The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 64

BOOKS ON CASSETTE 4E Thursday, Aug. 2, 1990 The Philadelphia Inquirer 3 emotionally rich novels about Chippewa families By Sandy Bauers Louise Erdrich's characters overflowing with emotions and in touch with every one of them are a therapist's delight. "How come we've got these bodies?" laments Lulu Lamartine in Erdrich's first novel. Love Medicine. "They are such frail supports for what we feel." Erdrich dives into the psyche in all three of her novels Love Medicine, which won a National Book Critics Circle award in 1984; The Beet Queen, and Tracks.

All are now available as three-hour audio abridgments from Harper ($15.95 each). The novels make up a trilogy of sorts, in that they depict if only peripherally the lives of three North Dakota Chippewa Indian families. These intergenerational stories have resonance. Early in The Beet Queen, a mother abandons her children and flies off in a stunt airplane. Forty years later, her granddaughter escapes mortification at a beet festival beauty pageant by jumping onto a plane that's about to take off from the fairgrounds.

Harper released the audio cassettes of Tracks Erdrich's third novel, although the first chronologically last year. Love Medicine and The Beet Queen came out last month. They're all particularly well-suited to audio, because they read as if someone were speaking to you. Erdrich, who is part Chippewa, and her collaborator-husband, Michael Dorris, who is part Modoc Indian, share reading duties on all three recordings. Events are related through the eyes of several characters: Dorris takes the male parts; Erdrich, the female ones.

Dorris has a comfortable and serene voice, and imparts the details in a direct and friendly manner. He's a distant watcher, compared with Erdrich's passionate, almost fierce, reading. Her voice is hushed and breathy almost as if she's disclos ing a deep, dark secret. (Which, as the omniscient author, she usually is.) Audio is at its best with a reader like Erdrich, who puts a lot into it. Subtly, but unmistakably, a good authorreader can add interpretation and drop hints.

Erdrich makes good use of tone, pacing and the pregnant pause. These recordings are so good that they almost make up for what was lost in what must have been a difficult abridgment process. Erdrich lavished the novels with detail, but she wastes no words on her bull's-eye descriptions. The bare-bones audio versions hold together fairly well, although several characters were axed. Last month.

Harper also released Dorris' first novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (abridged to three hours, S15.95). This is also a saga of three generations of Indian women. Having Dorris read Yellow Raft would have been difficult because the story is told in the first-person by three women, and having a man read would require some quick translation between ear and brain. Seems, then, that the logical choice would have been Erdrich. But Harper chose Colleen Dewhurst, whose voice is low and gravelly and difficult to understand.

Dewhurst is a great stage actress, and some people consider her voice rich. That might be true if the listener were sitting in a quiet room and playing the tape on a good audio system. But listening to Dewhurst while driving along a noisy highway is virtually impossible. Where to get tapes HARPER 10 E. 53d New York.

Y. 10022; phone 800-982-4377 (Pennsylvania). 800-242-7737 (New Jersey, Delaware and elsewhere). Not: PricM do not includa shipping and handling. TV legends to be live at of the '50s the shore The many personas in the roles played by Morgan Freeman i Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca in 1988 after she won a Life Achievement recognition at the American Comedy Awards.

Sid Caesar's filmography (V) indicates film is available on videocassette. STARS, from 1-E Liebman put us together. Why we work so well together is a mystery to me. I've never been very good at analyzing my own performance. But we've never had words.

I'd never work with anybody I had to argue with." It has been 40 years since Your Show of Shows, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, lit TV's "Golden Age" from 1950 to 1954. And though they had both worked plenty before it she, 30 years before it and plenty after it as single acts, they seem fixed forever as a team in the collective mind. He's a balding 67 now, and she is a surprisingly animated 81. Recovered from abuse Sid, who lives in California with Florence, his wife of 47 years, little resembles the bearish oaf of his early TV days, when he ingested great amounts of booze and food. In 1978, when substance abuse rendered him unable to perform, Sid took the cure.

