The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 13

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday July 2 1987 13 BRIEFING Quenttn Falk on the art of the scene setter Best films Radio Days (Odeon, Haymarket): The new Woody Allen a slight but attractive remembrance of a lost New York youth, dominated by the radio era. Woody narrates, Mia Farrow stars. Evil Dead II (Cannons, Haymarket, Oxford Street, etc): Sam Raimi's parodic reprise of the horror movie almost condemned as video nasty. Lively and fun, if you like this sort of thing. Dona Herlinda and Her Son (Screen on the Hill, etc): Mexican Jaime Humberton Hermosilio's gently witty story of all-powerful mother marrying her gay son off and allowing him to keep his boyfriend.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Lumiere, Gate): Francesco Rosi's beautiful-looking summation of Marquez novella, with international problems but also some force. Shite of the Eye (Cannon, aymarket, etc): Donald Cammell's macabre thriller, vividly made, well-performed and a notch up on Jagged Edge ,1 Come-yuw as virtuoso wont. Best on TV The RKO Story (Friday, BBC-2, 9.30): The first of six hour-long programmes, narrated by Ed Asner, on the smallest but most fascinating of the five major Hollywood studios. Not just a celebration but also an investigation. Supported by the films themselves on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday nights.

Top Hat (Saturday, 8.20), arid King Kong (Tuesday, 6.25) are the first two. Derek Malcolm reviews the new Bond, The Living Daylights, and the week's other releases Gdsjdq rVO iSiSa ssiFU (0) THE AWARDS, here and in Hollywood, from A Room With A Vrew earlier this year, inevitably, could only scratch the surface of the contributions to what is essentially a collaborative art So Jilly Gutteridge, for example, will remain one of the unsung, down-the-credits, "stars" of this British success. You could find her one morning outside your house, propping up a pink bicycle, prepared to offer lots of money. As location manager for films and commercials, her job is to find appropriate settings, exotic and mundane, for film-makers anxious to keep away from the sheer artifice, and expense, of studio shootings. Hers is, in a sense, an extension of the production designer's art If Jilly likes the look of your house, and her budget can stand it, she might be prepared to pay 500 or more a day for you to make yourself scarce while a film crew treks itself, and its bulky baggage, in and among your valuable fixtures and fittings.

Recently, she has been working on a lavish fantasy movie called Willow, produced by George Lucas and directed by Ron Howard of Splash and Cocoon. Among the less mundane requests she had to cope with were to find a setting for a couple of fairy castles (the grounds of Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire), to muster small people (or dwarves as they used to be known) from all over Europe, and to round up 250 horses. All in a day's work In the case of A Room With A View, she had to persuade not just a single householder but an entire village to co-operate for weeks of filming. The place selected was the beautiful, National Trust, Kent village of Chidding-stone, full of half-timbered 16th and 17th century cottages. However, the folk of Chiddingstone were not exactly clamouring to be in showbiz.

"We unfortunately followed in the footsteps of a commercial," says Jilly. "It had hauled all the villagers in to take part in a church service starting at six o'clock in the morning, kept them there until eight at night and paid out a fiver each for the privilege. So when I first arrived, they were really quite hostile." In order to gain the villagers' complete confidence, she virtually set up home in the place. The post office seemed central, and from there she patiently explained to villagers what might be entailed as Chiddingstone was turned into a turn-of-the-century village. King Kong himself Burning Patience, Lowest Of The Low and Katzelmacher (tonight, C4, 9 am): Films from Chile and West Germany, one after the other.

The first made in 1983, is about Pablo Naruda and (Leicester Square Theatre, 18) is based on the simplest of premises, and it is essentially the same one that activated Scorsese's After Hours. If Herbert Ross's The Secret Of My Success is the yuppie's wet dream, Demme's latest is another upwardly mobile nightmare. The yuppie in question is Jeff Daniels, an actor who, like Cage, has more range than most. He plays the newly appointed vice-president of a Manhattan tax consultancy who strolls out of a dinner without paying, is noticed doing so by a strange young woman (Melanie Griffith) and dragged off to spend Friday afternoon in a rather more exciting way than usual. Our generally unadventurous executive is then put through his emotional paces for real.

