The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 11

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday August 14 1986 1 1 BRIEFING Sixties splendour. Annie Potts relives her memories with Molly Ringwald in Pretty In Pink and, right, Steve (Mark Hayashi) raising a laugh in Chan Is Missing Derek Malcolm reviews Pretty In Pink and Chan Is Missing knowing as Pretty In Pink but far fundamentally supercilious ana It is a matter of actually lik and their unpredictability, not oi memai computer io create stereotypes. Eaele. to be reviewed next another movie the distributors of that's as ing people week, is danger. it is.

less exnloitative. using a Kina recognisable The Iron which have list until immediate, the Cobra money than One repeated it is surely allowed to want those who ashamed writing much Eagle, if about No film made about the Chinese in America, Chan Is Missing is more than a bit chaotic as it follows the misfortunes of Wood Moy's taxi-driver and his nephew (Mark Hayashi) searching through Chinatown for the Taiwan wheeler-dealer who has made off with their savings. The chase is funny, observant, and full of good detail, at once knocking old shi-boleths about the Chinese neatly on the head and unaggressively explaining the joys and tensions of Chinese-American assimilation, or the lack of it. Like Dim Sum, it comes from within that culture rather than outside and can joke about it more seriously and with relative impunity. The Year of the Dragon seems light away and so does the world of Char-ie Chan.

Instead, we get a fine view of a relatively ordinary world going about its business, alien perhaps from both the American mainstream and the Chinese mainland but making a stab at accommodating both worlds. This is a comedy music to pop suitings. They're really on the ball. But crisp as the crust is, the inside of the pie remains obstinately like junk-food goo. Pretty In Pink is manipulative dream fodder par excellence, and about as much like real life as Cobra, though without the realistic blood.

Castigated in the Letters Column last Saturday for not liking the Stallone film (with the greatest insult anyone can muster these days, which is to accuse someone of being I'd better be careful what I write about Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing (Metro, 15) in case by praising I condemn it All the same, it is a refreshing change from the macho slobbery and sentimental dollar-earning of orthodox Hollywood to see an independent talent strike out so freshly. This is Wang's first film, made before Dim Sum, one of last year's major sleepers, and it's a debut that's full of the kind of hell-for-leather risk-taking that Hollywood is incapable of just now. If Dim Sum was slightly over-organised, so that it looked like a classic Japanese The boy who loves her most is fellow Zoid Duckie (Jon Cryer) who talks smart but acts dumb. The one who lusts after her most is Steff (James Spader) who is handsome, rich, and totally unused to a girl saying no. But she fancies Blane (Andrew McCarthy) who eyes her like a yuppie puppy on heat.

But he's a gent and doesn't do anything. Steff knows one thing. If he can't have "the Blane won't So he mocks away merrily causing Blane pain as the "Ri-chies" reject the Zoid. Back home, Harry Dean, of the extremely well lived-in face and the emblematic taciturnity that encourages cults, tells her: "You like him. He likes you.

Take the heat It's worth it." Thus are life's grittier problems boiled down-into movie philosophy. And we ask the inevitable question who's going to take her to the Senior Prom? Hughes and Howard Deutch, the director, embroider this passion fruit tale with every icon of the under-21 set they can muster, from spots to in-phrases, rave-in JOHN Hughes wrote and directed The Breakfast Club, the best and most intelligent teen movie of last year. He's now written but not directed Pretty In Pink (Plaza, 15) which is the most successful of the genre so far this year. If it is also the best, however, we've just about reached the nadir. The intelligence that has gone into it is mostly a matter of cosmetics.

The film looks like nothing so much as a very shrewd compendium of what the market requires. Pretty In Pink is a teenage version of those wrong side of the tracks romances of some 30 years ago, impeccably dressed in mid-eighties clobber. The girl (Molly Ringwald) lives with her father (Harry Dean Stanton) in a simple bungalow on the poorer side of town, mother having deserted. But she's bright and goes to a good school, expecting a scholarship to college. She's also pretty even when she's not in pink though her habit of keeping her mouth half open when not speaking would seem likely to attract as many flies as men.

decided to leave ou tne press too late for most people's columns. Presumably it is in class, more likely to make friends. hopes this policy will not be too- frequently, since in the end self-defeating. If critics are see only what the major companies them to see, it can only help suspect that the cinema is of itself and probably not worth about Bad reviews won't make difference to Cobra and The Iron that is what they are scared reviews at all is the real Derek Malcolm on the controversial films of Frederick Wiseman ftffl the saiSe horn Best films YeUow Earth (ICA Cinema): Chen Kaige's remarkable film from China possibly heralds the emergence of a new wave from the Mainland. Beautiful and original by any standards.

Desert Hearts (Screen on the Hill etc): Donna Deitch's sensitive portrait of love between women in the gambling town of Reno, circa 1959. Fine performances all round. Hannah And Her Sisters (Odeon, Leicester Square): Woody Allen's latest, very well directed, tale of Manhattan neurotics, with himself and Mia Farrow in the lead. Easily the best romantic comedy around. Sid and Nancy (Lumiere etc): Alex Cox's "romance" about Sid Vicious ana Nancy Spun- ten, heroin addicts.

Mucn )etter than it sounds, and well worth a visit. Room With A View (Curzon Mayfair): James Ivory's adaptation Forester's novel, elegantly shot and very well acted by starry cast. An Impudent Girl (Chelsea, Renoir): Claude Miller's fetching account of awkward pubescence in French provincial town. Terrific performance from Charlotte Gainsbourg. Best on TV American Gigolo (Friday, ITV, 11.0): Cut version of Paul Schrader's slightly eerie 1980 odyssey of a loveless man, with Richard Gere in perfect part for him.

Man Is Not A Bird (Friday, C4, 11.30): 1965 first feature by Yugoslavian Dusan Maka-vejev, and a very cherishable collage of dangerous and imaginative film-making. King In New York and Monsieur Verdoux (Saturday, BBC-2 from 1.55): Two more in the Chaplin season the first made here in 1957 and one of his lesser works; the second his masterpiece among sound films, from a decade earlier. Escape From Alcatraz (Saturday, ITV, 9.15): Don Siegel's 1979 prison escape movie, with Clint Eastwood as real-life escapee who did the impossible. The Man From Laramie (Saturday, BBC-2, 9.0): One of Anthony Mann's most resonant Westerns, made in 1955 with James Stewart out to avenge the murder of his brother. The Asphalt Jungle (Sunday, BBC-2, 9.55): Made by John Huston in 1950 and scarcely bettered since as a thriller with strength and atmosphere, plus a classic robbery sequence.

Basic Training (Monday, C4, 11.0 pm): Frederick Wiseman on recruits being trained up for Vietnam during the summer of 1970 the third of four remarkable documentaries. Cagney Season (C4 this weekend and next week, various times): Six more Cagneys, including two of the best gangster movies of the thirties in Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (Saturday, 10.55) and Michael Curtiz' Angels With Dirty Faces (Sunday, 10.15). Men, Lady Killer, 13 Rue Madeleine, and Boy Meets Girl are the others. Special interest Two of the most famous Nicholas Ray films the extraordinary Western Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without A Cause, show at the National Film Theatre on Saturday. On Sunday, the Margarethe von Trotta season, which ends with a Guardian Lecture by the director on August 26, reaches the fine The German Sisters, winner of Venice's Golden Lion in 1981.

Jonathan Demme's excellent StoD Making Sense shows on Sunday at the Tyne-side Cinema, Newcastle, with Cimino's Year Of The Dragon from Monday to Friday. At Cinema Citv. Norwich. Woodv Allen's Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose Of Cairo should be a popular double bill from Monday to Wednesday. At the Duke's Cinema, Lancaster, there's a Sunday showing of the Argentinian Camila, one of the most successful Argentinian films to be shown in London over the last decade, peter Weir's Witness is at the Plymouth Arts Centre till Sunday, and on Wednesday next Letter To Brezhnev has a five-day run there.

