The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

ARTS GUARDIAN 10 Thursday July 5 1973 review MAN ALIVE on television by Nancy Banks-Smith "MAN ALIVE" (BBC-2) was more about Men dead, being an exploration of the undying adulation of dead stars like Flynn and Valentino. It was rather an uneasy necrophiliac business altogether, mth a touch of the Queen I don't feel easy in my mind about an interview with someone who is obsessive to the point of being ill. I even felt physically uncomfortable, adgeting, itching, and looking at my watch, during the interview with the girl who does nothing but listen to Jim Reeves records, write poor brokenhearted poetry to him and, once a year, fly to Texas to put roses on his grave. Her husband runs the house, cares for the child (deliberately conceived to be born under Reeves's birth sign and called of course Jim Reeves) and presumably pays the fare. I am, therefore, perhaps over grateful for comfortable things like the panel game "Where in the world?" (BBC-1) which ended last night.

No one would claim it is any more than a pleasant bit of persiflage, but the chairman and team captains suggest such a pleasant sense of easy good company that you can feel your toes and tensions uncurling. "Cleo and John" (BBC-2) another short in-filling show, was the Dank-worth's idea of a quiet evening at home half a doien Instruments and Moog synthesizer. I speak (-whom' Moog synthesisers, and music areg just noises that I hope people wdl stogs making soon. Still Cleo and John. had the kind of contagious ease wbicbJla exceptionally contorting: The frivolous response to question "Why should a beautiful be running through a wood in thStftiddle of the night carrying a 121b salmon (a recent puff in Radio Times for the series "Sutherland's is a sad comment on this day and age, in which we live, here and now.

I am not angry, I am just very, very hurt. I spurn, with the spurn they deserve, suggestions that she was being chased by the mad salmon-cake eater or was an industrial spy for Shiphams working late. I may add that it ill becomes contestants to specify the type of fish paste they pTefer for a prize or to ask for the money instead, unconvincingly claiming they intend to invest it. The prize of a pot of fish paste" (I have discovered a brand called appropriately Sutherland's) is held over and I solicit replies to this week's puff for Sutherland's Law Who is The Milkie? and who is chasing him 1 Really Sutherland's neck of the woods does seem replete with peculiar people in hot pursuit of, or flight from, each other. it, with unselfconscious style and atten-ion to detail.

Even so the words must-be paramount and Mercer's adaptation not only needs more resonance but quantitatively more of them. You could scarcely have a better Rank than Trevor Howard, nor a more competent Torvald than David Warner. But are they really given enough to say Edward Fox's Krogstad isn't a patch on Denholm Elliot's" and Delphine Seyrig's Kristine is hardly ideal. But we can't have everything and tHe-paying's never, less than Which brings us to the point Jane Fonda's performance as Nora, "which turns out to be exactly the opposite of what one might expect. She is distinctly better as the child-wife than as the burgeoning and un-intimidated woman.

Indeed her final scene with Torvald is inexplicably mun dane and with it goes the raison d'etre of the whole film. It almost seems as if she scarcely knows what it is about, which in view of the publicity attending its quarrelsome shooting may cause a hollow laugh or two. Jerry Fisher is the cinematographer and he's done Mr Losey proud. Perhaps the best verdict is Richard Roud's minor Losey but certainly better that than none at all. The Legend of Nigger Charley (Oscar X) is a good idea gone wrong in execution.

Charley (Fred Williamson) is a Southern slave who escapes the clutches of the vicious new owner of his' plantation and makes his way out West with two friends. When they reach a small frontier town, they are joined by a young black gunman and an elderly half-breed scout. It's them versus first a professional slave catcher and then a posse of bandits who threaten a homesteader. The good idea is that of the black cowboy roaming the West distrusted bv all but at least free. Where it goes wrong is in Larry and Martin Goldman's simplistic approach which hammers us half to death stating the obvious and seems uncertain whether to make the movie a straightforward adventure or a more weighty odyssey.

Adventure wins, which isn't a bad thing in itself: but not when we're promised a lot more. Wattstax (Classic Piccadilly, X) is a record of the Stax Organisations concert given for the black Southern Californian community in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum last year. It is interspersed with vox pop interviews with the sort of ghetto people the whole jamboree was designed to benefit. There is. in fact, hardly a white face in sight.

