The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 13

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday June 25 1987 13 BRIEFING Secret People (Wednesday, C4, 2.35): Thorold Dickinson's 1951 political drama with Audrey Hepburn involved in bomb plot against visiting dictator, circa 1937. Special interest THERE will be two Guardian Lectures at the National Film Theatre next month. On July 12, Don Bluth, director of the first animated feature to be produced by Spielberg, will be interviewed after a preview screening of An American Tail; and on July 21, Leslie Halliwell, former chief film buyer for ITV and Channel Four and film book author, gives a lecture to support a season of his favourite films. Tonight at the NFT, the National Film Archive presents a Technicolor restoration of Laurence Olivier's Henry made in 1944. This Sunday at the Ritzy, Brixton, there are three famous Japanese films Kurosawa's Ran and Kobayashi's Kwaidan and Woman Of The Snows.

The Kobayashi films form his complete collection of highly individual ghost stories. Sweet faces: Julie Kavner, Seth Green and Michael Tucker in Radio Days Sour face: Richard Domier as Ed in Evil Dead 11 Derek Maficolm reviews Woody Allen's nostalgic Radio Days and other Best films White Of The Eye (Cannons, Haymarket and Shaftesbury Avenue): Donald Cammell, who co-directed Performance, and then floundered, returns to virtuoso form with imaginative thriller. David Keith, Cathy Moriarty excellent. Chronicle Of A Death Foretold (Lumiere, Gate): Not wholly satisfactory but beautiful and intriguing Francesco Rosi adaptation of the Marquez story of small-town murder, and its consequencies. Everett, Muti, Volonte and Papas in the cast.

Dona Herlinda And Her Son (Everyman and Cannon, Piccadilly): Mexican director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's most successful film, about mother arranging the life of bisexual son to the satisfaction of all. Very sophisticated comedy. Prick Up Your Ears (Curzon West End, Screen on the Green): Stephen Frears and Alan Bennett encompassing the life and times of gay blade Joe Orton, with Gary Oldman fine in the lead. Desert Bloom (Cannon, Tottenham Court Road, Eugene Corr's very well acted family saga, set in the Las Vegas of the A-Bomb testing era and with Jon Voight as paterfamilias. Tenue De Soiree (Screen on the Hill, Bertram! Blier's black comedy with Gerard Depardieu as gay burglar muscling in on Michel Blanc's marriage to Miou-Miou.

Funny and provocative. Best on TV The Arrangement (Friday, BBC-2, 11.10): 1970 Elia Kazan drama about advertising man trying to remodel his life. With Kirk Douglas, Dunaway, Kern. Juvenile Court (Thursday, C4, 11 pm): One of the best Fred Wiseman documentaries, following cases in 1973 Tennessee courtroom and discovering as much hope as pessimism. Monterey Pop (Thursday, C4, 1.30 am): Classic A Pennebaker rock festival movie, made in 1967 with Joplin, Hendrix, Country Joe, The Who etc.

From the Life of The Marionettes (Saturday, C4, 12.40 am): Bergman's 1980 examination of sexual and moral pressures that drive businessman to murder prostitute. Made while in German tax exile, but with Sven Nyqvist Dracula, Prince of Darkness (Saturday, BBC-2, 9.40): Opens a season of Hammer well. Made in 1965 with Christopher Lee. Followed by the less good Evil of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing, made the previous year. Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (Sunday, BBC-1, 3.0): The 1954 MGM musical, directed by Stanley Donen, with Howard Keel, Jane Powell and macho male chorus.

Monkey Business (Sunday, C4, 10.15): 1952 Howard Hawks screwball comedy with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and a young Marilyn Monroe. ULh Old. Mil till new releases At one point in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II (Cannons, Haymarket and Oxford St, etc, 18) a flying eyeball is swallowed by the leading lady. For a glorious moment I thought it was the Alliance surge, since the undead whose bloodied orbs take wing bears a passing resemblance to Dr David Owen. All sorts of similar atrocities are committed on the small but courageous cast of Mr Raimi's epic as they huddle terrified in the woodside cottage where, if you remember, a pair of lovers had an unfortunate tryst in the first instalment This one, which has just elevated itself into the realms of art by being voted the best as well as the most popular film at the Paris Fantasy Festival, is even jokier than the original as if to make it quite clear to the British judiciary that it isn't really a video nasty.

