Spectator Sport : HOLDING MY OWN IN NO MAN’S LAND: Men and Women and Film and Feminism.<i> By Molly Haskell</i> . <i> Oxford University Press: 207 pp., $25</i>

At a time when film criticism seems polarized between disposable blurbs and impenetrable theoretical tracts, Molly Haskell remains a voice of sanity, lucidity and charm. Though “Holding My Own in No Man’s Land,” a collection of essays published over the last 20 years, may not break ground--as did her landmark book, “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies”--it does provide an affectionate assessment of the icons and issues that have shaped moviegoer’s sensibilities.

Subtitled “Men and Women and Film and Feminism,” the book is more of a sampling of hors d’oeuvres than a full meal. Its focus is tantalizingly wide-ranging, beginning with “Dames” (interviews or profiles of female stars from Marlene Dietrich and Gloria Swanson to Doris Day and Meryl Streep), moving through “Guys” (including a probing essay on the proliferation of screen “daddy” figures in the early 1980s), “Literary Heroines” (of Henry James and Jane Austen) and culminating in “The Nineties: Where Do We Go From Here?” (such topics as nudity and caustic female comedians).

Haskell’s introduction smartly articulates her desire to find “some common ground between my love of movies and their complicity in so many social injustices.” But the author is (luckily for us) more of a cinephile than a polemicist. If there is an underlying assumption, it would be (as she distills in 1974 from “Scenes From a Marriage”) “that we are in this together, that both sexes are plunked on this planet without a guidebook, and if we join our heads and hearts and the rest of our bodies, we will probably do better than if we spend all our time and energy trying to prove we don’t need each other.”

Throughout “Dames,” Haskell offers pungent insights on provocative women--including TV heroines like Lucille Ball, who is keenly appraised in terms of the medium: “She carries with her an air of perpetual innocence, an angelic Who me? She is starting life again each moment, without memory, without morality--she lies shamelessly, but, like a child, she does it with chocolate all over her face. This innocence is a quality particularly well suited to the weekly series, where life begins anew with each show.”

Foreign actresses provide the author with rich material for analysis. A 1990 portrait of Jeanne Moreau centers on the sharp perception that “the femme fatale is almost invariably a male-invented creation, the projection--and prisoner--of a director or writer’s fears and fantasies, and probably a means of satisfying his own self-destructive urges.”

Haskell’s assessments of American actresses are heightened by her firm historical sense. She places Shirley MacLaine in “the middle period of movies, after glamour and before grunge,” and grasps that it was only in the 1950s that movies began pushing maternity as the feminine ideal and suburbia as a women’s sphere.

The four essays making up “Guys” are kaleidoscopic rather than harmoniously juxtaposed (Truman Capote alongside John Wayne!). The centerpiece is an extended rumination on “Rape: The 2000-Year-Old Misunderstanding,” which begins with movies but is really about the problem of rape as perceived by men versus women. The most deeply felt article seems to be “What Makes John Wayne Larger Than Life?” in which Haskell’s relationship to her father colors her reverence for the icon.

The Wayne essay is emblematic of the book’s achievements and shortcomings. On the one hand, Haskell illuminates the movie star as well as a cultural issue: “Wayne was not a lusty sort in the fanny-pinching tradition, not one to carouse with the boys or leer at women. There was none of the compulsive womanizing of the male chauvinist or, on a subtler level, the sexual indifference that is as much a part of the macho pose as swagger.”

On the other hand, the interview feels dated. Most of it is in the present tense of 1976 or 1980 while--without transition--the “now” of the last page seems to be the present. The book needs more contemporary asides like the footnote admitting that the editors of Ladies Home Journal asked Haskell to obtain a recipe from Wayne: “To my everlasting respect, I refused. How could I sully my prose and my image as a serious feminist by including anything so frivolous as a recipe! We were a little uptight in those days, or I was anyway--already having misgivings about writing for a mass market homemakers’ publication.”

Ultimately, it’s hard to fault the book for what it does not include when so much of its content is on target. And Haskell certainly has a way with words, as in her take on Mae West: “Her singing is nothing much, a cut-rate Sophie Tucker, but her real music is in her movement, part swagger, part slither, part come hither.” Beyond the pleasure of her prose, Haskell is as much a humanist as a feminist--and as much a historian as a reviewer--which renders her work accessible and valuable.