The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 12

ARTS GUARDIAN 12 Thursday April 2 1981 CINEMA FIRST NIGHT Derek Malcolm on Chariots Fire and other releases PasOn ft nim Mike GwiUjm and Helen Mirren Round House fied, honourable and attractive figure. I said the film was inspirational and I won't take that back. But I'd much prefer to remember it as solidly professional throughout, knit together with real skill and only technically mundane when it comes to the actual Olympic finals. Ian Holm's Mussabini cameo is as good as we've come to expect from hi in when given half a chance, and I much enjoyed John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as the masters of Trinity and Caius, two dotty old hypocrites whom Abrahams capsises. David Wat-kin's camerawork is first-class too.

If Chariots of Fire does manage to succeed in America (it will surely do well here), it will substantially be because it dares to be so thoroughly British, not some transatlantic and stteless transatlantic and stateless many thanks Mr Puttnam, and more power to your elbow. La Cage Aux Follcs II (Cinecenta, Gate One, Screen on the Hill, AA) is more of the same, only worse and I didn't like the first film The Kidnapping of the President (Odeon, Marble Arch, X) may have accidentally struck gold this week. But I can't believe that word of mouth will work for it. There's Hal Holbrook as the President, holed up in a truck wired with explosives after being seized on a visit to Canada, where tax exemption, for this sort of film is usually the one reason they are made. There's also Van Johnson as the ambitious Vice-President, The whole thing reeks of the sell-it-to-telly syndrome, and what the Odeon, that vast and nowadays often empty cavern, will make of it is problematical.

Producer-director George Mendeluk's crowd scenes are the best of a bad lot. Jonathan Demme's resounding and colourful thriller, The Last Embrace, is at present doing the rounds unheralded with Kevin Connor's Motel Hell. It deserves to be seen rather more than his Crazy Mama, and is also newer, having been made in 1978 as opposed to 1975. Produced by Julie Corman, wife of Roger, Crazy Mama is a comedy version of New World's Bloody Mama and has Cloris Leachman as Mama, a distinctly amateur crook who leads a posse of the eccentric dispossessed across America from West to East, towards Jerusalem. Arkansas.

She is trying to raise enough loot to buy back the family farm. The social implications of all this will be evident to anyone who has seen Bonnie and Clyde and the hundred and one spin-offs. But, though Demme is clearly a proficient director, the film is neither funny nor relevant, enough to pass muster outside the confines of a double bill. There's a John Cassavetes retrospective at the National Film Theatre, starting next Tuesday, which scarcely needs recommendation save to underline once again that ROUND HOUSE Michael Billington The Duchess of Malfi JACOBEAN drama is always a good testing-ground for young classical directors and with his production of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. which opens a Manchester Royal Exchange season at the Round House, Adrian Noble offers the best early seventeenth-century revival since Trevor Nunn's Revenger's Tragedy.

He uses the space imaginatively, evokes an Italianate world of violent passions and yet suggests pity and goodness are not entirely dead. But where this production scores is in preserving the Websterian balance between decadence and tenderness. Without lapsing into mere blood and thunder melodrama, Noble highlights the tangible depravity. Thus when we see the Cardinal with his mistress he is bound by silken cords to a plum-coloured couch while incense coils into the air. But as well as illustrating the Cardinal vices, the director also exhibits the full horror of Ferdinand's descent into lycanthropic madness with Mike Gwilym (playing with all stops out) bearing his vulpine fangs and prowling straight-jacketed about the floor.

The virtue of playing up the horror is that it makes the inherent goodness of the Duchess an even more power WITH admissions to the cinema in Britain down from 124 million in 1978 to 101 million last year, each new home-grown product which isn't an insult to the intelligence like Inseminoid, is likely to be welcomed in wishfully glowing terms. It's best to be strictly honest about Chariots of Fire (Odeon, Haymarket, A). While it is certainly a well-made movie a great many people are going to enjoy and that's a resounding triumph in the circumstances it isn't exactly the birth of a New Wave. It has in fact all the virtues, and some of the drawbacks, of an old-fashioned English film- of the inspirational sort. It is likely, in short, to make Americans cry.

Its story, about the struggle for true excellence of two potentially world-class athletes of the Twenties, inhabits a world not leagues away from that of Boys Own. Wasn't there patriotism and an innate sense of decency, it seems to say, as well as snob-bism and blinkered ideals in the good-bad old days? While attempting to attack, it often seems secretly to admire. But if this causes doubts, it may well also make for popularity, since such nostalgic ambivalence is very much part of what many now feel. And no one could say that Harold Abrahams, the last Jew and the only Englishman to win the Olympic 100 metres, and Eric Liddell, the son of a Scots missionary who won the 400 metres in the same. year, are not worth remembering.

They are also very well acted by Ben Cross (Abrahams) and Ian Charleson (Liddell). The performances especially are what distinguishes the film from your average product. Hugh Hudson's first feature allows one to predict that he will certainly make more and that, if he can't make them here, he will do so in America. His cast play for him as they might not have been allowed to play for others, and Colin Welland's script gives them something on which to bite. Abrahams's often bitter struggle against anti-semi-tism, and the Establishment's ire when he dared to engage a professional coach in the odd shape of the half-Italian, half-Arab but Yorkshire-born Sam Mussabini, is not fudged one of the best scenes in the film is Ian Holm's Sam quietly listening to the cheers from the Olympic stadium from which he was banned.

It is distinctly more difficult to make much contemporary sense of Lid-dell's insistence that, on Sundays at least, God must come before country, yet Charleson manages to remain a digni law HoZm ire Chariots oj Fire lost $ea AS MIGHT have been expected, Hollywood couldn't quite forgive Roman Polanski for past misdemeanours by giving him an Oscar for Tess. But the film, eulogised by many American critics, did receive three awards all involving British artists. The late ff ey Unsworth shared the cinematography Oscar. Jack Stephens the art direction award, and Anthony Powell the costume award. Since the film certainly looks a treat, this was fair do's.

Another well-deserved British award, in the dramatic short category, went to The Dollar Bottom, Roger Christian's comedy about Scottish schoolboys insuring themselves against caning, which incidentally can be seen with Ordinary People in this country. At least, after a bad year, the 1981 Oscars don't look through his murderous employment. Julian Curry endows the Cardinal, who looks as if he might have stepped out of a Renaissance painting, with a lean-necked, eagle-profiled villainy, and Peter Post-lethwaite turns Antonio into an ambiguous mixture of straightforward decency and subterranean ambition. For some people Webster will always be what Shaw dubbed him: the Tussaud but this thrilling production. I believe, shows The Duchess of Malfi to be a play that blends external sensationalism with a genuine moral confrontation.

RAHRADIO 3 Edward Greenfield BBC SO FOR April Fools' Day what better choice of music than a piece that by all logical reckoning is rather mad, even by Berlioz's standards, his Shakespearean extravaganza labelled a dramatic symphony but fitting no known form, 'Romeo et Juliette. And where better to appreciate the fantasy than in the atmospheric expanses of the Royal Albert Hall, where three trombones in unison, instead of battering the ears as they do on the South Bank, like a clarion call from heaven? The conductor was right too, Gennadi Rozhdest-vensky relishing the quirki-ness, getting away from chiselled severity and sharp corners to a more relaxed approach. True, in the second half the BBC Symphony Orchestra might have attacked some of the more jagged passages with crisper ensemble, but what mattered was that Rozhdest-vensky chose speeds which allowed the humour of the writing, as well as the love, to emerge with full persuasion as it might have done a generation or so ago with Beeeham. So the music for the Capu-lets' oartv was full of bounce and jollity, beautifully sprung, the love music was dreamily beautiful, and the Queen Mab Scherzo was skittish rather than brilliant. All the singers, soloists and choruses, plainly benefited from the Albert Hall acoustic, though Jules Bastin as Friar Lawrence had an uncharacteristic huskiness to suggest a cold.

Sarah Walker sang radiantly and Robert Tear sparkled in the Scherzetto, the diction of both superb, while the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus produced their freshest brightest tone to make the reconciliation music at the end (so often dismissed) a genuine culmination. COVENT GARDEN Mary Clarke Manon MARGUERITE Porter was to have danced her first Manon at Covent Garden with Mark Silver, but unhappily he is indisposed and change of partner may have been partly responsible for her uncertainty in the role. On the other hand, she must have been glad of Wayne Eagling's experience as Des Grieux and the performance certainly benefited from his impassioned never glamourised dancing in the last act. Porter is becoming a problem ballerina. The gifts recognised when she was first given prominence under the Royal Ballet's new direction have not been carefully nursed in roles suited to her articular style and physique, ut rather dissipated in far too many leading roles for all of which she cannot have been carefully prepared.

