The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 57

1X1 AY DNOVKMli I ))! THE OBSERVER ARTS 457 Cinema Philip French Mohican king of the wild frontier (I AFTER starting his literary career with a pastiche of Jane Austen, Fenimore Cooper went on to create the espionage novel with The Spy in 1821 and the modern sea story with The Pilot in 1823. More importantly, he launched the Western with the five Leatherstocking novels that cover the life, from the 1740s to the early nineteenth century, of Natty Bumppo, also known as Hawkeye, the intrepid frontiersman, the orphaned child of Anglo-Scottish immigrants raised by the Mohawk chief Chingachgook alongside his own son. Cooper's Leather-Stocking saga would make a splendid epic TV series, but director Michael Mann has settled on the most famous of the books, The Last of the Mohicans (MGM Shaftesbury Ave, etc, 12) and has approached the 1826 text by way of Philip Dunne's screenplay for the 1936 Hollywood version. The characters remain Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis); the upright British officer Major Heyward (Steven Wad-dington); Colonel Monroe's daughters Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May), fresh from England, and Chingachgook (played by the courageous Indian activist Russell Means); Uncas (Eric Schweig); and the fiercely vengeful Huron brave, Magua (Wes Studi), who seeks to destroy Monroe and his family. The time and place are still upstate New York in the summer of 1757 during the Seven Years' War between Britain and France.

As in the novel, there are exciting ambushes, battles, chases and rescues; the crucial siege of Fort William Henry is brilliantly realised and there is an appropriately high body count. But most of the incidents are re-ordered and the relation- 8 0 'A frowning, fruity-voiced tyrant, assuaged only by the great malt that wounds': Harold Pinter as the alcoholic poet Hirst in his play 'No Man's Land' at the Almeida.Photograph by Neil Libbert. Theatre Michael Co veney The bit on the side takes centre stage 'when you look at Hal's films you can tell he is the only person who makes films like that' Yes and no. Hartley is a gifted independent film-maker who has created a world of desperate eccentrics living on the social margins in a colourless, thinly populated corner of Long Island. But his three feature films (performed by his own little rep company) are so mannered and so alike that any talented film graduate could turn out a passable Hartley.

In so-called real life nobody is exactly ordinary, but in Hartley pictures everyone seems to be auditioning for the Reader's Digest monthly article on 'The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met'. And they all spout a sub-Pinter or sub-Mamet line of saloon-bar menace or barrack-room philosophy. In Simple Men, two brothers set out to find their father, a 1960s anarchist sought by the police for allegedly having killed 23 people in a bomb attack on the Pentagon in 1968. Inevitably, the older brother, a handsome professional criminal, is really an austere intellectual while the bookish younger brother is dim and ineffectual. The father, of course, isn't just a political activist, he's also a former Brooklyn Dodgers star 'the radical short-stop' and, naturally, he wouldn't hurt a fly.

A young woman, who turns out to be the father's new lover, isn't just mysterious, beautiful and Romanian, she's also epileptic. A violent, psychopathic criminal released from jail is awaited in terror by his ex-wife. He turns out to be a cowering wimp who has driven 1,000 miles to pick up a leather jacket. The unpredictable becomes the easily anticipated. Maybe that is Hartley's peculiar insight into American life.

Accompanying The Last of the Mohicans in the West End and Simple Men in Hampstead is Jonathan Ripley's enterprising short feature Burning Ash. In this 13-minute eco-occult movie, a dispute between a Sussex village ancient (Charlie Drake) and his yuppie commuter neighbour (Jonathan Oliver) over an old tree straddling their premises leads to dark rural magic. It's told in a lean, wholly cinematic manner. The 36th London Film Festival opened last Thursday and continues until 22 November with several hundred films from 45 countries at a dozen venues. It proves that there is a lot of movie-making going on, though not necessarily that we are living in a Golden Age.

Not to be missed is the restored Valentino epic, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (Camden Parkway, 20 and 21 November) with Carl Davis conducting his new score with a live orchestra. Wednesday sees the opening of the most ambitious season of Scandinavian cinema ever staged here. Lasting until 13 December, it is part of the Barbican Centre's ambitious Tender is the North survey of the arts in Scandinavia. I myself look forward to chairing one of the season's highlights, a discussion on Sunday, 6 December, between Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom and Liv Ullmann. In the history of mankind, few people have brought so much pleasure to so many as Hal Roach, the Hollywood pioneer of movie comedy who died last week at the age of 100.

