The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

"10. -A Thursday' September 15 1977 ARTS GUARDIAN FILMS Linda Blair as Regan in Exorcist If: The Heretic Liza Mineili and Robert De Niro in New York, New York SBaM A MUSICAL directed by the formidably gifted Martin Scorsese ought to be something to make a song and dance about. With a cast that includes Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. and a plot that threads its way through the post-war big bands and the small jazz spots of Harlem, New York, New York (Odeon, Leicester Square. from tomorrow) has many rewards; but its good parts don't add up to a satisfactory whole.

Part of the trouble is that the film is couched delib-eratelv in the mainstream Hollvwood musical tradition, wherein struggling showbiz people make it to the top to taste the sweets of success and find them sour. Even the titles echo the 'forties MGM Tim to rise and shine in this original largely dreary version is Bessie' Love, which is as it should' be, because the film forms part of a brief Bessie Love season in honour of the 79-year-old veteran of the early cinema. She comes across freshly and vividly, and is cast as the sister who isn't pretty. You could have fooled me. Musicals aside, the devil may have all the best tunes he's also developing a corner in picturesque settings.

Exorcist II The Heretic (Warner West End, ABC Shaftesbury Av.enue, Fulham Road, Edgware Road, X) takes Father Richard Burton, SJ, in pursuit of evil to the piquantly poverty-stricken favelas of Brazil and ancient Coptic monasteries of Ethio of them are originals by John Kander and Fred Ebb (of Cabaret). The plot creaks uneasily at times: a legacy of cuts that have reduced it to 2 hours 17 minutes. The film may have worked better at its original length, but, since the shorter version teeters on the edge of dullness fairly often, I doubt it. I dare say some people will come out of New York, New York muttering that they don't make musicals like they used to. With amazing and entirely fortuitous timing the National Film Theatre is this weekend showing MGM's first musical, The Broadway Melody (1929).

It's a salutary cure for nostalgia to the seventies eye the girls seem fat, the dancing silly and the singing V2t. only figure extravaganzas the montage of a band's progress on tour all spinning wheels and road signs follows the pattern solidified by The Benny Goodman Storv and positively congealed by Funny Girl. Pure corn and none the worse for that, but it sits oddly on the plate of other, more tangy fare served by Scorsese and his principals. It is VJ day in New York. Robert De Niro is a pushy voung ex-GI tenor sax player, all gum, Brylcreem, and bruised ego.

He picks up a voung chanteuse and gets to work in the band she sings with. They many, he takes over the band, the crowds flock. Since the chanteuse is Liza Minnelli the crowds are flocking to hear her: he chooses not to accept this, FIRST MIGHT CZH i nm-- I Julie Harris is eerily compelling and has magnetic presence IS new releases base to all this swiftly paced entertaining mumbo-jumbo Teilhard de Chardin's is taken, probably in vain. There is some quite dramatic foo- lery with strobe lights -and electro-encephalographs and deep hypnosis otherwise it is the old story of evil giving good a rough time and an ambiguous ending which leaves open the way for ani i other sequel. Richard Burton potters.

through it with a look of weary distaste, or even nausea. John Boorman directed: the film was apparently somewhat re-edited after a disap-'. pointing opening in the United States but it is hard to imagine that it is a better or worse film for that. Hard to take it seriously at all, in fact. savaged by a couple of roa dies who serve as stand up comedians, Norman is the play's focus, and in the second half its natural victim.

Seen by Sammy Sphincter a rotter and a manager, he, is an inevitable choice for the first practitioner of Snuff Rock, in which the lead singer is subjected to every form of death threat from vampire bats to electrocution, before being snuffed out as a kind of terminal entertainment. But before he goes we have a wild, exciting range of rock satire from deservedly unknown reggae to the nadir of rock. "I can see it all now, I can see the secret of the universe," says Norman, out of-his mind on music and LSD, but refusing to reveal it. As rough satire (which'-' needs to be much crueller) 1 and clever music, as a fusion of both, Sleak will speak to more than one generation." Jimmy Hibbert as Norman, graduates cleverly from rather endearing simplicity to snuff rock musicianship and C. P.

