The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 11

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday March 14 1985 1 1 Eyeball to eyeball Rachael Kelly's, above, in Scream For Help; Julia Migenes Johnson and Placido Domingo, left, in Carmen; harry Riley and PatH Labelle in A Soldier's Story Derek Malcolm sings the praises of Carmen and also reviews A Soldier's Story, Phar Lap Heart Of A Nation, and Scream For Help dlesnr? a lonely road outside his base in Louisiana. He is in charge of a black company the US Army was segregated in those days and it looks clear that white officers have committed the crime. But the black investigating officer from Washington is not so sure as the white base commander, who wants the investigation over as soon as possible. This is not just a variant of Jewison's much-applauded In The Heat Of The Night, in which Sidney Poitier's Philadelphia detective proves himself as good as any white man but a more thorough going examination of racial attitudes cast in the mould of a thriller. Based on a play by Charles Fuller, which won a Pulitzer prize, it offers contrasting ideas of black aspirations through two juicy parts for coloured actors, and a series of other cameos.

It is certainly the performances that count in this otherwise still basically theatrical film, and they are between the two lovers, and 'perhaps make a virtue of an apparent deficiency, pays some dividends but not many, particularly since Ruggero Raimendi is so flexible as Escamillo. And I do not understand why the hyper-realistic bullfighting scenes, which seem to me integral, go side by side with an almost formally operatic knifing scene where you see no blood at all. These doubts apart, Rosi's Carmen (conducted by Lorin Maazel) has a passionate ver-isme that does succeed in keeping you on the edge of your seat for some 152 minutes. It looks superb, it moves splendidly and much of its detail is extraordinary. Rosi is a great film-maker, and that shines through time and again.

Norman Jewison's Oscar-nominated A Soldier's Story (Classic, Haymarket etc, 15) is set in 1944 and has a black master sergeant shot dead on in a lifetime and deserves better than to be latched upon by humans for the sole purpose of profit. You keep watching but Phar Lap merely looks Phar-fetched. In Michael Winner's Scream For Help (Leicester Square Theatre, 18), the daughter of a well-lined La Rochelle woman fancies her stepfather is trying to kill her mother. He is, but ho one believes her. We know it from the start but the question is when will all the other schmucks see the obvious? The answer is in about 89 minutes, during which Rachael Kelly loses her maidenhead and almost her mind.

Winner pushes his plot to further and further levels of implausibility, and ends with a bloodbath that looks ominously like a practise run for the forthcoming Death Wish HI. Charles Bronson, of course, would never have let it all happen in the first place. newspaper constructing alternative headlines before the international race Australian Wonder Horse Beats The World, or New Zealand Racer Beaten In Mexico. The film begs a large number of questions, even failing to make clear how old the horse was and what distances it ran. Which is rather like failing to tell us that Rocky was a heavyweight.

It was made by part of the team who constructed the box-office winner, The Man From Snowy Mountain and stars the same Tom Burlinson (as Phar Lap's lad.) But the story it tells is too amazing for this kind of luxury catchpenny treatment Phar Lap, bought in New Zealand for a sons by an obsessed, greedy and possihly brutal trainer, and saddled with a money-grubbing owner hated by the snobbish Australian racing establishment, was the kind of phenomenon who pops up, like Arkle, once the real streets and taverns, the soldiers' barracks and the tobacco factory. Sunlit Spain becomes a very effective metaphor. Although not known as a man particularly interested in music, Rosi's conception allows an old warhorse to grow effectively in the mind and sometimes to seem fresh again. Only a few of the familiar set-pieces sit awkwardly on the camera and very little of the casting seems inapposite. Certainly not that of Julia Migenes Johnson as Carmen who looks and acts the role like few others.

She is surely' one of the sexiest Carmens ever. You really believe they'd fall straight into her trap. Opposite her is a much more stolid characterisation. Placido Domingo's Don Jose, though more impeccably sung, is not up to the same mark. Rosi's idea of asking him to be more wooden rather than less in the effort to underscore the difference Peter Weir, left, Kelly McGillis, Jan Rubes and Harrison Ford during shooting, of Witness Three top Australian directors talk to Mike Bygrave about working in America Sydney goes to DfloMy wood PREVIOUS versions by Godard, Saura and Brook of either the opera or the Meri-mee story that inspired it may give a distinct feeling of deja vu to Francesco Rosi's Carmen (Lumiere, FG).

