The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

Thursday May 31 1879 10 CINEMA Steel) and his kinkv secre TERENCE MALICK'S Days of Heaven (Plaza 2, A)' is an elegy for a vanished Amer-. ica: it comes fresh fr.om, Cannes garlanded with" awards for the best cinematography, and for the best direction. The first is richly deserved one can but be uneasy about the second laurel for its writer and director Malick, who made the memorarable Badlands. The film centres around a smair American tragedy a young couple leave the grimy purlieus of Chicago for harvest work on the prairies, and fall into the employ of a young, lonely and very ill fanner (Sam Shepard) who lives in the big house on the hill. For some unexplained reason, the labourer (Richard Gere) pretends the girl '(Brooke Adams)' is his sister actually he has a real sister in tow, Linda Manz.

The older girl catches the eye of the farmer. He asks her to stay, telling her he loves her. The labourer is sick of his poverty why not? he tells the girl. After all, the farmer only has a year live. Well, after 94 minutes it ends in tragedy of course.

The trouble is that the film is so beautiful, and so beautifully mannered, that the essence of the tragedy is muted into melodrama. This is partly deliberates the narrative is told largely in voice-over by the young sister, a device which handsomely distances, the anguish of the trio. None ot the characters behaves badly when the young labourer learns that his girl has grown to love her new husband, he takes it on the chin he has, he says, no one to blame but himself. The trouble is that one's sympathies become altogether too disengaged the bloody denouement at the close is neither more nor less affecting that the riches of the photography (by Nestor Almendros with help from Haskell Wexler). Go and see it, but for the meteorology of the prairies, the plague od locusts, the groups of Norman Rockwell figures at harvest time, the raints, the steam engines, the biplanes and triplanes, and above all the deer and the buffalo and the wildfowl and the rabbits it is a regular carnival of the Linda Manz in Days Heaven Tim Radford reviews Days Heaven, The Muppet Movie and other releases Mow tttoey kejptt ttSnemm dowm oan 411a or 50 minute idea is padded to the obligatory hour and a half with songs, travelogue, flashbacks and a certain amount of mooning about.

Miss Piggy turns in a bravura performance, although I ended up liking Kermit the best he seemed to have his mouth shut more often. "I've seen detergents that leave a better film than this." observes Muppet Statler to Muppet Waldorf (or the other way round) he was being decidedly harsh about a fairly honest attempt to exploit a successful television show. However, that judgment will do just perfectly for The World Is Full Of Welles, all of whom should have known better than to try and trade one-liners with creatures as cute as these. The one actor who has what might be called a role is Charles Durning, who plays the proprietor of an embryo chain of Kentucky Fried Frogs Legs shops, who wants Kermit to croak his wares television. His tactics switch from blandishments to force, providing an amiable interlude from Mel Brooks as a' warped German brain surgeon If I can cause a little pain in the afternoon, I sleep well at and a joky little showdown in a ghost town, animals.

Which brings us glibly to The Muppet Movie (Leicester Square, after its Royal premiere tonight) another film spun slightly longer than it should have been. What plot there is concerns the journey of Kermit the frog from the swamps of the Mississippi to Hollywood where riches and fame await him. En route, he makes acquaintance with or acquires as fellow travellers Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, the Great Gonzo, a band called Electric Mayhem, and others. The others include (at random) James Coburn, Telly Savalas. Elliott Gould, Bob Hope and Orson complete with skeletal horse and a clock ticking to high noon.

In this last scene, the assembled Muppets confront the evil Durning and his bloodthirsty henchmen and deliver a moving plea to he allowed to live their own lives and make other people happy. Durning looks moved, takes off his hat, scratches his head and looks benignly at his little furry victims. "All right boys," he sighs. Kill 'em." The humour remains decently dry and self-deprecating throughout on the other hand there isn't nearly enough of it, and a good 40 What do es the creature oi the black lagoon 3 Clancy Sigal on the life of Mary Pickfbrd Captive star MARY PICK FORD was known as America's Sweetheart" and for once the hyperbole was right. As the silent films' first superstar she was more popular (and even richer) than Chaplin From 1909 when she made her first picture for D.

W. Griffith, until the peak of her popularity in the immediate post-World War I years, she held audiences spellbound in a myth of eternal childhood which she shrewdly fostered but which also imprisoned her artistically. Today it is easier for us to honour Chaplin's Little Tramp with our laughter than to sympathise with the pouting, golden ringleted waif who tugged millions of hearts in box office smashes with titles like The Foundling, The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Little Princess and Rebecca of ok Farm. They seem so mawkishly sentimental that the temptation is either to jeer or to darkly psychoanalyse these admittedly often starkly simple-minded stories as an expression of a pre-Lolita syndrome. This would be unfair to Pickford and her.

audiences Mary Pickford, born plain Gladys Smith of Toronto, Canada, was the first in a long line of stubbornly individualistic screen actresses who fought to control their own destinies. She was often accused of having a cash register for a Although she rarely escaped the "Girl with the Curls" stereotype, she always made her Hollywood masters pay through the nose for their right to exploit her saccharine image. At the very start of her film career, when D. W. Gnf- -fith (who thought her too fat) tried to hire her for $5 a day, 16-year-old Pickford demanded, and sot.

