Collective New York phobias -- fear of involvement, fear of strangers, fear of break-ins -- are enacted by way of a comic nightmare in which an Upper East Side word processor, lured by the prospect of a hot date, gets marooned in SoHo without a dime (well, actually with ninety-seven cents) and is unable to get out again. No need, however, for outsiders to be put off. Where the movie advances beyond the parochial and the topical and into the universal and eternal, and where it rises above a random carom around an artificial obstacle course, is in its vision of human relations, the notion of people as mismatched puzzle pieces: and not just that one person is a piece of the sky and the other belongs somewhere in the swamp, but that they belong to different puzzles altogether, the one to a 60-piece Milton Bradley (ages 4 to 8) portrait of your favorite Muppet and the other to a 3000-piece reproduction of a Jackson Pollock. It is no help that the insecure hero is endlessly agreeable, tactful, hopeful, accommodating, and self-deceiving -- that only delays the inevitable and gets him into extra trouble. Somewhere there must be a perfect match for a woman, for example, who exists in a sort of mid-Sixties time pocket, still wears her hair in a beehive, decorates her walls with sketches of Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Twiggy, et al., puts the Monkees on the phonograph in happy times and Joni Mitchell in somber. But the odds are not good. Certainly there is no one to beat the odds for our hero among the five principal women encountered in the course of his very long night in SoHo. These mercilessly observed encounters could easily have become monotonous if the hero himself remained a simple polestar of sanity. He perhaps begins as one. But he undergoes a gradual transformation from everyman to "other-man," becoming stranger and stranger, differenter and differenter, as the night rolls on. New Yorkized, you might want to say, but better just say humanized. With Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, and John Heard; directed by Martin Scorsese. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd