The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 11

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday September 18 1986 11 The third Carradine brother, Keith, talks to Neil Norman about Trouble In Mind BteMge BRIEFING "A FRIEND of mine said that Bang to rights Jane Birkin, right, in Dust, and Kris Kristofferstm in Trouble In Mind Derek Malcolm reviews Captive, Dust, Trouble In Mind and the week's other qmjuGs Una GDq releases afeo James Baldwin Guardian lecture Best films At Close Range (Electric Screen, etc). Strikingly handled modern variant on Fifties melodrama with intense playing by Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. Mona Lisa (Odeon Haymarket). Fairy tale of the London underworld, directed by Neil Jordan with a cinematic address all too rare in British cinema. Betty Blue (Gate, etc).

Amour fou Eighties style in a febrile, if somewhat over-extended movie by Jean-Jacques Beineix. director of Diva. The Money Pit (Plaza). Romantic comedy and knockabout farce married genially if a bit uneasily in a latterday equivalent of Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House. Best on TV Cinderella Liberty BBC1, 11.25).

James Caan as sailor on shore leave in well handled downbeat romance, directed (1973) by Mark Rydell. The Sea Hawk BBC-2 3 pm) Enrol Flynn and Claude Rains in suitably sumptuous Warners costume drama, directed (1940) by Michael Curtiz. Diner BBC2, 10.55). Witty, low-key evocation of the late fifties, in the promising directorial debut (1982) by Barry Levinson. Mandy C4, 10.55).

Deceptively understated 1952 Ealing movie, not so much about deaf daughter as purblind parents. The Odd Angry Shot BBC-2, 9 pm). Interesting if rather tentative Australian film (1979), touching on involvement in Vietnam. The Eagle C4, 9 pm). To mark the 60th anniversary of Valentino's death, one of his liveliest films, complete with Carl Davis score.

Special interest THERE ARE two Guardian Lectures at the National Film Theatre on Sunday. At 2 pm, American novelist James Baldwin talks to Horace Ove, and at 4.15, Franco Zeffirelh is in conversation with John Higgins. The Museum of London's British cinema season takes in Champagne Charlie tonight and George Formby's last film, George in Civvy Street, on Tuesday. The Everyman, Hampstead, has a Hitchcock double (Frenzy and The Birds) at the Sunday matinee and a Fuller triple (White Dog, Shock Corridor, Naked Kiss) on Tuesday. A season of H.

G. Wells adaptations at the Croydon Arts Centre takes in James Whale's The Invisible Man on Friday and Saturday, and Island Of Lost Souls, next weekend. On Tuesday, Bernard Crick gives a lecture on Orwell and Wells. TlmPulleine I was rapidly becoming the king of the cults," says Keith Carradine, whose film career has recently overshadowed that of his two brothers David and Robert Having associated, himself with Robert Altaian in the early seventies he has since transferred his professional affection to Altman's protege, Alan Rudolph. Their third film together, Trouble In Mind, opening this week, has Carradine playing a curiously stylised character who moves from indolent country boy to urban decadent, complete with mascara and elaborate pompadour.

"What I was trying to do was to depict his moral descent, visually. I was the nature of the beast." With The Inquiry, a biblical epic awaiting release, and another film now in production, Carradine is the most productive of his family. Was there any professional jealousy among them? "It's always subject to change. This business is one of changing fortunes. I remember walking the back streets of Cairo and looking through a window into a tiny room.

There was one light bulb and on the wall was a poster of David in Kung Fu. "I suddenly realised the incredible degree of penetration television has into the Eublic psyche. I have yet to in a blockbuster, so it doesn't affect me that way." As one of the few young actors who can alternate between leading roles and character parts, the 36-year-old Carradine often seems able to combine the two, though none of his roles, he averred, bears much similarity io himself. Keith Carradine cult king "I don't feel comfortable with characters close to my own and I've tried hard not to repeat things. There are different schools of thought about this.

Some of the great screen actors simply play variations on their own personalities. Somewhere along the line I was perverted into this approach and it has left me with a legacy of varied characters. I seem to have been able to bridge the gap between playing leading roles and character parts." He works with some directors more than once because of the rapport they build up which can be carried into the next project. Communication can tnen De conducted in verbal shorthand and at the conclusion of a film communication is at its height Clearly he was impressed by Konchalovsky, for whom he made Maria's Lovers and with whom he would like to work again, as he would with Walter Hill for whom he made Southern Comfort and the Long Riders. Sept 19-25 "THIS YEAR'S 'DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN.

EXTREMELY EROTIC" Time Out In A Fine Mess (Cannons, Haymarket and Oxford St, PG), a suppository is put up a racehorse to make it unbeatable, and another is used by one of the crooks who did it to outpace the police. This, you might gather, is a bit of a farce, hopefully but not very accurately inspired by Laurel and Hardy. It was made by Blake Edwards, who uses Richard Mulligan, Stuart Margolin, Ted Danson and Howie Mandol as the stool-pigeons of a plot that appears to be the victim of a third suppository. It spins out of control like it was written by a latterday Feydeau with hysterics. Here and there one can see authentic Edwards touches.

But only with field glasses. The naked eye discerns nothing much at all. Michael Jenkins' Rebel (ABC, Bayswater: Odeon, Kensington, etc, 15) is an Australian adaptation of a stage musical romance, with Matt Dillon in the lead to bolster its box-office potential. I doubt if it will. Dillon plays a Marine on leave in Sydney, circa 1942, who deserts the cause of war and hides out with the lead singer of an all-girl showband (Debbie Byrne).

She sings better than she acts and Dillon just pouts, like James Dean with constipation. The result is pretty difficult to sit through, even if you just want to listen to the music. director of Breaking Glass, and here he shatters credulity too as the Freeling family of the first film face another burst of psychic activity four years after Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg visited their initial reign of terror upon them. Not that Gibson has actually much chance to show what he can do, since the vast array of Richard Edlund's special effects take hold of the participants long before he can. Craig T.

Nelson, Jobeth Williams, Heather O'Rourke and Oliver Robins are involved again, but this is movie-making by numbers, orchestrated with thunderous but ultimately deadening technical resource. Some, however, may welcome the reprise as a ghost story with spectacular knobs on. But, for me, FX-Murder By Illusion (Leicester Square theatre, 15) is better fun. It has Bryan Brown as a movie special effects expert staging a fake assassination for the Justice Department, and then realising that he's been set up good and proper. He spends the rest of the movie extricating himself from the predicament with the only skills available to him and, though Robert Mandel's film is grossly uneven, it is quite clever at asking us what is real and what is fake, leaving us nicely in the lurch on occasions.

Californian navel-watching or, to put it more politely, introspective philosophising. It has ex-lawman, Kris Kristofferson returning home to Rain City after a jail sentence for homicide. There he meets Genevieve Bujold's cafe owner again, who now doesn't want to know. So he pursues another, younger woman (Lori Singer) who seems to be owned by Keith Carradine's Coop, a country boy turned crook. He offers to save Coop from the "edge of hell," if ne gets the girl in return.

One shouldn't complain, at a time when the American cinema is showing nothing but purely pyrotechnical imagination, when a movie like this arrives full of the regnant pauses of a ifferent significance. And I won't. Rain City is a weirdly wonderful creation the setting for a kind of urban Western with mythic bells on it, as if Anthony Mann has trod this ground before, perhaps with Monte Hellman. And Kristofferson's sad hero, seemingly impelled to justify himself even when caught on the wheel of desire, is a creation of some strength, as is Bujold's more worldly ex-lover. But, as someone said of the Ghost Train: "Where do it come from, where do it go?" Poltergeist II: The Other Side (Plaza, 15) was made by Brian Gibson, the British the veldt except for the old man and his black servants, has been opened out into a carefully-paced, beautifully lit and shot film that succeeds in expressing most of Coetzee's horror at the woman's degradation and despair as "a black widow in mourning for the uses I was never put to." It also encapsulates at least part of South Africa's equally lonely and more self-inflicted tragedy as her father takes the wife of a farmhand to bed, thus provoking a knifing that leaves his daughter totally on her own to reap the inevitable whirlwind.

