The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 41

OBSERVER SUNDAY 2 JULY 1989 41 RICHARD MILMNHALL Scout hoinour Too far out all her life IftjlSldAFA I igiqilLJ rh Stin8 House of Games, Fellini's bidone. If Caine or TAMES BOND the link between the pre-war Buchan-Sapper clubland heroes (practitioners of what Alan Bennett called 'snobbery with violence') and the Cold War organisation man. Indiana Jonot belongs to a richer, more likeable, now vanished tradition the scholar-advenrurer-mystk exemplified 'Warrior', The Voysey lip- Indiana Jones', 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels', The Raggedy Rawney' PHILIP FRENCH Professor Henry Jones Sr, the world's greatest authority on the Holy Grail, whom the Nazis have kidnapped. As played by Sean Connery, he is a wonderful creation, part pawky Glaswegian comic-turn, part stern Quedonitn Calvinkt patriarchy a crow between Harry Lauder and Lord Keith. No (anger concealing his age (indeed adding a few grizzled years), and giving full vocal range to that highly imitable combination of Bogartian slur and Scottish burr, Connery is in great form.

I believed in him as Indiana's father and was convinced by the mutual respect that grows up as they face shared dangers, and the love they can at last express for each other. Ford and Connery are a marvellous team, amting the greatest father-and-son acts since Gloucester and Edgar, and it even turns out that they've enjoyed the favours of the same beautiful German spy. 'I'm as human as the next growls a penitent dad. 'I was the next ays Indy. One of the first occasions Connery left off his hair-piece was to appear with Michael Caine in John.

Huston's The Man Who Would Be King. For Frank Oz's cynical-sentimental comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Odeon, West End, PG) Caine has become more hirsute, adding a moustache and sideburns to play a suave English con man competing with a coarse American trickster (Steve Martin) on the Riviera. These roles were played 25 years ago in Bedside Story by David Niven and Marlon Brando, and to say this remake is an improvement on the original is to make no great claims on its behalf. There is here an artistic finesse and the philosophical interest in confidence-trickery one finds in the first division of con-man movies Crusaders: Harrison Ford (left) and BEDLAM and the sea resemble each other in Shirley Gee's remarkable new play, Warrior (Minerva Studio, Chichester). Hannah Snell signs up as a sailor and goes to sea in the first half of the eighteenth century to search for her husband, Davy.

At the end of the voyage she is unable to return to her former self. She is stowed away in Bedlam where her new life is as rough and terrible as the old. She is troubled by visions. Warrior is about seeing things especially the things we don't want to see. When Hannah leaves the safe shores of her sex, she flattens her breasts with a scarf and, like Portia in The Merchant of Venice, is briefly elated by her disguise.

Turning mincing steps to a manly stride, she salutes the sea and swears it shall not take her husband from her. But the deep blue sea is a punishment. It's hard for a man, for a woman harder still, to survive. We are not spared any of the miseries of this floating penitentiary, nor ever allowed to forget that Hannah is a woman. Once on the ship, she is frantic at the sight of the wig she must wear and desperate at the sight of the musket she must carry: it is almost as big as she is.

Gee deliberately manhandles the language of the voyage. During the drill Hannah is told, 'Your musket is your girl, you find her in the dark. You do not droo Tim Luscombe's production brilliantly plaits three strands of the play: the past, the present, and a prophetic future. At the beginning Hannah, naked and in Bedlam, hurls herself against a white cloth, and the sense is that this could be a sail, a sheet from the madhouse, or her shroud. The fine writing invisibly stitches the scenes together; it is bittersweet, perfectly modulated and lifts lightness out of despair.

Daw dies at sea, and when Hannah sees his inadequate last note to her she observes, 'He spelt heaven right, 'n' all. Hannah's great quality saving grace is that she stirs affection in others. Even Mrs Sculley, the leathery old warder at the asylum with scorned berry-red cheeks, who mops the tallow complexion of her charge with a grey floor mop, says: 'I'm so fond of you. Don't ask me why. As Hannah, Lois Harvey stirs the same feeling in the audience.

