And then, in 1978, there was "Ice Castles," the film for which Heartthrobby Robby will be best remembered because it was totally fetishized by preteen girls. This is the one film where Robby gets to act halfway cool -- he's not actually cool, of course, but he's as cool as Robby Benson can get in a movie that's built around a romance with a blind figure skater and that features a Marvin Hamlisch-Melissa Manchester soundtrack.

Robby plays an aimless young quitter who bags medical school and his hockey team -- the one thing he doesn't give up on is gurl Lexie (played by skater Lynn-Holly Johnson), when she goes blind after a triple axel by hitting her head on some patio furniture.

"Look at him: He's a beautiful woman," said my spouse, while watching this film, and he was right -- with his long black hair and blue eyes, Benson could have been Charlie's newest Angel, from the Upper East Side.

Robby tries hard to have some teeth in this one -- he slurs his words to make himself sound tougher and more rustic. In the obligatory cheesecake scene, Robby has a phone conversation with his girlfriend while wearing nothing but white box-hugging boy panties that leave nothing to the imagination. A viewer wonders if Benson demanded this bod-shot in his contract, it is so strangely placed in the film -- "All right, all right already, Robby, we'll put your taut groin into the phone scene. Jesus."

Robby emotes a lot in this film. He watches all of Lexie's skating routines with a wet-eyed, heart-in-his-throat expression: Every little girl's fantasy of a boyfriend's face while watching them ice skate. It would be convincing were it not for the fact that no real young man would ever be capable of making that face without taking a lifetime of shit from his friends.

Still, in the big hollow sugar Easter-egg world of that movie, Robby Benson is perfect. He owns it. He plays the drippy, pansy-ass part on both feet like a man-boy with solid conviction. He might make you squirm, but that's your problem. Resistance is futile -- Robby did his job and gave 100 percent, and that is all we can reasonably ask of any actor. We can't demand that they perform in a style that is less cringe-o-delic.

Reviewers hated this movie, too, but it is a Hollywood tearjerk-template classic. It remains a touchstone of childhood in the '70s for an enormous number of American girls who loved the bejesus out of it, and Robby Benson best of all.

An interesting Benson-as-adult role is in the really clunky, dreadful film "Tribute" (1980). Robby plays the uptight, angry son of hammy, womanizing old Broadway hack Jack Lemmon, who gets a Medical Diagnosis at the film's beginning, giving him X amount of time to live. Mandate: Snitty, tight-assed Robby and rascally, good-time-Charlie Dad must connect before Dad dies.

This movie is a doomed wad of sentimental, ego-barking horseshit, for which I blame Bernard Slade, who wrote the stage play and screenplay. Even Lemmon is sucking air, despite his enormous skill -- probably because he was unable, after winning awards for the role onstage, to tone down his massive scenery chewing sufficiently for the intimate medium of film. Benson plays against type as a totally charmless cretin and does a pretty good job, considering that he is violently miscast and doesn't get to use any of the tools in his bag of charisma tricks. When he's playing angry, he has a tendency to go into a cartoonish, roaring voice that I can only imagine came in handy in 1991 when he was the Beast in Disney's animated "Beauty and the Beast" -- even when having ugly pangs of rage, Robby is still a bit on the cuddly side.

This is a movie only Gene Shalit goes down on the record for having liked, at least on the video box, which leads me to the conclusion that Shalit can either be bought for a six-pack of Milk Duds or has the worst taste in the history of American film critics.

In "The Chosen" (1981), based on the book by Chaim Potok, Benson plays a Hasidic boy who befriends a reformed Jewish boy (the consistently admirable Barry Miller) during World War II. I think Benson does a lovely job in this film. For the character of Danny, he developed a very thoughtful and interesting arrogance and self-composure. You can tell he did a lot of nice homework on the insular nature of the Brooklyn Hasidic community; he built Danny without standoffishness, but with an assured difference.

His enthusiasm is naïve, as usual, but (for once) this is totally appropriate to the role. There is a nice moment when it is revealed that he is already intimately acquainted with his new friend's father, a scholar who has been suggesting books for him to read at the library. He looks shaken by excitement, almost terrified at how his hermetic world is suddenly expanding. You can tell, in this moment, that Benson, though he doesn't pull off subtlety with much subtlety, has a proper respect for subtlety. This alone is almost enough to make him a good actor -- added to his spooky good looks. He is likable and compelling in "The Chosen"; the religious nature of his character is a great excuse for the Glow of Wonder in his eyes.

The bumpy friendship between the two boys is very sweet and convincing. Miller, who plays Benson's radical friend, is an underappreciated young actor of the same generation -- he turned in some fine performances in "Fame" and "Saturday Night Fever" but never hit the big time, because, unlike Benson, Hollywood didn't want to see him in his underpants.

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