He will be revered forever for bringing together Laurel and Hardy, and I think of him now in heaven meeting 'young Stamford', the physician who gained immortality by introducing Dr Watson to Sherlock Holmes in the chemistry laboratory at Barts. eaux's new production, whose sinister artificiality is reinforced by Bob Crowley's grey and monumental design, explores a darker side of the lagoon. Hirst is trapped on the last leg of a race he has forgotten how to run. The syntactical, Eliotian evasiveness of Spooner gives the periphrastic lie to the idea that all we have left is the English language. Hirst, who has seen a body floating in the water, is in no man's land which never moves and remains for ever icy and silent.

Whereas Richardson evinced an ethereal majesty, Pinter's Hirst is a frowning, fruity-vojeed tyrant, enthroned on a drinks cabinet, assuaged only by the great malt that wounds; his second act entrance in an electric blue suit, greeting his bemused guest and launching into the hilarious, Cowardian dialogue of summer sex and hanky-panky in Oxford in the late 1930s, is a revelation. The play is a vaudeville of dependence and subservience, of hospitality and rejection, of memory and instant amnesia. Richardson's cataleptic fit was a highlight of Peter Hall's production; at the Almeida, Pinter falls once, gets up, falls again in a corkscrew fashion, and crawls out the door on all fours. As theatre, it is almost unbearably exciting. Which is more than can be said of John Caird's RSC revival of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford-upon-Avon.

There are inventive felicities: Sue Blane's mock Hollywood design of sliding walls and buttresses reveals Pompey (Toby Stephens) billowing into action on a huge black sail; the Alexandrian coronations are enacted in a golden tableau while Octavius (John Nettles, an Antony in the making) angrily recounts the usurpations; the soothsayer is hauntingly amalgamated by Jasper Britton with the death-dealing fig merchant. But the central partnership of Richard Johnson and Clare Hig-gins is not a success, though each has fine moments in the last act. Their passion is admittedly a husk, but there is too much shouting and ranting and not enough humour. Ms Hig-gins's old hippie costumes and Theda Bara wigs are a very big mistake. The full bilious majesty of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling eludes director Michael Attenborough in the Stratford Swan, but there is no great shame in that.

The play's a monster, and it is nearly enough to have it done plainly and not over-pictorialised as was the RNT's Goya-esque version. Malcolm Storry is superb as the inflamed intelligencer De Flores, huge and hulking with a genuine nobility of expression and a diamond-shaped facial birthmark which fascinates his doomed beloved. Cheryl Campbell is a bit mad as Beatrice-Joanna, better at charting the BRENDAN BEHAN said a critic was like a eunuch in a harem, knowing what to do but lacking the wherewithal to do it. Believe me, I've had enough lust, passion and adultery this week to see me through Christmas, and I don't care if I do sound a little high-pitched. Two new major performances by Peter O'Toole and Harold Pinter give a fresh, contemporary male menopausal voice to the bit on the side syndrome.

O'Toole plays Roger Piper, an advertising executive in Our Song (Apollo) which Keith Waterhouse has adapted from his own 1988 novel: 'The bureaucracy involved in starting an affair is He is in thrall to Angela Cax-ton, huskily played by Tara FitzGerald in a remarkable stage debut, a 'freelance factotum' for whom he cannot possibly leave his wife (Lucy Fleming). Angie, he says, is having an affair; he is having the affair. The odd lambency of the text derives from its persistent air of recollection. The 16-month idyll is all in the past, there has been a terrible accident, and Roger is writing a novel. The Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell team of writer Waterhouse, director Ned Sherrin and O'Toole create something different: a carnal valedictory in which style and remembrance are more significant than concrete delineation of character.

Roger Piper is not a great Falstaffian creation like O'Toole's drunken Bernard. O'Toole delivers his new role in great wispy paragraphs, las-sooing the necessary oxygen with his whiplash, busy tongue, bending elegantly at the knees like a programmed marionette and craving our indulgence like a little boy lost. Tim Goodchild's airy cream settings are neatly littered with used bottles of bubbly, and Ms FitzGerald is gorgeously attired in a stunning array of costumes by Stephen Brimson-Lewis. The best laid plans are also the best dressed. After an absence of 23 years, Harold Pinter the actor returns to-the London stage in ferocious form as the cuckolding alcoholic poet Hirst in his own play No Man's Land (1975) at the Almeida in Islington.