Looking like a tiny Eve fallen from sanity, with mobile features, she mimics manhood in a deep squally-voice. Forced to navigate extremes of suffering with her, at times one feels mutinous towards the author, most particularly dur--ing the scenes where grapeshot in literature by the protagonists of Rider Haggard's romances, in films by Leslie Howard's Pimpernel Smith, in life by T. E. Lawrence and St John Philby. In his third outing under the aegis of producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg, Iadlana Jones and the Last Crusade (Empire, PG), we are given the grandest family entertainment likely to come our way this year.

In plot and incident, The Last Crusade is largely a re-working of Indy's First adventure. In 1937, his task was to prevent the Nazis getting their all-powerful Ark of the Covenant Now, a year later, he must stop them discovering the Holy Grail, which will confer immortality on the leaders of the Third Reich and ensure its promised millennium. The quest takes Indy from his, ivy-clad campus to wicked old Europe and through assorted hazards, chases and confrontations (one of them with the Fuhrer himself at a gleefully reconstructed Berlin book-burning), on to a final showdown in Petra, 'the rose-red city half as old as time'. In the eclectic Lucas-Spielberg manner, this climax features that classical actor Robert Eddison (as numinous a performer as Star Wars stalwart Alec Guinness) in a variation on the casket sub-plot of The Merchant of Venice. This rousing stuff is staged with wit and verve.

But what gives the movie a considerable edge over its predecessors is the way it fills in Indiana's character and background. Firstly, in a prologue set in the Utah desert in 1912, the teenage Indy (River Phoenix), riding with a troop of boy scouts, stumbles across, a band of tomb-robbers digging up the sixteenth-century Cross of Coronado. 'That belongs in a the future archaeologist says, and makes off with it. The gang pursues him along a circus train where, among the thrills, Spielberg (as ready to allude to his own oeuvre as to that of others) shows us the source of Indiana's bull-whip, the scar on his chin, his fear of snakes, and his distinctive slouch-hat and leather jacket. We also catch a glimpse of the remote father who has taught his son, to count up to 20 in Greek at moments of stress.

Secondly, the film leaps forward 26 years, the grown-up Indiana (Harrison Ford) finds that his political quest involves a search for his father, as Edward Voysey. Martin approached you seeking change for SOp you'd give their coins a sharpish bite. The best performance, in fact, comes from Anton Rodgera, a deao-ringer tor the lamented Bernard Blier, as a bent French cop. The film, however, did con me into believing that the splendid jazz violin solos on the soundtrack were by Stephana Grappelli. They aren't.

The Raggedy Rawney (Metro; Minima, IS) is the redoubtable Bob Hoskins's debut at wrhtf -director and it well enough put together. But why did he want to make this pntenrkxM, wtf-conscioiu, art-house allegory instead of a hard-boiled thriller? Sat earlier this century during a civil war in an Continental a band of gipsies led by Hoskins on a cross-country journey. On the way they are harassed by totalitarian armies and give shelter to a young deserter in drag. Blandly in favour of love, against war, and on the side of earthy ethnic humanity, the picture exists in a vacuum. These travelling folk look more like cockneys on an outing to the hop fields than Romanies fighting for their lives, and the whole affair resembles a version of Brecht's Mother Courage commissioned by Unkef from the authors of EastEnders.

Gary Sinise, one of the American theatre's best young directors, makes a promising if ultimately disappointing movie debut with Miles from Home (Cannon, Panton St, 15). A lyrical monochrome preface of a visit by Nikha Khrushchev to a celebrated Iowa corn-farmer in 1959 is followed by a conventional -tale of the farmer's two sons (Richard Gere, Kevin Anderson) becoming, 30 years later, local outlaw heroes when they destroy the family homestead and take to the road as a protest against the bankers who foreclose, and dispossess them. Scripted by the author of Mississippi Burning, Chris Gerolmo, this picture too is literally and metaphorically incendiary, yet politically rather timid. Sean Connery on the trail of the grail, Betiineter door protection MONTHLY RENTAL MONITORING ob 27 4BR APWWWO INSTALLER rsttz-Coburg movie folio Inheritance', Mystery Plays KATE KELLAWAY is cut from Hannah's flesh or where she is tortured in a black chair, a swing designed to cure madness. But at the very moment when it seems we are condemned to the darkness of Hannah's vision, Shirley Gee pardons us and lights up the blackout with images of life and of a continuing world.

