The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 110

20 Friday, Dec 20, 1985 The hfladelpbiA Inquirer Christmas movies A love story set Review OUT OF AFRICA Produced and directed by Sydney Pollack, written by Kurt Luedtke. photography by David Watkin, music by John Barry, distributed by Universal Pictures. Running time: 2 hours. 30 mins. Karen Meryl Streep Denys Robert Redford Bror Klaus Maria Brandauer Berkeley Michael Kitchen Farah Malick Owens Parent's guide: PG (semi-nudity, violence, By Rick Lyman Inquirer Movie Critic Sydney Pollack's glorious and stirring Out of Africa is a big-screen epic in the very best sense.

Pollack, known more for smaller-scale romances like The Way We Were (1973) and Tootsie (1983), takes to the broad loom with relish, weaving a dazzling and passionate tapestry of romance, spiritual rebirth, vast panoramas and Big Star close-ups. And best of all, he and screenwriter Kurt Luedtke have managed to remain faithful to the rich, complex core of Isak Dinesen's Kenya memoirs, upon which the movie is loosely based. Out of Africa's biggest hurdle, though, is the peculiar casting opposite Meryl Streep's Dinesen of Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton, her aristocratic adventurer-lover. Finch Hatton, an archetypal Big White Game Hunter, was Oxford-educated and conversant in the classics, a bit of a snob. Redford plays him as a cross between his characters in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the last of the rugged individualists.

The decision to cast Redford, clearly made for commercial reasons, is defended by Pollack on the ground that Finch Hatton is such an obscure character that no one would note Redford's absence of British manners. And Luedtke's screenplay neatly skirts the issue, even nullifies it, by making Finch Hatton not so much a person as the living embodiment of Dinesen's obsession with Africa; he's a charismatic, an icon, which is something that Redford knows more than a little about. Streep, whose most recent performances, in 1984's Falling in Love and this year's Plenty, were annoyingly mannered (you had the sense of watching her scrape the bottom of her bag of tricks), seems reborn in Out of Africa. It's her best work in years. Her Karen Blixen (Isak was a nom de plume, Dinesen her maiden name) is a fresh, beguiling creation.

Streep blossoms in the role and grows gorgeous. But the film's greatest triumph is the manner in which it replicates the spirit of Dinesen's work. She frequently wrote of Africa as a Finch Hatton (Redford) and Dinesen (Streep) share an intimate moment in 'Out of Africa' 'A Chorus Line' on the screen that still Review A CHORUS LINE Produced by Ernest Martin and Cy Feuer, directed by Richard Attenborough, written by Arnold Schutman, photography by Ronnie Taylor, music by Marvin Hamliscn. distributed by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 1:53.

Zaeh Michael Douglas Larry Terry Mann Cassia Alyson Reed Paul Cameron English Parent's guide: PG-13 of this agreement without damaging Bennett's fragile invention. On the stage the Broadway gypsies who really need the job confront their own illusions. The audience, meanwhile, sits in judgment and sympathy and is gradually drawn into considering the illusion of the theater itself. This view of the musical acknowledges that it's not only about the theater. It's what the theater is about.

In doing so, Attenborough, who was last seen disappearing under an avalanche of Oscars for Gandhi (1982), has done a service to the musical in general as well as to A Chorus Line. He reminds us of what the form was and can be after years of Hollywood-originated popcorn like Footloose and Flashdance and other sound tracks masquerading as movies. The heart of A Chorus Line is not far removed from the making-it-in-show business motif that has sustained good and bad musicals from 42nd Street to Barbra Streisand's remake of A Star Is Born. From the opening of "I Really Need This Job," Attenborough gives A Chorus Line a street-level urgency. This is a reading that underlines Bennett's clever dramatization of success and unexplained rejection.

To emphasize these deeper points about A Chorus Line and bring out the theme of coping with that rejection is no small feat. To surround By Desmond Ryan Inquirer Uovie Critic Richard Attenborough's version of A Chorus Line captures the heart and soul of a great theatrical experience by appealing to the mind as much as the senses. It's a thought-provoking and highly entertaining film that offers the lover of musicals a singular sensation. For 10 years, Michael Bennett's superb creation has enthralled theater audiences around the world and perplexed some of the best minds in Hollywood. A Chorus Line to a succession of directors and writers has been the rich orphan of movies.

Everyone wanted to adopt it, but nobody could figure out how to adapt it. The dilemma the musical presents to a filmmaker is as clear as the answer is elusive. If you keep it in the theater, the argument went, you wind up pointing a camera at the stage and trying to make "talking heads" visually interesting. If you open A Chorus Line up as a movie audience would expect you are forced to find some way to illustrate what the dancers are saying, and that leads to cumbersome flashbacks and digressions. Attenborough's solution has a Tightness about it that is both simple and elegant.

He realizes that to open up A Chorus Line would be to destroy a quintessential theatrical expert- ence. After all, the stage and the illusions both performers and the audience bring to it form the central and sustaining image of the piece. More importantly and it's the element that justifies the controversial choice of a socially conscious Englishman to direct a contemporary American classic Attenborough goes one step further. Not only has he surmounted the knotty problem of how to do A Chorus Line; he has gone beneath its surface appeal to the why of it. Attenborough realizes that Bennett's musical works by juggling illusion and reality for both the dancers and the viewer.

The theater demands that the audience use imagination to envision what the movies show. Attenborough keeps us in the theater and has the guts to make the same requirement of a film audience. And iuJJitti Iniini. mi nm 'fiiMMiiiiiii mm aim mimr" In mm Michael Blevins as Mark in Attenborough's 'A Chorus Line' he avoids the problems of staginess A Chorus Line is a sneaky covenant and confinement with camera work that places the audience between and editing of uncommon fluency Zach, the director casting a new and ingenuity, and choreography show, and the aspiring dancers. At- that rises to galvanic excitement in tenborough and scenarist Arnold its best moments.

Schulman have rewritten the terms.