Derek Malcolm STARTS TOMORROW 2.20 (Not Sun) 4.0!i S.dO 9.00 EARTH THE RETINA "Time Out Hilt piln Mondavi. AllSaaubookabla. All mijor cradit card ncetpfad. -i niM suwi Babylon bound: Vincent Spano, left, Vittorio Taviani, Paolo Taviani, and Joaquim de Almeida on the set of Good Morning, Babylon John Francis Lane on the talented Taviani brothers Kfiaiflnami snmiiKie(2ttfiim There's enough public apathy-as batch on Channel Four are invariably produced the same way. He shoots hours of material with just one camera in natural light, so as to cause as little disturbance as possible.

Then he edits it down with precise care. What comes out of it all frequently surprises him as well as his viewers. Thus Basic Training presents a world that means different things to different people, and by that one means not only those watching it but those participating in the training itself. A white recruit's family thinks the Army will make a man of him. A young black sees it all entirely differently.

What we think depends oh what we are. "There's something terribly misleading about the idea that my films, or anybody else's, are Wiseman I do is try to be fair. But even that is governed by the sort of person I am. Evidence is what I'm after or as much as I can find that will make an interesting film. It's true I am suspicious of institutions, but I can't suggest alternatives.

Society has to organise itself somehow, but we should be Sretty wary about how it's one." At the London Festival in November, there will be a special screening of a new series of Wiseman films concentrating on institutions in America which look after handicapped and sub-normal children. They are neither an attack nor a defence of the methods used and he finds the methods, and success, are very different, depending upon the institution itself. Curiously, he seldom has any trouble with permissions either from those involved or, if they are children, their guardians. If there is an objection he never uses the footage. Americans, he says, are less worried than the English may be about covering up who they are and how they organise themselves.

Wiseman himself seems to have an insatiable curiosity but a perenially open mind. at which Griffith was to be guest of honour along with the father of the two boys, one of whom (Spano) was-getting married (to Greta Scac-chi). The father (played by Omero Antonutti, the Tavianis' eternal patriarch), has come to California to see why his emigrant sons have never returned home. They were a family of Tuscan stone-carvers, restorers of cathedrals, but had hit hard times in 1910 when the story begins, so the two younger brothers rather than seek other jobs had emigrated, hoping to make enough money to come back home and save the family business. Hired by Griffith to come and work on his Babylon they had learned English and were already settling down in Hollywood, excited by the new world of movie-making.

I watched the Tavianis shoot the scene when Griffith arrives at the party and meets the father. It is a meeting between two maestri, one of Renaissance traditions and one of the emerging hew art forms of the 20th Century. Proposing a toast to the married Griffith says to the father: "Your sons are like those obscure stone-cutters who carved the master- Sieces on the cathedrals you onour. I honour moviemaking because I believe it, too, helps our neighbours to love and respect one another better." Those were certainly idealistic times. In making Intolerance outside the film industry Griffith was risking the prestige and profits he had made on Birth Of A Nation.

This kind of pioneer spirit appeals to the Tavianis who tell me: "The story gives us the chance to once' again describe man's need to transform things hviiis society. The Hollywood of those years was a community of pioneers where solidarity prevailed over competition. The. industrial dimension remains in the background." Good Morning Babylon is "only" costing $6 millions, which is a lot of money for an Italian film but is only a medium budget for an American film today. The pioneer film-making spirit evidently still lives on.

"concours," or competitive exams which are necessary for entry into any secure civil service job (in France even the postmen are civil servants) has led to the brightest in France leaving their villages for the towns. Of course the concours cannot take poverty and racism into account so the most deprived of French society have found it hard to make it But Jose is smart, even though he has to do chores before school. In one scene the teacher reads a wonderful essay about an old man being worked to exhaustion in the field. Jose has written it but is accused of plagiarism by the teacher. When the teacher later realises it is his own work, he apologises, a turning point in the film.

