Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 23

RFPHRim REPUBLIC MAIL The Arizona Republic Monday, January 24, 1983 and the arts SvyrA? v. Ben Kingsley, above and right, stars in the title role in Gandhi. Gandhi opens with the most impressive crowd scene in film history, a re-enactment of the assassinated leader's funeral procession. Spectacular epic details life of India's mahatma Movies Michael Maza Kingsley's power is so complete that it might be genetically based; he was born Krishna Bhanji in Yorkshire, England, the son of an Indian doctor and an English fashion model. Kingsley does more than disguise himself as Gandhi, however.

He goes for the inner lights of the man. He radiates warmth, but we wish for more Attenborough uses Kingsley well, but he might have used him better. What attracts us to Gandhi the man is his iron will, his gentle humor and his springy intelligence. Attenborough, however, pursues historical moments in Gandhi's life more than an exploration of his "great soul." The picture could easily have been titled Gandhi's India. The forces that shaped him are unmen-tioned; the picture opens with Gandhi fully formed, an apparently unchanging mahatma.

A blend of unimpeachable political pragmatism and humankind's highest moral aspirations, Gandhi's philosophy emerges piecemeal. We appreciate his differentiation between passivity, which he abhored, and "active and provocative (but non-violent) resistance." Ditto his distinction between fighting to change and fighting to punish "leave the punishment to God," Gandhi says. But Attenborough provides only the sketchiest of frameworks for these ideas. Without Playwright Athol Fugard, a contemporary foe of apartheid, is effective in a small role as a general, and Edward Fox is a wonderfully hateable, emotionless villain as Gen. Dyer, who left 379 Indians dead and 1,137 wounded at the Amritsar massacre.

Candice Bergen, on the other hand, should have been left on the cutting-room floor. As Margaret Bourke-White on assignment for Life magazine, she handles her camera like a neophyte. Her dramatic importance is restricted to asking Mrs. Gandhi an impertinent question about her sex life. Her real role seems to be to lend a recognizable, female, Caucasian face to the proceedings.

She is, however, merely the worst reason to see Gandhi, while Kingsley and some unfamiliar Indian actors notably Rohini Hattangady as Gandhi's wife and Roshan Seth as Pandit Nehru are the best. The last time we looked, Paul Newman seemed the odds-on favorite to win the best actor Oscar. After seeing Kingsley in Gandhi, all bets are off. Indeed, unless the box office triumph of E.T. remains fresh in the minds of Motion Picture Academy voters, England may see a repeat of Chariots of Fire's best picture victory last year.

If it happens, you won't hear any derisive noises from this corner. Like the man himself, Gandhi is not totally successful, but it comes closer to perfection than most. a framework we can appreciate the man, and marvel at his wisdom. But even given the perspective of this ballistic missle-pointing age, we can't fully comprehend Gandhi's point of view, even when he cautions that the man who practices "an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." We're not suggesting that Gandhi is a failure because it doesn't drastically reshape the world's view of itself. It isn't a failure in any sense.

But compressing a great man's life, and India's final 50 years as a jewel-generating outpost of the British Crown, into three hours and two minutes is a demanding task. Viewed from this perspective, the picture is far too short, not too long as some have suggested. In any event, Gandhi might have been better with more time spent inside Kingsley's Gandhi, and with shorter train' rides and fewer extraneous characters. Gandhi is loaded with familiar faces in small roles. Martin Sheen is the most effective, playing a New York Times reporter trying to keep up with the aging Gandhi's sprightly pace on a 200-mile march to the sea.

John Gielgud is wonderfully phlegmatic as Lord Irwin, the last of India's English masters. Ian Charleson, the rigid Christian of Chariots of Fire, is more relaxed but still an English churchman, here seen losing a congregation of colonists when he supports Gandhi from the pulpit. Gandhi is a huge movie, a truly spectacular epic equipped with a subject that deserves the full treatment. There is no denying that Mohandas K. Gandhi was one of humankind's great leaders, or that the India he inspired to nonviolent revolution during the first half of this century was, and is, among the largest, poorest, most populous and least understood countries on Earth.

