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The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 34

Publication:
The Observeri
Location:
London, Greater London, England
Issue Date:
Page:
34
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

SUNDAY 8 MARCH 1981 OBSERVER REVIEWARTS mm A good cry Unhappy families PHILIP FRENCH on Robert Redford's debut as a director 'WE ALL cried on stage said the mezzo-soprano Delia Jones after a rehearsal last week for the English- National Opera's new production of opera which opens at the Theatre Royal, Notting-' llam, on Wednesday. )0'Ve've been indulging our--Serves in our natural '-''f' She wasn't taking part in communal fit of tempera- dicaments than those Redford and Sargent have formed, and that we're encouraged to patronise them through our superior understanding of their lives. Redford has made a neat, tasteful picture, elegantly autumnal in tone and time, that harks back to those rather more strident Freudian family dramas (e.g. Rebel Without a The Young Stranger') that Hollywood produced in the 1950s, another period when affluent America withdrew into the private life. Adapted by the Italian-American director Lewis John Carlino from an autobiographical novel by the Irish-American writer Pat Conroy, The Great Santini (Gate 3, A) is a series of vulgar variations on the themes, familial relationships and social incidents of Ordinary But here it is a monstrous macho Marine father (Robert Duval!) who cannot give his JANE BOWN Breaking down emotional barriers David 'Freeman; (left) rehearsing Delia centre) and Jennifer Smith (La Monteverdi's1 4 young conductors feel they must onduct Beethoven tout de For the past 25 years Von Matacic has conducted without a baton, because the tension involved in holding it affected the nerves in his arm.

'The doctor told me to throw away the baton or give up conducting so I threw away the his native Yugoslavia, Von Matacic prefers to speak French. He has composed music himself, his latest work being the 'Ballade der which has been performed in Yugoslavia, Monte Carlo and Vienna. 'The dtird movement is a scherzo macabre it describes the menacing techno DIARY felt very moved today, which turned out to be detrimental because then we couldn't Lerner's latest ALAN JAY LERNER, whose best known musicals include My Fair Lady and is writing the book for a new one which he hopes to produce in London next year. Ic is based on Robert Sherwood's play 'Idiot's which won a Pulitzer Prize on Broadway in 1936, with; the Lun'ts in the leading Lerner has had little luck with his musical collaborators since his regular part- ner, Frederick Loewe, retired 20' years ago. with a score by Andre Pre-vin, was unsuccessful, while 1600 Pennsylvania with music by Leonard Bernstein, is described by its author as a 'Titanic' Idiot's Delight deals with the imminence of World War II, but Lerner has updated to the possible beginning of World War III.

I'm half way through and having a series of manias and depressions about he confides. 'I've always missed Loewe, though I speak to him on the telephone every week. I'm talking about collaboration with a well-known American Maestro Lovro AT- honie. jii Dubrovnik, the veteran iugusi.iv lyuuuum Lovro von Matacic keeps fit by swimming for one hdur daily from his home by the sea, In London, staying at the Savoy, he has to compromise--with, -a cold shower each morning. Now 82, he is proof of the remarkable longevity of con as.

ah j' ex-moll defending a stoql'pigeon's orphan from the Mafia-in a Runyon-with-l-eal-bullets- gangster yarn directed by John Cassavetes. THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (Ritz, Release, X): Gripping British crime thriller with a pungent script by Barrie Keefe. and Bob Hoskins in great form as the Little Caesar oira ia 1 nc 1V111IUIV lnrv (Release, A): Pedestrian Agatha Christie whodunnit, i Miss JVIarple (Angela Lansbury) investigates a screenland murder. F. W.

MURNAU SEASON (NFT): The small, fastidious oeuvre of the German master revived in glowing, newly ARTS ductors. Tonight, at the Festival Hall, he is conducting the PhiHiarmonra Orchestra and Chorus in a programme consisting of Bruckner's F. Minor- Mass and Dvorak's Te Deum, which will be broadcast on Radio 3. Although he was a frequent guest with the Phil-harmonia in. the 1950s, during the days of his friend, Walter Legge, the orchestra's founder, it was not until last November that Von Matacic conducted them again, in two highly successful concerts at the Festival Hall.

