The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

Thursday October 28 1971 I ARTS GUARDIAN 10 review MAX BYGRAVES on television by Nancy Banks-Smith Flies in the ointment new films reviewed by DEREK MALCOLM dutv doorkeeper leaning over a balustrade. He was not applauding but he was listening. On such a showing the Bygraves show may be accounted a success. You will ask go on ask were the Geoff Love Orchestra enjoying it. I replv fearlessly and frankly.

I am not sure" Thev were slightly out of focus. The harpis't. out front, so to speak, was actually seen to laugh. But then, she was young, female, and attractive. I have never actually met a musician (except Sir Malcolm Sargent and a fellow who played the cymbals with his ankles) but from my television observation post they appear to be mainly male, middle aged, and sardonic.

Like old lions, poised on their boxes, offensively ignoring their trainer's frantic baton. 1 have only seen musicians visibly excited once (by Sammy Davis jnr.) and laugh out loud once (at Bruce Forsyth). You must remember they have heard it all before at rehearsals and see not the performer but the audience. Any sign of movement, therefor, in a musician is the equivalent of an earthquake in a human being. He is a seismograph.

The Geoff Love band were visibly interested in Nina (which is natural but irrelevant) and smiled several times as, for instance, at the line We've all got jobs to do, however distasteful." Though the script, by Spike Mullins and Eric Davidson was above average funny and there was one joke about Des O'Connor which I shall hoard and pass off as my own. Mr Bygraves Oh. very well thank you. Why do you ask NEVER HAVE I been so set upon by sentle readers as when I mentioned that I did not really care for music much If at all. Actually Music lovers, savage breasts singularly unsoothed heaved all over the place.

It happens to all critics. You tread quite by accident on some public susceptibility and a landmine goes off under you. Dennis Potter mentioned once quite casually that he thought dogs smelt. Or rather he knew they smelt. He bears the tooth marks still.

To correct anv misapprehension. I should explain that I absolutely love bands, orchestras, palm court quartets, provided thev are not actually playing music at the time and the Max Bygraves show (Thames) had a gorgeous great orchestra like a wedding cake Tiers of it 1 feel that critics and musicians have much in common. We are not there to enjoy ourselves. We are paid to turn play up. and shut up.

It is tacitly understood that we will not fall riff our chairs in drunken stupors On the other hand, we are not actually required to fall off our chairs laughing. If I were a comedian. I would ask Did the band laugh The television audience are irrelevant. They got in free, and not realising that they are part of the soft furnishings, will in pure gratitude clap anything that moves: particularly when a fellow-wearing earphones shows them when to clap (as in The Max Bygraves show). No.

never mind the audience, what about the workers There was a man in shut sleeves possibly an off It is difficult to determine whether Robert Aldr'ich's The Grissom Gang (Carlton, )is parody or pastiche. A remake of the awful James Hadley Chase No Orchids for Miss Blandish," it seems einematically speaking to be by Bloody Mama out of Bonnie and Clyde." It is very skilfully done, but overdone all the way through. Burnt to a cinder in fact. Yet such are the times that there is hardly likely to be the same sensation attending it as dogged the first screen version with its two and a half minute kiss snipped this way and that by purity conscious local authorities. The Grissoms.

you may remember, are a psychopathic family of poor whites who murder the kidnappers of a millionaire's daughter and make off with her instead. Led by their tough mother, they decide to kill the girl, but find one of their brood in love Vith her. She is repelled but in the end responds, seeing in him a human being so pathetic that he needs her more than she needs freedom. Scott Wilson twitches his way through his part as the psycho-in-chief much as he did through In Cold Blood." Kim Darby, of "True Grit." shudders through hers as the kid-naDped lovely as if uncertain of how far to go in the Guignol stakes. Everybody has sweat dripping down them in rivulets.