Dust is only 88 minutes long, and expresses itself succinctly as well as passionately. It is also very finely acted indeed by Jane Birkin as the woman, Trevor Howard as the farmer and John Matshikiza and Nadine Uwampu as the farmhand and his wife. Birkin, in particular, has never given a better-controlled performance, the palpable eroticism of which is tempered by the woman's terror and foreboding. This is an impeccably unexploitative film, and that is essentially why it is heartening rather than depressing to sit through. Alan Rudolph's Trouble In Mind (Cannon, Oxford Street, Screen on the Green, etc, 15) is one of this director's odd but rewarding exercises in Xavier Deluc, Corinne Dacla and Hiro Arai are shown up by the highly professional performance of Oliver Reed as the girl's frighteningly suffocating father.

But the film at least has style and imagination, even if it also has a certain porten-tousness that sometimes makes it seem more prose than poetry. Captive is on a knife-edge throughout, since if you take it literally, the brain-washing and torture seems to be approved of as a necessary method to be used by those who wish to change our lives to suit their own beliefs. This is simply unpleasant and some of its passages, though not overstated, leave an acrid taste in the mouth. But to call the film reactionary would be to mistake its fundamental purposes. Captive, despite the central flaw, is on the side of the angels, asking us to free ourselves from the world we live in and be what we are from within.

The cinema of ideas, however, is easily misjudged these days. Dust (ICA Cinema, 18) is at least as controversial, being a brave adaptation by the Belgian film-maker Marion Hansel of J. M. Coetzee's extraordinary, and one would have thought unadaptable, In The Heart Of The Country. This interior monologue by the daughter of a Cape Province farmer, alone on "It's marvellous" timeout "A real treat, Rudolph's best A dense, chewy and highly enjoyable movie.

Rush!" city limits "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die" Everybody Kate Nelligan as Eleni Mike Bygrave on the personal odyssey that turned into a controversial film about the Greek civil war 1 I I VT? I Cl gt gj I i- Jlk I A YOUNG WOMAN, tied reluctantly but firmly to her rich ogre of a father, is kidnapped, brainwashed and tortured by three people of roughly her own age. They are from similarly privileged backgrounds, and are doing it not to extort money but to make her see the sham of her life. When she is freed, she returns to them without rancour and becomes part of a romantically ill-fated terrorist unit These are the bones of Paul Mayersberg's Captive, formerly Heroine (Cannon Haymarket; ABC, Fulham Road, etc, 18). But the flesh reminds one more of a fairytale than of the story of someone like Patty Hearst Or, at least, it is clearly supposed to do so. Certainly, Mayersberg has made a handsome film, proving, in his first movie as a director that a writer can express ideas through sound and images when he takes over behind the cameras.

Aided by cinematography from Mike Southon that nas real eloquence, by Voytek's splendid set designs and by excellent music from The Edge and Michael Berkeley, Mayersberg constructs a parable about the dark night of the soul that is never quite what it seems. Admittedly, the acting is variable. Irina Brook is only partially successful as the girl, and her kidnappers IN 1977 a Greek-American reporter named Nicholas Gage persuaded the New York Times to assign him to their Athens bureau. There he embarked on a six-year search for the truth about his mother, Eleni, who was a victim of the Greek Civil War between Monarchists and Communists. She was shot by a Communist firing squad in' 1949, immediately atier ar- ranging for her children (including Nicholas, then 9) to escape to join their father in America.

Gaffe's odyssey. which cli maxed in a confrontation with one of his mother's killers, became a best-selling book "Eleni," winner of. 1984's Heineman Royal Society of Literature Award. Now Peter Yates has filmed it with Kate Nelligan as Eleni and the rising young American actor John Malkovich Killing Fields," "Places of the as Gage. It opens in London next week.

Gaee. a forceful, articulate man who co-produced the film, and who describes him- the times fOUMEMYGATF San5 ffeEsfiimcfflfledl "But a country that tries to hide its past is like an individual who does the same thing: it develops neuroses." As in the book, one of the dramatic climaxes of the film is when Gage confronts his mother's surviving judge, takes out a gun to snoot him, and then thinks better of it Gage says: "I still wake up and think I should have killed the son-of-a-bitch. But it's a more fitting punishment that he relive his crimes in old age. "Since 'Eleni' came out, everyone knows who he is and he changes his story all the time. Originally he denied he'd ever neen in Lia or knew my mother or was at her Now he says, yes, he is the man, he was there, and Eleni Gatzoyiannis was a heroine.

