The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 29

the Observer, Sunday 21 September 1988 90 Wrong side of the tracks mCHARD MtLMNHAU. Glass of PHILIP FRENCH nmsSbSmU If (left) and Kris Kristofferson in Trouble in Mind: A.T A TIME when simple entertainment is in as short supply as common sense, one welcomes Robert Mandell's thriller EX Murder by Illusion (Leicester Square Theatre, 15). It isn't particularly original the fall-guy hero is a familiar figure, the picture begins as one of those backstage films about movie-making and turns into 'Three Days of the Condor. But it moves at the speed Ol a grand prix racing car on a serpentine track, and there are no pit-stops for gratuitous romance or windy moralising. Bryan Brown plays an ace Australian special effects man servicing New York splatter movies with titles like Rock-a-die Baby and I Dismember Exploiting his professional pride, some Justice Department agents specialising in the relocation of endangered witnesses hire him to Stage-manage the fake killing of a Mafia boss who had informed on the mob.

Brown has of course been Set up and is soon on the run for his life. Brian Dennehy plays a maverick Irish-American police lieutenant investigating a series of homicides that follow the death of the mobster, and finding internal police resistance to his inquiries. What makes apart from fee pace and the Czech cinemato-grapher Miroslav Ondricek's crystalline images, are the physically contrasted performances of Brown, the thin, edgy, morally ambivalent Australian, and Dennehy, the quizzical, overweight, rxwk-honest cop. In the film's view Of society they're both outsiders, and their enemies are Establishment Wasps from Washington. Unlike other recent conspiracy thrillers, however, the villains are motivated by financial gain, not by power, which makes them dramatically at least rather trivjal figures.

Trouble in Mind (Screen on the Green, etc, 15), the latest movie by Robert Airman's former protege Alan Rudolph, is as slow and abstract as 'FX? is fast and specific, though re-working similar fifa noir material. Rudolph has taken Seattle, Washington State's wet, misty, unvarnished version of San Francisco (and the town that gave us the term skid-row '), and has transformed it into the archetypal Rain City. Walter Hill did something like this with his rundown, future Chicago in Streets of But where Hill used heavy rock for his insistent narrative film, Rudolph uses slow blues numbers to create a mood piece. This is Waste Land West, an unreal city in a state of siege, patrolled by militiamen in combat dress, where Japanese is entering the language pool and the currency resembles monopoly money. Kris Kristofferson is a decent cop emerging from a stretch in jail for executing a vicious criminal.

Keith Carradine is an amoral tearaway who deserts his wife and child to pursue a criminal career The careworn Genevieve Bujold manages Wanda's Bar where the low-life characters gather. And the trans-vestite star Divine has his first male role as an epicene gang leader who's accompanied everywhere by a violinist playing popular classics. In his spartan retreat the wayward lawman Kristofferson builds a scale model of the streets surrounding Wanda's Bar and Rudolph challenges us to distinguish between the film's 'real' streets and his hero's table-top creations. How seriously you take this conceit will determine your response to this poised, rather precious movie. It is unquestionably the work of a sophisticated imagination.

A picture of Oliver Reed crashing to his death in Joseph Losey's 'The Damned' appeared on the cover of the first number of Movie, the influential magazine of the early 1960s that introduced the ideas and enthusiasm of Gainers du Cinema and its critic-directors to Britain, and crucially changed the way we perceive the cinema, and in particular Hollywood movies. Reed has the major male role in Keith Carradine Paul Mayersberg's Captive (Cannon, Haymarket, 18). There is an important connection between these two appearances separated by nearly a quarter of a century. Mayersberg was a founding editor of Movie and this film not only has many references to Losey, Hitchcock and other filmmakers the magazine championed, but also embodies certain of Mayersberg's critical preoccupations with, for instance, the dream-like nature of film and the essential perversity of human nature. Back in those heady days of the rtouvelle vague, there was a riddle that went Why did the critic cross the road? To get to the auteur Unfortunately Mayersberg has taken a long time to make that crossing.

He has written scripts for Roeg and Oshima and in 1964 he supervised the second unit on Corman's Tomb of Lygeia (one recalls a pair of striking images he was responsible for Vincent Price's stand-in approaching Stonehenge and walking on a desolate East Anglian beach). But Captive is his directorial debut, and it's really the prentice work he should have been given the chance to make 22 years ago. 'Captive' is the story of Patti Hearst rendered as a fairy rale, in which the beautiful daughter of a rich British banker is kidnapped i nmM' 'm -'i Province, South Africa. It's a dour drama presented through the eyes of Magda, a middle-aged spinster (Jane Birkin), and possibly only happening in her imagination. Magda's resentment of her taciturn father (Trevor Howard) turns to homicidal rage when he takes their black servant's young wife as his mistress.