Kansas. 1931, must have been exceedingly close. The determined veracity of the setting is fine but the film hasn't the style of Bonnie and Clyde nor the social purpose of Bloody Mama." It is an exercise in a vacuum which gets no orchids from me. Dick Clement's To Catch a Spy (Odeon, Leicester A) doesn't seem to be by the same man who made the observant Otley and the intelligent A Severed Head." It is flaccid and ham-fisted at one and the same time, a comedy-cum-romance-eum-thriller with a starrv international cast who have absolutely nowhere to go. The delicious Marlene Jobert is a French girl whose husband is hauled out of her honeymoon bed.

accused of spying, and dispatched to Moscow Kirk Douglas plays the man she tries to incriminate so that he can be used as a bargaining counter. Tom Courteney. Trevor Howard. and Bernard Blier also appear to disadvantage. Who wrote the script Nobody is credited.

And a very good job too. Zachariah (Odeon. Kensington. AA) proclaims itself the first electric Western but has little distinction otherwise. This is in spite of the presence of Elvin Jones.

Country Joe and the Fish, the New York Rock Ensemble, and White Lightmn'. who are hardly used enough to draw their pay packets. Zachariah is a oung gunfightor who learns the ways of peace from an old-timer in the desert Man, it's pure out There's a great deal of misty allegorising and a ghoulish determination from George Englund to out-hopper our Denis as a significant director. The result is awful. Even Pat Qmnn can do nothing as a transmogrified Belle Starr.

John Rubinstein, the son of Artur, plays the lead rather as if practising his acting scales in Carnegie Hall There's one funny moment when he brings Relle a birdcage full nf canaries. Put those in water." -he They should have drowned the negative. THE CURIOUS THESIS OF Walon Green's The Hellstrom Chronicle (Prince Charles, A) is that if any living species inherits the earth it will not be man. There was, as the spurious Dr Hellstrom says, looking all wild and desperate about the gills, an army hero before us and it is better equipped to survive. By the end of the movie, one is inclined to believe even him.

The creepie crawlics are on the march. Mothers of England, throw your DDT out of the window. It will do you more harm than them. What is remarkable about this film is not its scare story, which we all vaguely know about and might have had less portentously thrown at us, but the mechanics of its photography. It is all very well saying that insects can pull objects 100 times their weight, jump 50 times their sue, consume 100 times their weight in food each day.

Even the undeniable fact that the coddling moth reproduces 401,306,000,000 times in the months it takes a single human embryo to develop only creates a slight frisson in print. It's when you see these things in front of you on the screen that the panic sets in. And here you see them better than ever before. "The IIpII-strom Chronicle makes The Living Desert look dead. This is its justification, not the rather stagy presentation, with the good doctor impersonated by Lawrence Pressman as a transatlantic version of The Man They Can't Gag.

Slow motion, quick motion, huge enlargements from the minuscule, patient, and brilliant camerawork that must have taken months to achieve all over the world recreates the ludicrous melodrama of insect life so stunningly that you could see the film in silence and take the point. As a scientist I would very much like to have been on hand during the first seven days of creation." says our lugubrious guide. If only he had shut up one might have been welcoming a masterpiece. But it is still the most extraordinary film which alternates the stunningly beautiful with the intensely ugly so tantalisingly that you begin to wonder which is which. The three principal cinematographers Helmut Barth, Walon Green himself, and Ken Middle-ham have done the job of a lifetime.

The episodes of the termite house builders and the predatory driver ants are perhaps the most spectacular, but the whole is an unforgettable technical exercise you shouldn't miss. After this, what price science fiction Outback (London Pavilion, X) will not please the Australian Tourist Board. It may not even please Australians. But it ranks, along with Nicholas Koeg's Walkabout," as the most impressive piece of special pleading about the country I've seen. Strangely, it was made (from Kenneth Cook's novel Wake in Fright by the Canadian-born Ted Kotcheff.