Bubbling with enthusiasm, he manages to combine an interview, with studying an orchestral score and deciding1 which Chinese -restaurant toT visitvin the evening. He is, he 'constantly in searclr of thhew I'm always looking-- ian black friend is menaced and then murdered by some South Carolina red-necks, and concludes with Ben stepping into his father's jackboots after he's been killetl in a (lying accident. The year is 1963, America is on the brink of Vietnam, but while there is more good humour in The Great Santini than Ordinary there is even less irony. The egotistical mother played by Maty Tyler Moore and the chauvinistic father impersonated by Robert Duvall wOuld have been regarded with equanimity by our more full-blooded Today, in the Westen. world at least, we expect people to be gentle, kind and considerate, and so we're constantly shocked, disappointed and embarrassed when confronted by the monstrous.

This thought was in part inspired by catching up at last with Abel Gance's 1927 silent masterpiece Napoleon in Kevin 1 w's lovingly restored five-hour version that is showing again at the Empire (today and next Sunday) with the composer of the new music, Carl Davis, conducting the Wren Orchestra. I hope that regional television comoan-ies will follow Thames TV's example and sponsor screenings of Napoleon around the country. This innovatory film is an overwhelmins experience, a great martial poem, a superbly contrived and con-fnllod personal vision f-bat challenees Griffith's Birth of a Nn'on and Yet we have such reservations now about the character if, 'an'eon and the idea of inipprial destiny that 'when 'the picture draws us into its emotional vorfx and sweeps -us along on the invasion of Italv i-e feel first exhilarated and then guiUv. Several people have mentioned to 'me that thev felt as if thev'd been caught up in the spirit of a Nuremberg Rallv. The more acceptable face of contemporary monstrous-ness occurs in Jeffrey Bloom's Blood Beach (Screen, TslinRton, AA), a canny enterprise mating a 1950s stvle Ouatermass horror flick with a 1970s group-jeopardy film.

There's a nice balance between the menacing and the commonplace in Bloom's presentation of the Los Anceles beach where some subterranean creature lurks to emasculate rapists and to suck dogs and air-hostesses beneath the sand, John Saxon as a sharp, socially conscious captain leads a convincine police force. The dialogue cleverly mixes the briskly vernacular, the unexpectedly abrasive and the generically cliched. We have the inevitable Maybe there's a perfectly logical explanation' and 'Are we looking for a person or a thing But Bloom lets the acerbic police captain round upon a right-wing council-woman for supporting California's tax-cutting Proposition Thirteen. Saxon also has, and delivers beautifully, die line, Just when it's safe to go back into the water, you can't get to CONTRARY to Tolstoy's oft-quoted dictum, Hollywood's unhappy families tend to be unhappy in much the same way, and the problems of the Ordinary People (Plaza, AA), so sensitively observed in Ro'bert Red-ford's directorial debut, will be easily diagnosed by those lay therapists who have been attending psychiatric evening-classes at their local Odeons these past 40 years. The camera pans across a high-school choir practising an a to Jocate handsome Conrad Jarrett Timothy Hutton), immediately identifying him as sensitive, set aside from his class-mates, very troubled.

His father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland), a quiet business-suit, makes desultory small-talk and Has that defeated look that goes with earning the fat salary needed to support the colonial-style Chicago suburban mansion they live in. Cat is a tax one of those vague professions that artists and intellectuals automatically assume to be soul-corrosive. All his wife, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), needs to do is bang the orarjge-juice glasses on the breakfast table in the neat, louvred-door kitchen establish that she's an uptight WASP housewife, a monster long on organisation, short on spontaneity and affection. She isn't even allowed flashbacks. All her available love has been expended on an older son.

Buck, who drowned in a boating accident, leaving Conrad fraught with euilt. Beth keeps Buck's room as a shrine, constantly popping up there when not obsessively pushing laundered napkins into elegant silver rings. Contrasted with the life-denying rigidities of the Jar-retts is a Jewish psychiatrist, Dr Berger (Judd Hirsch), to whom Conrad is sent after an attempted suicide. We cut from Dad in his short-sleeved pullover and crisply pressed trousers to Berger lounging in ms messy omce wearing a floppy, unbuttoned cardigan and crumpled corduroy slacks. Forget about how it looks, how does it feel he tells the lad, and later spells out the film's message, Maybe there's some connection between control and lack of feeling Beth is hostile towards Berger and her mother is genteelly anti-semitic.

