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Page HA The Annittoo SUr, Friday, Feb. 1M Kenyans show no interest in 'Out of Africa' left Africa in 1931 and died in Den charity premiere that attracted a By JERRY GRAY Associated Ptcm Writer NAIROBI, Kenya "Out of Africa," which has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards and is one of the season's biggest hits in the United States, has attracted only lukewarm interest in the country where it was filmed. One reason audiences here are not flocking to see the Sydney Pollack romantic epic is because it is not a Kenyan movie but a film about the East African nation's colonial period. "There is not a single Kenyan who comes out strong," the Kenya Times said in a column. "They are the romanticized servants whose existence seems to be owed to the presence of the 'memsahib' and their various masters." THE FILM, based on the romantic writings of Danish aristocrat Karen Blizen and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, has received superlative reviews in the United States, where it had its world premiere in December.

Besides the 11 Oscar nominations, it has won three Golden Globe awards and has inspired a fashion line of safari garb. "Out of Africa" opened in Nairobi on Jan. 31 for its first showing outside the United States. After a full bouse to the 20th Century Cinema, it drew 9,349 customers for 21 showings in the first week of a scheduled four-week engagement, according to the theater's management. The movie, which slowly unravels Blixen's romance with Oxford-educated hunter Denys Finch Hat-ton, has little appeal for most Kenyan moviegoers who clamor for the action and violence of low-budget martial arts pictures and slick James Bond productions.

HOWEVER, MANY Kenyans have stayed away from "Out of Africa" for political reasons. During filming, charges were leveled that white extras received twice as much pay as black extras. At the same time, some Kenyans called Blixen, who used the pen name Isak Dinesen, a racist and her books repugnant. The Kenya Times repeated those charges during a scathing attack on the author last year and questioned why the government had allowed her story to be filmed in Kenya. However, during her stay in Kenya in the 1920s, Blixen was attacked by white settlers as being "pro-native" because she opposed regulations that permitted forced Labor and advocated educating the children on her coffee plantation.

She Meryl Streep, Robert Redford in scene froni Harlem dance troupe mark in 1962. DESPITE ALL THE hoopla, "Out of Africa" may be a financial blessing for Kenya, which is gearing up to sell Americans everything from beer to safaris. Abercrombie and Kent, Kenya's largest travel agency, has added an "Out of Africa" itinerary to its list of tours. The tour includes a drive through the Ngong Hills where Blixen owned a coffee farm and a stop at her now dilapidated farmhouse, which the government is turning into a museum. David Markham, operations director for Abercrombie and Kent, said 5,000 Americans visited Kenya in 1905 and he expected that number to increase this year, largely because of the movie.

Besides attracting American tourists who like to spend money, Kenya also is hoping to capitalize on "Out of Africa" by peddling its premium beer in the highly competitive U.S. market. PRIVATELY OWNED East African Breweries Ltd. signed an agreement 'with Creative Import Marketing Co. of Milwaukee, on Feb.

5 to market Tusker Malt Lager in the United States beginning in June. WE'LL By NANCY GOLDNER Kalght-Ridder Newspapers Although composed primarily of black ballet dancers, the Dance Theater of Harlem has always made a point of stressing the classical base of its repertory rather than the skin color of its dancers. As director Arthur Mitchell says of the company be founded, which is featured on PBS's "Dance in America" Friday, "DTH is not a black ballet company but a ballet company that happens to be black." MITCHELL'S STATEMENT, however noble, is not totally true. As a ballet troupe, the Dance Theater of Harlem has always been unique for having a chunk of repertory whose sources spring from black culture. The last selection on Friday night's hour-long program, for instance, is an excerpt from Geoffrey Holder's "Bele," which is based on Haitian court dances.

It is, by the way, smashingly danced. One characteristic that the Dance Theater of Harlem absolutely shares with many other ballet troupes, however, be they black. 'Out of Africa' to perform goers are accustomed to. Right from the start, Johnson snows us a provocative Blanche, a troublemaker who's out to get Stanley. Johnson also highlights Blanche's airs and fine-lady pretensions.

Frankly, she's a bit of a creep, and one can readily understand why Stanley can't resist unmasking her. STANLEY KOWALSKI can't understand, however, and one of the most moving things about Lowell Smith's performance is his befud-dlement and horror with himself. In this "Streetcar," it is Stanley who is the victim. Most literary ballets make their audiences fidgety: One keeps wanting the performers simply to say the lines rather than dance out an approximation of the text. Bettis' "Streetcar" isn't entirely fidget-free.

When Stanley is writhing on the ground in a terrible sweat, you want him to be done with choreography and bellow the famous yell for Stella. But most of the time the dancers' mute acting is so good that it's self-sufficient. The television medium adds to class of whites. Seth portrays Papa, an indolent drunk. He is an immigrant from Pakistan whose son, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), is given a laundromat to manage by Papa's entrepreneur brother, Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey).

