'CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC' (Published 1980)

''CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC" is a movie with its own ice cream flavor, which is duly plugged during the course of the so-called story. Beyond that, what is there to say? The Village People, for whom the movie is more or less a vehicle, perform lively songs and try less successfully to act. Bruce Jenner plays an uptight lawyer, and the comic high point of the film occurs when he spills dinner and has to take off his pants. Valerie Perrine plays a woman. In the boy-meet-boy world of the movie, this is something of a novelty, but it doesn't make for much of a role. The intervals between musical numbers are mostly dead air.

A lot of "Can't Stop the Music," which opens at the Ziegfeld today, seems aimed at small children; in fact, the movie's occasional smutty jokes may be its only real concession to an older crowd. Miss Perrine and Steve Guttenberg play old friends who want to make it big in the music business, and together they assemble the Village People. Miss Perrine finds the individual members of the group wandering around New York, dressed, respectively, as an Indian, a construction worker, and so on.

In the film's triumphant closing number, the group does a concert in San Francisco and wears stage outfits that are very glittery versions of their usual outfits. They sing a happy song, and confetti falls, and on the soundtrack the San Francisco audience squeals with glee. It's a surprisingly effective finale, especially for a movie without any real plot or momentum.

The musical numbers, which are the heart of the matter, seem both zesty and bloodless. One number features the construction worker Village Person (David Hodo) being danced around by many women in red dresses. The women, who behave as the Rockettes might if the Rockettes were interested in mild sadomasochism, playfully spike Mr. Hodo with their heels and bite his biceps. He kicks them away and keeps singing. The whole thing has a vaguely depressing high-fashion pallor, but the song is peppy enough to keep the scene moving.

Nancy Walker, who directed "Can't Stop The Music," gets her splashiest musical sequence out of "Y.M.C.A.," a big hit record for the Village People and a funny song to illustrate. Miss Walker simply assembles a lot of beefcake footage, as men in a gym do excercises or flop into the pool. The footage varies a lot and it doesn't have the rhythm of the music, but that somehow makes it more appealing. Another musical number with a less workable sight gag, "Milk Shake," shows the same approach wearing very thin. The performances range from funny (Paul Sand, as a record business mogul) to sympathetically amateurish (Mr. Jenner) to grotesque (Marilyn Sokol, as a predatory female). The unevenness of the acting comes as a kind of blessing, though, since the rest of the movie is so thoroughly homogenized. "Can't Stop The Music" presents itself as an event, which in this case means no spontaneity, no variety, nothing on less than an oppressively grand scale. It never succeeds at being purely synthetic, however. That's the only really likable thing about it.

"Can't Stop the Music" is rated PG ("Parental Guidance Suggested"). It features a few off-color jokes and fleeting nudity.