He quit alcohol and drugs and changed his diet and, ultimately, his life. "What happened? What happened was that I grew up. I took responsibility for myself. I realized that there was more in life than show business. Now show business has its place in my life instead of being my life." He's lean, with the healthy look of a man much younger.

Hardly the image of the man who once slugged a horse he was riding because it refused to move from a stream to which it took a liking. Or the manic strongman who held Mel Brooks, then a Show of Shows writer, out of an 18th-floor hotel window. "That was in Chicago. He kept bugging me about wanting to go out. I said, 'So you want to go Brooks used the horse-punching incident in his movie Blazing Saddles.

Except for sagging skin, Imogene looks astonishingly as she did on the show the same scraggly pageboy; startled eyes; that precise, if now softened, voice that slides the scale of expression like a trombone. Your Show of Shows, for those absent in the '50s, was most like Saturday Night Live, but on a much grander scale, with Sid and Imogene resembling John Belushi and Gilda Radner. It was the child of producer Liebman, who wrapped big songs some operatic and dance numbers featuring the day's biggest performing names around six comedy skits (some of them lengthy movie satires). It aired on Saturday nights from 9 to 10:30, and with such writers as Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen, it was definitely ready for prime time. Liebman knew Imogene who was reared at 5019 Woodland Ave.

in Southwest Philadelphia and made her debut at 11 in a long-dead Man-ayunk theater from her extensive work in New York nightclubs and revues. He knew Sid from military shows they had done together during World War II. Signed for prototype Sid and Imogene first met when Liebman signed them to perform with others on his short-lived, weekly Your Show of Shows prototype, Admiral Broadway Revue, in 1949. Imogene, who never considered her-sell a comedian, recalls being offhandedly thrown together with Sid in a sketch. Liebman liked what he saw and paired them for Your Show of Shows the following year.

Critics of the time said a key reason for Sid and Imogene's success was their grasping of the new medium's difference that it fostered nuance and subtlety of gesture in stead of the broad sweeps required in stage performance. The two were masters of facial expressions the drooped eye, a flick of a corner of the mouth and old accounts repeatedly referred to the "rubber" quality of their faces. Sid, gifted with a keen ear for dialects and a clown's instinct for pantomime, became a comedian in the Coast Guard, where his manic side got more attention than his saxophone playing. Imogene had intended to become a dancer and still has no idea why people laugh at her. But she recalls her first big-time laugh.

She was singing and dancing in a 1934 New York show when a director told her to play a silent maid in a sketch of a man and woman arguing. "He told me to look at them peculiarly. I did, and to my surprise it got a big laugh." The show they're bringing to Atlantic City is almost a complete transplant of skits and set solo pieces they did in their Your Show of Shows days the mistaken identity in a movie theater; the cliche-ridden chance meeting spiced with absurdity; the argument in pantomime to the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; Imogene's pseudo-striptease and her lost May Queen number; Sid's thoughts of a man walking up the aisle to his marriage, and a 6-month-old's impressions of its family- In an age of Saturday Night Live and comedy-club performers trying to outrank one another, there's a naivete about their show, Together Again, caught last week at Michael's Pub in Manhattan the same joint that clarinetist Woody Allen has played every Monday night for 17 years where it had a five-month run before it closed Saturday. Imogene isn't as quick on her feet as she once was, nor is Sid the wildly intense presence he used to be. But there's artistry in their effortless play off each other and in their attention to and execution of physical detail.

Theirs was never a gag act. "I don't work with jokes," Sid said years ago. "I try to take a subject and talk about it amusingly. I try to get a humorous rhythm. People are funny, but often they don't know it.

It's up to the comedian to show them in a good-natured way." To never offend And God forbid if he should offend somebody. Anybody. At the height of his Your Show of Shows fame, Sid altered a character after a single complaint. The character, Cool Cees, was a progressive jazz musician band is equipped with radar to warn us when we approach a with ultrathick glasses. A letter came from a teacher of sight-impaired children, noting that the image was offensive to her students.

