The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 11

-f Thursday June 24 1982 11 MOVIE GUARDIAN Paul Schrader, writer and director, likes to tweak the nerve of the American psyche. Gat People his latest tilm, opens here soon. Bart Mills reports SOMlE Lejt Montreal stripper Linda Lee Tracy in Not A Love Story right lsabelle Adjani in Possession Derek Malcolm reviews a ilm that attacks pleas pornography, and the other new releases anv films whatsoever until ha sniick off at 17 to take in Disney's Absent-Minded Professor. A one-time critic, he has published a tome entitled Transcendental Style in Film Ozu. Bresson, Dreycr.

So it was natural for the blocked ex-academic to go back to university. "I went to New York and studied and taught at Columbia. I fooled around, trying to write. For a year I worked on a screenplay but 1 couldn't get a handle on it. My agent sensed my despair.

He told me I just had to go back to work. He knew about the Cat Pcoplfi project. I got into it almost as therapy, and it worked. It revitalised and liberated me. As soon as I started working on the Cat People script.

I was able to complete the other script I'd been working; on for a year. Then I finished another very quickly and now I'm ready to do a third." The second finished script is The Last Temptation of Christ, an adaptation of a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, who also wrote Zorba the Greek. Martin Scorsese commissioned the script for Robert de Niro. The other completed Schrader script, which he will direct himself in Cleveland next autumn, is called Born in the USA. "It's psychological realism again.

Back to the streets. It's a semi-autobiographical pieie. about working class bar hands. The guys play on weekends. It's no rise-and-fail rock-and-roll story.

It's more Eugene O'Neill territory. It's a long dav's journev into Euclid Heights" (a Cleveland su burn). Schrader says he'll do Born in the USA on a "very. ery low budget." hut he's aware that now it's easier to do a 20 millions fantasy than a S4 millions realistic AVhy A few years ago there was a thing called a first-run movie. In America, cable TV has done to the first-run movie what TV did to the B-movie 30 years ago.

The conventional first-run movie now strikes people as something to catch on cable TV in a few months. Film-makers are thus driven into extravaganzas and experiments. What makes money is what is totally original and off-the-wall. So you have great licence these days. The further you get from reality, the more power you have over the audience.

People do not in fact mate with animals. Everybody knows that. But if you provide the audience with some kind of structure, you can plug into their desire to believe that magic exists all around us." Cat People opens in the Midlands area on Jidy Paul Schrader will give the Guardian lecture on Sep-tembcr 26. THERE'S a well-worn Bible on Paul Schrader's desk. Unclothed female mannequins are stacked promiscuously outside his window.

The only thing missing from the scene in his office at Universal is the sound of gunfire. Schrader writes and directs sexy, violent, puritan films. Fnini Taxi Driver (1975) to American Gigolo (1979), the one-time divinity student nas jangled deeply hidden nerves in America's psyche. Up to now, all Schrader's films 10 scripts, of which he directed four have been hideously realistic. His scripts for Raging Bull last year called for a serious depletion of Hollywood's blood bank.

William Devane lost a hand to a garbage disposal in Schrader's script for Rolling Thunder (1977). In Blue Collar (1978) Schrader made his debut as a director by spray-painting Yaphet Kotto to death. However. Cat People, which Schrader directed and co-scripted, is an out-and-out fantasy that has divided the American critics into those who think it's a classic and those who think it's rubbish. It's the sort ol film in which the leading man wakes up naked on the bathroom floor, having been a rampaging leopard the night before.

Malcolm McDowell is the leopard, Nastassia Kinski is the leopardess and John Heard keeps the zoo. We've caught a trend at work here," says Schrader. "It's the fear in our society now that there's a monster lurking under the calm surface of every person, of every country. In the cinema of pre-Nazi Germany, for instance, there were a lot of Golem images the Golem being a robot or a sub-human you. People knew something bad was coming, and sure enough it came." Schrader, 3fi, delivers these thoughts in a professorial yet engaging manner.