Having got him to bed, the woman takes the whole weekend to ruin his life. The couple eventually find themselves at a high school reunion in Pennsylvania where, as man and wife for the moment, they face true nemesis in the shape, of Ray Liotta's psychopathic ex-con who claims the woman as his own. Demme's slow destruction of everything the yuppie executive holds dear his work, his marriage, his confident capacity for imagining his life to be under control is accomplished with considerable elan. Griffith's woman rep: resents a part of the executive's psyche lie thought he had buried, and it isn't an easy one to deal with. Daniels, Griffith and Liotta play with real skill, and the whole film is orchestrated by Demme in a way which makes it difficult to define any of the three leading characters.

That way, you never quite know what is going to happen next. You do, though, have an innate sympathy for each of them. John Cale and Laurie Anderson provide an excellent music score. Michel Deville's Paltoquet (Chelsea and Renoir, 15) is one of those French metaphysical thrillers, with splendid casts and hardly any sets, that I never could understand but which some people find very stylish and profound. It all takes place in what looks fairly like a cafe where Jeanne Moreau is the bar-owner, Michel Piccoli the waiter and among the customers are Fanny Ardent, Claude Pieplu and Philippe Leotard.

A murder is committed somewhere near the dockside we never see, and Inspector Jean Yanne is called in. As Dvorak's Dumky Trio and Janacek's String Quartet No 1 blissfully flow over the sound-track, everyone makes enigmatic remarks to and about each other and one feels something must be going on if only one understood what. It looks like an attempt to make an outre piece of theatre into effective cinema, but I'm sorry to say that Deville, a highly skilled filmmaker, does not bring it off like Resnais did in Melo. But then one could fathom what Melo was about. IT IS POSSIBLE to be distinctly underwhelmed by The Living Daylights (Odeons, Leicester Square and Marble Arch, PG).

But then several of its immediate successors in the interminably popular Bond series suffered the same dim critical reaction. You no longer expect more than you get, and by now are left noting only the fine-tuning of the formula. Still, there's a new 007 to talk about and he's Timothy Dalton. And the formula has changed a bit, both to accommodate him and to take suitable cognisance of the post-permissive society. Dalton hasn't the natural authority of Connery nor the facile charm of Moore, but George Lazenby he is not.

He is, in fact, foursquare on the Balham Line decent, daring, not above unorthodoxy but unlikely to ask for a fool-proof condom for the Aids era. The caveat is that a good actor has to have lines, and Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson let him invent the character again only in the barest outline. It's an able first go in the circumstances, though perhaps it could do with a bit more humour. The other main newcomer is Caroline Bliss's Miss Moneypenny, who looks as if she might prefer to be called Ms.

And, of course, Maryam d'Abo as the one and only girl friend in this episode a Czech classical cellist who opens her legs for Dvorak rather quicker-than for Bond, and looks a bit like the young Audrey Hepburn. John Glen, the director, sees to it that there are the usual number of audacious stunts, with Bond doing incredible things in a souped-up and virtually nuclear Aston Martin and later hanging from the back of a transport plane as he fights off the KGB villain (Andreas Wisniewski). All in all, this is a slightly more sensible Bond than before, allowing for glasnost the Ruskies aren't all bad and suggesting that 007 has at last grown less like a predatory little boy. Whether the fans will like it is anybody's guess, but even they will surely feel that two hours and ten minutes is a bit long in its company and that part of the Afghan sequences ought to be cut, Art Malik in a kaftan or no. Debuts as auspicious as Blood Simple produced, directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen are as often as not followed by a rather bad movie.

Critics can kill with praise as much as they can with slatings. But Raising Arizona (Cannons, Haymarket and Tottenham Court Road, Screen on the Green, 15) shows the Coens to be much more than one-film wonders. It's one of the most refreshingly different movies you can see in London at the moment. If Blood Simple was a stylish genre piece which advertised an amazing film-making grace without really getting anywhere very much, Raising Arizona is the kind of ironic comedy that means to go places. Joel, the director, says it has all the basic elements of Clean-cut: Timothy Dalton and Maryam D'Abo in The Living Daylights kind of humour that stifles pretension at birth.

The Coens' view of the penitentiary and its inmates has odd kind of parallels with the home of the furniture magnate and his broad, and the various set-pieces, in which the brothers still tend to indulge, are stitched together well enough for almost all the performances to go a little deeper than normal. You are carried along not just by the pace of it all but by Cage's intense determination to produce a rounded portrait of a man playing to his own desperate rules, and particularly by Hunter, who really looks like an actress of originality and verve a Sally Field without the sickly determination to be loved. The Coens are technically proficient film-makers but actually seem to like their characters too. So, of course, does Jonathan Demme, another film-maker with a defiantly oddball idea of his country, as anyone who saw Melvin And Howard ought to confirm. Something Wild popular contemporary movie-making babies, high explosives and Harley Davidsons.

