The People Vs. Larry Flint, starring Courtney Love and Woody Harrelson as Althea and Larry, two honest, unconventional married lovers, and produced by Oliver Stone, has garnered the prerequisite hostile criticism movie lovers now expect upon the release of a Stone film. Gloria Steinem charges that the life of Hustler's irrepressible and tasteless publisher has been sanitized, while his magazine's abusive portrayals of women go virtually unnoticed. Such news may come as a shock to conventional viewers who may find it difficult to imagine a more vulgar and outrageous Larry Flint than Harrelson portrays.

True, Flint's several experiences as a married man have been left unmentioned. He's now preparing, according to a well-researched TV documentary, for his fifth foray into matrimony, whereas The People Vs. Larry Flint gives primary focus only to Flint's relationship with his longtime comrade and lover, Althea Leasure. It's also true, as the former publisher of Ms. insists, that women were long maltreated in the pages of Hustler.

But Stone's film allows a confession by Flint, upon the heels of his odd and short-lived "born again" experience, that his treatment of women had been, in fact, less than stellar. And Flint's exciting primary relationship with a woman with AIDS, a bi-sexual exotic dancer, while hardly monogamous, is, nevertheless a startling model of egalitarian comradeship, cooperation and personal loyalty. Courtney Love as Althea is unforgettable in a role for which Fate clearly prepared her.

Most important, The People Vs. Larry Flint, is a stirring tribute to the ideal of free speech and to an ordinary man who battled his way courageously to the United States Supreme Court, preserving an unfettered right to publish. It is also an expose of the hypocrisy of the religious right, particularly of the portly, cup-cake devouring, anti-homosexual crusader and Moral Majority founder, Jerry Falwell, who is repeatedly called "Fartwell" in the film. The retelling of Falwell's unsuccessful lawsuit, following Hustler's satire suggesting Falwell had sexual relations with his own mother, is accomplished with rollicking humor.

More Subversive than Mapplethorpe

The Sidney Janis Gallery on West 57th Street in Manhattan has hosted--till February 1st--the work of a major American photographer, Duane Michals. The exhibit, based on Michael's 21st book, "Salute, Walt Whitman," has just been issued in book form by Twin Palms Publishers. To those who try to compare the importance of Michal's work with that of Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer replies, "I'm actually much more subversive than Mapplethorpe ever was because I'm not threatening. He simply reconfirmed Pat Robertson's idea of what homosexuality is about. I always say that homosexuality is just like heterosexuality except it's different."

Michals recounts how he came upon the photographic scene in the early 1960's when, to be a photographer, meant to be Edward Weston, Dorthea Lange, or Cartier-Bresson. Then, he explains, Diane Arbus appeared with shock gimmicks by focusing on "freaks" a concept or word which, in itself, Michals rejects. Then there came Larry Clark showing drug-addicted children, and Joel-Peter Witkin, the decapitator and Robert Mapplethorpe with whips in inappropriate orifices. Presently, there's Andres Serrano "peeing on everything," and Nan Golden, being beaten. Somehow, says 65-year old Michals, they're viewed as being honest, but to him they're little more than eternal voyeurs giving peeks into life's pits. Michals has lived quietly for 37 years with his male companion, an architect.

"Duane is a romantic in a period when that is very hard for some people to digest," says Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. "He is sweet when bitterness looks hipper. He flies in the face of a modernism that judges artists by the elegance of their alienation."

Aristocracy and Same-Sex Love

South, a play by Julian Green, presently enjoys its delayed American premiere at Manhattan's At Here Theatre, 145 Avenue of the Americas. A Paris-based American playwright, now 96, Green saw his 1955 creation uproariously censored, being denied space on puritanical London stages in that year. By present day standards, South is tame, though its production by Target Margin, a New York theatrical company, has turned its mix of ante-bellum aristocracy and homosexuality into a popular outing event.

Though the play's homosexuality is hardly noticeable--it is nearly a riddle--its mere mention in 1955 was sufficient to put British censors on edge. Its unhappy hero, a Polish officer, falls for a youthful hunk. He is so given to being proper, however, that he speaks in oblique terms. Asked why he feels he can no longer go on living, he illuminates the sad dilemmas of 1950's gay romantics: "Because the person I love can't love me," he replies.

Patti Smith -- Singer-Poet -- Also Draws

Manhattan's Robert Miller Gallery plays host through February 8th to Works on Paper Over the Years by Patti Smith, the innovative rock singer and lyricist known in part for having roomed with Robert Mapplethorpe and for her singing in Central Park at the 1977 Gay Pride celebration in New York.

Some of Ms. Smith's bolder works are reminiscent of the well-known Mapplethorpe "X-Portfolio" that set off alarm bells and gave impetus to censorship in 1989.

Smith's works are primarily products of the 1960's and 1970's when she lived as a vicarious or wanna-be student, longing for the wisdom of Pratt Institute grads. She learned through roommate Mapplethorpe (who actually attended Pratt) certain secrets about drawing. As with her music, critics cite Smith for accomplished offbeat draftsmanship, as well as a "jittery, energetic, and highly expressive line whose imagery can border on the manic." Grace Glueck believes Smith is best when she's "just noodling around," though Glueck admits that the singer's exhibit is, "all in all...one of the season's more spirited drawing shows."