The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 25

OBSERVER REVIEW 25 SUNDAY 25 OCTOBER 1987 The cttiierni Updike an down hill Modern German drawings i TIM HILTON TO 'The Witches of 'Made in Heaven' Spring 1988 16th Opera Subscriotion LONDON is fortunate to have the Goethe Institute (50, Prince's Gate, SW7 open from noon until 8 p.m.), whose present show, The Art of German Drawing, from Menzel to Corinth, comes from the Kunsthalle in Bremen. Here are 60 carefully selected drawings they are not necessarily of the highest quality, but they nearly ail of them suggest much larger perspectives of North European culture. They belong to the years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries though there is a Menzel here from 1847 and a Barlach of 1926. The show therefore concentrates on the tendencies of emergent German modernism. These were various, and mixed.

There may have been political unity (of a sort) in Germany under the Prussian monarchy, but no country had a more complex entry to modern art. Anne Rover's sage preface to the catalogue speaks of late Romanticism, Realism, Idealism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Jugenstil, German Impressionism, ot early and it is true that all these ways of working are to be found in the show. But none the less there is a unity here, and one has the impression of a gathering force of art there was a richness of tradition in Germany for modernism to call upon, had the worst not happened. The feeling of something lost or half-born is reinforced by the fact that so many of the drawings relate to paintings not in the exhibition. Yet, curiously, in only one instance does one wish to call for the painting.

That is in Hans von Riff savines and a flexible schemes tK for NEW PRODUCTIONS of fully-clothed soldier on a giant Union Jack as a' state of the nation image. You don't have to be a Pollyanna Thatcherite to find 'The Last of England inadequate, and no dottier than the director's own Jarman figures in the movie like Prospero contemplating Britain from his cell overlooking Charing Cross Road, and he ought to ask himself this question Is there nothing to be said for a country where (a) he can find backing for this picture, (b) something so private and tendentious can be presented commercially in a cinema bearing the name of our future king, and (c) a film that a few years back would have had the exhibitor arrested can now be shown with impunity (while a mere 22 years ago you could have been gaoled for doing in private what people in the film's homo-erotic scenes so vividly simulate) The Comic Strip's latest home movie, Eat the Rich (Cannon, Haymarket 18), takes a similarly wild swipe at present-day Britain. An MI5 chief (Ronald Allen) in the pay of the Kremlin plots to get rid of a cockney fascist Home Secretary (the splendidly vulgar Nosher Powell) by encouraging a band of anarchists led by an androgynous black waiter (the drag artist Lamar Pellay) to take over a smart restaurant, murder the yuppie patrons and serve them up (along with the missing prime minister) for dinner Such pop luminaries as Paul McCartney and Bill Wyman have walk-on parts and the sexual revolutionary Fiona Richmond has been brought out of retirement to play a prostitute-turned-anarchist, and they're no more unfunny than the professional comics. A sort of moronic innocence robs the film of offence without making it endearing. A desperate re-working of Bringing Up Who's That Girl (Warner, 15) unleashes Madonna (kookie parolled murderess out to clear her name) and a fierce Amazonian jungle cat onto Griffin Dunne (bespectacled Manhattan lawyer about to marry the boss's daughter).

Poor timing, overacting and weak plotting combine to stifle such laughter as threatens to erupt. The movie seeks for a touch of class by billing its English guest star as Sir John Mills. Jack Nicholson: 'A dime-store demon with a talent to BILLY BUDD THE MAGIC FLUTE TANNHAUSER THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN and REVIVALS of MADAM BUTTERFLY ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD THE MAKROPULOS CASE COS! FAN TUTTE XERXES dereliction, and some apocalyptic fictional sequences of drug addicts and punks on waste lots, and refugees and non-conformists being tormented by machine-gun-toting terrorists and shock troops in ski-masks. Jarman has a great feeling for the medium. But the visual quality of this initially infuriating, ultimately mind-freezing picture is worth more than the numb of its parts.