Small, quick and bespectacled, he could be the sophomore co-eds' choice for Favourite Teacher. If you're not more afraid of war now than you were two years ago, you're missing out on something," he continues, flipDant as ever about serious matters. As a society today, Americans feel a loss of innocence. We feel that what will come out of us now is not a little girl with flowers in her hair but something that will destroy the world." Hence such recent American screen images as a man turning into an ape in Altered States, into a we-e-wolf in An American Werewolf in London and even into a snake in Conan the Barbarian. As reality becomes more depressing," Schrader postulates, we regress into fantasy." The fantasv in Cat People is that "There once was a tribe somewhere that mated with animals The tribespeo-ple exist today, scattered, lusting incestuously after one another, apt to turn up in Louisiana or Virginia but wherever they are, turning into black leopards when the tun goes down It's all a made-up mythology." Schrader explains blithely, though it does correspond closely to dream reports.

Black leopards have inspired sex-fear fantasies in various cultures around the world." Although Schrader set the film in New Orleans because of its miscegenistic history," very little of the background will be recognisable to residents of that city. I didn't try to make the picture work on a realistic level. There's just enough realism in it to keep the audience from breaking into guffaws. The film opens with a screenful of skulls under shifting sands and proceeds to provide a number of bloody shocks. Yet for his SI2 millions budget Schrader aspired to something more thaa cheap horror.

"The trick is to set people up for violence and then deliver sex. For the first hour of the film. 1 worked within the conventions of the horror genre, showing you I'm capable of scaring the living daylights out of you. So you're on guard. But I don't follow through: Instead of more bloodshed, I move into something more interesting.

If I'd provided the violence you expect. I'd have had the same prosaic beast-must-die movie you've seen a hundred times." Schrader's films have always striven for originality. Cat People is the first script he's worked on that was someone else's idea. There was a 1942 film of the same title, but Schrader says that aside from the basic idea of a woman being transformed into a beast, one scene in a swimming pool (topless in 1982 but not in 1942), and two or three shots intended as petits hommages." Everything in the 1982 version is new. Schrader undertook the adaptation, he says frankly, because I was blocked.

In 197H I wrote five scripts, two directed by others and three by me. After that I didn't write much, except Raging Bull. I had always assumed that the juices would automatically begin to flow again. They didn't. I found I had nothing in particular left to say." Schrader has a master's degree in film studies from the University of California at Los Angeles, though his religious upbringing in Michigan kept him from seeing undoubtedly has talent.

But what he does with it here makes The Exorcist look like a masterpiece. Adjani plays a promiscuous wife who cheats not only on her husband (Sam Neill) but also on her lover (Heinz Bcn-nent the father of the Bov in The Tin Drum). There is clearly something very wrong with her since she mutilates herself with an electric knife while preparing a raw liver dinner. The third man turns out not to lie Orson Welles but a monster she has given birth to herself. In other words, the evil that is in us all and can only be counteracted by exposure.

This, of course, calls for special effects, the like of which you may never forget. But what it also gets is cinematograph of such eccentricity and direction of such hysterical abandon that you soon start to eat your cigarette and smoke your popcorn. It seems endless like a scream that only ends when you leave the cinema. It doesn't so much engage the emotions as trample on them. Possession is a pitched battle which nobody wins, least o.

all the film maker, who treats it all so seriously that you can scarce forbear to laugh. Nelly Kaplan, for ten years a collaborator with Abel Gance, now makes her own except London, 7 15). Pasternak's epic rebuilt by David Lean into huge international movie success. Omar Sharif. Julie Christie, Rod Steiger and Alec Guinness plus Lara's theme.

The Boy Friend (Mondav, BBC-2. 7 35). Ken Russell introduces Twiggy and Christopher Gable as romancers in Sandy Wilson twenties pastiche, updated into the thirties. Made in 1970, with some elan. Special interest AT THE National Film Theatre, the Visions of India season continues (tomorrow) with one of the most accurate James Ivory's delightful Shakespeare Wallah.