Darling Legitimus won the Lion d'Or at the Venice Film Festival for her performance and Euzhan Palcy won the French Oscar, the Caesar, for the best first film. She is now working on the adaptation of another novel, Une Saison Blanche et Seche (A White and Dry Season) by the South African writer, Andre Brink. WHEN David Wark Griffith visited the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915 he was so struck by the ornately decorated Lovers Tower, which was the central attraction at the Italian Pavilion, that he wanted, to know who had designed and built it, especially its sculpted elephants. He was at the time getting ready to build the sets for the Babylon sequences of his Intolerance which he would begin shooting that summer. He wanted those Italians to come to Hollywood to work for him.

On the official credits no Italian names appear. But it is well known that Griffith had seen Pastrone's Cabiria (then credited to the poet Ga-briele D'Annunzio as author) which had been premiered in New York the year before at about the same time as Birth Of A Nation. Griffith was full of admiration for and even envious of Italian filmakers' flair for spectacle. So it isn't difficult to believe that he did in fact trace those Italians in San Francisco and bring them to LA. The idea inspired a possible film subject written by American screenwriter, Lloyd Fon-veille, and this in turn was incentive for American independent producer, Ed Pressman (who made Plenty) to invite Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, whose films he adored, to make a film of it The brothers Taviani who made Padre Padrone, The Night Of San Lorenzo, and Kaos among others, didn't speak English and realised it would be difficult for them to make an American film.

Pressman insisted and after a deal had been made by which the film would be a co-production with Italians (RAI, Italian public television, and Luce, the state distribution company) and with the French (MK2 who also co-produced Kaos), it became a European film and the brothers felt more at ease. They had it put in their contract with the Americans that they would not be obliged to speak English on the set They wrote the script with their usual collaborator, Ton-ino Guerra, and it was translated into English. THE National Film Theatre is putting on a French film as part of its Caribbean Day on Saturday which will include food, steel bands, and other live entertainment. Rue Cases Negres (Black Shack Alley) was a surprising success when it came out in France in 1983. The first film of a young woman director, Euzhan Palcy, it had sold 365,583 tickets in the first 62 weeks of release in Paris and was a huge success in Martinique.

It was still playing in five cinemas in Paris last week. Rue Cases Negres was filmed in Martinique, the French West Indies. A small Antillais boy, Jose, recounts his life there in the 1930s and we see the poverty of the Martiniquais and the racism of the white French settlers through his eyes. An orphan, he is looked after by his grandmother, played by the extraordinary Darling Legiti-mus. She fills the screen with her personality and determination.

Maman Tine has not only replaced his parents, she is his whole world, dis- NEXT Monday, the third of a series of four of Frederick Wiseman's early documentaries will be shown on Channel Four, at the safe hour of 11 pm. Even though they were made a decade and a half ago, the films are still controversial. The first to be shown, a fortnight ago, was Hospital, made at New York's Metropolitan Hospital. It caused a considerable stir. But then, Wiseman's studies of American institutions it was a Benedictine monastery this week, and next Monday it's the American Army are not easy to.

take. They are the opposite oT di-' dactic, expressing a point of view only, in the selection of material arid the editing of it But it is quite-impossible to see Hospital without forming an opinion of health care in America, or Basic Training without getting emotionally involved in the way recrujts for the Vietnam way, -were transformed from raw young men into trained killers. Wiseman has been frequently criticised for his determination to let it alj hang out without forcingWs material into polemical shape. He was not the initiator of this style; of filmmaking, but he is perhaps its most persistent and remarkable exponent. When we come to study the America of his era, the films will be extraordinary evidence, which social historians will value for their refusal to make a case for or against Wiseman, a lawyer from Boston, first burst into the film world with Titicut Follies, a frightening look at a hospital for the criminally insane at the Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts.