But its real forte is to turn a few basic movie cliches neatly on their heads. The new Bonnie and Clyde pairing are Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. He robs convenience stores and she is the police booking officer who welcomes him back to gaol with monotonous regularity. They fall for each other and marry. But, since a child is not forthcoming and adoption, with his record, is a hopeless quest, the two decide to steal one.

A furniture tycoon with quintuplets seems a' good candidate. But he can count. The film, which one has to admit doesn't quite equal the sum of its parts, is so entertaining on the way that one easily forgives it. Its view of America as the land of opportunity, where there's every chance to do the dirty on the way to the clean life of family and parenthood, is deeply subversive but clothed in the Jilly Gutteridge: sweet talk Jilly, who plonked the the end of the Allende era. The second, based on a best selling book, investigates the treatment of West German immigrant workers and was made last year arid shown at the LFF.

The third is 1969 Fassbinder, and another attack on German intolerance. Special interest ONE of the most intriguing of the National Film Theatre seasons for July is Going For American Independents, a survey of small-budget American movies of the last few years, including those in the documentary field. Among the films not seen here yet are Beth B's rip-roaring Salvation, Sara Driver's Sleepwalk and the more mainstream My Little Girl and Seize The Day. The documentaries include Ann and Jeanette Petrie's Mother Theresa, In The Name Of The People (Central America), Dead End Kids (nuclear power) and Are We Winning, Mommy? (the cold war). Outside London Outside London, John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick Up, reputed to be his best film for some time and not yet released in London, shows at the Corner-house, Manchester, for a week from Tuesday next.

Other movies, also based on Elmore Leonard novels, like 3.10 To Yuma and Hombre, are also being shown. The Whitgift in Grimsby celebrates the current Grimsby Festival with a season of films by Humberside native John Hurt: Elephant Man tonight, 10 Rillington Place tomorrow. To celebrate Bristol's twinning with Bordeaux, the watershed shows a season of French films shortly selected by the Bordeaux Centre Jean Vigo. Classics like L'Atalante and Zero De Conduite rub shoulders with modern favourites like Tavernier's Month In The Country and Pialat's Loulou. Derek Malcolm eider of her two young children in the local playgroup, said: "It involves everything from getting people to change the curtains in their windows to, effectively, closing down the village for three days.

You can imagine the problems with the pub and all the traders." EFaiflfl Archie Tait on the 'yuppie punishment movies ft 6Dq Mglto- aKsMewi? Only a great deal of sweet- talk persuaded the village publican not to scupper plans to block the main road. And ing small-town American life there was the dreadful morn ing the dining double-decker But Jonathan Demme's Something Wild is just the latest in a string of new movies from Hollywood which suggest that all is not well in the home of high-achieving young leisure execs. Comedian Robin Williamson's famous crack that "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you're making too much money" may reveal only the tip of an iceberg of self-doubt currently assailing hip young film makers. Whereas a couple of years ago Hollywood's yuppie filmmakers extolled the virtues of careerism and gung-ho acquisitiveness, a subversive strain of black comedy has begun to undermine that "tough get going" campaign. FIVE YEARS AGO the wisecrack in Hollywood was that Gandhi owed his popularity there to being slim, tanned and moral; these days, the stakes have changed.

The popular denizen of Hollywood is certainly slim and tanned, but nobody aspires to morality any more. Strike "moral," and insert "young," "rich" and "powerful." The Yuppies have arrived. The success of the "Bratpack" movies like Risky Business, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo's Fire has introduced a new generation of actors, writers, directors and studio executives who thrive on designer tags, moral majority politics and conspicuous success. cuffed to a bed in seedy motel, trying to explain to his boss on the phone why he's not back from lunch yet, while a distinctly racy young lady called Lulu is sexually torturing him. It's downhill from then on suckered into stooging for a psychopath's armed robbery, pulled inexorably into a netherworld of jealousy and violence which climaxes in death.