Carry On Up The Khyher (Sunday) is one of the least accurate but the best Carry On ever made. The Australian season continues, as does the series of films from ZDF television in Germany, one of the most enlightened stations in the world. Chris Monger's promising Voice Over, Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull and the El Salvador documentary. Decision to Win, are on the programme at the ICA Cinema. At the Barbican, a mixture of Bunuel, Shakespeare, Henry Fonda and Jack Nicholson continues till the end of the month, with Bunuel's magnificent El and Tristana on Tuesday.

At the films, usually both ironic and determinedly against conven tional values. Charles and Lucie (Curzon AA) is her fourth and most commercial project, the tale of a Parisian concierge and her layabout husband who are promised a huge legacy by a conman and then done out of what little they have already got. Its moral seems to be "The nearer you get to what you want, the less you should want it." The film doesn't seem to me to be nearly as sharp as either La Fiancee du Pirate or Nea: A young Emmanuelle. But the playing of Ginette Garein and Daniel Ceccaldi is pleasant, and Kaplan's idea of uniting an otherwise hopelessly inadequate pair with the triumphant bond of love is at least sympathetic. But too often their adventures go predictable ways and there's no real brio about either the supporting performances or the direction.

Nothing, in fact, like Ber-nadette LafontinLa Fiancee. Though it's a nice idea to have Charles and Lucie ending as itinerant entertainers, retelling ever more colourfully their real-life adventures, despite finding and selling a painting by Van Gogh among their possessions and thereby netting a real fortune. Electric, Godard on Friday (Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou) and four Rossellini films for the price of one on Sunday, including the rarely seen Germany Year Zero. Two more Fassbinders on Monday the highly personal Year of 13 Moons and The Third Generation. All-night punk at the Scala on Saturday, including the underrated Clash film.

Rude Boy and Derek Jarman's overrated Jubilee. Outside London: The Vyne-side Film Festival, announced for October, will include a 5,000 award, donated by Newcastle Council, for the best independent film. This is not just worthy. It is extremely enterprising Edinburgh and London should follow suit. At the Watershed, Bristol, Ophuls' superb Madame de on Friday and Saturdav.

Across the way at the Aonolfini. Helma Sanders-Brahms' verv moving Germany Pale Mother starts tonight. Buster Keaton helps the weekend along at the Birmingham Arts Lab, and till the end of the month. At Ipswich, Mephisto continues till Saturday, then the Australian Winter of Our Dreams. The 3-D It Came From Outer Space at Edinburgh's Filmhouse on Monday as does Zanussi's good The Contact.

Derek Malcolm CHARLES et LUCIE From Today A DECADE ago. when Lord Longford was on the stump and Mary Whitehnuse merely his provincial apprentice, you couldn't find a wet liberal to come out strongly against sex films. Weren't there, after all, rather more important things to inveigh against? And aren't there now Not A Love Story (Paris Pullman, X) suggests hat to be liberal, wet or not, about such matters is. in fact, the height of repressive reaction. Made by Bonnie Sherr Klein, a Canadian feminist film-maker, the movie, while showing a good few sights our censor would not generally allow, castigates pornographers for their sins against women Women should be obscene but not heard and solidly supports practically everything Longford and Co.

have eve" said. Except that it adds a point or two even he never thought of. like the adage (true enough) that "What really happens in sex never sells." It points out that the pornography industry in North America and Canada is now larger than that of the conventional film and music industries combined, that there are four times as many sex shops as McDonalds restaurants (is it that bad and that Playboy and Penthouse outsell Time and Newsweek. But the scale of the BRIEFING Best films Georgia's Friends (Odeon-Havmarket): Arthur Penn elegiac yet still tough and open-eyed account of four young Americans, growing up in the fifties and sixties, and finding the American Dream fading. Steve Tesich script, fine performances.