Her subsequent efforts alternately to dominate the black couple and to ingratiate herself with them lead to rape, humiliation and disintegration. There are hints here of Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Strind-berg's Miss and the movie develops a certain brooding authority. But it ends up looking like a piece of juvenilia discovered in Athol Fugard's bottom drawer. Given the choice I'd rather see 'My Beautiful Laundrette II The Second Wash' than Poltergeist The Other Side (Plaza, 15), and Pd guess that Brian Gibson, who was responsible for the TV version of Dennis Potter's 'Blue Remembered would rather have directed it. The original Steven Spielberg-Tobe Hooper Poltergeist was an effective shocker.

Gibson's sequel is a maudlin, religiose affair stating quite explicitly that the only protection against evil is the love emanating from America's nuclear families. fashion Philip Glass talks to NICHOLAS KENYON IF YOU'VE seen the British Gas ad on TV this week, you've heard the music of Philip Glass. Glass, the biggest commercial success in the world of crossover classical avant-gardist turned mass-audience minimalist is back in London for a concert with his Ensemble at the Albert Hall on Friday. Just off the plane, he was already worrying that CBS the record company with whom he has an exclusive contract gave away the rights to the British Gas track too cheaply. He has recently produced his first song album, 'Songs from Liquid mixing such stars as Linda Ronstadt and The Roches with old colleagues like Jon Gibson, Michael Reisman and the brilliant young Kronos String Quartet, setting texts by Paul Simon, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson.

Was it CBS pressure that led to an album like that? Hey, I have to say that for better or worse that was all my own idea. I thought it all up. OK, I did have ulterior motives, I admit that. I used that project as a way to learn to set English texts, which I hadn't done before in my operas. But I made one terrible mistake, which was to write all the stuff first before I thought about who would sing it.

So we had to go through a really painful process of auditioning people and CBS made some suggestions There are some nice stories going round about Glass's relationship with CBS, including one that when his LP 'Glassworks' was about to be released they called him up and asked if they could change the track called Rubric to so they could use the Cube on the cover. Glass grimaces. That one's true, yes. I still don't much like the Glassworks cover; I'm a bit sensitive to puns on my name. But look, that's just marketing it doesn't affect the music.

I still have a debit balance with CBS, because they've done my 'Satyagraha' and 'Einstein on the Beach' are just out on CD; 'Akhnaten' is to follow. So will there be more song albums? 'I don't know. "Liquid Days took far too long. But Paul Simon, who's pretty smart, said that people wouldn't know how to deal with this album until I'd done another one they could compare it with. Now that is clever.

Perhaps I will. Is Glass still doing much work with his Ensemble (who still have absolutely exclusive rights to play his works) or is most of his effort going into the big operatic projects? 'I do about SO concerts Making it in Britain from the tower of her London palace and brain-washed by a trio of cute, colourful terrorists right out of Godard's 'Bande a The experience is supposedly a liberating one, allowing her to discover an independent identity free from her overbearing father. Clever music (by Michael Berkeley, incorporating arias from Madame Butterfly and 'Tosca'), smooth photography (Michael Southan), elegant sets (Voytek) and a smug knowingness give it the sheen of an art-house movie, but of a hollow, pretentious kind. The picture fails to create its own world, the way Neil Jordan's thematicaUy comparable 'Company of Wolves does, and never generates the power of a true fable. There are attempts at wit, but there's not a touch of humour and the performances are stilted rather than stylised.

As the heroine, Irina Brook delivers her lines in a flat, unmodulated manner and wanders through the film like one of those pale, expressionless nudes in a painting by Paul Delvaux. Adapted by its director Marion Hansel from J. M. Coetzee's novel 'In the Heart of the Dust (ICA, 18) is a Franco-Belgian film made with an English-speaking cast in Spain and set at some unspecified time earlier this century on a remote farm in Cape TEC WILLIAM FEAVER promoting the Allied cause with exhortations to Aid the Wounded (Joint Committee for Soviet Aid) and smash the swastika to designing the hand-held dove emblem of the Artists International exhibition 'For held in the bomb-site canteen of the Oxford Street John Lewis's in 1943. Henrion, who was to find fulfilment in the Festival of Britain, helped devise the white palings and red, yellow and blue screens that made 'For Liberty' a promise for the future.