Sid got rid of the glasses and changed the character's name to Progress Hornsby. "Why not change it?" Sid said last week. "The teacher was within her rights, and the bit was just as funny without the glasses." He thinks current comedic style is geared to an uneducated audience with nowhere to look but down. "We never did topical humor. Never anything to do with religion or politics.

But we might've satirized George Bernard Shaw. And that demanded that the audience knew something about Shaw. "It seems all today's audiences want is instant gratification. That's why so much of it is about genitals and four-letter words. The problem with four-letter words is that there's nowhere else to go.

Once you use them in your act, you're stuck with them, because then the old words David Lynch before Twin Peaks want to see everything he's done," says Alana Winter, owner of Stock Rotation Services, a distributor offering Eraserhead. "The demand is much greater than the supply with this film." But the title isn't the only thing collectors are looking for. "A movie is worth more if it's clean and its box is in good condition," says Scherer. "Whether a copy of the movie is from its original studio is also important." There have been many video com--pany name changes, says Scherer, and "a tape produced by its original distribution company will always bring more. So Eraserhead from Columbia Home Video is worth more than Eraserhead from RCAColumbia Pictures Home Video." Even at $100 a cassette, Eraserhead wasn't the most expensive title at the finally made his film debut, as an increasingly desperate death-row inmate in Brubaker.

More film roles followed: the detective in Eyewitness (1981); a blue-collar foreman in Paul Newman's 1984 drama, Harry and Son; the bar owner who tries to save Emilio Este-vez from delinquency in That Was Then This Is Now (1985); a corrupt parole commissioner in Marie: A True Story (1985). A key turning point in Freeman's career came when he was offered the role of Fast Black, a Times Square street pimp, in a quirky thriller called Street Smart (1987). An authority on black history, Freeman had a reputation for turning down roles he thought were demeaning. He deliberately avoided parts in the "blaxploitation" films of the 70s; as a young actor in San Francisco, he had angrily refused to dance around stage, waving an American flag, as the reformed "bad" Indian in a camp production of Little Mary Sunshine. But Fast Black suggested deeper possibilities a complex manipulator with tragic flaws.

In Street Smart, a dishonest magazine writer named Jonathan (Christopher Reeve) makes up an interview with a pimp. Through a bizarre coincidence, his fictionalization turns out to be a fair portrait of Fast Black. Flattered, Fast Black hunts down the writer and sets out, in his way, to court him, to use him for his own ends. Freeman took the role. Oscar nod Kathy Baker, who played one of the Fast Black's prostitutes, told Connoisseur about an early moment in the filming: "We were just reading through the script, nobody really acting, and we get to the scene where Fast Black put a gun to Jonathan's head.

Morgan lunges across the table, grabs Chris' shirt and delivers some line like 'Listen, you with all the intensity of the final performance." Freeman kept that intensity throughout the filming. In a key scene, when he drew a knife to threaten Reeve, the moment was so intense that Freeman accidentally drew blood. "Morgan used to frighten the crew," director Jerry Shatzberg said. Street Smart quickly disappeared from theaters, but Freeman earned an Oscar nomination for his performance. From there, he went on to play a in Clean and Sober (1988) and controversial New Jersey principal Joe Clark in the hit Lean on Me.

Meanwhile, in New York, Freeman discovered Alfred Uhry's two-person drama, Driving Miss Daisy, about the 25-year relationship between an elderly, slightly imperious Jewish matron and her black chauffeur, reflecting the changes of the civil-rights era. Uhry who conceded that he would never have cast Freeman if he had seen Street Smart in advance raved about his star. "Morgan informs his work with a combination of gentility and sensitivity and lightning intelligence, and also a wonderful, solid virility," he told Connoisseur. "The only other actor I know who projected that was Spencer Tracy." His performance as Hoke won Freeman an Off-Broadway Obie award, a shot at the movie role and ultimately an Oscar nomination. Away from the set, Freeman lives quietly with his second wife, Myrna Colley-Lee, a costume designer.