Richard Prvor, the satirist, is very funny; Rufus Williams a joy to behold in outrageous pink shorts and cloak and Isaac Hayes as arrogant as ever in his attempt to play some sort of hip blacfc a laoct mi rpallv ran see the AND WHAT, I can hear you all asking with bated breath, is Mr Roger Moore like as James Bond? This vital and tendentious question, almost as important to the nation as whether that other Roger can win Wimbledon, is rather more simply answered. Mr Moore as Bond is exactly like the Mr Moore who played The Saint, who in his turn is the nearest approximation to the Mr Moore who plays anything. There are no surprises whatsoever. Which is just as well, since it is extremely doubtful whether Mr Moore could register them. In Live and Let Die (Odeon, Leicester Square, A book now for Christmas) he is the perfect cypher through which the glamorous hardware of the later Saltzman and Broccoli Bond movies can express themselves.

Mr Sean Connery, one always felf, was worth more; Mr George Lazenby less. Mr Moore surely deserves to go on playing Ian Fleming's male chauvinist snob for ever. That said, I have to report that Live and Let Die" is just about par for the course. It is good, lively, mindless entertainment, slow to warm up but once embarked upon its improbable story quick to appreciate its own absurdity. Long gone are the days when we took any of it seriously, chuntenng on like nannies about the vicious killings and the exposition of a commer cial traveller's world where women appear merely as sexual toys.

We all know now that it's just a joke, and so do the makers. You will notice the A certificate The deaths are now just a screech and a thud with scarcely a hint of Peckm pah ketchup, the seductions as inno cent and unerotie as a sudden glimpse of Mother Riley's knickert (stitched on for the winter, I seem to remember). Occasionally a secondhand car dealer's joke creeps in and curls up one's subconscious. I'm going to be completely useless," says a nubile black CIA agent, fingering a revolver as if she doesnt know where to insert it but would like to. I'm sure we'll be able to lni: you into shape," says Bond with scarcely concealed boredom.

Later, after they have made it. she says innocently You wouldn't want to kill me after that would you To which our hero replies Well, I certainly wouldn't have before." In other' words, what else can one possibly do with women Jane Fonda would love that. As for the hardware, clearlv so much more eloquent than characters, there's a goodish speedboat chase, which has them leaping over dry land like surprised salmon trout. There's a funny, almost Keatonesque sequence which has Bond in a two-seater plane skating about, a cluttered airport giving a flying lesson to the old girl inside as he tries to avoid the clutches of his pursuers without actually getting airborne. There are some splendid crocodiles whom he takes leave of in the nick of time by nipping over their arched backs like Tarzan looking for Jane.

And, of course, there are so many shots of careering cars that one wonders whether General Motors have anv left for their customers. Much the best animate reacting, crocs apart, comes from Clifton James as a tobacco-chewing Kansas sheriff mixed up bv accident in the farraso and determined to get his man no matter who he is. He is actuallv allowed to give a performance and ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR at the Criterion by Michael Billington lane Fonda in Losev's A Doll's Houe Tito Mooipe we aae DEREK MALCOLM reviews new Slims but still the domestic territory is invaded by people relentlessly determined everyone should have a good time. One man's catastrophe is another man's source of hilarity. In spite of a lack of internal rhythm, the play confirms Mr Ayckbourn's skill as a gifted farceur.

He displays genuine comic thrift the complexities of the situation all depend on character and, as in How The Other Half Loves," he builds a good many of his laughs round class differences in a confined community. The play may lack the diagrammatic mechanical ingenuity of, say, Waterhouse and Hall's Who's Who but at least it is about recognisable human beings. Eric Thompson's typically elegant production also contains splendid performances from Michael Addridge, looking like a St Bernard who has lost his brandy. Richard Briers as a pop-eyed small-town tycoon, and Anna Calder-llarshall as the girl who can't even kill herself in decent privacy. But what makes the play, rewarding is that underneath the bubbling fun you get quite a sharp sense of human pain and misery.

ALAN AYCKBOURN'S "Absurd Person Singular is a blithely funny play built round the old critical cliche that farce and tragedy are simply opposite sides of the same coin. Each act is set in the kitchen of a smalltown married couple at Christmas; and as the disasters accumulate, the panic intensifies, and the social relationships disintegrate, the audience laughs all the louder. But at any moment it would only take one small push to send the whole situation toppling into the direst tragedy. The first act is the weakest, built as it is round the social desperation of a lower-middle class couple entertaining their class superiors to a Yule-tide cocktail party. But the second act takes wing with a wild-eyed middle-class hostess frantically trying to commit suicide in her own kitchen while oblivious guess pour in to scour the stove, fix the plumbing and repair the light switch.