Restraint is no good in a project like this. While producer-director Richard Attenborough moves his film with a stateliness that is innately English, he is unstinting when it comes to scale. Gandhi opens with the most impressive crowd scene in film history, a re-enactment of the assassinated leader's funeral procession. Shot for panoramic effect from up in the clouds, it is populated by what appears to be a sizable chunk of India's liberation-era population of 350 million. The film never stops suggesting the immensity of India's population, the variety of its geography, the depths of its poverty or the diversity of its religions.

Pictures of this scope sometimes dwarf their characters, but Ben Kingsley, as Gandhi, is as big as the movie itself. A British stage actor (he's played Hamlet in London and was Squeers in the Royal Shakespeare Company's first London production of Nicholas Nickleby), Kingsley gets GANDHI A Columbia release produced and directed by Richard Attenborough, screenplay by John Briley, cinematography by Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor. Cast: Ben Kingsley, Rohini Hattangady, Roshan Seth, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Ian Charleson, Athol Fugard. Rated PG. At the Mann Chris-Town, Lakes 6 and Metro Center Cinema.

into this role with the totality of Robert De Niro. He ages 56 years in the picture, from 23, when the young lawyer is thrown off a South African train for refusing to accept apartheid; to 79, when his bony, fasting-emaciated body is struck down by an assassin's bullets. In the beginning, at the end, and everywhere in between, Kingsley, 39, absorbs the audience with his absolute conviction. The posture is exact. The quick, bandylegged, sandal-slapping walk is precise.

The quiet but powerful manner of speaking is irresistible. All of it suggests months of thought, and weeks more with old newsreels and in rehearsal. Quality poems are exception, not rule in 'Arizona Anthem' Southwest books Chamber concert The Phoenix Chamber Music Society will present the Emerson String Quartet in recital at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday at Scottsdale Center for the Arts. From left are quartet members Lawrence Dutton, Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer and David Finckel.

On the program are Mozart's String Quartet in K. 387; Berg's Quartet, Opus and Brahms' Quartet in minor, Opus 51 No. 1. For tickets, call 1 I--T- Singer's traditional values please crowd Ry Ed Montini Republic Stall Blair Morton Armstrong is said to have spent nine years collecting the poetry, old prints, drawings and maps that fill the pages of Arizona Anthem. During that time she gathered the work of more than 150 poets (100 from the past, 50 contemporary) and set off their words with more than 300 illustrations, producing in effect a history of the state in poetry.

One must commend her for the obvious dedication inherent to the task. The sheer volume of printed material contained within Arizona Anthem makes it an imposing and impressive manuscript, at least at first glance. Dividing the book into nine loosely aligned sections, Armstrong attempts to paint a portrait of the state under the headings "Arizona Begun," "The Desert," "Poems of Place," "The Forest," "The Grand Canyon," "The Indian," "The Cow-boy" and "Poems of Feeling." Most of the work is reproduced as it appeared when originally published. (Some of the work was collected specifically for Arizona Anthem and has not been published previously). The editor writes in the preface that reprinting original manuscript pages was done for "greater interest and historical record," but the changing typefaces occasionally make for difficult reading.

This is not the meat of Arizona Anthem, however. It is a book stuffed with poetry, one designed to illustrate if not create a tradition of poetry in the state. It seems to be a near-impossible task, and in the end a reader is faced with two striking conclusions about the book: 1. For 300 years, the natural beauty, native independence and adventurous possibilities of Arizona have inspired poetry; 2. Ninety-nine percent of it has been horrid.