But this epic translation of the opera from stage to screen at least has the merit of being the genuine article, both real film and real opera, less obviously interpreted than Losey's Don Giovanni but as monumental in its ambition to be true to both mediums. This is not filmed opera but opera as film, shot on location to emphasise a reality beyond most melodrama and infused with the same anxious social and cultural concerns Rosi invariably brings to his work. The location shooting by Pasqualine De Santis does not so much dwarf the characters as place them in context more than most stage performances could possibly manage. Bizet's theatricality is deepened and broadened by THE Australians have hit Hollywood. Three top Australian directors are releasing big American films in 1985 a situation analagous to the "new wave" of British directors, like Alan Parker and Ridley Scott, "going Hollywood" in the 1970s.

So far Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career) has released Mrs Soffel, starring Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson and based on a true story about the love between a strait-laced prison warden's wife and a convicted murderer, to critical acclaim but slow box office. On the other hand Witness by Peter (Gallipoli, Year Of Living Dangerously) a routine police melodrama which Weir subverts with his feeling for landscape and cultural contrasts, has been a hit with American critics and audiences alike. Still to come is Bruce Beresford's "realistic biblical epic" King David, which Beresford claims will tell "the whole story" for $15 million and stars Richard Gere. Beresford made one previous American film, the well-received Tender Mercies, but King David is his first major studio feature. The attitudes of the three directors to their Hollywood experiences are as different as the three films.

Armstrong cautions, "it's a wonderful thing to have the (MGM) lion on the front of your film. There's a wonderful sense of history any film-maker would feel. But my main ambition is to make the films I want to BRIEFING Best films Wetherby (Curzon West End): David Hare's examination of middle-class English mores; an impressive cinema debut, very finely acted by Vanessa Redgrave in particular. Dance With A Stranger (Screen on the Hill): Mike Newell's sociological study of the milieu within which Ruth Ellis (beautifully played by Miranda Richardson) lived, Hi "wrnrT 1 I i letting the director do the job," he feels. "There are experts in every crafts area to help him." And he adds, only half-joking, "All Aussie film-makers want to work here because of the absolutely absurd differences between the money you can make in Hollywood and the money you can make in Australia." As members of the so-called "first wave" of new Australian cinema, Weir, Armstrong and Beresford have been international figures for some time.

What of their successors and the current film scene in Australia? Weir, for one, is pessimistic. "There is an absolute polarisation between low-budget and high-budget films. It's caused the low-budget people to believe low-budget equals integrity, quality, the personal film. But their subject matter is too narrow and generally has to do with what critics and film writers have imposed on them, that is, we must stop making these nostalgic period films and deal with the problems of modern Australia. "Some are fine films but they don't travel.

Much of that material belongs on TV which would be alright if the film-makers themselves were happy with that. But a lot of them still want the phone to ring from Hollywood, they want to have their cake and eat it too. A lot of them aren't film-makers so much as social workers or politicians of some quasi-left position." REDGRAVE JUDIDENCH because of the risk involved, A Soldier's Story is rather more than just an accurate slice of history. It is moving, too. Phar Lap is not a Sri Lankan leg-spinner but a legendary racehorse who is the subject of the most expensive film ever made in Australia.

If you think it amazing that so much money should be lavished on the history of a mere animal, reflect that Pha Lap won 37 races in three years from 1930 onwards, before dropping dead possibly from overwork but probably from oison on a visit to America uring which he defeated an international field in spite of a split hoof. Australians love a winner, provided he, she or it is one of their own. It is no surprise that the film is called Phar Lap Heart Of A Nation (Warner West End; Gate, Notting Hill etc, PG) but thoroughly endearing that David Williamson, its writer, has a Sydney 'audience' and 'remember it's a and if you keep that in mind you'll construct a kind of hybrid between your style and the That's exactly what Weir has done, placing the relationship between Harrison Ford (in his best performance to date) and the young Amish widow at the heart of the movie, filming it with nuances and glances, in scenes from which Weir removed much of the dialogue, and at a pace slower than the Hollywood norm. While Weir found his seven months filming in America personally as well as professionally liberating, for Gillian Armstrong it was much more business as usual, albeit with a bigger budget and a major studio looking over her shoulder. "My attitude is never to be Blossoms.