Just before the final cataclysm, the girl turns to him and says: "Now you know how the other half lives the other half of you." In After hours, bored computer-programmer Griffin Dunne's casual attraction to bohemian Rosanna Arquette in another cheap diner leads him into a crazed underworld where the punishment for trespassing is death, as Peggy Lee glacially intones "Is That All There Is?" on the soundtrack. The seething gloop underly Since Martin Scorsese's left-field hit After Hours, a growing number of "yuppie Eunishment" pictures have it the screens. Something Wild shares the gloomy concerns of After Hours, Adam Brooks's Almost You (starring After Hours' Griffin Dunne), David Lynch's Blue Velvet, David Cronenberg's The Fly, Robert Harmon's undervalued The Hitcher, Jerry Garry Marshall's Nothing In Common, Tobe Hooper's banned Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Blake Edwards's forthcoming Blind Date. That most of these movies are comedies the Cronenberg and the Hooper are the blackest only helps underline the darkness of the views. In Something Wild successful young tax-consultant Charles Griggs slips out of a cheap diner without paying his bill.

A couple of hours later he is (voluntarily) hand envelops innocent Kyle McLachlan in Blue Velvet in the demonic form of Dennis Hopper. Smug young driver C. Thomas Howells picks up The Hitcher, Rutger Hauer, and steers straight to hell, without passing go. Moonlighting TV star Bruce Willis arranges a Blind Date with Kim Basinger, and three drinks later she's wrecking a classy restaurant while advising his boss's billionaire client's wife on where to get a divorce. Over and over, a rich, successful, self-confident young man is projected into a strange world over which he has no control, and reduced to sweating, stammering pulp.

The message is clear: the more you believe you've got life by the tail, the harder it's going to bite you. And if most of the directors of these admonitory tales have been round the track a few times, and teach their lessons from experience, the surprising thing is that the writers are young tyros, just starting out in the business. Scorsese and Demme are two of the most experienced risk-takers in Hollywood, and After Hours and Something Wild both began as film school writing projects for Joseph Minion and E. Max Frye. The Hitcher is the first script of Eric Red's to go into production.

This season's big comedy, Blind Date is Dale Launer's follow-up to his brilliant debut with Ruthless People, even if it is directed by veteran Blake Edwards, whose lawsuit-infested career has seen him virtually blacklisted by the film production establishment in the past. Hollywood is a small world of highly restrictive codes policed by executives with long memories, and it would seem that the young would-be achievers' fear of swimming in such shark-infested waters is being backed by established film-makers who have never submitted themselves to its punitive laws. Judging by the popularity of the movies, Hollywood's perception of itself is a recognisable mirror of American society. But it's as well to remember that almost all the filmmakers involved in the "yuppie punishment" cycle exist beyond mainstream Hollywood. Edwards alone is part of the old industry, and he has always been distinctly independent of it.

It remains to be seen whether the young authors of these movies will remain antagonistic to the dominant values, or whether they will simply find their way into the mainstream. slid into a ditch blocking another main thoroughfare. Somehow, Jilly located a Second World War tank at seven in the morning to help haul it out. Jilly, married to film-maker Tom Gutteridge, the director of Fire And Ice and Dash for television, never quite knows what she could be asked to find next. There was a ring of yew trees for The Bride, modern computer buildings for Spies Like Us, New York "doubles" for Bleni and, most recently, the interiors of Indian palaces.

The last were for the lavish televison mini-series Queenie. That project tested her powers of persuasion to the full. It was the last night of filming in England. The key scene of Kirk Douglas succumbing to a heart attack on a park bench in Jubilee Gardens was all that remained. Jilly had arranged for nearby bridge lights and the Gardens' illuminations to remain on for the poignant moment.

But, just as the director shouted "action," Big Ben, in the background, went black. Originally thinking she had another hour's grace, Jilly now knew she nad to do something quickly. A swift ring-around her police contacts uncovered the number of the Big Ben lights man. When she got through to him, "he was in the middle of a Christmas party. explained her problem, begged aid and, within 15 seconds, Big Ben was once more lit up.

Again, all in a day, and night's, work for a location manager. vriirimr 'T1 WQDPyALLEN lr I I Ar A TIAU ON LOCATION GfRStWINONfILM run violi GfRStWINONfILM L.mJuii!!lffjijuiuiMLj For Separate Performance Details and Credit Card Booking: 01431 Mil Thierry de Navacelle Published to coincide with the release of Radio Days. 1235 Illustrations from the film and on set "ft fiirfawiek A Jackson mm.