"PAPA BELONGS to a generation of Asians that I recognized very clearly," Seth said in an interview. "Conditioned to believe in the superiority of white liberal values. Papa is betrayed in his mother country. He has no escape route but the final one of drink." The two brothers represent two different roads in England, said Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the script. "The drunk is liberalism and its failure in England.

Nasser is the enterprise culture of Thatcherism," he said, referring to the self-starting initiative favored by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. SCARY!" English lifestyle revealed in 'Laundrette' Ul (CMTFISl on PBS that self-sufficiency. In most "Dance in America" programs, the cameras have pulled back, allowing us to see the dancers in full body and with space around them, thereby approximating live performance. In "Streetcar," however, most of the shots are in close-up, and there are many more cuts than in a pure dance work. PROBABLY NO "Dance in America" production has been so untrue to the experience of live performance, yet no ballet has been so enhanced by the television medium as this.

Of course, the treatment wouldn't have worked had the dancers not adapted their facial expressions to a frame infinitely smaller than opera-house dimensions. This "Streetcar" is a true collaboration between performers and the medium. The program also features charming snippets of Mitchell coaching and teaching the dancers, and a very unsatisfactory snippet from the Darlce Theater of Harlem's most classical leg of its repertory, an excerpt from Delibes' "Sylvia Pas de Deux." Caught in the middle, Omar finds racial and social acceptance complicated by his rekindled romance with a reformed white thug named Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), who was once part of Britain's racist National Front. NASSER, WHO IS married to an Asian woman, has his own secret trysts with a white mistress. "Most English films show Europeans in exotic costumes copulating in India.

This shows Indians in exotic costumes copulating in England," laughed Kureishi. For the screenwriter, the success of "My Beautiful Laundrette" is just a beginning. "We live in an intolerant and deeply racist society," he said. "As a writer, this area is so rich, and it's hardly been touched. "There are so many stories to be told, and we've got to get on with it.

I hope this film shows it is possible to get an audience." Cs MATINEES SAT. ft SUN. FOR 1 green or white, is an ever-changing identity. In its early years, the troupe relied heavily on the Balanchine repertory. Then came a spate of Russian classics.

In the last couple of years, the troupe's most successful ventures have been in the genre known as dramatic ballet. It is through that genre, rather than the pure-dance pieces, that the company has developed its first genuine ballerina: Virginia Johnson. THE CENTERPIECE of the Dance Theater program Friday night captures the company in its currently strongest profile with Valerie Bettis' interpretation of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar-Named Desire," starring Johnson as Blanche DuBois. She's simply terrific, her facial expressions having the range and subtlety that one expects from an actress but rarely finds in a dancer. Yet what makes Johnson's performance especially vivid is her interpretation of the role.

This Blanche is not a victim, and thus she is not as sympathetic as theater "Brideshead Revisited." THE RACISM in the movie is unfortunate but true, Frears added. "The movie has a sensitive finger on the pulse of this country now," said Roshan Seth, who stars in the $882,000 film. The only Asian in his class at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 1965, Seth won critical acclaim for his depiction of the late Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the Academy Award-winning movie, "Gandhi." He also was praised in his off-Broadway role of a right-wing novelist in David Hare's "A Map of the World." Seth said that in its own low-cost way "My Beautiful Laundrette" is revolutionary because its examination of British racial and sexual politics conflicts with England's cinematic obsession with nostalgic period pieces set among the leisured 7- "THE FILM IS irir I EUti 1 I -JOS mi US THE Good of I got a CI SI pi 1 TO; SALA11AE mm By MATT WOLF Associated Press Writer LONDON Without big names or a big budget, "My Beautiful Laun-drette" is spinning its way to success with a gritty, often humorous depiction of British racism and sexual politics. Cited as best film at the London Standard Film Awards in January, it has grossed $560,000 in London alone after three months of release. It opens in New York and Los Angeles during the first week of March and then elsewhere in the United States later in the month.

The movie presents an England that few Americans know. "It's more about Britain than said director Stephen Frears, who contrasted his film's contemporary portrait of Asian immigrants with the languorous, upper-class types in the popular television series, Jennings to broadcast live from Soviet Union Why is "ABC World News Tonight" broadcasting live from Moscow all next week? Because the 27th Communist Party Congress will be in session, and, as anchor Peter Jennings says, "I'll be damned if I'll be left behind on a big story." The debonair Jennings, 47, in Philadelphia the other day to be honored as "person of the year" by the Television, Radio and Advertising Club (TRAC) of Philadelphia, said the decision to visit the Soviet Union was made months ago. "I figured by the time of the Congress, we'd get a real good feel of how a man (Mikhail Gorbachev) who's likely to be in office beyond the year 2000 has consolidated his power. We'll also get a strong sense of where he and his colleagues want to take the Soviet Union in the next five years." Relocating network newscasts from New York or Washington to world hot spots such as Geneva and Manila seems to be the rage. Jennings agrees with the trend, as long as it's done for legitimate reasons.

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