The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 73

Arts 1 1 SUNDAY 23 JANUARY 1994 Philip French Murders and merry mayhem THERE are several ways for a movie that falls some way short of greatness to achieve a position of permanent importance in cinematic history. One is to saved by a kindly US marine sergeant. He takes her home to California where he succumbs to booze, debt, and guilt over his war crimes, first battering her, then blowing his brains out. Fortunately Le Ly's simplistic Buddhism (rather like Tina Turner's in What's Love Got To Do With It?) helps her to survive and become a prosperous restaurateur. The final nail in the film's coffin is Stone's decision to render the narration and much of the dialogue in that flowery Hollywood-Oriental style handed down from Charlie Chan mysteries and The Good Earth, where the buck should have stopped.

The best credit titles of the past couple of years are to be found in Man's Best Friend (15, MGM Panton St), an elegant montage of details from a dozen or more paintings of dogs, ranging from Velazquez's 'Las Meninas' via Stubbs and Land-seer to Hopper's 'Cape Cod Evening'. What they introduce is a commonplace horror flick centering on a lethal mastiff given the DNA of a leopard, a snake and a chameleon by a looney bio-engineer, and accidentally unleashed in a Los Angeles suburb. The director is John Lafia, creator of Chucky, the demonic doll in Child's Play. The movie has one great line, spoken to the cops by the mad scientist (Hollywood's creepiest current heavy, Lance Henriksen): 'How about my dog? Any Defence counsellor Colin Firth with Lysette Anthony in 'The Hour of the Pig' farmer in an idyllic village in central Vietnam. The result is a terrible disappointment.

This is Mother Courage, re-written in the manner of a cautionary Victorian novel and directed in Stone's battering-ram style. Le Ly's life is one damnable thing after another. Her village is burnt by the French and turned into a strategic hamlet by the Americans, the communists take away her brothers, she is tortured by the South Vietnamese for helping the enemy, then raped by the Viet Cong as a traitor. Seduced and abandoned by a wealthy Saigon merchant, she is forced to support her child by black market sales of cigarettes and marijuana. Her sister becomes a whore and Le Ly herself is 4 GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATIONS including BEST PICTURE and BEST DIRECTOR all civilised constraints are put aside for a climactic blood-letting of a primitive, tribal kind.

This isn't the Tombstone of John Ford, it is the cruel world of Leone, Peckinpah and Eastwood. The week's film with a unique quality is the rough-edged, engaging Bhaji on the Beach (15, MGM Tottenham Court Rd), the first British film to be directed and scripted by Indian women, respectively Gurinder Chadra and Meera Syal. It is a useful contribution to the growing body of films about the Indian experience in this country and it belongs to a European genre that is our answer to the Road Movie the Charabanc Flick or Day Out Film that dates back to such prewar pictures as Bank Holiday. In Bhaji on the Beach three generations of Indian women make a day trip from Birmingham to see the Blackpool illuminations in a mini-bus driven by a feminist community worker, and Syal and Chadra keep their contrasted, if somewhat predictable stories bobbing along nicely. The feeling of an occasion both commonplace British and exotically oriental is cleverly underlined by the Punjabi version of Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday on the bus trip north.

Blackpool is observed with an unpatronising eye ('It's just like Bombay' someone says of the Golden Mile) All in all, it's a warm, refreshing comedy. In writer-director Leslie Megahey's feature debut, The Hour of the Pig (15, Warner), the earnest, idealistic lawyer, Richard Courteois (Colin Firth), leaves medieval Paris in the 15th Century to become public defender in a superstitious, xenophobic corner of rural France where the local population look as if they've stepped out of paintings by Durer and Brueghel. His first major case involves a woman (Harriet Walter) accused of witchcraft. In his second, he is called on to defend a pig (belonging to alien gypsies) accused of murdering the son of outcast Jews. This rational Renaissance man knows both charges to be absurd, and so too does the local priest (Ian Holm), who supports him in private but goes along with the system in public.

One is reminded of the film review by Graham Greene that was based on his hearing Bogart say 'it's feudal'; he actually said 'it's futile'. There are strong echoes of Umberto Eco as Courteois attempts to understand the mentality of the community and penetrate the conspiracy that prevents him bringing the real culprits to justice. And Megahey brings to bear on this intriguing cross between Perry Mason and Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages the same wit, intelligence and taste that inform his features and documentaries for the BBC. A script neither archaically fustian nor blatantly anachronistic, a firm sense of place and a strong British cast help give the picture conviction. It isn't quite in the class of The Seventh Seal, but it compares well at the intellectual, if not the visual level with Franklin Schaffner's The War Lord.

