May 21, 1993

MARTIN SCORSESE was a teen-ager when he first saw Irving Lerner's B-movie melodrama "Murder by Contract," one of many obscure Hollywood films that left a searing impression on him. "It's an example of an American B movie that is 100 times better than the film it played with on a double bill," the director recalled in a recent telephone interview. "The film it was playing with when I saw it was 'The Journey,' by Anatole Litvak, with Yul Brynner. That film had nice color, but when 'Murder by Contract' came on the screen, it was surprising and lean and purposeful, and not like anything my friends and I had seen. Afterward we talked about it on the street for days. When I saw it again years later, I was overwhelmed by the severity of the style, which was dictated by the budget. I even tried to put a clip of it in 'Mean Streets' but had to take it out because it was too long."

One of the last chapters of the Government's six-year investigation of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. came to a close yesterday as the firm's former chief executive and another senior officer agreed to be barred for three years from supervising securities firms. The sanctions came in a settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Frederick H. Joseph, the former chief executive, and Edwin Kantor, the supervisor of the firm's trading departments. The settlement did not impose any fines.

The board of Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield forced the resignation of the company's top executive, Albert A. Cardone, after an internal inquiry revealed deep management and morale problems inside the nation's largest nonprofit health insurance company, board members and others said yesterday. Over the last several weeks, board members, long characterized as rubber stamps for Mr. Cardone, began interviewing his subordinates and heard complaints of Mr. Cardone's confrontational and autocratic style, said board members and government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

After 204 hours of debate and maneuvering that preoccupied the British capital for more than six months, the House of Commons passed the bill to ratify the Treaty on European Union tonight. The action moves Britain closer to becoming the 12th and final nation to back a stronger and more united European Community. After so much political infighting and debate, the vote, 292 to 112, which came shortly after 10 P.M., seemed an anticlimax. The opposition Labor Party called on its members to abstain on the final vote, virtually guaranteeing passage of the bill.

An influential bipartisan group of Senators threw a new obstacle in the path of President Clinton's budget plan today by offering an alternative proposal with fewer tax increases and deeper spending cuts. The new plan itself stands no chance of passing in its present form, but it could provide a starting point for negotiations on changes to the President's plan. Its announcement raises new questions about whether the President's measures will command enough support to be approved by the House of Representatives next week and about the prospects when the legislation reaches the Senate. President Calls Plan Unfair At the White House, Mr. Clinton denounced the alternative as a shift of the deficit-reduction burden "from wealthy Americans right onto the people just above the poverty line, the elderly and the working poor."