William Richert's recently unshelved black political farce, Winter Kills, continues at the ICA Cinema; Work by Ken McMullen is at the Cinematheque. At the Scala, two Makave-jev movies on Monday (Montenegro and WR Mysteries Of The Organism) and two Gil-liams (Time Bandits and Jab-berwocky) on Tuesday. A Huston double of Under The Volcano and Wise Blood shows at the Hampstead Everyman on Saturday. The three-screen Anvil Cinema, Sheffield, is the first and may not be the last regional theatre threatened with closure due to the Government's rate-capping plans. Yet its enterprising programme has been increasingly supported by the local public.

There's time yet for the decision to close the Anvil and transfer its resources to just one screen at the Library Theatre to be rescinded. Next week, Spinal Tap, the rock 'n roll parody. From this Thursday, 'for three days, Lang's The Thousand Eyes Of Dr Mabuse. Newcastle's Tyneside Cinema next week has the Taviani brothers' beautiful Kaos, Barry Hines' Threads and Altman's Nixon tour de force, Secret Honour. Next week at the Watershed, Bristol, there's Radu Gabrea's controversial A Man Like Eva, in which the Fassbinder figure is played, and brilliantly, by Eva Mattes.

Ray's Tagore story, The Home And The World, starts on Sunday at the nearby Arnolfini. uniformly excellent. Both Adolph Caesar, hitherto a stage and television actor, and the better known Howard Rollins Jr, who made his name in Ragtime, seize their chances brilliantly. In particular, Caesar, as the martinet sergeant who believes that blacks should destroy their stereotyping by acting as much like'whites as possible, carries total conviction. He is both villain and victim, an honourable man ruined by prejudice and circumstances.

The film's chief point that whether they are "different" or not, blacks are Americans first and Negroes afterwards is still worth making, though it may seem obvious enough some 40 years after the war. But without the virtuosity of its cast, the film would look a little old hat and talky. It hasn't the highly cinematic flow of In the Heat of the Night but takes the argument a good deal further. Cheaply and quickly made at the highest levels of the police department turns out to lie behind the crime and Ford, the widow and the child flee to Amish country and the strange but true world of the Amish people, god-fearing farmers who reject virtually the entire twentieth-century including telephones, cars, television and the movies. "Obviously the Amish element and the contrast between the two worlds was what interested me in the script," Weir recalls.

"In my first rewrite I dismissed the melodrama, removed it even, and the producer (Edward S. Feldman) brought me back to earth and back to realities. "He spoke as a great American showman and therefore, to me, connected with the 1940s and the golden age of Hollywood. He kept saying sion of Clint Eastwood's is on Sunday at 9.45, and at the National Film Theatre Bob Godfrey, Oscar-winning British animator, gives an illustrated lecture tomorrow, while Mark Rydell, director of The River, is interviewed after a preview of the film on Sunday afternoon. Four Corners Cinema, Tower Hamlets, has a women-only programme tonight with Marleen Gorris' A Question Of Silence as its main attraction; on Saturday, an East End evening, ending with D.

W. Griffiths' Broken the 1940s and the Hollywood studio system. "I came to realise if the Fords and the Capras had had total control, thqy might have had shorter careers and made less good films. Here on Witness I was facing a melodrama, a genre film, something one was very familiar with go in quick, move, do it with style and grace, collect your cheque and leave. "It was a great experiment and I think I'd like to do a couple of them now and again and put them among the projects which are much loved and more difficult to mount." Witness has Harrison Ford as a tough Philadelphia homicide cop who has to protect a young Amish boy and his widowed mother when the child witnesses another detective's murder.

Corruption frivolous about the budget," she says, "but I was treated (by MGM) as though I was this unworthy person who was secretly going to go six months over if I could, and that surprised me at first. I was used to working in a one-to-one relationship with a producer rather than with a group of executives who inevitably all have different ideas. You're dealing with, a bureaucracy in Hollywood. "At the same time, I have to say I was allowed to make the film I wanted to make, the way I wanted to make it, with the cast I chose. Creatively I was given great freedom." Taking a middle position is Bruce Beresford who points to the technical sophistication of American film-making and the advantages Hollywood money can buy.