But while Berger spars with the boy from session to session, we never have any doubts about his ability to unfreeze Conrad's emotions and to release him from a false sense of guilt. This is for the simple reason that we are as familiar with this kind of simplified case history with melodramatic trimmings as is the screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, who adapted the film from Judith Guest's novel. This is not to say that the movie does not deal in the coin of emotional truth or that the actors fail to perform plausibly. It is to suggest rather that we are denied the evidence to reach any different conclusions about the characters' pre- by the normally level-Ufheaded members of the company, but was describing the jneflrect of working with the -ropera's young Australian producer, David Freeman, a of theatrical gurus vlike Grotowski and Peter nBrook. Fi eeman, who directed a 'rsi-'l vn-s'n of T.Handel's Acis and by his Zurich-based rffpera Factory at tne Srudios last year, has rjieen taken on as an Associate Artist by ENO-and this is his ijst production for them.

It vvion't be seen at the London Coliseum until He his career in experimental theatre in Australia has worked with as different as Gotz Fiiedrich and Charles Maro-lyhz. He founded the Opera factory in Australia in 1973, relaunched it in Switzerland three years later. Freshfaced and looking younger than his 28 years. Freeman is keen to get lopera away from its traditional image: I'm not trying produce opera for opera bttffs or work- within the of current convention, i though I do feel very about doing opera Before leaving for the company's month-long visit to ittingham, the singers Tifegan their final rehearsals for Orfeo with exercises and improvisations, involving otions like anger and. session.

It's raneutic but there is a great risk attached because we don't know exactly how it will turn savs John Tomlinson, who sings Charon in the opera. It's like having a public disembowelling every comments the Orfeo, Anthony Rolfe Johnson. We Cinema ATLANTIC CITY (Curzon, AA) Louis Malle in the home town of Monopoly brilliantly manipulating ageing crook Burt Lancaster and other tfopeful players around the board. Not all survive to pass EL SALVADOR (ICA) Two polemical left-wing documen- fai-ies sub-titled 'The People WT11 Win and Portrait of a Liberated The latter, earlier this year, is ac-c a i by Gael Dohany's The Foxes's a -documentary about Peru-S-i'a'n Indians. GLORIA (Columbia, AA): gha Rowlands magnificent for: new- music to piayr'ana furtwangier, Karajan ana witoineite pimey.

nu never, finding it. Of. today's myself were young. began. Ballet-dancer in7recent years cbmposefsVil've conducted in little provincial theatres' has undertaken' die-demand-Penderecki and Lutosla'wski; operietta.ahd.'then: lih'g role so young.

Until now but the rest. An expres- slowly ascended to Wagner Bnnd has. -only been sive -Gallic shrug outside sarfd Beethoven." Nowadays seen in minor roles. Born in Jones (the Messenger, Plymouth, she began dancing at the age of three, attending both the junior and senior Royal Ballet Schools before joining the company in 1978. A slim, long-legged dancer, she' may turn out to be the romantic ballerina the company has been looking for.

Great Gorilla A GIANT alternative theatre festival is to be launched by the East End's Half Moon theatre next autumn. 'We are calling it the rwnia Festival it was to i hut then that was nreten- says the Half Moon artistic director, Robert Walker. 'It will be a big coming-together of alternative theatre at a time when it is under attack because of Government cuts. There will be 12 hours of events a day. from 10 to 25 October, so it should provide enough time and space for everyone who wants a A NEW SPIRIT IN PAINTING (Royal Academy): The show all the fuss was about, a mixture of the old established and the nearly new with emphasis on neo-German neo Expressionism (until li March).

Also at the RA until next Sunday Honore Daumier lithographs, paintings and sculpture, mostly from the Hammer collection; and Painting from Nature, a survey of the open-air tendency in oil sketching from Claude to Impressionism MICHAEL BUHLER (Maclean Gallery, 35 George Street, Wl): 'Lights in the paintings of and about UFOs, done with a deadpan, and strictlv non sci-fi. sense ot style. Until 20 March, DAVID BOMBERG (Anthony Street, Wl): Works from the collection of Lillian jsomoerg, ms wiuu, include spectacular examples of his early, angular manner and some of the superb later drawings based on apanisn landscape and underground bomb stores. Until 4 April. OUIlg SWail The Royal Ballet is taking a protective attitude towards the debut as OdetteOdile of its promising young ballerina, Bryony Brind, 20, in a matinee of Swan Lake on 18 April.