In fact, Raimi is a good, energetic film-maker having an eye-ball within the confines of a somewhat restricting genre, and making rather a lot of loot into the bargain. All I need add is that the special effects are most ingenious and I expect to be reviewing Evil Dead III sometime next year with rather more enthusiasm than the umpteenth Bond. I hope, however, unlike this one I don't see it shortly after breakfast A nauseous theme tune runs beckoningly through The Boy Who Could Fly (Plaza, PG), rising to a crescendo when Louise Fletcher, playing a child psychiatrist, tells her patient (Lucy Deakins): "You know, sometimes we need to believe in a little magic, especially when there's so much pain around." If this isn't enough to put you off Nick Castle's film, I don't know what is. But it really isn't too bad. The girl who has fallen off a ledge picking flowers thinks she was saved from death by the boy next door (Jay Underwood) who caught her because he could fly.

He thinks so too and seems in greater need of a shrink. However, the romance between the two, and all its psychological ramifications are delicately handled by Castle and the fable just about holds together. At any rate it doesn't have much need of the glue of its soupy score. But you know Hollywood. We need to have a little pain around if we are to believe in the magic.

It's very sad to say goodbye this week to Fred Astaire, a great artist and a genuinely nice man of whom one can for once honestly say that we will never see his like again. Stravinsky once asked who were the outstanding geniuses of the century, replied: "Myself, Picasso and, of course, Fred Astaire." He wasn't too far off the mark. glomerate, reads all the letters and comes up with a programme for stream-lining operations. Posing as an executive in another part of the building the bureaucracy is slovenly enough for no one to notice he starts to influence even board meetings, with the help of his uncle's wife who fancies him like Anne Bancroft fancied Hoffman. He, of course, wants Helen Slater's attractive young executive and eventually gets her.

One of the joys of the film is not Fox but Margaret Whitton as the voracious wife, and one of its best scenes is her seduction of him at uncle's country retreat, with time at a premium before hubby returns from work. Whitton's sense of farce and timing is very good, but Fox is no slouch in this respect either. His is a good performance in a film which constantly threatens to run out of steam when it momentarily forgets which other movie it is copying. It seems to need better editing and a little more sharpening up. But who cares if the dollars roll in? Once again Ross looks like a bit of a chancer as a director, happy with almost any genre but a real master of none.

The Secret Of My Success has too obvious an eye for the main box-office chance to be really successful either as farcical comedy or ironic social comment But it's kind of fun. sense of time and place to send anyone of around his age into transports of delight, even if they are not familiar with The Masked Avenger or Breakfast with Irene and Roger. It made me think, at any rate, of ITMA and Edmundo Ros. I don't think I've ever seen a more blatant or more ephemeral piece of Woody Allen memory massaging. But Radio Days is saved from its inherent sense of marking time by the easy skill with which it is put together, and from its rather feeble proclamation of lost innocence by the way Allen seems to sense that time gilds the lily, and that the tunes were better anyway.

What the film offers is a stylish child's eye view of a half forgotten world, acted out with the kind of comic dedication that his players Dianne Wiest, Julie Kavner, Josh Mostel, Michael Tucker, Tony Roberts and some of the veteran radio stars of the period seem to find so easy under his direction. You can't really distinguish between fact and fiction, and that seems a strength rather than a weakness. It is, all in all, the kind of movie that is impossible to dislike and very possible to adore, halfway between The Purple Rose of Cairo and Broadway Danny Rose. Not the best Woody Allen but at least the product of a director and writer fully in com THERE'S a story I once heard about a famous golfing President of the United Stales who sliced his tee shot on a seaside course, causing his ball to fly through the window of a passing tram, hit the driver on the head and send the train over a cliff. "Oh my God!" said the President, "What shall I do?" "Keep your left arm straighter on the backswing," replied the attendant professional.

There's a joke of similar taste in Woody Allen's Radio Days (Odeon, Haymarket, PG). It's about an heroic baseball pitcher who loses first a leg, then an arm and finally his sight in various misfortunes but still keeps trying. If he had nothing else, someone remembers, he had heart. Allen, though he doesn't appear, is the film's narrator and somehow the story doesn't even seem mildly distasteful. It all depends who's telling the tale.

