The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 13

MOVIE GUARDIAN Thursday October 22 1987 13 BRIEFING The beast and the beauty: Jacfc Nicholson, letting himself go in The Witches of Eastwick Madonna, shooting from the lip in Who's That Girl? "a passable imitation of the young Mae West." a young man trying to be a supercop and then giving everyone away to the authorities. Both films caused great controversy in Russia. Cujo (Saturday, BBC-1 11 50 Derek Malcolm, on the week's new releases, finds Jack Nicholson in an oddly funny mood again tf film Best films Tin Men (Warner West End): Barry Levinson's beautifully written and very well performed successor to Diner, with Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito as Sixties Baltimore conmen on the make. Full Metal Jacket (Warner West End, Stanley Kubrick's powerful Vietnam parable, made in England but set in Texas bootcamp and Vietnam war zone. The Untouchables (Empire, Brian De Palma's most successful film for years, with Kevin Costner as unsullied cop facing Robert De Niro's Capone in Thirties Chicago.

Beyond Therapy (Cannon, Haymarket, Robert Altman with another. Play For Today about the American psyche. Excellent performances from Goldblum, Hagerty, Jackson and Conti. River's Edge (Curzon West End): Tim Hunter's tale of teenage mayhem in small Californian town. One of the most powerful movies from America this year.

What Happened To Kerouac? (ICA Cinema): Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams' fine examination of the life and work of the father of the Beat Generation, with the help of relatives and distinguished friends. The Love Child (Metro etc): Observant and pleasurable South London Comedy about life in Thatcher's wasteland, with Peter Capaldi and Sheila Hancock. Director: Robert Smith. Private Investigations (Cannon, Oxford Street, etc): British director Nigel Dick's LA thriller, distinguished bv excellent location work and a good music track. Angel Heart (Leicester Square Threate): Alan Park orchestrates diabolic thriller.

starring De Niro and Mickey Rourke plus Lisa Bonet and Charlotte Rampling. Very well made. Best on TV Streetwise (tonight, C4, 10.30 pm): British director Martin Bell's extraordinary documentary on Seattle's runaway kids. Oscar nominated. A Matter Of Dignity (tonight.

C4. 12.25 am): 1957 Cacoyannis melodrama, shot by British cameraman Walter Lassallv. with Ellie Lambetti and vivid Athens background. The Swimmer and Plumbum (Saturday, BBC-2, from 9.45 pm): Two Soviet glasnost films, the first censored until now and about a Georgian family living through the Stalin era; the second a newer film about pm): Lewis Teague's 1983 rabid dog norror tuck, taken From Stephen King. TV version.

Objective Burma! (Sunday, C4, 2 30 pm): Raoul Walsh and Errol Flynn twist history remorselessly in 1945 war story. But it's still a good, tough film. The Winslow Boy (Sunday, C4, 1025 pm): 1948 Anthony Asquith adaptation of Rattigan piay, witn uonai, Harawicke. Leighton and Jack Watling as the boy. Smooth Talk (Monday, BBC-2, 9 pm): Joyce Copra's excellent debut film about teenager (Laura Dern) seduced into adulthood by Treat Williams's menacing stranger.

Glenda Jackson: Beyond Therapy Special interest THE THAI season at the National Film Theatre ends tomorrow with an outstanding film, The Story Of Nampoo, about a young heroin addict. But the Gay Lives programme continues with short films by Curt McDowell and Barbara Hammer on Monday. Hammer, who once shunned conventional narrative as "the missionary position of lesbian film-making," will be there to explain. The Jazz film programme continues tomorrow with Ellington. Rollins and Powell tributes, and on Sunday there's a showing for Shirley Clarke's jazz-orientated The Connection.

The Birmingham Film and Television Festival continues to the end of the month in various venues there. Today, before its London opening, there are two performances of Angelopoulis's The Beekeeper, which won Marcello Mastroianni the Best Actor prize at Venice last year. Derek Malcolm THETAVIANI BROTHERS' TAKE John Updike, shake him thoroughly, add George Miller, the Australian progenitor of Mad Max, and top up with a large dose of Jack Nicholson. Then sprinkle on essence of Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, and you have The Witches Of Eastwick Shaftesbury Avenue, Screen on the Green, etc, 18). It's a heady brew but not really very convincing.