The couple is rearing Freeman's 8-year-old granddaughter, E'dena, Inputting memories His spare time is often spent at a word processor, typing long essays or memories he classes as "junk," and haunting hardware stores, buying parts for his 38-foot ketch, Sojourner. An avid sailor since 1967, Freeman frequently sails solo or with his family from Massachusetts to the Caribbean. "Sailing's about going slow, about taking command, accepting challenges that keep changing but keep coming," he told Esquire magazine. Politically, Freeman remains engaged. Last month, he joined Kevin Kline and Kathleen Turner on Capitol Hill, lobbying for continued support of the National Endowment for the Arts.

And, like any good actor, Freeman is always storing away material. "We can be walking down the street," his wife told Connoisseur, "and all of a sudden someone will culch Morgan's eye, and he'll start walking like them and talking like them trying it on." FREEMAN, from 1-E grandmother, saving every penny he could get to buy tickets to movie matinees. He saw little of his father, a Nashville barber who sold moonshine, occasionally ran numbers and slowly developed a drinking problem. Freeman must have been an observant child. Years later, he would recall revivals at the Sanctified Church to get the right pitch and rhythm for his sermons in Colonus.

He watched the intricate etiquette that black and white grown-ups practiced in the segregated South. It was like a dance, he told Connoisseur magazine, "and they knew all the steps." would remember those steps, and practice a few, when he played Hoke Colburn Off-Broadway and on film. Move to Chicago Freeman found himself thrown into a shockingly new dance when he was 6. His grandmother died, and he was shipped to relatives on Chicago's South Side. As a small-town black child, he had to turn street-smart fast.

"I stole, I conned, I passed the tests," he told People magazine. "But I was scared." Sent back to Greenwood, Freeman became a popular student. One day, Leola Gregory, a teacher at Thread-gill School, spotted him entertaining chums and quickly enlisted him in school dramas. He was hooked. By 1950, he was good enough to win a gold pin in a statewide Mississippi acting contest.

"You can talk about your Academy Awards," he told Connoisseur with a chuckle, "but this was a major major." After a brief enlistment in the Air Force wanted to fly," he said, but he wound up a radar technician), Freeman headed west, taking a clerical job with Los Angeles City College and studying acting while waiting for Hollywood to discover him. But in the late '50s and early '60s, Hollywood was looking for Sidney Poitier. So Freeman whose looks have been compared to Jimi Hen-drix's began commuting between New York and San Francisco, taking brief pickup jobs, including a stint as a dancer at the New York World's Fair. Better work Gradually, the jobs got better. On a national tour of Peter Shaffer's Royal Hunt of the Sun, he was promoted from the ensemble to a speaking role as one of the lnca generals.

On Broadway, he played opposite Pearl Bailey in Hello, Dolly! Perhaps Freeman's greatest exposure came on The Electric Company, the PBS series for young readers taped from 1971 to 1976. Freeman played Easy Reader, a takeoff on the characters in Easy Rider. The pay was good, and the regular cast included the likes of Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno. But Freeman felt trapped by the show. "It's like being Captain Kangaroo," he said.

At the same time, his first marriage was breaking up. His work began to slip, and he began drinking heavily. "I'm not an alcoholic or anything," he told Time magazine, "but I can get out of control." One morning, he found himself on the floor, where he'd passed out the night before. He quit drinking and has never resumed. The end of The Electric Company brought Freeman more chances at serious roles.

In 1978, he won a Tony nomination as a proud wino in the short-lived Broadway drama The Mighty Gents. In 1979, he earned critical raves after Joseph Papp cast him in the lead of Coriolanus. In 1980, he The 1 0 most wanted out-of-print videos BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers. Magnetic Video, 100 (prices are approximate). ERASERHEAD (1978) Jack Nance.

Charlotte Stewart. Columbia Home Video. 100. GIMME SHELTER (1970) Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane. Columbia Home Video, $75.

LET IT BE (1970) The Beatles. Magnetic Video, $90. ON THE BEACH (1959) Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire. CBSFox Video. $85.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK 11975) Rachel Roberts. Dominic Guard. Vestron Video, $90. PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) Divine, Mink Stole. Harmony Vision, $75.

