The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

ft ivrc A Thenar am I Thinly May 1975- -m1. o.y. 4' iwi'vt ir -j Edward Greenfield's record review I CodfatherVrevehe toty Ci'lt salute's Don "Francesco (Cuiseppe Sillato) before slayinV him TClhvs Derek Malcolm reviews fiammfiHy The Godfather, Part II, and other new Silms FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA'S The God-father, Part II (X) is the film the director would have liked to have made from Mario Puzo's novel the first time round. And to say that it fills in' the details absent from Part I is the understatement of the year. In a sense it is all detail, 200 minutes long and without half of the first film's plot.

As a commercial proposition it shouldn't work, but box-office receipts in America suggest that it certainly does. Clearly it is some way the more subtle piece of cinema and worth at least some of its half a dozen Oscars. But one has to say straightaway that it is not as viscerally exciting and that it has both dull and confusing patches. Apparently Coppola's first cut was closer to four and a half hours and perhaps the trimming of 70 minutes or so Is both too much and too little. Too much because at times you have to tread very warily through the narra-tive to pick up precisely who is whom (often the case between a first and second cut) and too little because one occasionally feels that whole sequences could disappear without a great deal more harm being done.

Perhaps the best solution would have been noJtaitting, and two more films instead of one. Even so and one- must emphasise this the film is a very considerable achievement It is an epic about the underbelly of America that says far more than The Great Gatsby, for instance, aver did. There is not, this time around, the succession of well-modulated frissons that had applause breaking out in the stalls but made the whole process of condemning the Mafia a somewhat suspect operation. Much of it simply became a brilliant giggle. The laughs, for whatever reason, are distinctly sourer here.

Part starts in Sicily where Vito. Corleooe's father, mother, and elder brother are murdered in a Mafioso INSIDE STORY MAREK by Nancy Banks-Smith MAREK (BBC-2) is the record of a seven-year-old boy who was operated on for pulmonary atresia (an operation with every hope of success) and died. And lives in this film. I do not think it is possible to watch it without crying. And yet the boy was brave and bright with the transparent prettiness of the dangerously fragile.

His parents were loving and selfless even in their decision that the film should be shown, so people would appreciate their normal, healthy children. The surgical team fought for 14 hours, with almost no hope but without surrender. And Mark Anderson's television team kept on filming, though less and less as they saw what anyone watching could sense. So it was not singled or brutal or intolerable. Humanity had done its best and was shown at its best.

At the very beginning Marek in school read a poem "The breeze is blowing, The river flowing, And there isn't any knowing, Where it is going." At the very end. his little sister, in a boat on the river with her parents, laughed: "We, are going. We are going." "Where" asfked her mother, s'are we going?" That was not accidental. The shape of the film is- deliberate, One would like to think that nothing was just accidental. "IT WAS almost as if Bach, happily settled as cantor of St Thpinas's in Leipzig, had suddenly started writing Italian operas" There in an eye-'' catching' analogy conductor and scholar, John Eliot sets in place the Great Vespers which Monteverdi published in 1610, a.

work which perhaps, more than any single Piece of music, has opened "an. entirely new area for modern listeners: What more surprising, argues, Gardiner, than that the acknowledged leader among secular composers in Italy should without warning and with no direct chance of performance, turn his hand to what in effect -is the grandest and most magnificent choral; work before Bach Gardiner having presented the' anomaly does of course help to explain the riddle. In the early years of the century, though brilliantly successful as opera and madngalist, Monteverdi had personal worries, both emotional and financial that pressed hard -on him. If the Vespers of 1610 speak to us with an immediacy that' leaps the centuries it is because they represent something more personal than had ever been contained, in choral-music-before. It was: music to.

the glory of God but the' eruption came out of individual tensions period of frenzied creative activity. No doubt the Vespers helped to get Monteverdi his new post in Venice three years later in 1613, but their purpose was hardly practical. The grand quasi-theatrical design of this spectacular Work, says'Gardiner; has always--, seemed' compelling to me," s- and his new recording (Decea SET 593-4 6.50) triumphantly presents the music in that light. Till now recordings have been variably successful. This of all works demands the spread stereo, but the stereo versions- have- never really exploited the expansion possible.