And Radio Days is, in fact, one of the master of acute nostalgia's gentlest forays into his own past the story of the time when steam radio was king and a small Jewish boy from New York's Rockaway maintained his fantasy life listening. Seth Green plays him, and also Mia Farrow as a starry-eyed cigarette girl whoiibecomes a wireless celebrity by default The period is the late Thirties and early Forties and Allen's episodic comedy is invested with enough of a made an unf ilmable' story work Rupert Everett and Ornella Muti in Chronicle of a Death Foretold Outside London Nicholas Roeg's Castaway opens a 12-day run at Cinema City, Norwich, on Monday an adaptation of Lucy Irvine's best-seller that has not received its due. Cardiff's Chapter starts a run of Eugene Corr's excellent Desert Bloom on Friday, a film deservedly rescued from the video-only shelf by Palace'Pictures. Elem Klimov's Farewell, the film he took over when his wife (Larissa Schepitko) died, shows here from Monday. The Holy Innocents, one of the best Spanish films of recent years, will be screened from June 30 to July 5, at the Arnolfini, Bristol.

Directed by Mario Camus, the film was highly praised at Cannes in 1986. At the Watermans Centre, Hounslow, Rob Reiner's Stand By Me, one of the best American films of last year, runs from Monday next Karl Francis' thunderous Boy Soldier, his most striking film yet, can be seen at the Edinburgh Filmhouse on Sunday and Monday another film given less public attention than it deserves. Derek Malcolm ANGEL TUBE (226 3520) Film at 2 05. 4 15. 6 40.

8 55 All seals bookable I RAM-IS VON BURIN ml SI Sl A FILM BY FRANCESCO ROSI mand of his material and one who is also quite brilliant at summoning up the showbiz absurdities of a former era in a spirit of affection rather than cynicism. Dreams probably have more substance than reality anyway. But not the dreams of The Secret Of My Success (Empire, Leicester Square, PG) which stars Michael Fox as an enterprising yuppie on the way up within the awful corporate jungle of New York. If Allen's film looks back with rose-tinted bifocals, Herbert Ross seems merely to have undertaken the task of providing as suitable a vehicle as possible for one of the rising stars of Hollywood. It is not altogether easy to see the secret of Fox's success, which has incidentally put the film into almost as much profit as Spielberg's Back To The Future, in which he made his name.

He's good-looking and carries around with him a vulnerable charm, probably not unconnected with the fact that he looks a little more like the boy-next-door than a typical product of the Los Angeles publicity system. But he isn't exactly Mickey Rooney, and he's certainly not Cary Grant As the yuppie in question, he's in fact the sort of ingenue Dustin Hoffman played in the The Graduate, only more determined to get ahead. He gets a job in the mail room of his uncle's con Nick Smurtfawaite on IN THE topsy-turvy world of film-making it is not unusual for the first scene to be shot last That's what was happening at an idyllic location in the Brecon Beacons, mid-Wales, on the last day's shooting of On The Black Hill, the feature film version of Bruce Chatwin's acclaimed novel. Bob Peck and Gemma Jones, playing Amos and Mary Jones, were leading their respective horses up a narrow country lane when they came upon The Vision, the farmhouse in which they spend their married life together. While Chatwin's novel concentrates more on the twin boys born to Amos and Mary, Andrew Grieve's film is centred on Amos, whose complexity is reflected in the development of the twins.

Like the author, Grieve was brought up in mid-Wales and On the Black Hill struck a lot of familiar chords when he read it "I'd wanted to do a film in Wales for years," he said, "and this area in particular because of my affection for it, but there was not enough about my own background to make an interesting film. "Bruce Chatwin reckoned his book was unfilmable and at first he didn't want to do it But I think he changed his mind when he realised how keen I was. He told me to use it as a source, because he realised you can't really film a book. Luckily he is an extremely visual writer, which made my job easier." Grieve spent months writing and re-writing his script, compressing storylines, amalgamating characters, paring it all down CHRONICLE rf-x a ATI! TT I NMBKHQHUk ariHBUUhi JL fflS BT 9EBBK -JWwir ucn i GORGEOUS, rune i yj MYSTERIOUS ISMlMWIIltttllN XI AND RIVETING" An elderly gentleman in braces and hobnail boots, quietly reading a book in the shade of a tree, while the rest of the crew was enjoying a noisy lunch, turned out to be 38-year-old Mike Gwilym, scarcely able to smile for fear of spoiling the effects of five hours' cosmetic surgery. Bob Peck, sporting a chestnut wig and contact lenses to match, every inch the Victorian rustic, seemed to have got off lightly.