who certainly hasn't done anything better for the cinema. Gary Bond plays a borel and idealistic young teacher who finishes term in his isolated outback school and stops off at a booming mining town on Ins way back to Sydney. He gets drunk with the local policeman (the late Chips Rafferty, very good in his last par't, gambles all his monev away and goes on the booze in earnest. What's MISS JULIE at The Place by Michael Billington A KETTLE hisses fiercely on a red-hot stove the heroine, after sex, gently caresses her crotch with her discarded bloomers and the decapitation of the greenfinch is so bloodily tonvincing that a member of the audience last night rose to protest. In other words, Robin Phillips's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Miss Julie is as meticulously naturalistic as Stnndberg himself could have wished and is comparable to Peter Gill's production of the Lawrence trilogy in its concern for domestic detail Unfortunately the play cannot contain quite as much Zolaesque realism as Phillips has bestowed on it The electric sexual tension in the prolonged duel between the rich girl who wants to sink and the valet who wants to climb is here overlaid by the measured pace and preoccupation with kitchen naturalism There is also a nightmarish quality in the play (numerous images have to do with vertigo, the sensation of falling (perilous ascents), that suggests a more feverish, phantasmagoric mood is required.

However Mr Phillips pursues his chosen line with rigorous consistency, delicately underscores Strindberg's concern with social nuance and sails lightly over such notorious hurdles as the explosion the Midsummer's Eve revels, here played as a corrupt, sinister fertility rite. There are also two impressive, sharply-etched performances. Helen Mirren's Miss Julie, wasp-vvaisted and high-busted, has exactly the right blend of arrogant sensuality and concealed enom like to bathe my feet in your guts she tells her lover and you don't doubt it). And Heather Canning's Christine, busy, puritanical and doting, looks set for a lifetime of domestic drudgery. The disappointment is Donal McCann's beefy valet which lacks the self-esteem and sexual vanity Which should ignite his scenes with his mistress.

Still, even if it seems happier with the class war than the sex war. it's an honest, intelligent, painstaking production. Kim Darby in The Grissom Gang, the matter with him Rather talk to a woman than someone says during a momentary break in the beer swilling. He is forced into a bloody hunting expedition for kangaroos by his new companions, is befriended by the local alcoholic (Donald Pleascnce) and eventually lands up back at the schoolhouse, very much sadder and wiser. The story is a little long-winded and melodramatic but what make the film absolutely is its cruelly accurate observation of a certain type of Australian 111 o.

an observation heightened by some very good playing indeed the minor parts. The brutal environment of the outback reflected each of them with a sense of inevitability it is hard to get out of the mind. The film, though not hesitating to paint these people to the last wart, still manages some sympathy for them. In the immortal words of John Osborne they are queer because they're here, rather than the other way around. Simply in these human terms, it is quite an achievement.

Otherwise the location work is excellent and there is a musical score from John Scott which ought to make his reputation. BOULEZ AND THE BBC SO at the RFH by Edward Greenfield Bi ANDERSSON Barry Norman interviews the star of Ingmar Bergman's 'The Touch' ONK OF T11K fascinations of having Pieno Boulez in the saddle at the BBC will lie to hear him in all sorts of unexpected roles For this Festival Hall concert ith the BBC Symphony Orchestra he had what for any other conductor would have been a "conventional programme of Brahms's First Piano Concert and Schumann's First Symphony, but with Boulez, keen convert to 19th century romanticism, there was something didactic about the coupling. One was forcibly made aware of the direct links, particularly in orchestration, between the young Brahms, and his mentor Schumann. With Boulez there was no question of any apology being made for the thickness o' When Schumann or Brahms doubled the woodwind unnecessarily, it was (sq we are told) to ensure thai entries were underpinned and made more secure Evidently Boulez does not see it that way. His view plainly is that the wind choir must be presented massed contrast to the string band.

Over and over again BouUv. underlined the angularity- of sound, and with his characteristic insistence on sharp attack the results had unexpected clarity. Traditionalists might at times have hankered after more conscious expressiveness, but particularly in the Schumann symphony with its bald syncopations the result was invigorating. The finale was particularly infectious with its strange reminders of Sullivan and Rule Britannia." Who knows. Boulez may soon be tackling British romantic music.