'It is obviottslv- a nerve- racking occasion and we are anxious not to push her into the a member of from twe ott; are well worth eeing. Last week. Gallery guide EDWARD HOPPER (Hay-ward Gallery): Scenes from quiet American life, in diners, by railroads, on sidewalks, steadily stoically depicted (until 29 March). The Fruit-Market Gallery, 29 Market Street, Edinburg has Edward Hopper The Formative Years, a selection of his illustrations, prints' and advertising designs; the mundane source material (until 4 April). JOSEPH CORNELL (White-' chapel): Boxes; showcases, collages, in which the great artist of U.topia Parkway, Long sorted out i his thoughts and dreams.

and fantasies. Some comic, seme simply beautiful, some panicky and disturbing. Until 12 April. struck -rpr-ims toV; the r' -rv5-. death California" ir: RAGING BULL (Classic Haymarket, 'AA') De Niro slugging his from middleweight contender to ov.e weight offender in Martin Scorsese's engrossing life of Italian American fighter Jake La Motta.

Theatre ASPECTS OF MAX WALL (Garrick) The doyen of British clowns going through his familiar but still amazing paces. THE BET LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary teenage son Ben the love he craves. (As Ben, Michael O'Keefe is competing with Tim Hutton for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor of 1980.) Duvall, himself an admiral's son, plays Colonel Bull Meachum as a straight version of the crazy, napalm-sniffing Colonel Kilgore of 'Apocalypse He's the last of the old-style larger-than-life flying aces that Tom Wolfe celebrates in 'The Real a boozy braggart who treats his gentle Southern wife (Blythe DannerV and four- kids with the same semi-comic Gung-Ho brutality he uses on his squadron. Ail in all he's the most loveable commanding officer to hit the screen since Philip Francis Queeg of the USS Caine was taken away in a strait-jacket. The initial observation of this war-lOving bully at home and on duty is grotesquely funny, as if Life with Father had been re-modelled as a vehicle for General Patton.

But then the film introduces a clumsy sub-plot, in which the son's Faulkner- stances in which incongruity counts for so much more than demonstrable or original meaning, Thek, Oppermann and the Laceys are hardly challenging 'our orthodox They are, instead, sweeping up after it, collecting the remains and dumping them where they can safely assume they'll make some impact. The latest New Contemporaries, at the ICA (it ends today), had twice as many entries as last year and strikes me as being that much more lively and promising than usual The event itself is more significant than the individual works involved, for the New Contemporaries is important as a debut occasion. It's one of the few chances art students get of sizing themselves up in what are, in effect, competitive, semi-professional conditions. This time it was planned to give every entrant a look-in by setting up a slide-show of works that failed to get included in the exhibition proper. That palliative Farewell to the crumpled Observers cracy that takes us on the road to he says.

IPC rOUrLII, da III ail liu optimist, is full of hope for our spiritual survival. I have a large string section, two solo pianos and 11 percussion instruments. No woodwind, no brass. The public and orchestras it, but the critics. More -Gallic sign-language.

Young conductors', today, are't-hrnwnintb the deep-end too quickly. (Drury Lane) Bouncy, and -msii more trushvoKth'ySdhTexa than on whorehouses. THE CARETAKER (Lyttel-ton) Good reviyal of Harold Pinter's best play, the one accredited" classic of the' Sixties. Last performances by this cast, headed by Warren Mitchell. RICHARD II (Young Vic) A production populated by eccentric Russians who persist in referring to their homeland as this A.

lucid central performance by Nickolas Grace. SUBURBAN STRAINS (Roundhouse) Functioning as author-director-lyricist, FULHAM ROAD BAYSWATER programme times '00 0200 r.curs.' the Continuous Creation show at the Serpentine Gallery. kids no one what counts is making it, preferably to the ICA Main' Gallery. Naturally derivations obtrude, quotes from all quarters, cribbings passed off as homages, respects paid and ideas lifted, as of right. Picasso is still far and away the most potent source.

Trends to note include the continuina fad for Sixties trash graphics, tarted up and guaranteed to raise revivalist smiles and winces. In sculpture there's the cult of landmass and boulder concretions, made of plaster usually, and lumber, in lieu of more formidable, costly and less readily obtainable materials. Gary Power and Stephen Parker stand out among the sculptors. In painting the influence of Ken Kin" (one of the selectors) would appear to be in the ascendant, given- the number of symbolic menages in grassy- settings to be seen. Martin Eev, Paul Griffin and.

in particular, Maeeie James have produced work that would look well in any context. flowers, nature notes. Zodiacal signs, scarecrows, eggshells, a horse-collar, wor-zels studded with cowie shells, straw and sacking. Where there's muck there's as Walter Gabriel's old granny probably used to say. All this would be quite acceptable as a typical wholehearted Lacey attempt at bringing a taste and a whiff of immemorial rural life to trim Kensington Gardens, were it left at that.