Lee who wrote the con-y fection and Gordon Kaye and-i'-Arthur Kelly give very cle- verly judged portrayals of the unacceptable faces of rock music and of life itself. Sleak, in Charlie Hanson's exuberant production, will probably connect with a lot of people, whether bewildering, disgusting ot provoking an affinity. OPEN SPACE John Ashford Twelfth Night THIS PRODUCTION of Twelfth Night has, been two years in the making and-, generated a great deal of goodwill when it was seen at the Oxford Playhouse last year. Most of the company are students at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and their dir-" ector, Michael Gearin-Tosh, is a don. The.

cast is completed by three young professional actors. Where the production is successful is in the riage of the professional and student worlds. The profes-" sionals do not necsssarily take the larger roles, ana distinc- -lions become unimportant. This is. made possible by the production's simple and unpretentious style.

The marriage is indeed an achievement but so much of the play is lost in its There is little sensual little sense of playing the absurd games of the narrative, and unforgivably no real indication of the comedy's essential passion or sexuality In truth, much of the evening is dull and lifeless. The seriousness of tone at the conclusion is rightly achieved by the sensitive and inventive performance of Jim Hooper, as Feste one of, the professional actors and one Is left wishing to see this performance within the context of a fully worked professional production. v1 ST' It nfx Radford reviews the pia. The Heretic picks up a few years beyond the close of The Exorcist. Linda Blair is now a chubby character of 17, who has, it seems, been repossessed.

She's undergoing deep therapy in a clinic masterminded by Louise (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) Fletcher. Max Von Sydow makes what you might call ghost appearances, James Earl Jones plays a kind of Ethiopian shaman, or possibly shams the role, because on another level he's an entomologist. There are some very impressive sequences by courtesy of Oxford Scientific Films, the evil spirit this time being enshrined in the desert locust. The production notes reveal that there is a philosophical beautiful and subtle passages was disappointing. The last movement went better it was almost as though the pianist took the cue from wind soloists who answered his questions with pointed eloquence.

Mahler's First Symphony is a test piece for any orchestra. Under Edo de Waart the Rotterdam players scored highly for vigour and clarity, and for the power and accuracy of their admirable violins. The hot, heavy and aggressive sound of their trombones and tuba gave a new meaning to those threatening chords, separated-by pauses before the flat section of the finale. If the work seemed longer and plainer than usual, its was due to lack of dynamic variation pianissimo often came out as mezzoforle, and some detail was lost because of the generally high level of tone. The conductor avoided all expressive lingering in earlier movements, but brought off a most eloquent and moving last moyement.

It was good to hear- that this generally solid and sensible orchestra can also play so passionately when the spirit of Mahler moves them. ROYAL COURT Nicholas de Jongh Sieak THIS ARTISTIC sanctuary where middle-class people like me are encouraged to relieve generalised guilt-feelings about deprived sectors of working class life has been transformed into an area for punkish performers and their pin carrying supporters. For this is the first time that the theatre has faced up to the manifestations of punk rock and the people who have pierced themselves, dyed their hair and given anger a new face. Alberto Lost Trios Paranoias are the performers and they are a rock rarity, a band whose act is partly musical and partly a. satirical assault upon the ways of the rock world at large its practitioners and some of its unlovely accessories the roadies, the managers, the violence and the dope.

Sleak is not only a satire on rock and punk rock in a raw and crude unmetropolitan mode. It also gives an idea of people whoso lives are goaded by punk. The result, however farcical, caricatured and the-matically slovenly is most exciting, and exciting because the methods are so unusual for the theatre. We begin with Norman a dimwitted, unemployed punk boy. whose intelligence quotient is low and sinks through the evening.

Only his girl a lady plumber, interrupts the flow of bad luck and exploitation bombed, out of. his mind on acid from friends, and and, when she gets pregnant and leaves, the band collapses. So does their marriage. She goes on to fame in the Hollywood musical; he goes back to his first love, jazz, and makes it to celebrity. They meet but things have changed.

Well, that's show business. The film's strongest moments involve long passages of bravura acting by De Niro and Minnelli: the pickup in a drunken dance hall; a set-to with a hotel clerk about an unpaid bill; a frenetic wooing in the snow before the sleepv, astonished eyes of the small' town they've aroused for matrimonial purposes. The dialogue has edge: De Niro blurts out to Minnelli the words I love you and then, shocked at the bluntness she lets her memory run free, recalling the early excitements of young beaux, her distaste for organised religion; confess a desire to be a poet. She fears her father, laments his death, dreads the arrival of Mr Higginson, the essayist with whom she long corresponded, and who finally pays a visit after eight years of written communications. In this rambling and jovial drift, with sudden poetic declamations, the brief uncon-summated encounter with her married lover passes for nothing.