The Brahms concerto was not so consistently successful, if only because Boulez's approach was too idiosyncratic to match thai of his fine soloist, the young Argentinian pianist, Bruno Leonardo Gelber. Gelber's spontaneity and warmth were never -n doubt, but his insistence on tempo changes found Boulez sounding stiff and calculating, making abrupt changes where gentler tactics were needed. A Schubert motet, the 'ast and most impressive setting he made of the Song of the Spirits Over the Water made a strange opening item a beautiful piece on this occasion not at all well sung by the BBC men's chorus. TOM JONES at the ADC Theatre, Cambridge by Hugo Cole THE FIRST OPERA to be written by a chess champion and to contain a septet when no more is generally remembered about an opera, one suspects the worst about the music. But Philidor's Tom Jones really does have some charming music in it.

even if it is easy to see why it was soon pushed into the background by more dramatic brilliant successors The connection with Fielding is slight: the spirit of the whole is that of many other comedies of crossed love, and I am not sure if the restoration of some Fielding dialogue helps the music. First, because most of the cast are rather better at putting over dialogue than at expressing personality through music. Only the experienced Alastair Thompson as Tom Jones gives a well-balanced acting and singing performance (Hugh Daviess Squire Western, on the other hand, radiating good humour, only manages to be properly choleric when he is allowed to sing). Secondly because there is so much dialogue that the music is reduced to secondary status. That is all that most of the solo arias deserve, perhaps but a few pieces, such as the duet between Sophia and her father in Act II and the septet at the end of the act generate genuine musical tension.

The orchestration is interesting, with horn and bassoon solos very well played last night, and the long accompanied recitative to Sophia's big aria in the last act another extended and very effective piece came off very well. The girl's voices were generally too small to get over the orchestra who were few in numbers but disinclined to give us any real pianissimos. Production was often witty and the music had clearly been well rehearsed. The incidentals and the interpolations as much as the music itself makes this into a good evening entertainment, well worth a visit for any one within bicycling distance of the ADC. says he must hae a starting point you must show that you have some idea of what the scene is about.

But if you are too linn in your convictions you cm have terrible arguments with him. "Theie was one scene in "The Touch' where I decided I should wear pants, trousers So I did and Ingmar hated them. He said. "You have the worst taste in the world. Who else would appear in pants? 'We had an awful quarrel and 1 thought it was so unfair.

Here I had this big scene to do and all he could think about was my pants So I put on the ugliest skirt I could find and said. 'There is that what you want and he said. 'Yes. and you've made me so angry that I'm not even going to rehearse the scene You'll just have to go ahead and do He was very rude and insulted me terribly and yet I did what he wanted. Actors are all masochists "Ingmar knows this and exploits it He won't even let you go to the toilet alter a take.

No. no. stay here." he says We must rehearse the net Sometimes it can be agony Even so, she would rattier work with him than any other director I'm always pleased when he approaches me. Besides. I'm very grateful to him.

If there had been no Ingmar I would have had no film career. Who would ever have discovered me without him" The fact that Hollywood came to Sweden to find Garbo and Ingrid Bergman doesn't mean they would also have come to find me." Not. of eourse, that she exists solely as a film actress. In Sweden she has done some notable stage work in. among other things.

After the Kill and Who's Afraid of Virginia WoolfV" and her TV performance as Miss Julie won her a prize in Sofia. "It wasn't as good as it should have been." she says, but I got the prize anyway." Her father, now retired, had a transport company, her mother was a social worker, her elder sister is one of Stockholm's leading ballerinas and her husband. Kjell Grede. is a film director. She has never worked for him and thinks it unlikely that she ever will.

"He doesn't write the kind of parts for me." she said. "Anyway, like all directors he wants to discover his own talent and. as far as acting is concerned. I'm already discovered territory. Then.

too. if he used me in his films his work might be compared with Ingmar's and he wouldn't like that." They live on an island just off Stockholm where one of her pleasures is to wheel her seven-month-old daughter 'o and from the shops. "It's very strange," she said. I like to stop and talk to other mothers and ask them about their babies and tell them about mine. But they just look embarrassed and go away.

It makes me sad." It's quite heartrending to think of her being made sad. Heavy in the rump and short in the leg she may be. but she is a most remarkably appealing woman. AS ANYONE KNOWS who has seen her in The Touch." Bibi Andersson is short in the leg and heavy in the rump and her hi casts aren't what they used to be. Very nice indeed, mmd you.

but not quite what they weie She is also, anyone who can add one to will quieklv gather. 33 ear old. In the scene in winch all this information was imparted. Ingmar Bergman, the dircctoi. had wanted her to say she was 3(i.