Christ Stopped at Eboli (Camden Plaza): Francesco Rosi's beautiful and satisfying account of the Carlo Levi novel about a northerner (himself) exiled in the decaying south of Italy for anti-Fascist pronouncements. Gian Maria Volonte is superb. The German Sisters (Aca-demv): Margarethe von Trotta's highly impressive story of two sisters very different from each other who come together when one is imprisoned as Red Brigade member and later found dead in mysterious circumstances. Venice Golden Lion. Missing (Empire.

etc): Cannes prize-winner from Costa-Gavras, with Lemmon as middle-class American searching for his son after American-inspired coup against Allende. Cissy SpacPk the son's wife. Based on true story. Quest For Fire (Odeon. Leicester Square): Still the best commercial movie around a science fantasy of prehistoric times with language by Anthony Burgess, body movements by Desmond Morris and fine direction from Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Mv Dinner with Andre (Gate, Bl'oomsbury): Louis Malle watches a playwright and producer have dinner and talk. An excellent conversation piece, beautifully achieved. Best on TV Husbands (Friday, BBC-1, 11 10). 1970 John Cassavetes film about three married Americans on London spree after death of close friend. Superb performances from Cassavetes himself.

Ben Gaz-zara and Peter Falk. Marv Queen of Scots (Friday. BBC-2, 7 30). 1971 Charles Jarrott historical epic with Vanessa Redgrave as Mary and Glenda Jackson as Eliza- worthier variety rather harder than the rest, seeing more danger in our espousal of sexual freedoms than in men's capacity to degrade women for the purposes of fantasy or most of the other good causes this film espouses. What makes me suspicious of Not A Love Story, for all its worthiness, is that it will put more power at the command of those who want us to see only what is good for us, and who regard sex as pornography per se.

There are other kinds of pornography seen around the circuits every week, and left virtually untouched. Seen around evervwhere, in fact. That said. Not A Love Story, though not a very good film, is worth seeing and arguing about. It does at least suggest that it is the attitudes hehind it.

not the stuff itself, that need more careful examination. Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (Classics, Haymarket and Tottenham Court Road, X) secured lsabelle Adjani hair her Cannes best actress prize last year for a performance which I can only describe as Grand Guignol phis. But then the whole film is so determinedly dotty that even seeing is scarcely believing. Zulawski. a Pole who made it in English with-Kranco-German money, The Boyfriend BBC-2, Monday Stciger movie, directed by Sidney Lumet in 19(5.

in which he plays old New York Jew embittered by concentration camp past. Stylised now but impressive. Romeo and Juliet (Sunday, ITV 2 0). Still the best Zef-firelli, with newcomers (then) Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey as and and much swimmy photography. Dr Zhivago (Sunday, ITV liriOTfiTTlCTniirillMKVl'ILlJ operation is not as worrying as the fact that most of it is securely in criminal hands.

Interviewed in the film, Kate Millett says that at first she thought all this had an educational role but that what we actually got was purno and what we needed was eroticism. Other women call it a cultural ritual in which women's bodies are desecrated." And a gentleman who acted as a stud in such films and videos, says he got out of it because every time I came I got an extra 50 bucks, but 1 couldn't stand what I had to do on the way there." God bless the working woman cries a stripper by way of a contrary argument, it's better than eight tricks a night." What nobody seems to argue about is the inevitability of a huge industry in the latter half of the 20th century, given the appalling repression and hypocrisy of the first half. That, and the fact that what makes it so sleazy are the manufacturers and participants themselves (undoubtedly aided and abetted by ourselves, the audience). Society creates its own monsters, and this is one which doesn't mean to say that sex films, in themselves, are wrong. Unfortunately, our censors invariably attack the Twiggy and Christopher Gable in both, each nominated Oscars despite moderate script.

Marathon Man (Saturday. ITV. 10 30). Otiose but entertaining John Schlesinger version of William Goldman best-seller with Dustin Hoffman as runner chasing Laurence Olivier's nasty ex-Nazi. Will they use the dentist's drill scene The Pawnbroker (Sunday.

BBC-2, 10 30). Famous Rod I l.t.l.lliJI iTTTI I lil 1 King Crimson Adrian Belew, Robert FripRlbny Bruford A Beat eg New Album and Cassette.