Denis Stevens on Vanguard omitted the great non-liturgical (on grounds which, however were disappointing in their result), while Robert Craft. vigorous and dramatic, used a strange concert order of his own. JUrgen Jurgens with Nicolas Harnoncourt and the Concentus Musicus, in the only surviving stereo -set on Das Alte Werk. in meticulous concern for authentic detail, saw it as a small-scale piece set against a domestic acoustic. The- Jurgens version will always, remain a valuable ddcujnent, but it lacks light and shade as well as tic splendour when compared with Gardiner's realisation p-f "the grand quasi-theatrical design." Multiple strings are.

used and modern trumpets instead of corhetti, but with' sharper, more "resilient rhythms than Jurgens commands, the result-is never inflated merely apt for the scale' of the music. Some, I suppose, may find the sounds too seductive in such -a, motet as Pulchra es with the voice of Jill Gomez and Felicity Palmer delicately intertwining, but there is no question of romanticising and the whole span of the thirteen movements sweeps you forward with a sense of complete unity. The Monteverdi Choir, which Gardiner founded and trained sings splendidly and the1 excellent soloists also include James Bowman, Robert Philip Landgridge, John Shirley-Quirk and Michael Rippon. The Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and the David Munrow: Recorder Consort join the Monteverdi Orchestra in superb playing. Nicolas Harnoncourt, director of the instrumentalists in the Jargens version has since then gone on to build up a formidable library of performances on authentic instruments of much baroque music.

His latest issue on Das Alte Werk contains Monteverdi's great opera. L'In'coronazione di Poppea, the Coronation of Poppeia, in a version absolutely, uncut Das Alte Wer 645247 five discs), and in spite of the Wagnerian proportions the- result is fascinating. Just how freely Raymond Leppard used the cutting shears in his recording (HMV SLS 908). cut down from the Glyndebourne production, is very dear from statistics alone. Leppard's set takes four sides against the 10 of Ham-oncourt's, which in playing time lasts, something like four hours.

Harnoncourt, predictably more than presents the music relatively straight. Elisabeth Sbderstrbm is not the ideal soprano to sing the role of I should have preferred a sharper, more, biting- tone, but her characterisation intensifies as the. opera progresses, and her great scene with Seneca (Giah-carlo Liiccardi a -very dark bass) is superbly effective, the swift interr changes made more involving in this complete form. of his early films (Structure of Crystals. Family Life, and Behind the Wall) was not illusory.

And if his work still seems tied to a certain extent to the example of it is never merely imitative. John Berry, the director of Claudine (Studio One. AA), left Hollywood for Paris a few years ago after a series of disastrous brushes with the film-making establishment. So I suppose one should happy that he went back there to make this movie, which proved a considerable box-office success in the States. Unfortunately I find it almost totally meretricious one of those attempts, at elucidating the problems of black Americans that's so self-conscious that it hurts.

Claudine (Diahann Carroll) is a 36-year-old Harlem mother of six who works as a maid to add surreptitiously her welfare, pittance. With her husband vanished, she is courted by a huge garbage man (James Earl Jones) who wants to do the right thing but finds he cannot because of welfare regulations. He too has got children and if he makes respectable woman her the welfare payments are cut off. The way he gets around first Claudine, then her suspicious children, and, finally even the hopelessly inadequate social system ortns the of comedy not without a certain irony but also so deliberately tear-jerking as be positively dishonest. Almost everything is loaded against proper appreciation of the realities of the situation and in favour of a series of dramatic devices labelled tenderness, bitterness, hope, and the like.

The emotional punches are telegraphed as they might be in a TV series such as Within -These Walls, which makes the problems of women's prisons the basis for a worthy but weak-kneed soap opera. Claudine is entertaining if you like that easy way out. But don't go near it if you don't. ROGER at Sadler's Wells protracted, their music might iu pail. The opening basilica scene is impressive and beautiful.

The- action, merely of confrontations for the greater part, is static. The notions conveyed are easy enough to digest Nietzsche without said a wag in the interval). So is the music i accessible, I mean. One rather wishes it was less so," said another commentator. I coujd see truth in these views and had.

a feeling that I. was Flecker Hassan and. Fokine's Sherazade by some trick associative side-slipping. But there "are "many episodes cf soupd and an atmospheric richness 'wihioftc recalls Bartok's UluebeardV Castle. Peter Knapp sang the name part of the king led under the spell of the Dionysian himself sttng, with considerable effort only, by the tenor David Hillman (usually piuch steadier).

Janet Gail sang the queen, easily lured by the'' relteioft. John Windfield sang 'the counsellor. I didn't find the lyricism of the vocal' line quite as expressive as I had hoped from all the preliminary puffing but the overall sound is rewarding, warm, without now fashionable spikes' and barbs. in Chichester from the flies to remind us the last act takes place in autumn. As for Cyrano himself, Keith Michell gives a gallant, energetic, and often dashing performance.

