Or maybe he was smug. It could be that he found his creative identity only as he defined himself, increasingly not as an actor-writer but as a writer-director. When he reached maturity as a filmmaker with "Groundhog Day" (1993), he had the wit to strip his old pal Murray of that late-night-TV trademark -- ironic self-satisfaction -- and get audiences to love it.

Indeed, from "Groundhog Day" on, Ramis the director has been the soul of anti-smug. "Groundhog Day" tried to bid farewell to Reagan-Bush-era careerism when slick weatherman Murray chilled out and found the better angels of his nature in a small, wintry Pennsylvania town. As the '90s became even more frantic, "Multiplicity" (1996) had Michael Keaton discovering that cloning could not help a contemporary man have it all. Even "Analyze This" (1999), which premiered at the same time as "The Sopranos," forced Robert De Niro to acknowledge that all a don's judges and all a don's men couldn't put a godfather back together again, at least when it came to combating anxiety.

Yet Ramis hasn't lost the inspired scampishness that helped make mere catchphrases in his youthful scripts -- like "That's the fact, Jack!" from "Stripes" -- explode like dynamite punch lines. And his appetite for all-out physical comedy hasn't diminished since his 1980 directorial debut with the baggy-pants golf comedy "Caddyshack." What Ramis tries to do is find premises he believes in and then erect platforms for skilled, slap-happy performers.

He does it again in "Bedazzled." This brashly entertaining movie opened to bizarrely mixed reviews and fair business two weeks ago. A remake of the 1967 Dudley Moore and Peter Cook cult classic of the same name, it stars Brendan Fraser in the Moore role of a lovelorn shlub and Elizabeth Hurley in the Cook role of the devil. It's a rowdy kind of farce anthology in which Hurley offers Fraser seven wishes in exchange for his soul. Fraser tries on fantasy identities from a Neanderthal basketball star to an ultrasensitive soul who tears up at a sunset. Hurley's many guises include those of a supersvelte meter maid and a brusque, seductive schoolteacher. The combination of bull's-eye casting and erotic pranks brings on belly laughs all the way through.

I spoke to Ramis by phone at his home base in Chicago. He discussed where he finds the sparks to set off his comic conflagrations.

In the original "Bedazzled," some of the scenes between Dudley Moore and his love object, Eleanor Bron, were like the satiric dating routines that Mike Nichols and Elaine May developed in their Chicago days. Having a graduate of Chicago's Second City troupe do this remake of "Bedazzled" makes it feel like the material's come full circle.

Absolutely. What you identify as some continuity or relationship between Nichols and May and the "Beyond the Fringe" group -- it's a real connection. These groups were in touch with each other. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were in a college improv group, the Establishment, and they did an exchange with Second City: They came to Chicago and Second City went to London. These are common streams; that's probably why I so wholeheartedly embraced that kind of comedy.

I love the original movie. There are certain ideas that have mythic importance in our culture. They're dealt with all the time and they keep coming around and around. And here's one that hasn't been dealt with comedically for a while: the fable of Faust, of selling your soul to the devil so your dreams come true. This "Bedazzled" is partly a homage to the original film. But I didn't merely want to copy that movie. You can't duplicate its casting, which had a specific quality -- English, and of its time. I wanted to do a contemporary, energetic, broad, colorful, American spin on this.

The original "Beyond the Fringe" depended heavily on the rapport of Cook and Moore.

That's one reason Elizabeth Hurley plays the devil; I was wracking my brain for a team like that, and if it didn't exist, how could I create it? That's when my wife said, "Why not a woman for the devil?" It made sense from every social, cultural and entertainment point of view.

You don't toy with the Seven Deadly Sins the way Cook and Moore did in the original film, most effectively when they had Raquel Welch play Lust, although, actually, the Seven Deadly Sins went in and out of the old movie, and weren't treated systematically.

That's why it felt theatrical to me in the original film -- the Sins kind of took you out of it. Creating more of the devil's world, oddly enough, made it less convincing. But Cook's choice was great and so appropriate to him as a character: creating a devil who was tired of being the devil and couldn't wait to get back to heaven. We had a whole different theological spin that liberated us from that view. Our film is really grounded in postmodern existential reality, if you'll forgive me for that.

I'll forgive you for that, but first you have to explain it to me.

You know: The old theological models posit good and evil as things that are providential, God given. Temptation and redemption come from outside us, somehow; the devil is an agent on Earth. But I totally believe that good and evil are the result of personal choice. We should take responsibility for what we do and not lay it off on some objectified demonic evil in the world.

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