By the third act total Strindbergian gloom has set in the lady of the house has taken to the bottle, her husband squats in front an oil stove reading dirty books English version but curiously broken-backed as an exposition of one of Ibsen's greatest plays. It is seldom lacking in care or intelligence, as one would expect, but has very little genuine flair. What one remembers are not the performances at all but the eloquent camerawork which treats the eye better than David Mercer's rather gutted screenplay always treats the ear. I'm not convinced that it is possible to open up Ibsen in this way without losing some of the suffocating atmosphere and cumulative force that the enclosed world of the theatre vouchsafes to his argument. But if you can then this is surely the way to do repays Guy Hamilton, the director, a hundredfold.

Jane Seymour, Gloria Hendry, Yaphet Kotto, Geoffrey Holder and Lon Satton play assorted ladies of not too difficult virtue and villains of no virtue whatsoever. But production values are what count and, though distinctly variable, these suffice. The plot Oh. for goodness sake don't ask me to recall that. But voodoo comes into it so regularly that one kept on expecting (Bernard Lee.

one short scene only, alas) to come rushing on in nothing but a Carmen Miranda hat and a pair of bones. Joe Losey's version of A Doll's House (Odeon, St Martin's Lane. A) is much more of" the cinema than the recent necessitv for ail that chanting I am Somehody in between the razzamataz and soul. Bless This House (Studio One, V) is yet another television spin-off movie. Directed by Gerald Thomas for Peter Rogers, it has all the aplomb of a drunken ostrich.

But it's certainly no worse than the TV show upon which it is based and at least has Sidney James's crumpled visage to sustain the longeurs of Dave Freeman's frightful script. With Terry Scott, Diana Coup-land. June Whitfield, Peter Butter-worth and the magnificently camp Julian Orchard in support. TWO NOBLE KINSMEN at York Theatre Royal by Merete Bates Melodrama in realistic setting anguish on the boulevards, anxiety in cafes, terror in the repeated shot of the peripheral highway round Paris The cinema will never be the same again, and nor will I. 9 RICHARD ROUD reviews Jacques Rivette's new film 1 Out OneSpectre at the Berlin forum of young films ful, infinite questioning is abruptly dropped.

In its uncomfortable, disturbing place pushes an impossibly noble, simplified tale of star-crossed passion with echoes of Ophelia in a sub-plot. Somehow, in spite of promise of a rousing conflict, the action slightly drags. But only slightly. For director and company have fought tooth and nail to keep it fresh, passionate, and unexpected. A battle scene is evoked only bv a huddle of bodies, pounding hands for hooves, smoke and sudden wild eruption of streamers, yells and the thud of arrows on metal.

The gaoler's mad daughter hopscotches round her father. Lighting glows or fades to echo mood. And costumes again gleam white with touches of brieht colour. The actors have keen tone. The headstrong love, turned to hate, between the cousins is superbly compelled by Malcolm Armstrong and Philip Bowen.

Jane 1 Casson has luxuriant and sympathetic distinction as Hippolyta, Lea Dregorn is a lucidly beautiful Emilia. Only Jean Viner. as the gaoler's daughter tends to see-saw her lines with more indulgence than sense. And Elizabeth Tyrrell ploughs her grief as a widowed queen. But altogether the production has a radiance that should not be missed.

GAY, sweeping, and exuberantly romantic, Mervyn Willis's all too brief production of Two Noble Kinsmen," has certainly crowned the York Festival. It has even introduced potentially transforming cnanges. Tickets entitle the holder to a seat anywhere from box to gallery. For once enthusiasm instead of money sits closest to the show. Then the stage, normally withdrawn, now juts a white platform to stop at the dress circle.

The audience all but surround the actors in the wings, box, circle, and gallery. There is a white backdrop and giant white balloons float in the central space. So much change brought excitement. Even watching a normally class-divided audience adjust to unexpected egalitarianism was a 15-minute happening in itself. But to the play, begun by Shakespeare most likely in the year ot his retirement, carried through by Fletcher, and finished by Shakespeare.

The combination of writers doesn't work. A stately, sad. but tiredly formal interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, in which three widowed queens implore Theseus, on his wedding night, to avenge their husbands' unhallowed deaths, suddenly turns into the rivalry of two cousins in love with Theseus's lister. Thus Shakespeare's slow, pain what Renoir often did in his films instead of getting actors to fit into a preconceived notion of character, the character is developed from and by the actor. In a very significant way, this technique also resembles a certain kind of contemporary painting, where the paint itself the raw material becomes the subject of the picture.

Here the actors who are. after all, the raw materia! too become the subject of the film. But the difference is in the fact that Rivette always has what he calls the canvas-scenario against which the actors must evolve, must improvise, must create. The result is a dialectical experience but one which is conditioned by the director. He, after all, chooses the actors, and the actors he has chosen all seem to participate in his own anguished, paranoid, neurotic world.