$10. In 1916 she was making $10,000 a week when she etamed Up with Chaplin and her new (and second) husband Douglas Fairbanks Senior to form United Artists in 1919 as a largely successful attempt to wrest control from moguls like Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor, she could count on earning a cool half million annually. In fact, she was the business brains of United Artists. Jesse Lasky once bitterly complained that lib would rather do business with half a dozen bankets than with Mary Pickford. She would have regarded this as a great compliment.

The contradiction between Pickford as a toughly independent organiser of hr own affairs and the simpering roles she kept playing is not as sharp as appears at first glance. There are always hints of spunky realism and even a no nonsense attitude to sex in her sentimental heroines. Even in films lige Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or Daddy Longlegs, she was never altogether a duirfb, dimpled Cinderella-doJI. Along with the Victorian purity and innocence went determination and gnt, a rebelliousness that made her champion poor against rioh, gutter orphans against snobbish rich kids. She could even satirise her own screen image as in Pollyanna where she suddenly acknowledges what an arch-angelic bore sne is.

In 1929 she outraged her public by defiantly throwing i. 1., i awaj iiei guiuea-uuneu Yg. She dared take on mature roles in four talkies. Al though she won an Academy Award for Coquette, audiences stayed away droves. ine reT tired at 40 to write religious books and do the occasional radio broadcast.

Sadly, for almost the next half century, she remaineda captive of her own past not unlike the Gloria Swanson heroine of Billv film, Sunset Boulevard inner Beverley Hills mansion Pick- fair, once the social capital of jazz age Hollywood. Her third husband, Charles "Buddy- itogers, a light leading man of the twenties and thirties whom she mar ried in 1937, was at her bedside, when she died on Tuesday, aged 86, in a Santa Monica, California, hospital. intend to remain young indefinitely, she once announced. That wa3 her wish and her curse. Last 3 performances STRIFE byjohnuaiswortny "A magnificent revival" (D.Mail) "Michael Bryant, brilliant Andrew Cruickshanlc, memorable image of 9 white-haired implacability' the National on top Guardian', 2 Limited decor due to 9 recent dispute involving stage staff.

All seats 2. 1 NATIONAL'S 01-9282252 9 TRIBUTE tary as well. The selfish married man has a wife (Carroll Baker) wno virtuously endures her husband's neg lect but subsequently has it from a trendy young pop star. Nobody actually does any work, everybody seems to make pots ot money and the whole film is couched in some kind of mid-Atlantic London in which you need an operator to connect you to Manchester, and the shop is Harrods and the paper is, the Times (although the girl, Sherrie Lee Cronn, appears in the nude on fage 3 of Another Newspaper under the amazing heading "A star is The moral seems to be that fornication causes un-happiness but makes good cinema. Robert Young directed this film which has the distinction of being, at one and the same time, incident packed, offensive, risible and boring.

Alongside this, Jeanne Diclman (ICA, no certi-cate) seems quite worthy. Which is odd. because it must be the only film of the week, or the year, which actually set out to be boring. The minimalist female film maker Chanlal Akcrman plonked Delphine Seyrig in front of the camera for more than three hours, instructing her neither to act, nor to express emotion. So we have two and a half days in the life of a poker-faced Belgian housewife, who spends most of the time mechanically peeling potatoes, cleaning the bath, and taking gentleman callers into her bedroom.

The camera works from fixed points it does not When it is focused on the stove it stays focused and when Miss Seyrig goes off camera to the sink we sit staring blankly at the stove until she comes back. After two hours, your critic passed the pain barrier and began to get interested. Ooh look, she's left the top off the tureen! Is that significant? By heck, she's missed that bit of potato The last nine minutes are positvely packed with action and significance, and those nine minutes include a five minute shot of her staring into space. Strictly for minimal audiences. Take a torch ant' a good book.

ing marriages the same restorative energy it does to the soulless, concrete follies erected in the name of postwar architectural idealism. PURCELL ROOM Hugo Cole Nona Pyron OVER THE last, few weeks, Nona Pyron has been exploring the obscure corners of the cello's repertory in a series of London concerts, playing every sort of sonata. These four contemporary works were all written by composers who clearly respond to the outgoing character of thi" most eloquent of instruments, Samuel Barber, perhaps without meaning to, brings out in his early sonata its power of making large romantic gestures always backed up by equally romantic piano that leads nowhere, like the speeches of a plausible lover not much earnest. This sort of music can convince us for the moment if played with total conviction and seductive tone. Nona Pyron makes pleasing, sounds and has a neat and generally sure left hand.