In Platoon, Oliver Stone dealt with men in battle and in Born on the Fourth of July with the crippled hero back in an America which rejected its troubled veterans. In what he regards as the concluding film in a trilogy, Heaven and Earth (15, Warner), Stone focuses on the experience of the native Vietnamese. His ambitious movie covers some 40 years in the life of Le Ly (played by the pretty, rather limited Hiep Thy Le), daughter of a have some unique quality, another is to make an original contribution to a major genre, a third, to be an interesting addition to an important director's ouevre. There is a film in each of these categories this week. The addition to an important body of work is Woody Allen's The Manhattan Murder Mystery (PG, Odeon Haymarket), a delightful souffle of a film that re-unites Allen and Diane Keaton.

They play Larry and Carol Linton, a New York publisher and his wife, who become convinced that their neighbour has murdered his spouse. The pair are movie burls, the suspect is the owner of a repertory cinema, and the picture is about the movies. As wise-cracking amateur sleuths, Larry and Carol resemble Nick and Nora Charles. But like James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window, they are projecting the tensions of their stagnant- marriage neighbours whose dreary lives suggest what their own might be in late middle-age. Into the chase are drawn a footloose novelist (Anjelica Huston), to whom Larry is attracted, and a recently divorced playwright (Alan Alda), who's in love with Carol.

In! the film's climax life imitates Welles's Lady From Shanghai. Allen has never worked with a lighter touch. Setting aside the influence of Ingmar Bergman, he pays tribute to his other idol, Bob Hope. Indeed the film begins with the Liptons being lured into the neighbours' flat for coffee when Larry had been hoping to catch a Bob Hope film on TV. Stylistically, however, the movie steers clear of pastiche, and a characteristic touch is to have the suspense sequences accompanied by percussive jazz records of the 1 940s by Benny Goodman, Bob Crosby and Lionel Hampton.

The significant addition to a movie genre is George P. Cosmatos's Tombstone (15, Odeon West End), a reworking for the 1990s of the story of Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer), Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) and the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Kevin Jarre's script attempts to comprehend the moral complexity of frontier life and its legendary figures without either losing the essential romance or falling into a glib cynicism. Thanks to the cinematographer William Fraker, (his own 1970 Monte Walsh is among the best realistic Westerns) and the production designer Catherine Hardwicke, Tombstone is a strikingly handsome movie. It brings to mind Missouri Breaks, which also contrasted two different kinds of American violence -that which allies itself with so-called progressive, respectable society and that which opposes it.

In Tombstone the debonair Earps in their fancy city clothes have become opportunistic townees. Gamblers and entrepreneurs, they are prepared when the need arises to enforce the law on behalf of a corrupt society. Opposing them are the raffish thieves and rustlers known as The Cowboys who live outside town. At best the Earps are defending the bad against the worse. Finally when the gloves are off and the time of reckoning comes, A VISUAL A PACKED TREASURE-HOUSE OF SENSUAL AND CEREBRAL PLEASURES! Paul Carol! MAGAZINE "A SUMPTUOUS Alexander Walker EVENING STANDARD ELLE "Ecstasy from scene one delicately poignant, greedily sensuous revel in romantic Angle ErriscENiriRE "A THRILLINGLY DIRECTED AND ACTED SCORSESE SWEEPS US AWAY ON WAVES OF DIZZYING EROTICISM AND RAPTUROUS Peler Travels ROLLING STONE "All the film's performances are superb, but pfeiffer is that rare thing of sparkling Bob Strauss LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS Daniel Day-Lewis Michelle Pfeiffer Winona Ryder A MARTIN SCORSESE PICTURE TrMGE GPlNNOCENCE COLUMBIA PICTURES to a CAPPADE FINA w.

a MARTIN SCORSESE DANIEL DAY-LEWIS MICHELLE PFEIFFER WINONA RYDER THE AGE OF INNOCENCES ELMER BERNSTEINteGABRIELLA PESCUCCUTHELViA SCH00NMAKER DANTE FERRETTI MICHAEL BALLHAUS.A.S.C. WHARTON JAY COCKS MARTIN SCORSESE Ui, UNA MAKlh SCORSESE RREiSED BYCOLUMBU nflSm FILMS fK FT; EXCLUSIVE PRESENTATION STARTS FRIDAY LEICESTER-SQUARE JANUARY 28th a i 1 11 JiCJ ADVANCE BOX OFFICE NOW OPEN.