This is an outpouring of bile so extreme that by comparison John Osborne's I Hate You England diatribes appear calm and carefully argued. Alternating between the impenetrably obscure and the obvious, the picture presents a view of Britain as a country with a complacent, idyllic past, a ghastly present, and a nightmarish future. Jarman yokes a raving Hitler Pomp and Circumstance on the soundtrack, quotes from Ginsberg's How and Eliot's Wasteland in his portentous commentary, and offers a scene of a naked, vodka-swigging punk making love to. a away on a wave of sentimental whimsy including the attractive leading couple, a chain-smoking heavenly fixer, a seductive female devil called Lucie (played by an uncredited Ellen Barkin), and an angelic impresario running the Halo record label. The picture begins, incidentally, with Mike and his parents watching the final moments of Hitchcock's presumably on its first release after the war, and thus seeing a romantic rescue from the jaws of death involving two Hollywood angels of the 1940s Claude Rains (' Here Comes Mr Jordan ') and Cary Grant ('The Bishop's Wife ').

The most striking aspect of Derek Jarman's poetic essay The Last of England (Prince Charles, 18) is its rich visual texture. The film skilfully interweaves blown-up Super-8 film, video, old family home-movies taken by his RAF officer father and grandfather, newsreels of street riots, new documentary footage of present Booking opens November 2 by post only rnone ui-ojo ioto FREQUENTLY optioned though rarely filmed, John Updike's fiction has been poorly served by the movies. Neither the coarse film of Rabbit Run nor the sensitive version of his Maples Family stories, Too Far to Go has reached our screens. Now Hollywood has taken Updike down-market by turning his scintillating novel The Witches of Eastwick (Screen on the Green, 18) into a simple horror film. The novel is set in 1970 with the Vietnam War at its height, the new feminism just getting going and permissiveness chipping away at the traditional values of a charmingly evoked New England coastal town, founded in the seventeenth century when local puritans were burning witches.

Such matters as female identity, liberation, the power of the will, and the immanence of evil are approached with delicacy, humour and insight. Little of this remains except the idyllic setting. Directed by the Australian George Miller of Mad Max fame, the movie has thrown out the literary bathwater and found Rosemary's baby at the bottom of the tub. The eponymous 'witches' are the divorced music teacher Jane (Susan Sarandon), the widowed sculptress Alexandra (Cher) and the deserted mother-of-six Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer), who in their sex-starved loneliness draw on their needs. He immediately arrives in a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes as the new owner of a nearby mansion.

He's Daryl Van Home, no orthodox Prince of Darkness, 'just your average horny little devil he says, and he's played by Jack Nicholson as a heightened version of his mad husband in The Shining An appalling vulgarian in dress, speech and habits, this dime-store demon has a talent (not to say talons) to amuse. Very soon he has seduced all three woman and drawn them into his harem. Only the local newspaper editor's neurotic wife (Veronica Cartwright) recognises the presence of evil and she is visited by a succession of escalating misfortunes, the last of which alerts the trio to their danger. By this time, however, each has a bun in the coven There then ensues a battle of special effects between the witches and Daryl, the suspenseful question being, will the time of Old Nick be averted in the nick of time It is difficult to care The Witches of Eastwick ends up as a second-rank spoof horror picture for the carriage trade that makes no attempt to grapple with the serious ideas Updike raises or, surprisingly, to match his warm eroticism. Since the success of Rosemary's Baby 20 years ago, old Hollywood hands have been finding work for idle devils.

It'spleasant therefore to find Alan Rudolph's Made in Heaven (Renoir, PG) employing so many unfallen angels. Starting in the monochrome 1940s, when angels fluttered through many a movie, Made in Heaven kills off its youngish hero Mike (Tim Hut-ton) as he heroically saves a mother and her children from In a Technicolor heaven that resembles Disneyland with sex (yes, Virginia, there is sex after death), Mike falls in love with a beautiful tin-born soul, Annie (Kelly McGillis) and marries her. But before you can say 'It's a Wonderful she's despatched to earth to live out her three score and 10. The grief-stricken Mike is then granted a second earthly existence of just 30 years, and wanders around America as an itinerant musician, constantly crossing her path but never finding her. This odd-ball movie, a cross between the Orpheus legend and Heaven Can lacks the consistency of tone that Wim Wenders brings to his astringent and not wholly dissimilar 'Angels Over Berlin' (shown at Cannes and opening here next year).

But it has enough that's sharp and likeable to prevent the affair from being swept mm mriparier js XtSXES draw with his left hand and paint with his right. His drawings of his right hand, which sometimes holds a cigarette, are most peculiar. He has a technique with a soft, fat pencil and watercolour that gives a sort of blotted effect. Yet the drawings have unlikely internal strength, and they swell up like enlarged pieces of ancient' statuary. I doubt if any German was truly an impressionist, even including Max Liebermann, who is commonly held to be interesting only in his submission to French painting.