With this, Art in Exile perks up. The same Henrions recur in Make or Break, in the Henry Moore Gallery at the Royal College of Art. Here they are an accompaniment to the liberty bodice, the Chiltern utility chair, the Henry Moore silk headscarf and the demob suit. Though the exhibition has a strident, and somewhat tautological follow-through section concerning British design today, the focus is Britain Can Make It, organised by the British Council of Industrial Design at the in 1946. This was a Crippsian orgy of export-only or some time-never consumer goods.

People went to get an eyeful of multi-coloured fabrics and decorated china. Today the most chic exhibits are the ones with the Utility CC sign and the child's sun-suit made out of a pilot's silk escape map of Formosa. 'Get in Shape for Civvy Street' urges an Abram Games poster with narrowing perspectives underlining the prospect. The best one could hope for was a Cavendish convector, with egg-slicer vents, or a 'Mary Ann' electric iron sensitive enough to cope with nylon whenever that became available. Unseen motorists park their cars on promontories overlooking sullen Welsh seas in Emrys Williams's paintings at the Benjamin Rhodes gallery.

Sometimes a second vehicle can be seen, reflected in a wing mirror: a Citroen 2CV in subdued yellow or a classic Volkswagen. The paint lies heavy, clogging the dashboards, cramming landscape against the windows. Previous subjects treated by Emrys Williams have included British Heritage castles and Colwyn Bay roller-coasters. The ambition is to produce resounding Bottom line music scene wide open: that was entirely visual. It needed an opera house.

People forget how closed off the serious musical world was from the visual arts in the Sixties the visual artists were the powerfully influential people. We busted the serious music scene wide open, and it's one thing I'm proud of that I was one of the energetic ones then. Something else happened too. I realised that opera on that level can be a very social art, that you can address social issues OK, you can write string quartets for a few people but it's not the same as having thousands of people watch an opera. I grew up with Vietnam, I did my peace marches like everyone else, but it wasn't until I watched my children grow up that I really wanted to put these social issues into my pieces.

Whenever you talk about establishing a relationship with an audience people always say you're just prostituting yourself. But it doesn't mean hitting the lowest common So now Glass is on to his fifth opera, a collaboration with Doris Lessing from her novel 'The Making of the Representative from Planet It was supposed to be done in Rotterdam this spring but missed the deadline. Now the plan is a four-way collaboration between Houston, New York, English National Opera (where it would arrive in the autumn of 1988) and Amsterdam, with all the companies coming in on the commissioning, and just one production, which Glass revealed would be by the controversial Andrei Serban. I I JON SAVAGE THE HUMAN LEAGUE Crash (Virgin V2391) NEW ORDER Sham Ol Th Nation (Factory FAC153) The PmI 8Mlons (Strang Fruit SFPS 001) PET SHOP BOYS Suburbia (Parlophone R6140) DESPITE the propagandising of the back to the roots movement, Pop pleasures remain in artificiality rather than authenticity. The Human League go straight to tha heart of the matter by hiring this year's hot black dance team.

Jam and Lewis (Janet Jackson, Alexander O'Neal) to produce and co-write Although on occasion the two strong styles cancel each other out, the bulk of the record is state-of-the-art, melting pot music with all its ironies and flights of fancy. While not the anthem the title promises, New Order's new single shows them pursuing their successful art rockhip hop fusion into formula they are better represented by the elegiac BBC EP of a June 1982 John Peel session. Anthem (and record) of the week is the Pet Shop Boys' best heard on the American mixed 12" Neil Tennant's tart observations on that most fascinating of environments are perfectly matched by a strong tune and the synthetic grandeur of the production. TINA TURNER: Break Every Rule (Capitol TEST 3018) RUN DMC Raising Hall (London LONLP21) TINA Turner's record title could be prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act, accepting as it does every rule of mainstream American rock. The result is not without some atavistic attraction, but Turner remains imprisoned within her dull format.

Run DMC entertain white styles much more on their own terms their single with heavy metal group Aerosmith. Walk This Way (currently in the top ten), is one of the year's funniest and best The deliberate hysteria and monotony of their approach, however, becomes wearing over an LP's length. We busted the serious a year with them, and we get to places which will never see the operas. I want my music to be heard live, not just on record or on video which is only useful up to a point. But I am a theatre composer now and I'm surprised people don't realise that more.