The Voysey Inheritance (Cottesloe) could be renamed 'Serious Edwardian Money. The Voysey firm got rich it took generations of corrupt dealings to make the firm its money. When Edward Voysey discovers that his father is a swindling solicitor, he resolves that as soon as he inherits the family firm he will do the right thing. Granville Barker's unwieldy play is, in part, a debate about what the right thing should be. Truth cannot be easily accounted for.

The part of Edward Voysey is played by Jeremy Northam, a young actor who looks, to judge from the photograph in the programme, satisfyingly like Granville Barker himself. When Edward is first forced to listen to his father's self-justification, presented as advice, Northam makes, his head and shoulders look wonderfully like a hanger from which the rest of his body dangles. In the second half, once in command, he moves back into his suit and sits on the powerful side of the desk. This production gives a convincing sense of Edwardian life: the longueurs during which after-dinner bores, inspired by port, talk on; it also shows how frankness upsets formality. At the funeral tea Edward announces to the company the indignant, the deaf and the weeping 'There will be no The great dramatic moment of the play turns out, perhaps unintentionally, to be comic.

Barbara Leigh-Hunt is wonderful as Mrs Voysey, deaf as a post, larded in black jet. Alice (Stella Gonet) is a gilded, singular figure getting her kicks out of Edward's plight, ordering him to crack nuts, propose to her, go to jail for her sake. Suzanne Burden is powerful as Beatrice Voysey the bookish wife with strong ideas and a weak husband, Hugh (Crispin Redman) a velvet-suited artist who believes in a Bohemian version of the right thing. Michael Bryant's Peasy, a manservant bribed to keep his peace, 7 Lord Reith remembered on top. 'What a curse it is to have outstanding, comprehensive ability and intelligence combined with a desire to use them to maximum purpose': Reith, then the BBC's first Director-General describing himself, broodily longing to 'fully stretched' once again.

His great days at the BBC were over by 1938 when he was not yet 50 years old; the rest of his life was in his view downhill, a succession of snubs and insults. 'I do find these little men so he told a colleague. He wrote bitter letter to Churchill about his distress at not being given a challenging wartime job: 'I was eyeless in Gaza and without the consolation Samson had of knowing it was his own A hulk without a purpose, a legend with half a lifetime still to live. The second part of this absorbing two-part portrait, Reith Remembered, written and presented by the veteran reporter Frank Gillard, is broadcast tonight (10.15 p.m., Radio 4). It concentrates on Festival the Arts Box Office Tel.

(049 1) 4 10523 Turn up the vision Discovering that his sounds mild but isn't. He brings out the line 'I want the money' in a husky animal hiss. William Dudley has designed a plausible solicitor's office with views of Lincoln's Inn and an agreeable dining room, all decanters and damask, with a portrait of a Voysey ancestor in a prop-up-the-mantlepiece pose a favourite family attitude. There is much leisure in which to ponder the effect that a desk or a dining table between two people has on their conversation. The desk increases power, the table seems to inhibits it, and in The Voysey Inheritance there is always the centenary of his birth the less familiar half, and begins as Reith leaves Broadcasting House in tears.

His children remember a demanding, dominating father. Reith arranged for his son to go to Oxford without telling, him. He refused to speak to the man his daughter married, and only turned up at the wedding because Sir William Haley told him he was a great man and shouldn't do anything that would make history judge him to be petty. He still hurried away from the reception. His daughter describes his 'angular embrace', which he compensated for by mammoth statements describing his affection for her.

He demanded affection be returned unquestioningly. Later he humiliated his long-suffering wife by taking out younger women or ignoring her at functions. I would like to hear more about the saintly Lady Reith; she is mentioned only in passing, a shadowy, loyal figure. His daughter has an- icy insight, describing her father as 'still coping with his own adolescence'. Of his days at dad is a dlddler Jeremy Northam either a desk or a dining table in the way.

The play itself resembles a huge mahogany dresser which can't be moved easily and hasn't been dusted for years. But Richard Eyre polishes it diligently and respectfully and makes its limited virtues shine. At the Crucible The Northern Mystery Plays are in progress, adapted and directed by Mike Kay and John Tarns. Every night God creates Sheffield with help from Bruno Santini, whose witty construction site offers plenty of steel to remind us where we are. Angels wear hard hats and Lucifer is the the BBC she sums up: 'He knew what lay ahead and what were the possibilities of broadcasting) and he explained these creatively We will always be proud that he was able to do that in that short The programmes suffer from Reith's own standards of detachment, the individual voice of the reporter is squeezed out.