But there's this notice as you go in: Please Do Not Touch the That's enough to put the mockers on the whole shooting match, as Phil Archer would say. No need to take any notice of Phil when he sees red; even so he'd have a point. For with those words the informality turns arty, the dyed-in-the-wool sincerity congeals into a blithely affirmative rhythm method. Mistletoe and goose-, feathers, flints and birds'-nests, are transformed from honest-to-goodness pickings into pretentious exhibits. By simply giving each installation the status of an by setting up circum WILLIAM FEAVER oh THIS time last week Paul Thau's contribution to Continuous Creation at the Serpentine had hardly begun.

There; on an indoor sandbank, was a raft laden with spinning' tops and' alarm clocks and a conning-tower version of Tallin's proposed 'Monument to, the Third International' (an ultra-revisionist model, it being clad in Financial Times pink pages) set about with footprints and votive candles. Overhead were newspaper clouds (crumpled Observers) and a stuffed gull. By Tuesday things had changed. Alarm clocks were out. The clouds too were scrapped and the seagull hit the deck.

In their place candles were hoisted and a giant Financial Times toadstool sprang up. But it was still early days. As we go to press Thek's Creation continues. He and his assistants are to carry on assembling further jetsam (a bath, a pram, a pump, ropes, a beach umbrella) until, at end of the month, the exhibition comes to a close. The live element not so much performance as input, surveillance and maintenance work is vital to 'Continuous Five artists are involved 1 Thek, Anna Oppermann, Robert Filliou and the Bruce Lacey-Jill Bruce duo.

In various ways they 'make and b. ing together objects which represent physically and "symbolically a sensibility that has been hidden or corrupted by our orthodox So says the exhibition's Michael Comp-ton of the Tate. The un-orthodoxy he implies is, with one exception (the sparse but' pithy arrangements made by Robert Filliou), a matter Of on the effects, seeking enlightenment "through clutter. The main Filliou exhibit, a long scroll of canvas marked with what can be said to be "on-going, snow? balling statements of intent, didn't arrive on time. So the visitor is encouraged instead to whistle a birdsong into a tape recorder, thereby adding a few bars to Filliou's singalong assault on.

homo-avian language barriers, Pidgin pigeon, etc. Anna Oppermann, from Hamburg, is a retentive type. She works from the corner of a room outwards, starting with a single, kernel object and adding and augmenting and documenting and recapping and dilating by degrees. What happens is that litters of data Polaroids of previous stages of the accumulative process, blown-up photographs of same, notes in more than one language, datelines, stocktakings fill tabletops, spread along the walls and advance across the floor. There are three of these 'ensembles' as she calls them at the Serpentine.

One, tinted red, is entitled 'The Economic Another, Problems of has black accents. A slit window and a skylight interrupt the clustering, amassed paperwork of this particular burdened train of thought. There are no other hints of exterior life, of the natural world. In Opper-mann's cells everything is equally valued; nothing can be expunged. It's sheer brainstorm, blizzarding, proliferating, on and on.

The mind stutters. With the Laceys we are into egg-laying, milk-yields, mulch and tilth and Jill Bruce's menstrua cycle. Indeed ail ij cyclical as they see it. Climb the steps of the viewing platform at one end of their gallery and you can see spread below you a long wood and oddment obstacle their Serpentine Cycle. It's truism-time down on the smallholding.

Several varieties of turd and dropping ('the most precious commodity on the farm ') are on show. Festooned on the rustic centrepiece are lish (in polythene bags), dried On Sunday MARCH 22nd The Observer will be publishing a special feature on CONFERENCES EXHIBmOjVISjji Donald Suthetland Mary Tyler Moore Judd Hirsch Hutton Music Adapted by Marvin Hamlisch Upon the Novel by Judith Guest Screenplay by Alvin Sargent Produced by Ronald L.Schwary Directed by Robert Redford A Paramount Picturei1 Distributed by Cinema International Corporation1 'copyright MCMLXXX by Patannxin! Corporation. A' najiw. Read the Fontana paperback This will appear under the banner you see above and will include lively editorial covering important areas of the subject. The feature is being designed to provide a comprehensive guide to all aspects of Conference and Exhibition organisation.

CLASSIC OXFORD STREET Tel: 01-248 8840 TO ADVERTISE: NOW For cietsiii of all -Tifdita 01 OFF PICCADILLY CWCUS Separate proframmesrtaiiv 1.OO1.T0 5 00S.t0 tilt she Fr Sal. 11 15 ni..

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