The pieces I do with the ensemble now are virtually all theatre transcriptions in this London concert we'll do bits from 'Akhnaten' and a 25-minute version of my musicdance piece Descent into the Maelstrom I don't mind making these cut-down versions, like the Wagner orchestral arrangements. Glass's eyes brighten: 'Did you hear about that? Dennis Russell Da vies did three programmes in Saratoga last summer of music from operas by Glass and Wagner Pretty flattering 1 People kept asking me why it worked and I couldn't think what to say Well, I belong in that company kinda sounds wrong. So I said we're both operatic composers who work in the concert hall, which I really It's a bit of a puzzle how Glass, the impecunious Sixties radical who (as his publicity never tires of pointing out) drove a New York taxi cab to make ends meet, got into the megalomaniac business of huge opera houses. You know, for a guy who spent most of his time with equipment in garages just to have all that stuff in an opera house was a revelation Look, rd worked off off-off-off Broadway, as far as vou can get, and with Bob Wilson in Einstein we had something Rod Stewart at Wembley JOHN PEEL Stewart's voice was at its wistful best in Danny Whitten's uncomfortably poignant I Don't Want To Talk About It. The consumers roared along with this, as they were to roar along with Sailing and the recent hit, Every Beat of My On the up-tempo numbers many of them were too busy dancing to sing and the air around us increasingly resembled that of an indifferently run bear-pit as the revellers cavorted.

"These Rod suggested, prior to launching into the lyrically-daft Do You Think I'm 'are all about what the audience makes of In far too many cases this is the whole truth, but Rod Stewart, whose faintly Hogarthian appearance is seemingly unaffected by time, beyond the arrival in his face of a set of suspiciously glossy teeth, would have been just as diverting before any audience. To be frank with you, I had gone to Wembley expecting to write that the singer was not as good as he had been with the Faces, but his voice and energy and the fact that he is not above self-ridicule won me over. On the way out of the Arena, my companion returned, with rather more force than I considered meet and proper, to the subject of that bottom. All I could find by way of retaliation was the observation that I bet he still never gets his round in. harmonica player, unusual in that he tends to play a chromatic harmonica rather than the traditional blues harp.

His vocals may be nothing special but he's strong on showmanship, growling and harping his way around the audience at the end of a long microphone lead. The star, though, was 28-year-old Lurrie, a powerful and emotional guitarist. His normally sparse style makes his occasional frenetic, almost Hendrix-like climaxes all the more dramatic. Paul Lashmar images on a massive scale, so large that they become detached from anecdote. The car interior is a promising motif: privacy combined with world view.

The treatment, though, is fumbled, for between fresh sketch and considered enlargement the desire to paint museum-pieces takes over and the idea goes numb. Cella Paul's paintings of members of her family, at the Bernard Jacobson gallery, are admirably direct; no home comforts for ornamentation. Her mother, couched in Hispanic black, is the most patient, and most rewarding, sitter, but when she and her daughters are grouped on a bed the sense of ordeal under scrutiny flowers into something stronger. This big, densely-worked composition is a remarkably coherent group portrait of individuals not just huddled together but made to interact. The strength of Andrze) Jackowski's paintings at the Marlborough gallery lies in an invariable gloom.

Boats are beached for funerary purposes, one assumes. Cots are coffins: trees mark graves. Jackowski conducts pilgrimages through Dark Ages and somewhat Baltic time zones. Each reddened shore calls for a pause for thought. The vigils are more convincing when details are left to the imagination than when as in 'Settlement with Three Towers' portentous hints are packed in like candles on an old man's birthday cake.

Indeed, a drawing, 'The has more atmosphere, more forest-immanence, than most of the more obviously poetic paintings. Francesco Clemente is a great one for cultural overlaps and misalliances. His recent paintings, at Anthony d'Offay, all small and on wooden panels, are products of a stay in Madras last year. The orange and greens, the metallic raking light on turquoise waves, are Southern Indian, as are the tiger heads and Tantric touches. The struggles, however, enacted with heraldic formality in 'Geometrical Lust' and 'Mother and are undiluted Clemente: more ying than yang, more adroitly impassioned than usual.

A key hangs in a river; a phallic rock readies itself for the plunge into a moonscape ocean. Dagger raised, Mother turns on her winged, spread-eagled victim. Clemente's intentions slip through his advanced ambiguity. THE HUNS of Room 10 House 36 would be delighted to have your company at their Season's The cyclostyled invitation (RSVP hardly necessary in the circumstances) was one of many that punctuated the monotony of internee life on the Isle of Man. It now helps alleviate the drabness of Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933-45 at the Camden Arts Centre, a localised version very Hamp-stead of a recent exhibition in West Berlin.

