Updating "Pygmalion" and sprinkling it with Cinderella dust may seem like a perfectly workable idea until you get into the nuts and bolts of "Pretty Woman" (citywide). Here, Richard Gere's bored cipher of a corporate raider, Edward Lewis, transforms Julia Roberts' happy Hollywood Boulevard hooker Vivian Ward into a lydie he can pass off at a polo match in less than a week.

All he's asked of his stars is that they be a matched pair of beautiful automatons. Roberts is stunning but cool as plastic, something she's been in everything since the modest "Mystic Pizza." It was impossible to care whether she lived, died, had that baby or didn't in "Steel Magnolias." Vivid, real Sally Field-for all the excesses required of her-acted Roberts right off the screen in that one. Here, Laura San Giacomo, shoe-horned into a too-small role as Vivian's hooker-roommate, bursts out of it, giving contrast and shading where Roberts merely gives us something perfect to gaze at.

A Touchstone Pictures presentation in association with Silver Screen Partners IV of an Arnon Milchan production of a [Garry Marshall] film. Executive producer Laura Ziskin. Producer Milchan, Steven Reuther. Director Marshall. Screenplay [J. F. Lawton]. Camera Charles Minsky. Production design Albert Brenner. Editor Priscilla Nedd. Costumes Marilyn Vance-Straker. Co-producer Gary W. Goldstein. Music James Newton Howard. Art director David Haber, set decorator Garrett Lewis. Sound Jim Webb. With Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, Laura San Giacomo, Alex Hyde-White, [Hector Elizondo], Elinor Donahue, Patrick Richwood.