The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 40

40 OBSERVER SUNDAY 18 DECEMBER 1988 SUE ABLER Sundowners CERTAIN real-life incidents and coincidences concerning the famous are so intrinsically inter esting or bizarre that planted in i amm I 'Sunset' and 'Just Ask for Diamond' PHILIP FRENCH a few inches oi creative peat and watered with a little imagination they cannot fail to grab an audience's attention. The Marquis de Sade directing a cast of fellow lunatic asylum inmates in a play about Marat, for example; James Joyce associated with a produc No chance of the Turner prize next yean Glynn Williams with his 'Stone Bridge', 'caught at the moment of maximum exertion doing Bodybuilders us bright 13-year-old brother Nick (Colin Dale), who does everything for the older lad from interpreting clues to explaining the plot of 'Farewell My Lovely. The pair go around London at i Christmas in pursuit of the man or woman who murdered the client who (eft them a mysteri- ous package containing a box of Maltesers (the film is based on Anthony Horowitz's children's novel 'The Falcon's Malteser'). Along the way they visit the Casablanca Club and stationery shop, and meet the Fat Man, Johnny Naples, the faded torch singer Lauren Bacardi (Susannah York) and the femme fatak Brenda Falkenberg (Patricia Hodge). Such heavy allusions fly over the beads of children and thud down at the feet of adults, and generally this inoffensive little picture falls between bar-stool and high- -chair.

The two junior leads are under-directed by Bayly and the adults mostly overact, the excep- -tions being Ms York and Ms 1 Hodge who could both slip into something noir without changing 1 their acts. The latest contribution to Hollywood's tired role-reversal cycle, Like Father Like Soa (Odeon, Marble Arch, PG) involves a widowed workaholic Los Angeles surgeon (Dudley Moore) accidentally imbibing an Indian brain-transplant seruia and exchanging identities with his fun-loving 16-year-old son. The clever twist is to have a well developed mature teenager swap bodies with a diminutive childlike adult. Moore is in his element as a petulant winsome infant, though much less convincing when impersonating a solemn doctor at a hospital will the motto 'no insurance, ro admission'. When his sett advances the revolutionary idat that the poor deserve the sane medical attention as the rich, the movie avoids confronting ths heresy by driving full speed int a swamp of sentimentality.

In Prisoner of Rio (Metro, IS), an idiotic Swiss-produced thriller directed by Lech Majewski, a vengeful Scotland Yard inspector (Steven kidnaps lovable family man, Ronnie Biggs (Paul Freemanjij lii and attempts to sneak him out Rio on a British warship, return-? ing no doubt from the Falkland's! This incoherent, implausible pic-. ture is co-scripted by Biggs him self and suggests that he still hai a knack for extracting big bucks I from the coffers of the unwary. adventure to what would otherwise be just a mixed batch. What Cragg has going for him, besides his Turner Prize, is openness to suggestion and tactical agility. Piece by piece, never exactly repeating himself, he picks his way.

Cragg sans fron-tieres proves himself well prepared for 1992. You can't say that of Glynn Williams, whose work at the Bernard Jacobson gallery won't improve his chances of getting the Turner Prize next year. Instead of concerning himself as to whether his sculpture is sufficiently MiUbank-compatible, Williams simply chips away. thriller, not a spoof. Plot often takes second place to splendid set-pieces, some of them elegant padding, yet there are few longueurs, and when I read that scenes in a radio station and at Charleston contest have been cut I could have wished the picture longer.

Despite the obvious surface resemblance, the setting isn't the innocent Hollywood of 'Hearts of the West' and 'Singin' in the Rain'. Beneath the celluloid glamour and the art deco glitter there is appalling corruption and exploitation of the sort Edwards maliciously observed in 'S. O. his rancid portrait of the present-day movie colony. But at the centre of a well cast, well acted movie is a remarkable performance by James Garner, who 20 years ago played Earp in John Sturges's 'Hour of the Gun'.

Aged 80, in the last year of his life, still handsome but now walking with the uneasy gait of the elderly, this Earp is a witty laconic fellow of probity and massive dignity, yet no plaster saint. In the famous distinction made by David Riesman in "The Lonely Crowd', he belongs to the dying breed of 'inner-directed' men, who answer to personal moral imperatives and principles, as opposed to the new 'other-directed' types, as represented by the glamorous show-off Tom Mix, who look outside for their values and constantly seek the approbation of contemporaries. At the end Earp travels by train into the sunset as Mix rides alongside, performing tricks on his horse Tony. A major contribution to 'Sunset' is the glowing widescreen photography by the British cine-matographer Anthony Richmond, and Billy Williams, another British cameraman much in demand in America, gives a polished professional look to the somewhat amateurish English movie Just Ask for Diamond (Cannon, Haymarket, U), directed by Stephen Bayly, the American film-maker responsible for the Ealingesque Welsh comedy 'Coming Up Roses'. This is a laboured private-eye spoof about the dim Camden Town sleuth Tim Diamond (Dursley McLinden) and his THERE'S one of each in Tony Cragg's display at the Lisson gallery: a cast, a carving, a cast-cum-accretion, a set of moulds or patterns, a bout of and a redeployed debris.