It is impossible at least for me, today to say what the film means. But I always tend to think that this is the supreme proof of what is a great film. Something happened last night I entered a world which is different from my own world, but which is now part of my world. Everything looks different today from what it did yesterday. In this, the film resembles Magritte and Feuillade melodrama in a realistic setting anguish on the boulevards, anxiety in cafes, terror in the repeated shot of the peripheral highway round Paris.

It was a mind-blowing experience, but one Which, instead of taking one out of this world as the expression has it, took one right smack into the world. Or into a world which one only dimly realised was there always there right beneath the everyday world. Feuillade did it, and now Rivette has done it the cinema will never be the same again, and nor will I. the object ot which is always the mysterious number 13. Meanwhile, The 13 succumbs, not to these external attacks, but to internecine warfare.

Bulle Ogier, distraught at Igor's continued absence, decides to send some compromising business letters to the newspapers to expose and punish Pierre whom she continues to hold responsible for Igor's absence. Bulie's distress grows to such a point that she gives up her (anyway almost bankrupt) boutique and retires to the seaside. There, suddenly, she gets a phone call from Igor he is back in Paris now joyfully she leaves to meet him. But Lonsdale tells us that he has good reason to believe that the call could not have been from Igor. We never find out the truth, for it is at this point that the film ends; the final image is of Leaud.

sitting in his yoga position, ceaselessly counting up to 13. I have used the actors names rather than those of the characters partly because, with such a complex plot, it seemed easier for readers to fix on a few well-known names. But there is another more important reason. Rivette unlike Rohmer, Resnais, or Eustache, does not believe in scripts at all. Each actor invented his own character and dialogue then, together, actors and director worked out who was to meet whom.

And perhaps this is the reason that the main scenes, shot with extreme simplicity the camera is simply planted there in front, and the scene unrolls without any camera movement at all come over with a richness and a density that one has rarely seen in the cinema. In a way, it resembles what Berto-lucei did in a few scenes of "Last Tango" with Brando cinema verite with actors. And, of course, it is PYGMALION at the Chester Gateway by Andrew Veitch telling envelopes and Juliet Berto, an amateur whore who steals on the side. Then there are the two theatre groups, the Prometheus troupe directed by Michael Lonsdale, and the "Thebes" bunch directed by Pierre Baillot. Finally, there are the two absent members of the film Pierre and Igor.

Igor is the husband of Bulle Ogier, and he has been out of sight for the past six months. Bulle keeps busy with her little boutique, significantly called 'L'Angle du Hasard and located on the Place St Opportune. She blames Pierre- for Igor's disappearance, although we are never quite told why. And, in any case, neither Pierre nor Igor ever appear in the film. Leaud in his wanderings through Pans comes across a piece of paper on which someone has typed the introduction to Balzac's Story of the 13," and he becomes convinced that there is now in existence a similar group of 13 people a secret organisation devoted to revolutionising society.

So determined is Leaud to discover the identity of the 13 that he even begins to wonder if he himself is not unknowingly a member of the 13. The plots begin to converge when Juliet Berto steals some letters from Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, one of her many pick-ups. She reads them, and although she does not understand them, she begins to make the rounds of the 13 implicated people with the hope of somehow blackmailing them. At the same time as Berto is making her clumsily pitiful blackmail rounds, Leaud is doing the same thing in a disinterested fashion. But the two only see each other once they never speak and both their searches end disastrouslv.

Berto kills herself in a fit of despair or so it appears and Leaud is reduced to a kind of vegetable existence, obsessed with little games. TWELVE HOURS have now passed since we saw the world premiere of Jacques Rivette's four-hour film Out OneSpectre" here in the Berlin forum of young films, and the film remains etched on my brain tike a bad dream. The original film Rivette made in 1871 ran for 12 hours and 40 minutes-episodes for television or for video cassettes. It has never been shown publicly except once at the Maison de la Culture at Le Havre, and that was only a work print that kept breaking down. Television has so far not shown any interest in buying the film, and, as we know, video cassettes have not really arrived on the market.

So Rivette made this short version which is in no way a digest of the longer one, nor like the butchered version of Amour Fou." Instead, he tells us, it is a new film using elements of the longer one. Like Paris Belongs To Us," his first film and L' Amour Fou," it's nominally about a theatre group rehearsing a play. In Out One Soectre" we have not one but two plavs one troupe is preparing the other "Seven Against Thebes both by Aeschylus. However, this element is the least important in the film. French directors ever since Agnes Varda made La Pointe Courte in 1955 have been fascinated with the possibility of telling separate, parallel stories which eventually meet.