Mr Luce ignores the fact that it was his departure from her life which inspired the feverish, unique poetry meditations on love and death. Renunciation is a piercing virtue, the letting go a presence," she wrote with that huge serenity which inhabited all her work. He makes her life crisis seem the wish to be published and this rejection devastating but she wrote on unheeding, It was the love which mattered. In this formless and undra-matic scenaa-io Julie Harris has the hardest of tasks. She is an eerily compelling actress.

At the age of 50 she manages to convey a childlike personality a highly feminine personality but one which has never reached adulthood. It is not really Emily and the histrionic, melodramatic loud tones are sometimes monotonous. But when the director Charles Nelson really allows or encourages her to relax into true Dickinsonlan repose Arlott Tom Burke of the phrase, slinks back into the jargon of his environment: he means he digs her, he likes the way she grooves. Sometimes the camera looks with a fresh eye upon the old hoop-la: thus a man dances with a girl in the silent streets of New York, but this time the lens is 20 or 30 feet above them, and there is no music but the noise of the trains as a rhythm section. It is always an eyeful and usually an earful: Liza Minnelli is as satisfying a songthrush as she is an actress.

Robert De Niro apparently insisted on mastering the tenor sax for the role: if he played what's on the sound track then he has done handsomely. Many of the songs and numbers are standards: some and quiet, she transforms memorably hazy-eyed, the closing of the wooden lid of her poetry box is like a coffin closed and she projects a great sense of unerotic exaltation wherever allowed. TELEVISION Nancy Banks-Smith Whicker's World THE FACE was familiar in Whicker's World Palm Beach, Florida (Yorkshire), but I could not put a name to it. Until like a coconut, it hit me. Mehitabel.

It is just pos-sible that you don't know Don Marquis's dilapidated but indomitable cat, Mehitabel, and her faithful chronicler Archy, who happens to be a cockroach. Mehitabel has a somewhat unspecific history in Hollywood, a number of matrimonial misadventures and the courage of her convictions. Which were usually for clawing a torn who done her wrong. Her life was chequered but her spirit was 100 per cent proof. My motto has always been toujours gai archy toujours Gai always jolly archy always game and thank god always the lady If, with a little effort of the imagination, one casts Alan Whicker as Archy the cockroach, then the indomitably dancing Dames of Palm Beach are unmistakably Mehitabel.

The typical resident of Palm Beach is, it seems, old and loaded and admits neither. Money is one thing I will not discuss, even though I have piles of it," said one, tastefully and I'm 39 and holding," said another. Like Mehitabel their motto is the hell with anything common. A Monet in every bidet sort of thing. "Time in Palm Beach," said Whicker, who relishes the quiddities of the rich, is measured by thS year Mrs So and So's face-lift fell or the year she had her bottom ribs removed for a wasp waist or had her blocd changed These matrons seem to have been in musical comedy before marrying into cheese spread.

As the local editor callously calculated, most of them have only a few years to spend when they get get to Palm Beach, the cheese spread king having gone before. And the accuracy with which they spit right in death's eye commands admiration. Mrs Ann Hamilton had a nice line in mortician's humour providing the sub title, How can I lie abput my age when my son needs a face lift 1 I am asked to emphasise that this son is not George the film star but her older son, who looks like a Enine. "When I had my osom lifted," she said, "I thought with my luck. I'll die but if I do I want to be buried topless." The un- Honeysett Terry Jones Bryan McAllister Julie Harris Phoenix.

Picture by Douglas Jeffery ground, he hits his right kneecap a sharp blow and his left leg perversely shoots up. Erect once more, he discovers his right leg is now mysteriously shorter than his left. His attempts to remedy this by hobbling abotu only to find that the right limb has now acquired an independent life and is prone to vivacious rotating twirls. In desperation he regains the wings with left leg archly bent and right leg board-stiff looking like a Can-Can girl inexplicably crossed with a First World War veteran. It is in the high tradition of eccentric physical comedy and in those ten minutes one comes far closer to the spirit of Buster than in all those showbjz pieties (well though they are delivered by Wall and Jan Waters) about a clown with a breaking heart.

RAHRADIO 3 Hugo Cole Rotterdam Philharmonic THE SCORE of Tristan Keuris's Sinfonia on the con-' ductor's desk looked large enough to be very avant garde but the first few bars must, have reassured the apprehensive. It is one of those pieces which foreign orchestras like to take on toiir guaranteed nqt to upset conservative audiences, side-stepping the obvious with the odd extra beat and occasional off-key harmony, but all in a context of normality. The work is scored most expertly and is flattering to the players, unselfconsciously slipping in clarinet and flute cadenzas, and ending with a sort of berceuse, soft, luminous and sensuous with an effective epilogue in which a solo piano Unexpectedly takes aver from the orchestra, is rather as though Keuris took up where Ravel left off but he does not stop there, developing his own quiet but' individual idiom without much regard for more recent developments. He explains that he sticks to simple neutral titles and that a programmatic interpretation of. this purely abstract work is out of the question.