The souvenirs of Hutchinson Camp, Douglas IOM, where there was a concentration of artists and academics, have a particular poignancy and bite. Schwitters was there, free to Mere as best he could in a boarding house on the sea-front. He collaged cork, newsprint, cigarette packets and landlady lino. He sculpted too in stiff porridge and, it's said, lived and slept for extended periods as a dog. 'Art in Exile' isn't strong on Schwitters, nor on the other most celebrated emigres.

No Mondrian (who admittedly only became a true refugee when he left for America in 1940), virtually no Kokoschka or Gropius. The exhibition dwells on the average experience, the lack of opportunities, the gradual reassertion of self. Hugo Dachinger, who contributed to 'The the Hutchinson newsletter, and who organised Art Behind the Wire in the camp, then, in 1941, held his first one-man exhibition at the Redfern Gallery: 'Art Behind Barbed For most, internment was brief and the preoccupation was how to establish some sort of professional life. John Heartfield (who had anglicised his name as an anti-war gesture in 1917) produced fewer photocollages than before and worked mainly as a designer of dust jackets. Fritz Landauer redesigned the facade of the Regent Street branch of Boots.

Joseph Flatter drew cartoons for propaganda leaflets. His image of a Nazi trooper as the mouth of a concentration camp devouring multitudes, dated 1938, is one of the few intimations of holocaust. Among the portraits of resigned individuals with NW3 addresses few stand out. The paintings of street corners, occasional bomb damage, sparse domesticity and prevailing fog convey little more than makeshift stoicism. Heroics are for posters.

F. H. K. Henrion passed from incl. FREE BED BASE Mail Order? send SJLE.

823-27 Rancras Road. NWJ 01-8333945 FUTONS double size 98 YOU'VE stUl got a lovely volunteered my companion wistfully as Rod Stewart took to the Wembley Arena stage on Thursday night. I wondered whether Rod would have retained the other characteristics that made him and the Faces our favourite combination IS years ago. Introduced by the themes from Match of the Day' and 'The Archers (the latter surely a subtle protest at the planned dropping of Nigel Pargeter), the former Face appeared before an audience earing the end of its eligibility for 18-30 holidays and plainly familiar with all of his songs. These were drawn almost entirely from Stewart's American period the past decade when his song writing slipped somewhat from the high point reached on his first two solo LPs (for which he wrote songs of considerable wit, avoiding the cliches of then contemporary song-writing in establishing a character of vulnerable defiance) into the themes considered indispensable by the American rock market, themes revolving, roughly speaking, around 17-year-old girls prepared, on the most casual acquaintance, to remove their black leather clothing in order to make love for 24 hours or more.

Although Rod Stewart's way with a lyric may have suffered, the artist himself has clearly kept more than his bottom in pretty good shape. His athleticism was quite extraordinary, his use of the lightweight throwing microphone stand exemplary, and his voice seemed unmarked either by the Californian lifestyle or the ageing process. OPERA A ANDREV LLOYD VEBBERSj Nev i -I' iii i ROYAL CHARITY PREMIERE jl SI a The Prince and Princess ofWalcs iBSPDon- II iWNCP.S7HUiTondF.ROMLOmMH01flEOTV AH II TOMORR0WNIGHTAT7.O0pm fjH BARBICAN CENTRE, LON0ONEC2 I PUBLIC PERFORMANCES COMMENCE 1 TUESDAY, 23rd SEPTEMBER Separate performances 2.30. 5.40. 8.40dti iaHy indudiTin Stint Jays.

ALL SEATS FOR 8.40pm PERFORMANCE BOOKABLE IN ADUWCE- Boxotficeopericlaity1.00prn-8.C0pm. HS ACCESS VISA PHONE BOOKINGS WELCOME ud lo 6.30 om on Hie evening ot the performance. 55 Chiming Bells i sa THE only disappointment in my recent trip to Chicago was that I missed one of Carey and Lurrie Bell's gigs by just two days. This father and son team are one of the finest blues acts playing regularly around the town. I was finally able to catch them this week at my favourite British blues venue, the 100 Club.

Fifty-year-old Carey Bell came up from Mississippi in the late 1950s and has since played with many of the Chicago greats John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Earl Hooker. As he showed last week he is a fine 1 0 SeiUiaie performances2.40. 5.45. 8.45pm daily msl j'Jina Sundays. ALL SEATS FOR 8 45pm PERFORMANCE BOOKABLE IN ADVANCE.

Box office ACCESS VISA PHONE BOOKINGS WELCOME up to 6.30pm on the evening ol the performance. 1.