The story to date: 20 years ago Deedee abandoned her ambitions to become a star of the American Ballet Theater and, instead, moved to Oklahoma City with her husband, Wayne, with whom she opened a fabulously successful ballet school, raised three fabulously sweet children, moved into a splitlevel house and acquired a fabulously long station wagon. Deedee chose love—unlike her best friend, Emma, who chose success and became Ballet Theater's prima ballerina

As our movie, which is called "The Turning Point." opens, Deedee and Emma are reunited when Ballet Theater comes to Oklahoma City. Old hopes are rekindled for, as all of us know, an old hope never dies in fiction of this sort, no matter how many tears are pumped on it. Emma, who gets 19 curtain calls and has "everything" envies Deedee, while Deedee, the one who got pregnant, still dreams of stardom. Wil Ithey ever find peace and fulfillment—these two women who now recall their—how shall I put it?—turning points?

To ask that question is to know the worst about this entertaining new movie, an old-fashioned backstage musical transplanted to the world of ballet by three people who not only know it but also love it, sentimental clichés and all.

"The Turning Point," which opened last night at special performances at the Coronet and Baronet Theaters, begins its regular commercial engagement at the Coronet today. It's the work of Herbert Ross, the director; Arthur Laurents, the screenwriter, and Nora Kaye (Mrs. Ross), the former ballerina who is its executive producer. Their curious, collective achievement is in having found so much vitality in the sort of movie that demands that its audiences weep with sympathy for characters who have all they ever wanted but simply don't realize it yet.

Among the film's principal assets are Shirley MacLaine, looking very pretty and almost matronly, but not quite, as the sharp-tongued, intelligent, deep-down furious homemaker, Deedee; and Anne Bancroft as the driven ballerina, Emma, a woman of ravaged beauty and whose frail frame could possibly lift a freight car if she willed it.

The intensity of their lifelong friendship, and rivalry, is carefully and sometimes hilariously detailed as "The Turning Point" follows Deedee's daughter, Emilia, charmingly played by Leslie Browne, her mother and her little brother to New York, where Emilia joins Ballet Theater's school. It's not giving away too much to report that the girl's almost instantaneous success means that one day in the not too distant future she will be replacing her beloved godmother, Emma, as the A.B.T.'s major attraction.

These are more or less the bones of the film, which are hardly bare, what with Emma's having to face the reality of time's passage, and Deedee's having to come to terms with her missed opportunities. Could she have danced the lead in "Anna Karenina" 20 years ago? Probably not, though from what we see of Emma in the role, it's mostly walking through steam.

There are also the emotional crises faced in New York by Emilia, who has an unhappy affair with a young Soviet dancer named Yuri, a role played with cheerful ease by Mikhail Baryshnikov, the young Soviet dancer who chose success in the West several years ago.

As Emilia learns that the love of a young Soviet ballet dancer is not forever—which is just as well when one has her eye on the top of the bill—and as Emma and Deedee are wrestling, once physically in a very funny and moving scene, with their doubts, "The Turning Point" gives us excerpts from more than a dozen ballets that feature, in addition to Mr. Baryshnikov and Miss Browne, the stars and the corps de ballet of Ballet Theater.

The manner in which Mr. Ross handles these sequences defines the choice that he made when planning "The Turning Point." That is, he chose to create a backstage film about the ballet rather than a ballet film. The excerpts are lovely but often so brief that not even an obnoxious child would have time to become bored. Because this is a film about people and not dance, the film spends as much time showing us the dancers' faces and reaction shots of people in the audience as it does showing us the complete figures of the dancers in motion. The method is that of show-biz, not art.

Show-biz is also apparent in the tone of Mr. Laurents's screenplay, which delights not only in backstage sentiment but also backstage bitchiness with, I'm told, all sorts of references to people living and dead. Though "The Turning Point" does show us that ballet is an extremely difficult, physically demanding art, the film's concentration on its female characters tends, if only by accident, to confirm the oldest ballet cliché of them all—that ballet is, in this country anyway, women's work.

All of the men in the film exist as little more than dance partners or as props for the drama. This is partly the result of the focus of the movie in which Miss MacLaine and Miss Bancroft give such powerhouse performances and only Mr. Baryshnikov is allowed to be a man of any substance.

The others, including Tom Skerritt, who plays Miss MacLaine's blandly decent husband, are background figures. Such a comment, I realize, could also be made about any number of Bette Davis. Joan Crawford or Greer Garson movies of long ago.

"The Turning Point" is entertaining, not for discovering new material, but for treating old material with style and romantic feeling that, in this day and age, seem remarkably unafraid.