It's not as if everyone concerned couldn't have known the quality of the gruel before they plunged into it. The result of this high-powered collaboration is a movie of such unrelieved genteelness that it makes one long to head for Schrafft's for a double-gin martini, straight up, and a stack of cinnamon toast from which the crusts have been removed.

It's a modest performance in an exceedingly dim role, and of interest only when seen alongside the actor's spectacular work in the just-opened ''Good Father.'' Playing opposite Miss Bancroft is the estimable Anthony Hopkins, as the mild-mannered English bibliographer at Marks & Co. The film ''84 Charing Cross Road,'' which opens today at the Baronet, has a screenplay by Hugh Whitemore (''Stevie''), was directed by David Jones (''Betrayal'') and stars Anne Bancroft, who's equally at ease in drama (''The Pumpkin Eater'') and farce (the remake of ''To Be or Not to Be''), and who may be the only leading lady in America today with the ability to cross one eye without moving the other. To justify her disappointment, she recites her own family tree, recalling a Catholic sister-in-law, Presbyterian cousins, and others in her family and their religious.WORKING carefully and with the least sleazy of intentions, some very good people have taken Helene Hanff's popular epistolary memoir, ''84 Charing Cross Road,'' which records the New York writer's 20-year correspondence with a London bookshop, and made a movie guaranteed to put all teeth on edge, including George Washington's, wherever they might be. upon receipt of a Bible, complaining that the Church of England has tinkered with the Vulgate Latin. 'Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written,' says Helene in a letter to Marks & Co. The books arrive safely, and with the help of a neighbor in Helene's New York apartment building, Helene is able to determine the cost in dollars per British pound. in London, she encloses a list of 'her most pressing problems': copies of secondhand books she cannot find, and a request that they must be clean copies costing no more than $5.00. Helene Hanff is responding to an advertisement for a bookseller specializing in out-of-print books.

84 charing cross road summary