His drawings suggest otherwise. In one of them, a pastel of two horsemen in the sea, there is a glimpse of the German palette, so unlike the French. A fine crayon drawing of himself, wearing a straw hat at the seaside, hints that there was a mystic adventurer beneath the bourgeois surface. Here is another theme of the exhibition. I dare say that German self-portraiture, from Diirer onwards, was more intense and varied than in any other country.

It can incorporate some strange ideas. Lovis Corinth, for instance, once did a self-portrait in which he posed as Bismarck and Rembrandt at the same time. I think his drawing of Frederick the Great on his deathbed, is really a self-portrait. There are some sheets in the Goethe Institute which deeply examine his self-esteem. In one drawing there is a picture of himself in the centre, all pride, while around him, more lightly drawn, are further heads that tend towards deformation: it is as though his egotism were being broken down by another artist.

Two further drawings which depict his physical decline after a stroke are moving in a different way: they compel us to pity an artist without self-pity. Kathe Kollwitz also has a nice self-portrait, one of her very early ones from 1891-93. She was tougher as an artist then than later in life. Kollwitz is the one artist in the show who introduces sentimentality. It was forced into her by the world.

She lived for years as a doctor's wife in the slums of Berlin. Her most characteristic art records the struggles of working people. Here are two charcoal drawings from her 1903-8 series 'Peasants' which were subsequently made into etchings. The graphic media made her drawings more forceful, as also may be. seen from the more elaborate charcoal in which a woman labourer is seen asleep over her work, next to a baby.

Kollwitz had a long life, and so she knew Nazi oppression. An excellent new book, Nancy Heller's Women Artists An Illustrated tells us more about this, but does not tell me as much as I wish to know about Paula Modersohn-Becker, who has a wall of terrific drawings in the Goethe Institute. Paula Becker trained at the Berlin School of Art for Women, then went to the artists' colony at Worpswede, a little moorland village outside Bremen, perhaps best known from its evocation by Rilke, whose friend she was. There she married the artist Otto Modersogn. I find his art rather weedy.

So, apparently, did she. Paula made a real break with German provincialism by going to Paris and studying developed modernism. Her drawings are oddly similar to contemporary work by Picasso. I weary of the complaints about neglected women artists. Why don't some women get together a show of Paula Becker It could be a revelation.

Lovis Corinth Self-portrait. WHILE YOU'RE RECONSIDERING THE BP SHARE OFFER, CAN WE INTEREST YOU IN OUR LIFE SAVING SCHEMES? This week, the biggest concern for many people wii! be whether the latest share offer 1 i while investment. Either way, represents a wortn is likely to change hands in 2.5 billion pound? the City. Marees's study Idyl) II. As we know, there is something immediately depressing about drawings that are squared up for transfer to canvas or fresco, in this case but von Marees's sheet is disappointing for a further reason.

The concentration of. idyllic fresco subjects into easel painting was an achievement of early modern art in Germany, as it was in France. This concentration, and therefore completeness, could also enter drawing but not in an artist like von Marees, whose vision lacks conviction. I prefer the fragmentary observations of Adolph von Menzel, an artist who is easy to overlook but in truth is a wonder of this exhibition. The paradox is that his domestic notes, of quite familiar things, are really not at all ordinary.

He is an artist who looks and looks, then records. We often forget how rare such people are, and how they are eccentric to the norm. Menzel's drawings show that his naturalism, far from being a constant of art, was one of the nineteenth century's most precarious inventions. And he refuses to fit in. He sometimes looks like an impressionist, yet he disliked Impressionism.

He is said to have been influenced by Constable, whose work he saw in 1839 1 can just about believe this. The catalogue relates something of Menzel which I have never heard of any other artist. Ambidextrous, he preferred to Meanwhile, in) Bangladesh millions of people I I I I I 1 I I I have been affected by the recent floods; thousands made homeless, and many more are now seriously threatened by disease as the flood waters recede. For the same price as ten BP shares we can provide ten families with enough emergency food supplies to sustain them for a week. In war torn Mozambique over 4 million people now face destitution and starvation as rebel forces backed by South Africa continue to terrorise the civilian population.

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