"Everything in America is geared to VANESSA IAN HOLM Wetherby, "We'd gathered a small production team, my cameraman had come over, we were sitting in a hotel all ready to start when the film was cancelled. I've never had a thing like that when you're all set to work, and it's a terrible experience. "I called my agent and I said, 'you know all those scripts you've been sending me and I've been sending back to you all these years. In the next couple of weeks, send me only "green light" projects and if one is half-decent, I'll take Out of three possibilities, Weir chose Witness, already developed, scripted and with Harrison Ford cast Signing up strictly as a hired hand on somebody else's project was a new move and he sees it as a throwback to the old days of can homestead cycle, with Jessica Lange excellent. A Private Function (release): Malcolm Mowbray's debut with Alan Bennett, a large and a fine, funny cast.

All lour English yesterdays. Best on TV The Barkleys of Broadway (to-night, BBC-2, 6 0): 1949 Astaire-Rogers backstage musical their reunion after 10 years. Les Visiteurs du Soir (Friday, BBC-2, 11 20): 1942 Prevert-Carne collaboration, with Arletty as she-devil sent to medieval earth to destroy Love. Viva Zapata! (Saturday, C4, 1 55): Elia Kazan's 1952 view of Mexican revolutionary hero, with Brando as Zapata, Anthony Quinn as his brother. Kiss Me Deadly (Saturday, C4, 1 55): 1955 Robert Aldrich-Spillane film noir, now a cult movie.

The Middle Man (Sunday. C4. 2 25): Satyajit Ray's portrait of life in 1975 Calcutta, a human jungle of corruption and poverty. The Lodger (Sunday, C4, 11 10): John Brahm's Gothic 1944 version of Jack the Ripper story, with Merle Oberon, Cedric Hardwicke and some genuine horror. Another Way (Wednesday, C4, 10 0): Karoly Makk's extraordinary moral tale about lesbian affair, made in 1979 with magnificent performance from Jadwiga make and I don't think many of them are being made (in Hollywood)." Beresford, whose next project backed by Virgin is a film set among the Australian aborigines, feels, "it's not as if one is a refugee from eastern Europe who can't go back home.

Reading the Australian newspapers, you do get this message 'you can't go which isn't true. I'd like to be able to go back and forth between Australia and Hollywood." Peter Weir is the most enthusiastic of the three about his American experience, although in his case it came about almost by chance. While Armstrong and Beresford had planned to make their films, Weir was in Hollywood preparing to shoot The Mosquito Coast from the Paul Theroux novel. and died by the hangman's noose. Ladies On The Rocks (Screen on the Green): Sympathetic Danish male director's stab at a feminist movie, about two touring cabaret artists.

Brazil (Odeon, Leicester Square): Terry Gilliam's over-long and possibly over-produced Kafka-meets-Walter Mitty saga, but a real eyeful. Country (Odeon, Haymarket): Much better than Places In The Heart in current Ameri- (dm Brian Pfalutw) Hnversiodi Hill. NW3 (01 -435 33669787) 4T 1 II I Mil tiJfcuM IB A I- ILM UV DAVID HARE Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak in Another Way Television, Wednesday Stuart Wilson. Tim McInnerny Suzanna Hamilton oaxiou Simon Relph David Hare "Challenges and Redgrave is outstanding in an outstanding cast "Sunday Times "David Hare cunning as a director; Wetherby -imaginative, ambitious and intriguing" Derek Malcolm. Guardian "An utterly absorbing, brilliantly acted and immaculately crafted piece of adult drama" um.is "A complex, emotional acid bath" Bim A FILM FOUR INTERNATIONAL AND ZENITH PRESENTATION A ORE ENPOlNT FHH C.lifcMCOOi"''ti lO t.4 8 Special interest THE National Film Theatre's Southern Comfort season, put together by Jim Pines, continues with Tobacco Road on Saturday, Birth of a Nation on Sunday and In The Heat Of The Night on Tuesday.

The Japanese Writers On Film season includes Woman Of The Dunes tonight and Fires On The Plain on Monday two once very controversial films. Three Guardian Lectures come up in the next few days the Channel Four transmis NOW SHOWING CURZON west END Film starts 2.00 INol Sun) 4. 10 6.20 8.40 Shaftesbury Avenue W1. Tel: 439 4805 Seats bookable al 4.00 in advance lor 8.40 performance daily. Also 6.20 performance Sat Sun.

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