It was shown at the New York Festival in 1967 but triggered a bitter legislative battle which has not been fully resolved to this day. Wiseman was accused of violating the rights of patients. But what his film proved beyond doubt was that the rights of the patients were being violated not so much by the film-maker as by the staff, and by an uncaring outside society which did not and still does not wish to be concerned about them. One's responses to a Wiseman film are generally not so fnrthrieht. because most -American institutions are not so blatantly appalling, rnose who saw Hospital, for instance, could just as easily take the view that the hospital staff were doing a hopeless and desperate job as well as they could, as curse them for their inadequacy.

That is the Wiseman way. Without commentary or music, he beavers away deep into his subject, producing as much evidence as he can. The films and he made many more since has the painted on its side was chugging down Sunset Boulevard which was then still called Prospect, bringing extras to work for the scenes of Belshazzar's Feast in Babylon. A giant painted stairway was sculpted with papier-mache figures on each side was being shot by lighting cameraman Beppe Lanci (Nostalgia, Kaos) through a maquette screen on which the top part of the set was painted. I was asked not to reveal this special effect but as it is unlikely that anyone will believe any producer of today could afford to rebuild Griffith's original colossal set, I don't think I am letting any great secret out of the bag.

That afternoon, as they waited for the erratic Italian summer to produce some genuine Californian sunshine, they were setting up a modern-day wedding banquet plots her grandson's escape from lite suyur jnuiimnu" Education is the classic way out of poverty for some French children and the colonies are no exception. With the education system based on a series of tests, the bright theoretically get sifted out whether they come from Paris, the provinces, or the middle of the Caribbean. The theory has worked surprisingly well, the famous In the early scenes, set in real Tuscany before the brothers emigrate to the States, the dialogue will be in Italian. The only post production dubbing needed will be for Spano and De Almeida (the former, of course, of Italian origin, the latter of Portuguese) who were able to mouth their dialogue in Italian. It will be the reverse of what usually happens in this kind of Italian coproduc-tion when it's the Italian actors who have to mouth English dialogue and then be dubbed.

Arriving just outside Tirrenia on the back lot of what was once a film studio and is now only used for Communist fetes, I found myself in the Hollywood of 1915 which set designer, Gianni Sbarra, had rebuilt after meticulous research. A streetcar with Pacific Electric Western Sweet talk: Darling Legitimus that her grandson shall escape the sugar cane field by education, the only other alternative on Martinique. School is a challenge, as there are few books, archaic teaching methods (the children are made to learn many tiny details about mainland France which must have seemed very far away to a small boy in the 1930s). The film, entitled Good Morning Babylon, is being shot mostly in Italy with. one desert sequence on location in Spain and some exteriors in the ports of San Francisco and New York.

When I visited them at Tirrenia in Tuscany, near to where they were born and grew up, San Miniato, which inspired their Night of San Lorenzo, there seemed to be no language problem on the set Charles Dance, who plays Griffith, Vincent Spano and Joaquim de Almeida who Slay the two Italian brothers ired by Griffith in San Francisco, seemed quite happy to work through interpreters. And perhaps the Tavianis understand more English than they are prepared to admit What is more, the dialogue sounded more credible than most dialogue one hears in American angled Italian films. Kathleen Griffin on the track that leaves poverty and racism behind IFceimcIfai Heave pensing logic, punishment, and affection. We are shown the dreadful conditions of the sugar cane workers and the cruelty of their white bosses who try and cheat their workers of their meagre pay by "fines'' at the evening pay-out after a blisteringly not day in the fields. The grandmother, Maman Tine, is determined THE MOST ACCLAIMED CHINESE FILM EVER MADE YELLOW "BEAUTY THAT FLAYS EXCLUSIVE PRESENTATION 5.007.008.00 ICA THE MALL CINEMA -SW1 -9303647.