IT starts with his teeth, his whole teeth, and nothing but his teeth. Close up, framed in blue light in a dental surgery, but still unmistakably George Clooney's whiter than white teeth.

When gorgeous George was previously on the Coen Brothers' books, playing a prisoner on the run, he was obsessed with his hair pomade in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Now arthouse aesthetes Ethan and Joel Coen swap dark for light as they slip easily for the first time into mainstream screwball comedy, inviting George to join them in their superficially glossy but still grown-up new world.

Growing even more handsome as he greys, like Cary Grant before him, Clooney is sharp attorney Miles Massey, a Beverly Hills divorce lawyer with the lock-tight prenuptial agreement.

Those teeth, that smile, have won their way without Massey ever experiencing a fly in the ointment, but then along slinks serial divorcee Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones).

When Massey outsmarts her in the courtroom, she vows to make him pay as she entices him into her web. He is up for the battle of the sexes, for here is chemistry not seen since George met Jennifer Lopez's booty in Out Of Sight.

That glamorous chemistry harks back to Preston Sturges' and Frank Capra's Hollywood era, and Clooney and the alluring Zeta-Jones spar with style and barbed wit as they try to pull the rug from under each other while falling in love.

What distinguishes Intolerable Cruelty from screwball's golden age is the gleeful cynicism and amoral irony of the Coen Brothers.

They were hired hands on this movie, the story already in place from Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, but the work is still singularly theirs.

On the one hand they pay homage to Sturges and Capra; on the other, cruelty is at work, as they send up both Hollywood and heartless Beverly Hills.

Occasionally the dialogue sags, the comedy works too hard, but there is always a cameo from Geoffrey Rush, as a sleazeball soap producer, or a droll Billy Bob Thornton, or an asthmatic hit man, to roughen up the golden surface.

Updated: 09:33 Friday, October 24, 2003