He wraps his tongue around Christopher Fry's rhymes with proper masticatory relish and, when simultaneously improvising a ballad and fighting a duel, he displays the right exaltant panache. The trouble is, as Tynan noted, the play requires an actor who can. merge the extrava-. gant and- the bizarre into the heroic and Michell finally lacks the mad grace that is at the heart of Cyrano. In spite of some soaring Olivier cad-' ences (and what a part it would have been for our theatrical Lord) he just misses the grotesque moonstruck quality of this -desperate 'Gascon.

The supp6rtlife company admittedly lend their playing-card characters a good deal of vitality. David WilUams's de Guiche is, like the gentjernn in Daisy Ashford, very sneeyy and full of insolent hauteur; Barbara Jefford's Roxane has the right calculating sensuality; and Bill Frser, rubicund under a giant pastrycook's hat, offers a neat sketch of the, poetic Ragueneu. But Rostand's otiose tragicomedy needs-more than talent if it is to work; demands, in fact, nothing short of genius. 0360 ,119) is now thoroughly involved: the kind, of. jazz per-formknceLin 'which theineft'are domin ated by ppcurring base guitar Legrand Recorded Live at.

-Jimmy's (RCA SF 8412), and hear a composer-pianist from the popular field revising his tunes 'to fit his company Phil Woods (alto sax). Ron Carter (bass), Grady Tate (drums), and George Davis (guitar). We have to put up with Legranrt's singing, and too florid right hand, but this is a very happy made whole byf-Wopfls's superb -solo the ballad Yoh Must 'Believe Jrt m-v' bloodbath and the young boy is packed off to America, where he learns his criminal education in New York's Little Italy. It then progresses forward in time to the late fifties with his son Michael in charge of The Family and intent on going legitimate by making the biggest deal of his life with corrupt politicians and businessmen in Batista's Cuba. "Think of it," says Hymie, the Jewish gangster with whom he has formed an uneasy alliance, We're bigger than US Steel.

Just one small step away from finding a man to be President and getting the money to make him so." And this is the major point of tihe film the way the name of the game changes into something perhaps less bloody but infinitely more dangerous. The scenes in Havana, just before Castro's revolution, are superb andinci--dentally a splendid corrective for all but the blindest of reactionary Americans. Some, however, will- doubtless point 6ut that The Family's sucessors, thwarted in Cuba, still found an excellent "pro-businass" President in Nixon. The film switches backward and forwards in time to make its points about the institutionalisation of crime in America, and the early scenes in New York where Vito is initiated into the roundabout of favours taken and received (and of offers no one can refuse) are almost as good. There is a stunning sense of corruption leading to corruption but very little of the moralising that other epics of the genre are so apt to indulge in.

Only towards the end do we get the on BBC-2 Right-minded people like me have spent time we can ill afford reassuring the credulous like you that there is' no such thing as a Mad Scientist (in spite of cries from the back of "what about Patrick To us Don't Ask Me (Yorkshire) is a bitter body blow. It is up to its mandibles in mad scientists and reminds me very much of the sort of Bulld'og Drummond yarn they don't write any ipore. The hero of this episode was one Fred Gray, who had rescued an 11-year-old boy from quicksands and you don't come much more heroic than that. This fine man was lured into a tank of sand by the potty Professor Pyke who then, ripping off his wiskers and disclosing himself as. the villain of the piece, turned on a tap and submerged poor Fred up to the top of hi? legs.

The scenario, circulated to me beforehand, promised that at this point a crocodile would bite either Dr Bellamy or Dr Stoppard. The creature was clearly a critic and I looked forward to its contribution but was saddened to see that the talented animal's performance had been lefton the cutting room floor. There is a lot of jealousy in this business. This left us with clean-limbed Fred Gray still silted up. Will he escape? Is Magnus Pyke an alias for Big FishJ Will he be eaten by piranhas Tune in next week.

and Rochdale almost like a 1975 Bosch geometric, panofafhic, -with light spearing in. The effect is great, the message without substance. His paintings and drawings of Oldham are beautiful he captures perfectly that washed-out brightness of drizzly, pearly grey streets, that permeating marrow-chilling half-rain peculiar to the industrial North. And in these works, like Wet Wednesday in Uppennill, there is magic glimpsed in the most unpromising of scenes. Equally, in Nightscehe With Mist a smoky town recedes to garish specks in the fog, and the work pulses with power and secret drama.