Further investigation revealed that he'd had to learn how to ride, plough, shepherd and slaughter livestock for the role. "They told me I ploughed a very straight furrow," he said proudly. Peck's last film (as yet unreleased) was Kitchen Toto, set in Kenya, and he was reminded of the lush Kenyan countryside on this clear blue, sunny day amid the rolling hills of Brecon. It was, however, rather different from his last working trip to Wales, shooting the climactic scenes for Edge of Darkness down a slate mine in Blaenau. It is unusual for assistant directors to blossom into directors in this country, and Grieve is well accustomed to the sorry-he's-in-a-meeting response to his ideas and initiatives.

If nothing else, he hopes On the Black Hill will mean a few more returned phone calls. "It would be nice to have one's ideas taken seriously," he said. RUPERT EVERETT ORNELLA MUTI GIAN MARIA VOLONTE IRENE PAPAS LUCIA BOSE ANTHONY DELON ALAIN CUNY SERGI MATEU CAROLINA ROSI CAROLINE LANG SILVERIO BLASI DiRKiiiiHt FRANCESCO ROSI GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ VHMMUHUCK.UI how Andrew Grieve Bob without losing sight of Chatwin's singular vision of rural isolation in the face of a changing world. The final script encompasses 200 scenes, many of them portraying humble rituals of country living, brought to life so vividly by Chatwin. "He came down to watch some filming," said Grieve, "and instead of comparing it to what was in the book, he measured the reality he knew against the reality we'd found." Grieve had difficulty finding a backer and took the Dresst MIOU-MHHJ NOW SHOWING CURZON WEST END 93 Avenue, W1 Telephone 01-439 4805 Film at 1 00 (no! Sun).

3 30. 6 15 8 JS Seals E5 00 bookable in advance for ihe fl 45 performances daily also for the 6 15 performances on Saturday Sunday CONTINUING AT BRIGHTON Cannon, MANCHESTER ComerhousB, SALfORD QUAYS Cannon FROM FRIDAY BIRMINGHAM Bristol Road Cannon FROM MONDAY WARWICK Film Theatre A Peck with Rhys and Aled Baker project to Colin McCabe at the British Film Institute who decided it was possible to do it cheaply, with some help from British Screen, the successor to the National Film Finance Corporation. "Everybody I took it to liked the script but they all thought it would be too expensive. So we've worked on an incredibly tight budget, less than three quarters of a million, and tried to make it look four times that. It's not so bad for me, but a tight budget can be hell for the art department.

You can't just call up. London and ask them to send down a grandfather clock. A lot. of our props are on loan from people living in the neighbourhood, which is freat because it gives the ilm a strong sense of reality." Indeed, art director Jocelyn James was required to find artefacts and memorabilia from every one of the ,10 decades covered by the story. Neither was it a bed of roses for make-up artists who frequently rose before dawn to start work at 5 am applying prosthetics to the actor brothers Mike and Bob Gwilym, who play the twins over a 60-year period.

JA TART BLACK COMEDYLZ TBMDE SOIREE Evening "Very, very funny" TIMEOUT umn The National Film Theatre preset A Family Preview Screening of the acclaimed new animated AN AMERICAN TAIL Presented by Steven Spielberg Directed by Don Bluth Following the screening Don Bluth will give a Guardian Lecture about his film. magmiHue guardian Who or what is PEE-VJGO HECIf.lAlM? JAf.lES BOND The 007 file: July I sum on sal now. CI mm wm wua HAM AND HIGH BLIER gffll poTnowjarrtMrEtATiLi Sunday 12 July at 3.30 p.m. in NFT1 Tickets 2.95 (adults). 1.70 (children) DEPARDItU BLANC CANNON TOTTENHAM CT.

RD. MS 3.30 s.so o.io 636618 Frlsatn.is.