Six pieces in six different materials: stone, wood, metal, plaster, expanded polystyrene and foam rubber. It's Cragg's flexible response strategy. He lays on a giant laboratory basin in bronze, bent in the process of making it Moore-like in double-bottomed majesty. He provides coffered plywood reinforcements, one of diem shaped like a sarcophagus, another like the top of a leaning Chrysler Building. He poses slabs of granite cladding, imitation drainpipes and little perforations.

All of them look reasonably straightforward, fundamental even. Sure as eggs is eggs. And, like recent eggs, at least four out of the six excite unease. tion oi me importance of Being Ernest' in Zurich when Tristan Tzara and Lenin were also there; or the town-taming frontier marshal Wyatt Earp meeting in his twilight days Hollywood's leading silent Western star, Tom Mix which is the point of departure for Blake Edwards's Sunset (Cannon, Haymarket, 15). In his best movie for years, Blake Edwards takes the known fact of Earp's friendship with the Gower Gulch Cowboys (the name given to the band of Western performers who hung out on the corner of Sunset and Gower) and mixes it with a modest fictional plot and a good deal of lurid Hollywood scandal of the sort you discover from looking back in Kenneth Anger.

In a film largely devoid of Edwards's recent bad taste, the chief gross touch is to make his villain, a sadistic studio boss called Alfie Alperin (Malcolm McDowell), a cross between Harry Conn and Charlie Chaplin. The year is 1929 and the monstrous Alfie compels his contract star, the flamboyant Tom Mix (Bruce to make his talking-picture debut as Wyatt Earp ('I didn't become numero una by being someone the actor whines) and for a publicity stunt brings in the former marshal of Tombstone (James Gamer) as technical adviser. It transpires that Alfie's abused wife (Patricia Hodge) is an old flame of Earp's from Denver, and she persuades him to look into a blackmail threat to her son. But no sooner has the ex-lawman started his investigation than the boy is accused of murdering the madame of Hollywood's most prestigious brothel, a fancy joint where all the whores are parodic look-alikes of movie stars. So down those mean streets Earp must go, accompanied by his new sidekick, and threatened every inch of the way by the industry's front office, crooked Los Angeles cops and the underworld.

The picture is a light romantic melodrama with lots of jokes about the movie business, though it's a genuine comedy- rodents, or warehouses of confiscated elephant tusks, can be rapidly developed into themes and variations. One of his more predictable ploys is to reverse roles so the container becomes the contents and unexpected size tweaks one's perception: the eye-bath so dilated you can insert your head; thought-transference with mangel-wurzels. Each of the Lisson exhibits has its quirk and its warning note. On both sculptural and ecological grounds Cragg runs true to form, consolidating his position (leading sculptor in the EC), adding the conceptuaKst's taste for hard thinking to a model-maker's enthusiasm for facsimile. He brings a sense of order to lumpen components, of They are designed to shake one's confidence.

A sculptor based in Wuppertal, Cragg alerts us to bleak urban development, industrial spillage, and Rhine (or North Sea) pollution. The granite slabs boxing one another are a sort of monument to neo-Bas-tille architecture. The worn bits of expanded polystyrene, collected from some dirty water's edge, are evidence of non-biode-gradability beached on the floor. The outsize dummy bottle, fashioned from fresh polystyrene and cast among them, feeds Green Party fears about unsuitable undrinkables. Such promptings lead to supplementary questions.

Why the solid granite bottle in the architectonic piece? A gift for Cragg and Williams WILLIAM FEAVER Archimedes? why turn round and adopt traditional materials? Much of the work seems to be about the use of misgivings for sculptural effect. The new combinations are Cragg's means of expediting his notions. He is now so well established that he can order whatever enlargements or distortions he wants in whatever material he chooses. Loaded images that occur to him, the environmental artificiality of a vivarium, fitted with playground equipment for Nine pieces, mostly in Hopton Wood stone, rest uneasily on Jacobson's dodgem-style metal flooring. This unsuitability is their prime virtue.

They look so old-fashioned. They could almost have been done by Frank Dobson the Twenties, or even by Eric Gul unbuttoned yet circumspect mood. Williams carves direct, as he I IMS 4) WagS I has done for more than 10 years, ever since a change of faith took him away from novelty materials and would-be-new constructivism. His belief in figure sculp ture restricts him, for he feels obliged to oenbrm the tradi tional 'timeless' act of liberating body from stone. His figures have strengths where in AND IDE BEST MXJ ICAL BEST ACTOR IN A MUSICAL NICHOLAS GRACE! BEST ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL PATRICIA ROUTLEDGE! DESIGNER OF THE YEAR RICHARD HUDSON! the past they tended to oe rawer PC Plod.