Occasionally he gets away from Oldham, and presents seascapes, but grey and drab ana ordinary, like Oldham. At Rochdale Art Gallery (until June 1) Susan Bennett js an exhibition of uncomfortably juxtaposed work: strip paintings on a somewhat hackneyed theme and extremely good watercolours. She worfcs best on a tiny scale the little paintings of flowers end figures have much more impact than the large abstracts; which are dullish in form, content, and application. IN THE NICEST jazz sense, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra have been musical arrangements have marvellously contrasted the excitement of the ibig band ensemble and freedom for his soloists by dropping brass or reeds or even part of the rhythm trio during improvised sections. And What was basically a rehearsal band for studio instrumental lists, thriving on a fortnightly New York gig, recording dates, and holiday tours, could afford to drop out of the competition by regular, travelling jaw groups for a place in the hit DaraUe.

A change of record company bow appears to be provoking a change of rhetoric about broken lives and untie-able blood knots with which we, are little too familiar. But-there is 'a chil-. ling moment when Michael says to the' wife who has finally decided to leave him If history's taught us anything, it says you can kill anyone." With that philosophy you can't possibly get out from under, and. Michael, never Fine performances from Robert De Niro (Vito), Al Pacino (Michael), John Cazale (Freddo), Lee Strasberg (Hymie), Robert Duvall (The Family's lawyer) and G. D.

Spradlin (a corrupt Senator) help Coppola and Gordon his cmematographer, to recreate from the dry bones of Puzo's bo'ok something memorably living. Longueurs there are, but Godfather remains the one sequel that's arguably better than the original. The film can be at the Plaza 1 and 2, the ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue, and the ABC, Fulham Road. Krzystztof Zanussi's Illumination (Paris Pullman, AA) is one of those' highly intelligent and well-made European films that generally get hawked round one festival after another without actually getting bought by nervous distributors. One can understand why.

It has no self-evident stars, it is about a very Polish young man searching disconsolately for some meaning to his life, and it is by a director who is only beginning to be known in the West. Yet it's a film, for all its difficulties and hesitations, that is very much worth seeing. Congratulations to Contemporary Films for giving it a chance. Zanussi's technique is to build a LITTLE MALCOLM in Manchester by Gillian Unscott FROTH and Sentimentality are no respecters of circumstances. David Halliwell's Little Malcolm at the University Theatre; Manchester is about three art school dropouts in a Hud-dersfield bed sitter.

But, 10 years after its first performance, it shows up as insubstantial and soft centred as the chintziest drawing room comedy. A matter of perhaps: in 20 years a comedy may be a period piece, at 40 with luck a classic. At 10 it has to live on its wit and there are signs here of malnutrition. It was certainly no fault of the acting. There are four superb central performances by members of the Contact Theatre Company, especially Chris Hunter as Malcolm and Philip Talbot as.

his dimmest ally. The problem is the character of Malcolm. He talks like a fascist, plans to take over the whole world beginning with his art college, and is incapable even of organising a shilling into a gas meter. When the girl he fancies invites him to make love to her he is so scared that he clobbers her unconscious, Is he funny, pathetic, or a jstudy of the nature of political violence? All three, seem to be the theme of the play and it doesn't quite The self realisation scenes' where dreams meet reality and lose are written, and were' played, for pathos and last night got a few giggles. The comedy is but comes over as a' series of et pieces with each actor taking it in turn for his big solo spot.

They, are hilarious solos but go nowhere, funny turns for the sake of funny turns. And the exploration of the roots violence which the fo -promise; at soine of Its best moments degenerates at the end' to' the old question of whether MalcOhh will be saved by the love of a policy. On their first album for' the, Philadelphia International label, Potpourri (PIR 80411,, distributed by CBS Records) Jones (flugelhorn) -and Lewis, (drums) offer, five jazz originals with the band dropping out an one of 'them, for a fine unhipdered Jerry Doflgion flute solo include two numbers by Stevie Wonder, In my view, going commercial is only a jazz crime when.it entails a drop in standards; Seeking a' larger audience did not damage -the music of Louis Armstrong, JDuke Ellington. Wes Mongomery, and Stan Getz; and it-has not yet harmed the Jcines-Kewi band. But I am perturbed ''by reports''that Peter Knapp: Sadler's Wells I mosaic of short scenes round his central (character to illustrate the 6f life, so that in the end we come to know him quite intimately.

Ultunination, a term taken from St Augustine, means the attaining wisdotft through the enlightenment of the mind not as a result of rapture but of. thought. And the young man. studying t6 be a physicist, tries to find in' science the certainties lacking in the rest of his life. But the more he looks, the less certain he becomes that the scientist is necessarily the whole He watches brain surgeons violating the human mind with casual ease.

He observes how some scientists regard themselves as a controlling elite. After the excit-ment of his university education comes his army training, marriage to his pregnant girlfriend, and then a job a hospital orderly to pay for wife and child. Finally, as he is received back into a scientific career; he learns that he has heart disease and is, after all, a mere mortal to the truth isn't likely to be vouchsafed. Illumination is not an easy film, and perhaps: it is too fragmentary to be wholly effective. Somehow its 90 minutes seems longer than it is.