TOM JONES (1963) Albert Finney, Susannah York. Magnetic Video, $125. TWO FOR THE ROAD (1967) Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney. Magnetic Video. $90.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957) Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton. CBSFox Video, $85. Associated Press man, Dom Deluise, Fernando Lamas, Eileen Biennan, Phil Silvers. Spoof of 1940s detective movies. RCAColumbia, $19.95.

(VJ GREASE (1978) John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John. Blockbuster musical set at a fictional California high school during the '50s heyday of rock and roll. Paramount. 14 95. (VJ THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR.

FU MAN-CHU (1980) Peter Sellers, Helen Mirren. Sellers' last film. Warner. $39.95. (V) HISTORY OF THE WORLD PART I (1981) Mel Brooks, Gregory Hines.

Comedic romp of the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution. CBS Fox. $1 (V) THE MUNSTERS' REVENGE (1981; made for TV) Fred Gwynne, Yvonne De Carlo. Revisited after 15 years, the Munsters get involved with a mad scientist who has created their robot look-alikes. MCA, $39.95.

(V) GREASE II (1982) Maxwell Caulfield, Michelle Pfeiffer. Maybe the worst sequel ever made. Paramount, $19.95. (V) OVER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE (1984) Elliott Gould, Margaux Hemingway. A Jewish restaurant owner wants to borrow money from an uncle who objects to his Catholic girlfriend.

MGMUA, $79.95. (V) LOVE IS NEVER SILENT (1985; made for TV) Mare Winningham, Cloris Leachman. A woman is torn between the needs of her deaf parents and her desire for a life of her own. STOOGEMANIA (1985) Josh Mostel, Me-lanie Chartoff. A man's passion for the Three Stooges overtakes his life.

Paramount, $14. 95. (V) THE BEST OF COMIC RELIEF (1986) Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams. All-star concert to aid the homeless. Lorimar, THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES (1988) Clive Revill, Robert Morse.

Live-action musical version of the fairy tale. Cannon, 19.98. (V) Skelton's most beloved character comes to life in this holiday tale. IVE, 19.95. (VJ 10 FROM "YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS" (1973) Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, Louis Nye.

Great collection of skits from the classic '50s comedy-variety series. They don't make TV like this anymore. Media, $59.95. (V) RABBIT TEST (1978) Billy Crystal, Alex Rocco, Joan Prather. Off-kilter comedy about a man who gets pregnant.

Directed by Joan Rivers. Charter Entertainment. $14.95. (VJ NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (1983) Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo. Anthony Michael Hall.

A middle-class father takes his brood on a cross-country tour. Warner, we walked to a back room, where a bunch of men were sitting around playing cards. With me standing with her in my curls, she told them: 'My husband lost $200 here last night, and I want that money back or I'm going to the And they gave it to her." Then Imogene got wide-eyed and said: "I wonder why she took me with her." And after a thought or two decided: "For protection. That's it I was her protection in case they didn't want to give her the money back and didn't want her to go to the police. But when she told the story to my father, I never saw him laugh so hard." thing like that.

Then again, I might just take the next best offer." Several Walt Disney films are also hot commodities, because the company discontinues videos regularly. "A little while ago, Pinocchio was readily available," Howe says. "Now I can't get my hands on it. Disney has taken it off the market, and people want to buy." Howe says that since production stopped on Pinocchio, the film's $29,95 retail price has gone up and "consumers can't buy it because video stores don't want to sell it." "I know it will be reintroduced eventually. The queslion is, when?" For more information Pearls, a newsletter about rare and collectible videocassettes, is available for $30 for 12 issues.

Write Video Oyster, 62 Pearl New York, Y. 10004. ADMIRAL BROADWAY REVUE (1949) Imogene Coca. Short-lived program that preceded Your Show of Shows. Video Dimensions.

19.95. (VJ YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS, Nos. 1-2 (1950-54) Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris. Louis Nye. Classic comedy skits from the fondly remembered series.