But her technique is not of the sort that allows us to forget about technique while we listen to the music, and she remains rather detached, like a real-life interpreter, who conveys thj sense and syntax, but who would be exceeding his brief if he allowed his own feelings to colour his translation. Halsey Steven's Intermezzo, Cadenza and Finale was a valuable discovery a clean, lively and purposeful work in which the celloist was admirably partnered by Chee Hung Toll, who asserts her individuality within the ensemble neither too modestly nor too boldly. RFH Meirion Bowen GarciaECO IF THE orchestral sonority of the opening performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No 1 was here only slightly short of heavyweight it was not because the forces were larger than Bach might have expected quite simply, this performance lacked any rhythmic life or vitality. The best thing in it was the horn playing of Ifor James and Christian Rutherford who duetted their way through Bach's odd high writing for the instruments with case and abandon, especially in the second trio movement. But the English Chamber Orchestra seemed desperately in need of a conductor, the direction of the leader Jose-Luis Garcia leaving them often at sixes and sevens.

Things improved somewhat when the French trumpeter Bernard Soustrot came on. Soustrot's rhythmic body movement and knee bending during crescendos added to an already compulsive stage presence. I did not take to his trumpet tone in the Haydn concerto it was a bit too much like the pier band sound but there was no mistaking the quality of his phrasing. 11 nave in common witn dirty Harry? for the speciallowsubscription price of2.20,reducedfrom3.30.So'that's ffaffinm Married Men (Classics Oxford Street and Haymarkel, Scene, ABCs Fulham Road and Bayswater, on release from Sunday, X). This is a movie scripted by Jackie Collins from her novel of the sanio name it remorselessly but ineptly exploits several sources of overripe rubbish the moral melodrama, the disco movie, the soft porn skinflick and the woman's magazine weepie in an effort to have it all ways.

There is a girl in the film who has it all ways. She gets it from a selfish married man (Anthony Franciosa), a centrefold photographer, a movie tycoon (Anthony FIRST NIGHT PICCADILLY Michael Billington Can You Hear Me At The Back? ONE COULD write two notices of Brian Clark's new play at the Piccadilly, Can You Hear Me At The Back The first would praise it for dragging on to the West End stage the living social issue of joyless urban planning the second would damn it for dwindling into yet another play about the seismic shocks induced by the male mid-life crisis. My own infuriating, mugwumpish position is that both notices would be right I got a distinct charge from Mr Clark's proselytising fervour about urban blight but was disneartenea Dy nis iau-ure to illuminate the age-old problems of middle-age. Set in a new town, the play shows the architect-hero facing two forms of disillusion. The professional one concerns the new town itself for which he (somewhat improbably) takes sole responsibility the post-war dream of a new visionary architecture has been replaced by a town full of high-rise boxes and populated filing cabinets.

The personal disillusion concerns the failure of his 20-year-old marriage and its reduction to meaningless habit. Mr Clark links the two themes by suggesting the hero's emotional coldness has. lent bath his architecture and his relationships a desiccated quality. But whereas the issue of buildings produces some splendid out-front editorialising People take over our community and we are too lazy to stop the hero's private refuge in a defensive irony is no more than a repetition of the thin Gray line. So we have a good play and a much less good play living cheek by jowl.

But Mr Clark is also the poignant victim of theatrical economics. We meet only five characters the architect, his GP wife and their revolutionary son plus a neigbouring teacher and his wife who has an unrequited love for the hero. I know you can write a good play with only five characters but even so I longed for a richer, wider portrait of the architect's professional and social life I wanted to know about his colleagues, the local councillors, the kind of friends he had. And even though Barry Davis's production ingeniously ropes in the. audience, I still felt sheer economic necessity forcing Mr Clark 'to write a sociopolitical play with one hand (and half a dozen characters), tied behind his back.

But let me say that Peter Barkworth as the architect wonderfully conveys a worried integrity and brow-furrowed frustration at not being able to achieve a planned spontaneity in life or work and that there is good support from Hannah Gordon as his wife and from Stephanie Beacham as the seductive neighbour who is thoughtlessly and improbably spurned. By West End standards it's a lively evening I only wish it brought to sink goodnewsl And the answer isn't that theyVe been shownin the same season at the National FilmTheatre-butthatmight giveyou a Itjustgoes to show what an amazingly widerangeoffflnareshownattheNFX getnearly 40-every week, "SipiM and Sound" and an NFTprosrammC. Butitisn just thebest cinema club in London, it's arestauranr, club-bar, aplace you cango to meetpeople likeyou-whethertheyrefurnnuts or justlike goingto the movies.Because since Fillinthecouponnowandgetnext month's programme brochure free Or callattheNFTformore details. We're i (Sundays3.30pm to 9.00pm), focidenuyDirty Harry Clint Eastwoodhadawaik-onpartas alab if ou didnt know. I beingsetupbythe BritishFilmlnstitute has become one ofthebiggest andbest cinema clubs intheworld.

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