But Zanussi's skill in shooting and editing his highly personalised material, and the natural performances he has secured from his cast (Stanlslaw Latallo is the young man, very ordinary but still interesting), make the film ajar richer experience than most. Its attempt to externalise the internal proves beyond doubt that the promise i SZYMANOWSKI'S KING by Philip Hope-Wallace SURPRISE AND PLEASURE were experienced at Sadler's Wells when the New Opera Company put on the overdue British premiere of Szymanowski's opera King Roger, written 1926. First the surprise of the turn-out and sellout by top musical London all agog. It could have been sold out again and again, yet there are only two performances, last night, the other on Saturday (they couldn't afford the Royal Philharmonic for more). But Anthony Besch production is anything hut skimpy or makeshift and the designs (John Stoddart), lighting (Joe Davis), and Sally Gilpin's choreography, which could be so embarrassing in "this Bacchae-like story, were convincing and well rehearsed, as "indeed the whole rather splendid effort.

Charles Mac-kerras conducted and, though" the tenor Was temporarily below par, the words came ip declamation through the densely coloured, rather marvellous sheets of orchestral sound. A minor pleasure is perhaps that this story of a conversion of a Sicilian king to Dioriysian 1 rites does not end in murder and mayhem, only a little orgiastic dreaming (we are told the dream is over when the third curtain falls). The scenes are succinct and advisedly so. I had a feeling that, CYRANO DE BERGERAC by Michael Billington GIVEN THE buccaneering eccentricity of -an actor like Richardson and the busy genius of a director like the late Tyrone Guthrie, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano may well have worked upon the English stage. But without those extravagant piratical qualities, as in the opening production of this -year's Chichester Festival, the play seems a rather hollow and long-winded piece of romantic theatre.

Admittedly a rather more inquisitive director than Jose Ferrer might have, unearthed an interesting subtext, I once heard, it suggested, for instance, that the, p)ay Js a classic homosexual study and- that Cyrano is really in' lpve with Christian de. the Gascon cadet on' whose behalf he tirelessly, wooes Roxane; and. this ertanly makes sense of Cyrano's, refusal, even 14 years after Christian's death, to confess his passion for Rox-ane. But no such interpretative novelty' is allowed to disturb Mr Ferrer's col-ourfully fivundane production in which lights are suddenly lowered to indicate the. meettaS of two, in.

which cadets fti? avhearty. male voice number that irreverently reminded- jne-: of the Monty Python ganff poslng as Canadianrmountrest and in whicfoJeaves are their fascinating pianist Roland Hanna has qultbecause.he disapproves of a more-commercial, approach. But there is a world of difference musically -between the band's version of Wonder's living for the Citywhich has a monotonous pedal relieved by brief releases and a Waltz fragment-rand tile pointedly funky paraphrase by the' pianist Ramsey Lewis on Sun Goddess 8067.7). Lewis is so committed to his Switched-on cliches that he ruins a basically acoustic ballad, Love by moving to electric piano to incorporate them; Similarly; the trumpeter: Ian Carr's Nucletfs-SmKeshlps; Etcetera (Vertigo be to of to a EXHIBITIONS in Oldham by Stephen 'Dixon IT'S VERY HARD to knock a painter who was born in poverty, left school at 15 to become a riveter of door handles, and ended up at 24 as a council dustman with a wife and three kids. Not quite ended up," however.

Robert Littleford, whose exhibition runs at Oldham Art Gallery until May 31, was discovered by the media even though he didn't start painting until he was 20 his name is assured through ecstatic press reviews, consolidated by coverage on BBC's Nationwide. Look, they all said, he's a dustman and he actually has the and sensitivity of spirit to create decent paintings. And everybody said Faced with this one's objectivity is sorely pressed. Because Littjeford is not really a Northern -primitive, or a follower in the well-trudged footsteps of Lowry. an excellent draughtsman, given the same limitations allowed to rtipts who happen not to have been dustmen, and he must be evaluated as if one doesn't know his bcjtgppund.

Some of the work In hi current exhibition disappoints he seems overly, concerned with tons Of light and shade. In Passing Cloud this Is most marked, by Saint Peters ELECTRIC CINEMA 181 Poitobalo Road, W11 Tiphooo 01-7274882 Mavlttt) 'Woody AUwi'a Everything Ycu. Evr To Know About 8 i Woe UiUKuft MM (ft) 'flKDJCOOPo iYY 1 mm.