`Going Places' Is Back For First Viewing Of Uncut Version

One of the most scandalous European films of the 1970s, Bertrand Blier's ``Going Places'' (``Les Valseuses'') is back at the Grand Illusion this week - for the first time in its uncut version.

Originally toned down in order to receive an R rating, the movie stars the late Patrick Dewaere and the very young Gerard Depardieu as a couple of reckless young men on an odyssey of petty crime and kinky sex.

The racy, picaresque script follows these two unrepentant male chauvinists as they bum their way across France, breaking into houses, stealing cars, harrassing people, abducting and seducing a string of women - among them Brigitte Fossey as a young mother, Miou-Miou as a beauty-parlor employee who tags along on their spree, and Isabelle Huppert as a rebellious teen-ager who wants to join them.

Blier, who based the script on his own novel, has a wickedly anarchic sense of humor, and he eventually turns the tables on these two losers, demonstrating that the women they pick up aren't always the helpless victims they expect to dominate. The movie may sound like an Andrew Dice Clay vehicle from another era, but it's more ironic and intelligent than that.

Nevertheless, even the R-rated version faced an almost unanimously hostile reception during its first American release in 1974. It became the first film on Home Box Office to be dropped as a result of viewers' protests, and Seattle theaters didn't show it until 1979. One critic called it ``a nasty shocker in chic dress,'' while another wrote that ``the film deliberately evokes the sounds and smells of sex.'' It was, however, a box-office smash in France.

The restored scenes include a more explicit episode involving a menage a trois, and a sequence that makes more sense of the cameo role played by Jeanne Moreau, who nearly walks away with the picture with her part as a desolate ex-convict the two men pick up.

Blier went on to make a kind of sequel, ``Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,'' also starring Depardieu and Dewaere - it was mild enough to win the 1978 Academy Award for best foreign-language film - as well as such Depardieu vehicles as ``Menage'' and last year's ``Too Beautiful For You.'' Dewaere was 35 when he committed suicide in 1982, while Depardieu, Huppert and Miou-Miou survived to become ubiquitous in modern French films.