At the same performance, Derek Deane was making his debut as Lescaut, a piece of casting I thought equally misguided. He does not establish the villain at all and the relationship and the conspiring with his sister is never clear. Even his drunk dance did not raise a laugh. It was not until Monica Mason joined him in the drunk pas de deux that things livened up. The evening also marked the first performance to which the press was invited to hear John Lanchbery's re-orchestration of the score.

He seems to have opted for big dramatic climaxes, but at the expense of the melody and charm of the Massenet music. Why a score which has been popular since 1974 had to be changed is another Royal Ballet mystery. TALK OF THE TOWN Mary Harron The Drifters THE DRIFTERS first introduced their effortless pop harmonies in 1953 since than, dressed in the same matching suits but with changing personnel. they have slid gently intu the role of the high-class nostalgia act. In London this means a four-week appearance at the Talk of the Town, where you get cabaret with a vengeance.

The Drifters were preceded by an endless floor show waves of dancers appeared in body stockings, smiling ferociously as their heads sprouted fluorescent pineapples, silver antlers and Christmas trees. This setting might destroy James Brown but the Drifters survived it rather well. Their music never raised blisters, it merely translated the spiritual power of gospel harmonies into commercial pop songs as light and perfect as soap bubbles. It was the most pleasurable music ever recorded and the Drifters were absolutely right to concentrate on their classic numbers. Where they went wrong was in cutting up Under the Boardwalk.

Up on the Roof, and Saturday Night at the Movies into medleys and by trying to involve the audience in constant singa-longs. This show was also a tribute to a unique vocal style. It marked the return of Johnny Moore, who first joined the Drifters in 1954. No matter that his voice has slightly faded and that he has performed the same songs not just hundreds but thousands of times. In his hands the classics remain untarnished he was a joy to behold.

MAYFAIR Nicholas de JongH Karamazov I USED to have a sneaking suspicion that juggling was all very well but best done in private. The Flying Karamazov Brothers prove me wrong they almost persuade me that juggling is a legitimate sort of theatrical pleasure. Here are four young jokey Americans, hidden under soubriquets from Russian fiction, dressed in black workout tunics and long hair, plaits and moustaches. They juggle with everything cones, sickles and. for light relief, eggs.

As they juggle they talk, or at least a few effortless asides intersperse, introduce and conclude the snappy juggling pirouettes. As the pace of the evening develops the juggling becomes more daring the audience is invited to offer a few objects with which to conjure, and one of them tries with umbrella, boot, and scarf. The lights go out and in the darkness you see blue and green lights circling like flying snakes; And the finale consists of a fusilade of juggling objects which hurtle through the air at mind-confusing speed. The show lasts about 90 minutes and I could have done with a little less, but they are an amiable, endearing quartet and if there are sufficient aficionados of manual acrobatics, they should stay long. ODEON iheSCfieen remington ofl BUMIon tTSen 6026S44'5 2263520 ItzhakPerlman appears on HMV as well as the I Michael Serrauli in La Cage aux Folles II much.

That, however, seemed to be genuinely affectionate towards the gay world while caricaturing it with merciless accuracy. And it did have the additional merit of two marvellous camp performances from Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault. This is damp stuff indeed, with Serrault becoming too much of a parody and Tognazzi only occasionally allowed his brilliant if-looks-could-kill double takes. Edourdo Molinaro, hampered by a silly tale of thrill and spills among crooks and policemen who look as if they couldn't possibly exist outside bad French movies, does however manage a few goodies such as the. marvellous sequence when Serrault, forced by circumstances into permanent drag, hides out with Tognazzi's peasant mother and quickly finds out the drawbacks of being a working-class Italian woman.

Almost all of the rest is dross. The Awards Winner! Best New Play Drama Award 1980 ST FOR ON byTomKemplnski DUKE OF YORK'S 836-5122 Credit Card Sales 8364837 379-6565 83W855 ridiculous Sissy Spacek clearly deserved her Best Actress tag for Coal Miner's Daughter after a stream of good performances, and Robert De Niro was well worth his Oscar for his portrayal of boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. That Scorsese didn't get Best Director, and Redford did, was surely nonsense. Another odd award, in an admittedly dottily nominated section, was Best Foreign Language Film for Vladimir Menshov's Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears, shown here at the NFT's last Russian week. It is a good film but Kurosawa's Kagemusha was there too, and Truffaut's The Last Metro.