Video Yesteryear (Vol. 1-2)Unicorn (Vols. 3-8). $19.95 each. fV) CAESAR'S HOUR, Vols.

1-4 (1954-57) Howard Morris, Carl Reiner, Nanette Fabray. Highly imaginative successor to Your Show of Shows. Video Yesteryear (Vols. 1, 3, 41Video Dimensions (Vol. 2).

$24.95 each. Q0 IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD (1963) Spencer Tracy, Edie Adams. Giant comedy about greed. CBSFox. $29.95.

(VJ A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN (1967) Walter Matthau, Robert Morse. Matthau is hilarious in adultery skits featuring a bevy of guest stars. CBSFox. $59.95. (V) 10 FROM "YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS" (1973) Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, Louis Nye.

Great collection of skits from the classic '50s comedy-variety series. They don't make TV like this anymore. Media, $59.95. (V) AIRPORT 1975 (1974) Charlton Heston, Karen Black. First Airport sequel has stewardess Karen forced to fly a 747 when the flight crew is sucked into outer space; Chuck's on the radio talking her in.

MCA. 14.95. (VJ WHEN THINGS WERE ROTTEN, Vol. 1 (1975) Dick Gautier, Dudley Moore. TV series sendup of the Robin Hood legend.

Paramount, SILENT MOVIE (1976) Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman. Bernadette Peters. A silent movie about three Hollywood zanies trying to make a silent movie. CBSFox. $19.95.

LVJ THE CHEAP DETECTIVE (1978) Peter Falk. Ann-Margret, Madeline Kahn, John House Imogens Coca's filmography indicates film is available on videocassette. ADMIRAL BROADWAY REVUE (1949) Sid Caesar. Short-lived program that preceded Vour Show of Shows. Video Dimensions, $19.95.

(V) YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS, Nos. 1-2 (1950-54) Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, Louis Nye. Classic comedy skits from the fondly remembered series. Video Yesteryear (Vols. 1-21Unicorn (Vols.

3-81, $19.95 each. (VJ EARLY ELVIS (1956) Elvis Presley, Milton Berle, Charles Laughton. The young singer in a variety of TV performances from the mid-'50s, including Stage Show. The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show. FREDDY THE FREELOADER'S CHRISTMAS (1963) Red Skelton, Vincent Price.

sound childish." The future of Sid and Imogene's latest teaming is uncertain. Sid got itchy in New York and closed the show though it could have run at least two more months. And although there's talk of taking it on tour, Imogene plainly doesn't relish one-nighters, has lost her patience with air travel and likes the home comforts of New York. But she clearly remembers the first laugh she got in Atlantic City 70 years ago. "My mother kept me home from school one day, and she took me to this store.

She waved off the clerk and said, 'I know what I and show. Tom Jones, the 1963 Oscar-winner starring Albert Finney, was going for $125. "Collectors, rather than video store owners, will pay that for a movie," says Liz Howe, owner of Mrs. Hudson's Video Library in Manhattan. "They must be in love with the movie and it must be hard to get, but they have no problem with that price if they want it in their collection.

Of course, sometimes somebody will spend $100 on a film, and a few weeks later it will be re-released for $19.95. You have to be careful." Tom Jones has been unavailable for some years, Winter says, but because it was re-released in theaters last year, video store owners are waiting to see if it will be reissued. Collectors, however, are another story. "I have a $125 price on it," Howe says, "and I expect to get some A new category of collectible: Movies on videocassette COLLECTIBLES, from 1-E rights to a film and nobody picks ihem up," says Norman Scherer, who organized the swap meet and publishes Pearls, a newsletter covering hard-to-get videos. "Sometimes they simply decide the market has dried up Ifor a titlel and it's not worth producing they put them on moratorium and forget they ever existed.

And sometimes a company just goes ojit of business. "These things happen frequently, but usually without warning. Then, when word's out a title is off the market, everybody scrambles to find it." One title everybody seems to be scrambling to find these days is Eraserhead. Duvid Lynch's eerie first film, which has been out of print for several years. "Many people who never heard of.