again)" and refurbishing classics like "What's New" and "Why Was I Born?", Ms. Allyson has a creamy, hypnotic style, smoky as a seasoned veteran from Stan Kenton's cool school but wholesome as a bobby-soxer. She appears more relaxed in pink angora sweaters than strapless sequined dresses, and there's a beautiful Technicolor photo inside the CD to prove it. No wonder she sings "Too Young to Go Steady" with such wistful longing. I always associated this moody song with Nat King Cole, but it seems to be finding its way into the repertoires of several lady chirps these days (Jane Monheit also sings it on Terrence Blanchard's excellent new collection of Jimmy McHugh songs, Let's Get Lost ). Karrin's unique rendition is more rueful. She also swings. Classically trained, she accompanies herself admirably on "I Wish I Knew," the old Harry Warren ballad introduced by Betty Grable, but on the other 10 cuts she is cradled in a hammock of perfection by some of the most talented musicians on the planet, led by her superb pianist-arranger, James Williams. Collaboratively, they create a mood of intimacy that honors the heartbreaking saxophone solos of John Coltrane, yet her interpretations remain imaginative and very personal. There's a misty, uncomplicated quality in the way she sings, talks and looks. As a jazz singer vocally re-creating the smoldering sounds of Coltrane, she is something of a paradox, for she has a scrubbed, young-girl look instead of the torchy, been-around appearance of most hard-edged jazz stylists, and she exudes a carefree ambiance of playfulness onstage. You can hear it on this remarkably mature CD, and then see it for yourself when she makes one of her rare personal appearances at Birdland on Aug. 24 and 25. Experience Karrin Allyson's vocal magic; she's a singer for settling back and sort of melting into. Special stuff, indeed.