Since he wasn't the one who actually sentenced her to death he thinks he can explain things that way." Gage is frank about the obsession that drove him to write Eleni and the relief he's felt since completing it Kate Nelligan, too found Eleni becoming an obsession. "Usually when I'm playing something very sad I'll think of the saddest moments in my own life, and so on. Something happened with this part which was quite different. The emotions I felt were all Eleni's, not mine. It was a very emotionally difficult film to make.

I found I couldn't leave the set or the character." Soutfna- wooymouv msiua. OHSmfSlEV GtttVUCtNT JOMNVUSH KHTH MRWUHNE LORI SINGER GENEVIEVE BUJOLD i mm am OH' fee cultural gap between my being a North American who lived for some years in England, and playing a Greek woman was the most difficult part of the role. Nick (Gage) took me to the real Lia and we spent some time there." Going back to Greece, says Gage, is "important to show that they couldn't scare my mother and they can't scare me. What happened happens in all civil wars, but for some reason Greece has never been able to say 'this side killed so many people and the other side killed so many people so now let's put it Behind Instead the truth is buried under the government policy of 'forget the past Bawdy, Witty, and Wlse.marvellously astute and sardonic a tteltfmap of the strategies and deceptions "I don't think it sold 2,000 copies. His previous book was about transvestites.

He's a journalistic opportunist. Even the Communists rejected that book. "I go back all the time to Lia" (his mother's village) "and they've had 6.000 visitors because of my book. It's very funny the guy who owns the coffee house is a Communist and hates my book but at the same time he's making all this money because of it!" Since Lia has been partly modernised over the years, Yates and his production team decided to build their own Lia in southern Spain. Meanwhile Kate Nelligan was researching her part: "The Milinffi OXFORD STTtKKT 01-6360310 01-2263520 of the sexual war" David Rotmon DINTS HONO'l TOO EDDCUHD OP TOD AnOBIGAH Bhpibd "Like 'MY DINNER WITH ANDRE', this conversation piece Is a cut and thrust above the average action For once, the word Is mightier than the penis' Alexander Wilkcr.

THE STANDARD on wt am a tu mt MMtt ABC FULHAM ROAD 01-370 2636 0BBMR winner: KSTACTKS55 crniFmni "CL 1 3.1 self as emotionally Greek and intellectually American, says "The American reviews of the film were surprisingly black and white. "I'd have liked the film to show more texture of Greek village life at that time, a life which had stayed the same for centuries but which vanished forever in the mid-1950s. I also wish the film had been shot in harsher tones, that it didn't look so pretty. But other criticisms are unfair. To say Kate Nelligan doesn't look Greek is completely untrue.

She looks just like my mother who came from northern Greece and had fair hair and blue eyes. "Also, I think it's unfair to say the Communists are portrayed as too evil. You don't hear the same criticism of films like Missing or Under Fire where the villains are the rightists." Though director Yates naturally emphasises the personal story of Eleni was hard to get money to make the film because everyone thought it was a sad story which of course it's not Eleni dies but she achieves life for her What gave Gage's book its weight was the political background. In spite of some splendidly chilling portrayals of guerrilla leaders by Ronald Pickup and Oliver Cotton, relatively little politics gets on the screen, though they persist in Greece and in Gage's own' life. Feelings still run high enough for a Greek journalist to have written a rebuttal of Gage's book called The Other Eleni.

A Film by MARGARETHE VON TROTTA stoning BARBARA SUKOWA "AMAGNIFICENTROSA" "ATOWERING am'Mns "WITTY AND SUBTLE" CITY LIMITS UA WRYLY AMUSING REFLECTION OF SEXUAL A SURPRISINGLY ABSORBING PIECE" FINANCIAL TIMES "An extremely funny clever film" PHOTOPLAY "RAUNCHY AND PROVOCATIVE" 9S "Comic conversation piece about sex: sophisticated satire" time out PERFORMANCE" 'a "SUPERBASROSA" CUE Notilm in London ar .1 me momma nut muic serious intent or raises more important questions" Derek MofcoJnvTHfGUAftQUN I i 5 (UuiMtlfi!.