Resnais experimented with this in "Muriel" but Rivette has gone much farther. We start with three plots three pairs of characters, in fact. There are the two Outsiders Jean-Pierre Leaud, an unemployed young man who makes a precarious living pretending to be deaf-and-dumb and making the rounds of the cafes distributing little fortune- Henry Higgms that was James Leith, he was real. Dashing around being terribly impolite and thoughtless. You meet that type at IC1 parties you know.

Live in another world. Pity they missed out the reception at the embassy. I'd have liked to have seen what those posh parties were like. But it would have been almost impossible to stage. And anyway, you don't want to make the play too long.

It gets boring. Oh no, this wasn't boring at all. And they had a full house the financial people will be pleased. A lot of these festival things lose money, you know. What did I think about Shaw's ideas on phonetics and class conflict and education, and, sorry, did you say Socialism Oh.

was that what it was all about. YES, it was lovely at the Gateway, sipping beer and looking out over tne Dee to misty Welsh hills. Not a place to think deeply, but to be entertained, I always think. Nice people, a nice bar with a nice carpet in a nice city with a nice festival. It's been quite a nice day.

Perhaps the sun will shine tomorrow and we can go for a drive. It was a lovely play, "Pygmalion." I did lake Alan Leith as Doolittle. So full of character and poetry, but then, his ancestors were Welsh, you know. And Liza, she was good too. Margaret Ann Archer wasn't it? A bit plump for a half-starved street girl, and her cockney wasn't quite what you hear in the East End, but you can't really expect that can you.

I mean, the real thing. And she was lovely. Now GABRIELI QUARTET at the Chester Festival by Helen Tetlow THE LINCOLNSHIRE ASSOCIATION FOR THE ARTS (Regional Arts Association) it' From David Bowie to Donny Osmond to Bob Dylan nowadays pop music touches everybody's life. But where did it begin? What are its roots? i Buddy Holly, Bin Haiey ana i-ais uommo are yesterday's giants, but how do they mm jta 11 TUESDAY evening at Eaton Hall was an occasion designed to titillate the most acute of sensibilities. A pleasant drive through acres of magnificent grounds ended in a sheltered courtyard where the Duchess of Westminster (an inspired and extremely generous patron of the arts) cordially welcomed and ushered her guests into the Long Room.

Here chamber music, in the form of the Gabrieli String Quartet wafted through an atmosphere laden with Rembrandt, elegant sofas, marble tables, and endless aperitifs. How else should one listen to Haydn string quartets? A champagne buffet followed in the Dow candle-lit court-yard. Altogether a perfect trip into Wonderland for those who could, afford it. Theoretically this should have been the ideal context for a concert of chamber music. So often this intimate medium Is completely depersonalised by vast, functtdnal concert halls.

But unfortunately while gaining in sympathetic surroundings, concert simultaneously lost in audience concentration. Perhaps there Is a case for bare, uncomfortable concert halls if lavish surroundings distract to the fit into the fabric of pop history 7 point of tepid responses. Or perhaps this indicated a general discrepanci as to who assumed' the incidental-rOle the Gabrieli String Quartet or, the champagne buffet. Although the Gabrieli Quartet played well, they seemed somewhat inhibited by the genteel and somewhat frigid atmosphere, Their pe formance of the Haydn Quartet in Minor (Opus 76 No. 2) lacked thj dynamism which one associates with Haydn's "Sturm und Drang" works, and apart from the Menuetto the whole- work seemed underplayed.

The Smetana "From nw.IdtftS Quartet poses similar balancing' tension and relaxation. Mottr settled by this stage-of -the. proceed Ins, i the Gabrieli offered momenta 6t excellent ensemble playing; tiateH the difficult transition of tM traumatic coda with complete isam ance. In between these works -the -Gabrieli: chose, to play the vapid, first qttrtfc of Shostakovich. How ttontel.

thM this quartet, written in. accordance; with Staling of "pctajl realism," should receive the best formance of the evening' djmufK with unqualified approval from tincQy bourgeois audleiiie. FELLOWSHIP IN FILM-MAKING New fellowship offered from November 1st, 1973, initially for twlve months; minimum value 1,000 o.a. (under review) Rent-free workshop space In Lincoln provided. Details and application forms from Th Director Linealmhlrc Association County Centre Burton Road, Lincoln It's a fascinating story with pictures to match! We've got it all together into a special four-part series 71 JiflLnJ I I I I -and it's essential reading for If II just about everyone who ever bought arecora.

Out today Ja IT STARTS IN THIS WEEK'S.