Nobody, however, could quarrel with Henry Fonda's special award. Some people were a little worried that it might have gone to Ronald Reagan. D.M. (J A LINK HOUSE PUBLICATION ful moral antidote. Helen Mirren also plays her excellently as a woman of strong sexual instincts who yet has a reassuring nobility of character.

As her sick brother Ferdinand creeps up on her in her chamber she greets him with a high-chinned stoic fearlessness and when she cries I am armed against virtue you feel it is no empty vaunt but a sign of genuine security of soul. What Noble has realised is that a play is built round powerful opposites love and lust, beauty and depravity, courage and terror. But he also makes excellent use of the space, so that the tiled floor is always bisected by cricket-pitch length carpets allowing for deep perspectives. And sound is also potently employed whether it be off-stage maniacal screams, the iron clang of a grille as a group of madmen are released from a cage, or the brutal percussion of George Fenton's music which reaches its highest pitch of intensity as two men pull on a rope to strangle the Duchess in a fierce white light. Words occasionally get lost in the Round House acoustic.

But there are some powerful performances not only from Mirren and Gwilym but also from Bob Hoskins as Pjsola, a stubby black-leathered malcontent, who for once looks as if he might have done time in the galleys and who yet allows conscience to pierce WIUYRUSSELLS'UII JtBIAIIC' A MARVELLOUS PLAY PAINFULLY FUNNY SUNDAYTIMES QUITE ASTOUNDING, JIMtUUI f- PICCADILLY A THEATRE Box Office 4374506 CroditCdi3796565 BRITISH ACADEMY AWARD BEST DIRECTOR ft NOW SHOWING ATfcUATFAII 493-2031 CINEMA MAYFARHOTa STUATTON Sr. CA.MD6NTOWN. IN STEREO SOUND- 4852446 2671201 NEWCOMED 1 JS I he is one of the most influential of post-war American directors both by precept and example. If you substitute Africa for America, the same could be said for Ousmane Sembene, who also has a season next week, and gives a Guardian lecture on Wednesday. Sembene's five films, made between 1966 and 1977 despite opposition in Senegal, are an extraordinary summation of the possibilities of African cinema.

His last, Ceddo, is certainly the most sophisticated and imaginative to be made there. If a distributor won't take the risk, why not BBC-2 or the Fourth Channel, now buying in a number of excellent films for later. oooooooooooo Shakespeare's MEASURE FOR MEASURE A production set on a mythical Caribbean island snoruy aiter tne Second World War, and acted by a cast ofmixednationalities. Jf Yvette Harris who 9 plays Isabella NATIONAL 2 THEATRE 01-9282252 5933 oooooooooo it is superb to look I urge you to see it is one of the outstanding 'prospects in London at the moment. GUARDIAN "Ferretl.

is magnificent" F. TIMES a persuasively truthful picture of life in me ota west." THE TIMES HEARTLAND GRAND PRIX: BERLIN 80 "ConchataFerrell is marvellous as the heroine. "DAILY MAIL Quad If you enjoyedltzhakPerlman's brilliant performarce on TV, you'll also enjoy his records. You'll find his recordings of theBrahms Concerto.Scote Toplin's Easy "Winners and Paganini's Caprices (hepIayedNo.24 ontheshowJalongvvithmanyothersonHMYatallgood mm record snops. Also available is his new digital fllhnm'A Different Kind of Blues', with jazz compositions by Andre Previn.

ItzhakPerlman onHMV. Evenbetter thanltzhakPerlman onParkinson. All recordings also available oncassetce. Buy the April issue of Hi-fi News Record Review magazine, and you'll now get two publications for the price of one. That's because we've introduced a new supplement "Audio Video Mart" A no-nonsense, 32 page loose insert that takes a long; hard look at the ever-confusing worlds of audio and video.

Plus in the Hi-fi News itself, there's the latest news, reviews, facts and tracks that you'd expect from the leading authority in Hi-fi. IWIIIIHHIMt-WHllllim Dun "Stunning piece oj film-making'" GUARDIAN of powerful, unforgettable images magnijicentperjormances SUNDAYTItiES Tarkovsky conjures images like yoti'veneverseen beore. TIMEOUT ANDREI TARKOVSKY'S dazzling cinema. It has to be seen. It is unique." NOW STflLKER mm Kovn hi mmi UUbpW NO ISS, NO W0Wy NO FLUTTER 11 NOW Studio CUfMIMfi Oxford Circus uiiuvviivu 4373300.