Would that, it were not so, for its main weakness is a lack of continuity, giving one the feeling, that many essentially picturesque conceptions, are looking for a guiding force to give them purpose and direction, and shake them into one. The American pianist Paul Sehenly "did nothing in particular with, Mozart's A major Concerto K.488. A straight, classical unsentimental concepts is all very well, but we want to learn something of, what the player thinks of this most wonderful work. A few' smudged notes were of no consequence, but the prosaic way in which he played many- PHOENIX Nicholas de Jongh' The Belle of Amherst THERE IS something grotesque about the way in which Emily Dickinson, the greatest woman poet who wrote in the English language, has become the subject of a Broadway triumph that is now set to repeat the feat here with Julie Harris in the solo role. For Emily Dickinson lived a life quite empty of outward excitement or incident.

Throughout the middle and later years of the nineteenth century she lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, the last 25 in virtual seclusion. She never married and her fame was entirely posthumous. In her own lifetime her poetry was unknown and derided by the one expert in whom she confided. But there was a governing sorrow in her life, a loye affair, unconsumated with a married man which precipi--tated her great creative period and which remains a mystery. But it is a disappointment that the play's author.

William Luce, sould have made this stage biography, which gives Julie Harris her long overdue and welcome British debut, an example of escapist whimsy. It is enjoyable enough in its fashion but has too little to do with Emily Dickinson escapist whimy is the manner spurred by ingratiating charm. Onto a beautifully evocative set, adorned with bric-a-brac, a hat dolls, a piano, vases of flowers, an, oil lamp, family photographs, comes this white-dressed trembling old girl. She CHANGE DECAY An cnlishtening exhibition on the problems facing our decaying churches. Should they be saved How could they be used? Who pays the price? Weekdays Fridays) Sundays 2.30-5.

50. Lastadm. 5.15. Admbsion50p Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington London's liveliest museum. Max Wall quenchable spirit of Mehitabel Only three legs archy only three legs but what the hell there's a dance in the old dame yet.

OLD VIC Michael Billington Buster Max Wall BUSTER at the Old Vic is short on fact and long on sentiment. Conceived as a musical tribute to the great Keaton by Jane McCullor.h and Donald Fraser. it is full of numbers with titles like "Sad Clown" and "Little funny man," And although they refer to Buster's tragic life rather than his art, they still seem to me out of keeping with a comedian whose forte was a quietly sardonic stoicism and whose films bad what Agee called a fine, still and dreamlike beauty." What Buster does have, of course, is the magnetic presence of Max Wall. He doesn't impersonate Keaton: he presents him, filtering him through the prism cf his own wry, quizzical personality. After a typically Maxist warm-up Ave trouble with the tandem he inquires of well-heeled latecomers), he steers us past the familiar signposts of Keaton's career: the vaudevillian baptism at the age of three, the impulsive decision to join Fatty Arbuckle, the great movies of the 1920s, the fatal decision to sign with MGM, the alcoholism, the decline and ultimate rediscovery.

The trouble is it all has the ring of a standard biopic: what one misses is idiosyncratic detail such as the fact that Thalberg was interested in Keaton returning to MGM to do a spoof version of Grand Hotel but that the great man's pride prevented him. The show does, however, have ten minutes of pure magic when Wall, reared in the same acrobatic tradition as. Keaton, resurrects his vaudeville brigins. He comes on as an' over-zealous hoofer, re-, turning for unsought encores, whose legs gradually capsize under him. Sitting on the, RichardMabey John Piper Peter Porter arrives carrying a black cake my own special recipe and asks us to forgive me if I'm frightened," then proceeds to indulge in a life-reminiscence of domestic chatter.

The confiding, arch manner hardly suggests a shy recluse, far less a considerable mind. Aided by a bewildering repertoire of lighting changes Spend a day at the A new magazine, edited by RICHARD BOSTON, on sale today and the third Thursday of every month Price 60p Wsm Contributors John Jeremy Sandford Or write to VOLE 20 fitzroy Square. London, W.I for subscription details IS HERE! SasfhiBrata Jeremy Bugler Fay Godwin Christopher Hall Anne Scott'-James PosySitfirrionds.