Miss Andersson. however, was feminine enough not to want to go shoving unnecessary years on to her age and insisted on telling it as it was That being so. 1 said, had she also composed the catalogue of her physical deficiencies which she recited, as a sort of conversational ice-breaker, while in bed with Elliott Gould" No. she -aid. certainly not.

"My God. I wouldn't have written that 1 told Ingmar. That's the most stupid thing I've ever heard." Nothing on earth would force me to point out all my faults to a man. If he couldn't see them for himself, whv should I put them in his mind" 1 didn't want to do that scene." Why not. I said because the facts were "No." she s.ud.

because they were right. Ingmar drew up the list and he knows me too well, although he was wrong about my breasts. 1 was pregnant at the tune, so they were huge and firm. Rut I am a little heavy round the bottom and my legs are a bit short. I often think.

If only my less were five centimetres longer." vv hat might I have been There was then a long, reflective silence broken by a prosaic friend who said, "Five centimetres taller, I suppose." Andersson has now made 10 films with Bergman, starting a tar back as The Seventh Veil but. fact, her association with him began even earlier. In 1933, 'here being a -lump the Swedish movie business. Bergman made a series of soap commercials for television and Miss Andersson, fresh from drama school, starred in one that was based on the Princess and the Swineherd. She had to sive him a hundred ki-ses to get from him a bar of soap, although on thinking it over she reckons the swineherd was probably in greater need of it than the princess.

Since then she has made 33 films, many of them for Scandinavian consumption only. Once or twice she has ventured out into the international scene, for instance in Ralph Nelson's Duel at Diablo and John Huston's "The Kremlin Letter." -with results that have been financially but not always artistically pleasing. Huston, she says, was particularly nice to her and let her work the way she wanted to. which is to say instinctively. Bergman, too.

lets her work like that. Well, sometimes largely when her instinct happens to coincide with his. Other times things can become a little fraught He likes you to come up with ideas." she said. If you show nothing he gets verv angry' because he Bibi Andersson picture by Frank Martin THE ENTERTAINER at the Liverpool Everyman by Gillian Hush MUSIC IN THE CINEMA MISHA DONAT considers some notable film scores and the problems facing the composer in the cinema. 'CARNAL KNOWLEDGE' An interview with its award-winning director MIKE NICHOLS 'I WANT TO BE WILD' RICHARD MAYNE reflects on Tarzan and our varying attitudes to the primitive ideal.

IN THE INTERVALS they show slides of Philip Harben and Marilyn Monroe, What's My Line and rock 'n' roll. It's all to conjure up the dear dead days of 1957 and the time of Archie Rice in John Osborne's "The Entertainer." Osborne chose the decay of the music hall as a symbol of the decay of British society as he saw it at that time, and within the framework of the Rice family he sts up an arena for the conflict between generations, the disillusion and despair of Archie set against the tentative revolt of his daughter and her vague feeling that she ought to do something in protest against Them." Then there's Archie's father, Billy, a real old-time star of the music hall with his generation's memories and standards. It's a play full of conflict, but in Paul Hellyer's production at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, the characters don't start to connect until far too late in the evening. They are all busily giving their performances as best they can but they are all individuals not an interacting group. But when Jean Hastings, as Archie's unhappy wife Phoebe, comes to her big scene of bitterness and grief the production somehow begins to come together.

In choosing the music hall as his microcosm of disintegration, Osborne also uses music hall techniques and the play is intercut with Archie's professional patter and musical numbers, which, at the Everyman, lose much of their point simply because they're barely audible. Richard Ireson, who plays Archie in a soft and private rather than strident way, has to contend with an accompaniment of vintage variety (and other songs on tape. We get a pot pourri as it were of the golden days of music hall but it's a bit hard on Mr Ireson, and on Mr Osborne, too. MORE AUTUMN BOOKS Ravicws of outstanding new books including WILLIAM EMPSON on Dylan Thomas JOHN CAREY on the plays of Henry Reod ON SALE TODAY A BBC PUBLICATION 9p.