'Long Stone Couple' is impressive; so is the feat he calk 'Stone Bridge', it turns out to oe Man the bodybuilder caught at the moment or maximum exer tion, doing his press-ups. mm Catch with both hands mm mm mm RICHARD MILDENHALL 00 a "wmmmm ofiivffi 'Orpheus Descending' and 'The Bells' KATE KELLAWAY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS'S Orpheus Descending (Haymarket) burns like a fire in which both death and passion are consumed. A beautiful young man arrives at a dry goods store in a small southern town and warns: 'I can burn down a woman any two-footed 'Niggers' are hunted by gangs with blue-jet blowtorches. A 'wop' has been burnt alive in a winegarden. Tennessee Williams's men and women are marked by life and the effect of the language is itself branding: words are repeated until they scorch.

In Peter Hall's production, while the fire burns within, rain falls outside. It shines on the window of the confectionery store and part of the word Hamburger, lit up in neon, sparkles through it. Alison Chitty's design has followed Williams's directions almost to the letter. The lights within are dim but the talk electric when Lady meets a man she will find sweeter than the confectionery she sells. As Lady, Vanessa Red Art of the osteopath: Jean-Marc Barr with Vanessa Redgrave.

(Dhobi Oparei) enters like a black snowman, shakes the snow off his coat, hits the bottle and 1 laughs. Laughter is employed, 1 throughout, as a disguise for fear, and rattles on the nerves. The virtue of the evening is its unity of mood: Ben Ormi-rod's pure icy searchlights sedc out Mathias attended by Gavin Bryars's dark, frightening muse; both are complemented by Brim Vahey's exquisite set: a cod-black room with graceful sah windows behind which rages a blizzard. Mathias's guilt is played as a fever: he embraces his enchasing daughter (Susannah Doye) with unholy fervour, as if sje were his lost innocence. But in spite of his admirable energy it's hard to sustain interest in hs conscience when for two intervals and most of three acts ve have known about his crime.

Croydon Warehouse bjs, transformed itself for Christmts, into a cheerful Tudor tavern which Roister Doister, Nicholis Udall's sixteenth-century hen, cavorts. Derek Crewe plays hin as a depressive cherry-cheefed blob, intent on ravishing Chrs-1 tian distance (Christina Mtt-thews). She's a wit, not quitein her first youth. Tibet Talkapice (Joanna Brookes) is a bawd tut not bored and Matthew Merjy-greek (Simon Pearsall) has: a similarly mischievous chain. Lust makes this world go roujd.

Vince Foxall has had fun updoing 'Roister Doister', strippingjt of its original rhyming form alii redecorating it with references kissograms, pantaloon emporiv urns in Dalston, lapsang tea and silly verbs 'Beeneth there doneth that'. The thought of this romp fil-" led my heart with dread but having beeneth there, the merry cast directed by Ted Craig made me glad I'd doneth that. terrible violence that shakes the watcher to the roots. It conveys with particular force Tennessee Williams's obsession with life as corruption and death as purification. 'Orpheus Descending' is scattered with 1 bones as symbols Of this: the magic bone that the old negro brandishes, the frail bone of Carol's wrist, the bones in Lady's neck which Val massages with the art of an osteopath.

Carol's words serve as an epitaph to the evening: 'Wild things leave white bones behind At the Leicester Haymarket Studio The Bells do not jingle for Christmas, they jangle. There is a sleigh but, more importantly, a slaying in Leopold Lewis's Victorian melodrama which has been revived with skill by Simon Usher and David O'Shea. Mathias (David Gant) has murdered a Polish Jew. He is reminded of the crime by bells that keep chiming in his head. The evening gets off to an enjoyable start when Hans her perfectly with his peculiar gravity and beauty.

He also has exactly the right quality of withdrawal and self-absorption. He holds his guitar as if it were a lover and announces, aged 30, that he is no longer wild. Peter Hall's production is true to the spirit of a work which is at once wild and trapped. Val seems free but believes that we are all in 'solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins'. Lady's husband Jabe (Paul Freeman) is a sick yellow predator, but disabled by sickness.

Carol Cutrere (Julie Covington) shows off in order to live but in her crushed shoes, half out of her coat, she is the glittering white-faced prey. 'What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you with both your hands until your fingers are she says. 'Orpheus Descending' is about trying to catch whatever comes near you with both hands until violence breaks you. This is an evening of grave changes magically from the extinguished middle-aged wife of a dying husband to a young woman, laughing a telltale laugh, wearing blue gloves that turn her arms into stems and a dress out of which she seems to flower. She can show how humiliation is akin to mourning; she can pitch a complaint so that it sounds like a compliment.

Her mood changes as simply as the store sign from closed to open. Val Jean-Marc Barr) answers VANESSA FORD PRODUCTIONS In uioclrtion with ALDERSQATE PRODUCTIONS. THEATRE ROYAL PRESENTATIONS and WESTMINSTER PRODUCTIONS praswtt vs. TWO NARNUN PLAYS FROM THE BOOKS Oil rjy byC.S. Lewis ADAPTED BY Glyn Robbins i T- Hmi ilfclK i -I 'f I 1i Mb -I (1 "VtUlmiW Sills al rfH( HM" tt if dirt tanMOMoi tan liiKs ik 1 THE fro GICI ware 1 AND TfHII(0 MEPHEV NOV 29 -JAN 7 4 JAN 11 -FEB.