Gillard, who knew Reith, rose in a BBC dominated by Reithian values doubtless he has many anecdotes and insights to add, yet they hardly intrude in this account. Gillard stands detached, presenting both sides, letting the contrast do the work and hoping the truth will emerge in 'he middle. How I longed for less balance and more passion. There's still a lot to be told about this great, complex and infuriating man. Now that the 'brute force of the monopoly' and the 'cosy duopoly' have been replaced by the broadcasting fee for all, Reith's vision, which has shaped every generation of broadcasting until now, has more historical interest.

And if Reith could deliver one message to his successor, Michael Checkland, it might be: 'Vision Try saying that at the new White City. guv'nor enjoying the brief thrill of sitting in God's hot seat on top of the scaffolding. In this inventive production, surprises come thick and fast. Adam and Eve crash into the world naked, black and wrapped in cling-film. When Noah puts his ark up, he brings the house down.

When a giraffe pokes its neck through a porthole, Noah sternly instructs it to 'sit'. In the first half the world is created, flooded and saved. The second half of the Northern Mysteries cannot compete, focused as it is on visiting time at the manger. Control console wHhptnk buttons 1 I Comprehensive Protection for an Installation Fee INC From95.00 vat STUCK in a traffic jam on Westway last week, I got a vivid impression of how far the BbC has retrenched in its own estimation, not just from the cries of the demoralised staff at Television Centre, but from the design of the new budget radio headquarters which is slowly being unveiled at White City. The building already blends in with the dreary surroundings.

Skimped, anonymous, unlovely, it resembles an airport franchise hotel. Is this really to be the borne of BBC radio in the Nineties? Surely there's still time to sell it to Tesco? Last week marked the centenary of the visionary Lord Reith (celebrated in two programmes), who confidently built Broadcasting House in the 1930s certain that his great national institution would last and flourish. What a contrast to today's monument to short-term financial expediency. But then during Reith's days at the BBC he never entertained doubts about anything, least of all himself. The voice is strong and sombre, each word delivered as though from a mountain Henley of Music and be a lll Bttt box I I Peace of mind is knowing that you and your family are protected and safe, day and night.

A Telecom Security system guarantees you this peace of mind at a price you can afford. And when your home's been fitted with the very latest equipment and we're watching over you 24 hours a day, you too will know what it means to rest assured. i Bell Sox i Europe's largest Monitoring Station Extra Packages Available 3 Exterior Door Sensors 1 Passive Infra Red Motion Detector 1 Warning Siren 24 Hour Monitoring Keypad with 3 tome Burtons Standby Power Supply 1 lUtf-1 SB (3 July 5th -8th, 1989 Artists include Andrew Litton Richard Armstrong Norman Del Mar Gyorgy Pauk Elizabeth Cornell Dennis O'Neill Michael Collins Jacek Kaspszyk Barry Douglas Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Prometheus Ensemble Philharmonia Orchestra Peter Rush exhibitions Nickelodeon Dutay Collective Victor Pasmore Andrew Heard Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra LesBubb Joanna Macgregor The Light Blues Thealresports Yhe Barbican Piano Trio Band of the Irish Guards Spaghetti Opera Fireworks Fun and Festivities TICKET AVAILABILITY There arc a.fcw GRANDSTAND CANCELLATION TICKETS for each night. Otherwise LAWN TICKETS are available on Wednesday. July 5th and Thursday.

July Gill tit 13 on Friday, July 7th at 15 and Saturday. July 8th at 27.50 nsn IS! JUST DOWN THE LINE WHEN YOEEDUS MOST If you require further details regarding the Telecom Security System complete the coupon below and seno rteepost to: Telecom Security Limited FREEPOST (TK 819) Fettham Middlesex TVV13 ii Name Address. Tel No. Tttecom itcufflr limned SPONSORED BY: EMPEROR MARKETING SERVICES LTD. MANOR.

HENIEY-ON-THAMES. OXFORDSHIRE Signed. ttgutcttd Olttte: (1 Ncri Sirett LONDON tCU 7AL Registered tniJindNo WWttAiubiidurvotBntnh telngmmunmnorn pit All information from the Festival.