He is partnered by the deferential, Prufrockian literato Spooner, whom Paul Eddington embodies as a frail and sycophantic attendant, battered into astonished submission by Hirst's scowling accusations and trenchant monosyllabism. Spooner has been invited back to Hirst's airless north London house after a chance encounter in the highwayman's hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. In the original production, the double act of Ralph Richardson as Hirst and John Gielgud as Spooner blazed to life on the latter's enquiry, 'Do you often hang about Hampstead So it is here, but David Lev- moral dilemma than the actual lustful nitty-gritty. The end-of-season Stratford triple-header is completed by a fascinating new play about Christopher Marlowe in The Other Place, latest fruit of the rich collaboration (five plays, now) between author Peter Whelan and director Bill Alexander. The School of Night follows Charles Nicholl's fine book, The Reckoning, in placing the mystery of Marlowe's Deptford death in the context of the Elizabethan espionage network.

Whelan complicates matters further by suggesting a body switch and a plot to graft Marlowe's work on to Shakespeare. This does not quite come off, but the attempt is very entertaining, with Richard McCabe on blistering form as the impetuous playwright. Whelan even manages a wonderful near-anagram of the hero's name and works it into the plot: 'Worm(m)ale; hither Britain out of the economic and political whirlpool. And the cost of doing the opposite would be absurdly small. With the national lottery in prospect (and expected to earn the exchequer more than it earns charities and heritage), an injection now of few million pounds directly into arts organisations (not the bureaucracy) could stimulate the sort of recovery in confidence the Cabinet so deperately craves.

Simon Mundy is director of the National Campaign for the Arts. snip between tne characters is considerably changed. Hawk-eye and Heyward are now sworn enemies and rivals for the hand of Cora. Like Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk and DeMille's Uncon-quered, The Last of the Mohicans is not strictly a Western. By time, place, weaponry and decor it belongs to that sub-genre, the Pre-Western, tales of coonskin-capped frontiersmen armed with flintlock muskets, travelling by foot or canoe in the forests of the East.

It is a more remote world historically than the Western proper, and because it lacks recognisable conventions, considerable thought must be given to matters of speech and period detail. Mann is largely successful in creating a surreal world where a European war is imposed on the American wilderness, the colonialist combatants exploiting the natives and the settlers in a conflict to which they have no real commitment. Beyond, or beneath, the official imperial incomprehension, there is a fine sense of the friendly contact between the Indians and the working-class pioneers (a primitive game of lacrosse is an especially nice touch). Hawkeye (his intelligence, vigour and charismatic presence superbly registered by Day-Lewis), the new man who confidently straddles both worlds, speaks an idiomatic modern American; Cora (looking like one of the proud military daughters painted by Gainsborough) speaks in a stylised period idiom. The film's weaknesses are an occasional narrative incoherence and a lack of variety in pace.

The undifferentiated tone is emphasised by a score that incorporates what sounds like eighteenth-century fiddle music into a modern electronic buzz that numbs as it hums. According to the producer of Hal Hartley's Simple Men (Metro, Everyman, etc, 15), POLITICS Arts come under the hammer As the fourth largest invisible industry in Britain, the arts fear the worst as the new Heritage Minister takes their annual plea to the Treasury. Simon Mundy believes further cuts would be foolish. wKtaiat The Gerard Depardieu Collection place where there is nothing to do when you arrive. The Ministers who will have thrown away all the goodwill they have so assiduously acquired over the past two years will bear the brunt of the ensuing hostility.

Peter Brooke will discover, as so many of Mrs Thatcher's Ministers for the Arts did, that in bad times this is not a fun department. There are still a few days left for the Treasury to be persuaded that it is killing one of the greatest chances it has to lift AT THE general election in 1979 the arts world was in an optimistic mood. Despite the economic gloom, and the aftermath of the winter of discontent, the outgoing Labour government had given the junior Education Minister, Lord Donaldson, an increase in grant to pass on to the Arts Council. It was not a great deal, but enough to show that the arts were regarded as part of the solution, not the problem. When Mrs Thatcher arrived in Downing Street the pleasant surprises continued.

The portfolio was detached from the Department of Education and upgraded to an Office of Arts and Libraries, presided over by a Cabinet Minister, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Norman St John-Stevas. Then came the bombshell. One million pounds was cut from the Arts Council's current and committed budget. The gains of the previous autumn were reversed and it was made clear that Cabinet patronage did not carry much weight with the Treasury. The arts accounted for the smallest of all departmental spending budgets, yet the cuts were shared around the table.

The sense of betrayal felt in the arts was immense. Mrs Thatcher was never really forgiven and the arts constituency was considered to be firmly part of the opposition until John Major and David Mellor, in various offices, demonstrated a new approach. Yet there is a terrible danger that history will repeat itself this week. In the past year the Government has won high praise for improving the finances of many organisations (though many more are still in a parlous state). First seen as an election bribe, its promises began to look like part of a long-range change of attitude that, through initiatives like the European Arts Festival, put cultural activity at the centre of attempts to regenerate the economy and the quality of life.