This is not to sav that all the poetry Jest light from your saddle and rest feraspell. Here are the makins', so roll you a smoke Yure jest out uh town and I bet you are broke To "native" customs: If you ever hit the border When the sun has stopped his climb You will find a western custom That we call "siesta time" Under the section of Arizona Anthem dedicated to the desert there is even a poem called To an Invalid. We will spare the crippling details. Still, there are some pleasant surprises in Arizona Anthem. Several of the illustrations are very good, including reproductions of paintings by Maxfield Parrish and others.

Among the better poems included are contributions from beat generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Indian author N. Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968. Arizona Anthem is not a book for poetry scholars, however, or even poetry aficionados. It is a collector's item, a good investment for history or nostalgia buffs. Others should beware, for while there may be plenty of rhyme contained in the book, there is precious little reason.

Perhaps the most telling poem to appear was written in 1922. It is called The Visiting Author in Arizona. The last stanza reads: But when he wishes to describe our needs, To make prosaic action even duller, To moralize upon our fancied creeds, And illustrate what he calls local color, Then is the time to seize him ere he heeds, And grind him into bits with cast-steel nniller. Unfortunately, this advice went unheeded. I Arizona Anthem: An Anthology of Over 300 Years of Arizona Poetry, edited by Blair Morton Armstrong (The Mnemosyne Press, 608 $50 in stores, $45 through publisher).

in Arizona Anthem is bad. Some good work is there, along with some very recognizable poets like Carl Sandburg, Archibald McLeish, John Galsworthy and Sarah Teasdale. But they are by far the exception, and are all but lost in a tidal wave of trite, obvious, melodramatic ram-blings by poets stretching back several hundred years. Here are some examples. Historically, a poem like The Trumpeters might be considered important since it was read on Feb.

14, 1912, the day Arizona swore in its first governor. There is little other reason to consider it so: We salute Arizona, the State our cheers are exultant and loud! The dawning has come and the sunburst, the sunburst that follows the cloud No subject matter goes untouched, or unbruised. From the Grand Canyon: My brother, man, shapes him a plan And builds him a house in a day But I have toiled through a million years for a home to last alway To the desert: I'll starve you, I'll parch you, And if you don 't withstand I'll bleach your bones. Rut, I will make you strong To cowboys: How are you there cowboy, I hope iu arc well On stage Andrew Means DON WILLIAMS AND THE SCRATCH BAND Saturday, Phoenix Symphony Hall Practically the only sure bet in country music for some time now has been the crossover trend, and this makes Don Williams more of an anomaly than he might have been. Talk about a performer being true to a style Williams makes few concessions to passing" traffic.

And yet, with his traditional values, he remains high in the country-Western popularity stakes. There are no gimmicks and precious few embellishments. Melody, the meaning in the lyrics, and Williams' rich-toned, lonesome baritone are the be all and end all. The values represented clearly continue to appeal to the older country-music fans, and it was this element that dominated Symphony Hall. In the context of his own career, his songs are timeless.

Amanda, Till The Rivers Run Dry, You're My Best in Phoenix last May apart from a little more gray in his beard was that this time he stood, while last time he sat on a stool. His band was the same, and as before the quartet had a set of its own, giving singerguitarist Danny Flowers a chance to showcase his talents. The band's set was considerably more upbeat and abrasive than Williams' music and as such provided quite a good balance. Flowers showed glimpses of his talents, with attractive fills on electric guitar and a capacity to hold his notes well as a lead singer. With Williams' commendation, the band could really do little to offend the audience.

Williams had to repeat stanzas of a few songs to please his listeners, and the standing ovation and encore were a foregone conclusion. Friend, Good Ole Boys the titles can be arranged in any order. From a fan's viewpoint, it must be reassuring to follow such a reliable performer. Williams gives his audiences almost exactly what they hear on his records, and almost exactly what he gave at the last concert. You either like him or you don't, and that's all there is to it.

He doesn't inspire sudden conversions. Practically the only difference between this performance and his show i i- -unmxinnnnnrtnnnnnnnnni n-ifr-nrirm-nnri mm.t.