This was reinforced by the creation of the Department of National Heritage, a powerful cultural ministry that brings together all the areas in which the arts (in their broadest definition) have a role, under a senior Cabinet Minister for the first time with no other duties. The new Secretary of State should now be consolidating his place in the ranks, offering his colleagues one of the most important elements in the new policy of 'going for growth'. The arts have proved and government has accepted that they create permanent jobs in inner-city and rural areas more cost-effectively than almost any other sector, certainly than any of the usual schemes. They improve the look, morale and saleability of the communities in which they are given a leading part. If you can turn round the image of Glasgow, Bradford and Birmingham through judicious investment in the arts, then you can do it anywhere.

But it seems that these lessons are about to fade away amid Government panic and Treasury incomprehension. It is rumoured that not only will the arts receive less than the 3.5 per cent increase they were promised in this year's planning total, but they will be cut and cut with disproportionate severity. This comes at a time when local authority support and income from sales is also in decline (figures suggest that council money from London arts may have shrunk by 43 per cent in the past year) and sponsors are becoming harder to find as the recession bites into business finances. If this proves to be the case, some major companies will simply shut. In the past the arts have inventively made the last twist of thread go a long way.

But they cannot survive if all their sources of finance are attacked at once. The effect on employment, the trade balance and confidence would be out of all proportion to the money saved. The big capital infrastructure projects that will be offered as the alternative will neither benefit from the money to any significant degree nor achieve their aim. There is no point in building a tube line to a 1 1 I 1 I Price lor Two. 28.98 payable to Observer Offers Expiry Date or snrvicos ploase tick this box til HfKlgn Hrgysfi.

Qupenstown Road. 1 onrion SW8 4NN Latimer. Northants NN15 SJW A comedy about love, friendship and other natural disasters. Kenneth Branagh Alphonsia Emmanuel Stephen Fry Hugh Laurie Phyllida Law Alex Lowe Rita Rudner Tony Slattery Imelda Staunton Emma Thompson For your own enjoyment or a superb gift we have put together a Collection of six Gerard Depardieu films from Artificial Eye. Cyrano de Bergerac the most successful French film ever in the UK a spectacular swashbuckling epic "Depardieu is Danton It is 1 794 and France is in the throes of Revolution.

A dramatic story of the fight between Danton, the Revolutionary and Robespierre the uncompromising Government leader and Loulou The story of a love affair between two young Parisians from totally different social backgrounds. Depardieu is Loulou with Isabelle Huppert as Nelly. The characters are briliantly portrayed and the atmosphere of low life Paris drips from the screen. Merci la Vie an outrageous story of two girls, one innocent and one precocious who set off on the road to discover life "Exciting, funny and Police -Depardieu won the Best Actor price at the 1985 Venice Film Festival for his portrayal of the uncompromising Inspector in this powerful thriller which gave the director Pialat his first really huge commercial success in France. Trop Belle Pour Toi- Bertrand Blier's award-winning, witty and brilliant black comedy is an original variation on the love triangle "Exquisitely These videos are available to Observer readers at 13.

99 each 1.50 pdrp -I rrfi IS. 99 i or save money and buy lioo for 28. 98 itic pisyp. For AccessVisa orders please phone 0536 420667 nlnc rut PETER'S FRIENDS Henaissanie Films The Samuel CJotdwyn Company Channel 4 Films IVter's Friends Lmmanuel Stephen Fry Ihi'ili Laurie 1'hvllida Law Alex Lowe Hita Ktulner 'limy slattery Imelda St.uinloii Fmni.i Thomp-'' Mart in Henman OiateS A Stephanie Collie i- Tim Harvey Andrew (If amis Kita Hudner Martin llcntmau javid larMtt Stephen Kvans Kenneth tlranaqh mm'Iears Tor Fears Nina Simone Queen Cyndi Lauper Unite Sprinusteen Tina Turner Kru: Clapton I 'IVtrr's friends' timludimi he Pasadenas Michael Nesmith tnnksl available from Sony Music on CtiMd Ciwllr. Daryl Hraithvvaite Plase tick boxs) as required r- a 1 I 1.1 Frop Belle Pour Toi i Price for ono.

C15 49 1 (inclose crossed cheque value i tsft to pay by Access Visa Card number Sup UK alurf: ers fjniy Subject to availahility Allow Kenneth Hi i Pretenders ATA CINEMA NEAR AtpTionsiii rciiturvs music 21 days lor delivery Observer Depardieu Video Collection, 88 Station Road, Burton Latimer Northanta NN19 SJW YOU FROM NOVEMBER lT lis ol offffrs P.i. -ton.