Updike translated by Hollywood, in fact. The trouble is that George Miller coarsens Updike's book, or at any rate has chosen to change it, and present us not with a story of suburban womanhood learning to outdo the Devil, but a rip-roaring farce that turns into sci-fi horror. You can't believe a word of it, and the novel's twisted smile becomes a baleful roar that's far less credible. What is more. Miller treats Nicholson much the same as one of his special effects, allowing him full rein for the kind of performance that makes his overcooked portrait in The Shining look underdone.

Make no mistake, it is very funny, and pretty shrewd at times too, but it is a risk letting Jack play Satan and all hell is let loose as a consequence. Hard as Cher. Sarandon and Pfeiffer try, they really can't compete. Or they are not allowed to. The story, if you remember, concerns three women from Eastwick, New England, who discover they can summon up odd disturbances in nature and finally the Devil himself.

He arrives in the shape of the rich and eccentric, Daryl Van Horne. who seduces each in turn before they seek revenge. late twenties to the early fifties, and dramatised sequences featuring Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh and others from the Jarman rep. All this lasts just under 90 minutes and reminds one often of those experimental films of the late sixties and early seventies they used to show at places like the New Cinema Club only those films were shorts rather than full length features and the mood then was ready for everything. Now seems a much less likely time for this kind of passionate but fractured and impressionist expression.

What is more disappointing is the fact that almost all the images and ideas seem to come, not from some new, fresh anger but from the same imagination that gave us Jubilee and Angelic Conversations. It is certainly not tired, but it isn't any longer revelatory. The film's chief virtue lies, surprisingly enough, in its technical proficience rather than its cumulative power. You get the feeling that it is much more a personal than a political film. Eat The Rich is described as a gourmet epic and I find it indigestible.

It's one truly original idea is a restaurant for the smart set at which they are invited to eat each other. The rest of England, the film suggests, has an equal propensity for cannibalism. Alexl a black waiter of indefinable sex (Lanah Pellay) gets fired from the exclusive Bastards and mixed up in a KGB attempt to destabilise a right-wing government by. bringing down Nosher Powell's no-non A demonic rage results, before the hopefully liberated women finally come to terms with their tormentor. The book is a metaphor of sorts, working on several different levels, which the film broadens, out and in the end flattens, largely because the Devil has the best tunes.

He can call up Industrial Light and Magic. This is perhaps why Cher is less striking than usual, and neither Sarandon nor Pfeiffer totally convince, ably as Sarandon in particular tries. But at least the film entertains, going for its effects with a gusto born of conviction. If it ultimately doesn't work, no one need doubt either its energy or its drive. Subtlety, though, is not its strong point.

Both Derek Jarman's The Last Of England (Prince Charles, 18) and Peter Richardson's Eat The Rich (Cannons, Haymarket and Oxford St etc, 18) purport to be some kind of commentary on Thatcher's England, the former almost terminally depressed and the latter manically aware that we deserve what we are getting. But there the similarity ends. Jarman's film was shot for very little money in a few days and transferred from 8mm to 36mm to stunning visual effect. There is no script and virtually no story so that Jarman can truly say that it is "nearer to poetry than prose." There are four discernible elements a central section shot in the director's own flat, documentary-style footage of a London and Liverpool in forlorn decline, the Jarman family's home movies from the sense Home Secretary, and eventually in a contemporary version of the Peasants' Revolt. That's the barest outline of a plot which presents us with an England in which heroes are at a premium and shits multiply like tadpoles.

The Comic Strip are among them, but the cast also includes a good many familiar faces playing cameo roles, including Fiona Richmond. Not one of them seems likeable. The humour varies from broad to broad, rarely reaching the heights of the restaurant sequence Bastards is renamed Eat The Rich for the occasion. And you frequently get the feeling that Richardson's dyspeptic portrait of the times is precisely as negative as what, it illustrates. "The world doesn't exist in this film," says the blurb.

"It's just the goodies and baddies and even the goodies are Come on, Mr Richardson, have a heart. This is a much better made movie than The Supergrass, but it badly lacks the saving grace of human sympathy, and so becomes exactly what it attacks. Alan Rudolph's Made In Heaven (Renoir and Chelsea, PG) has Timothy Hutton as a young man who dies, goes to heaven, falls in love with Kelly McGillis's celestial spirit and, when she is sent back to Earth, pleads to go back there too. The boss gives him thirty years to find her, or they will never meet again. The film, cut and re-edited by its producers, was sent to the Venice Festival with a rather reluctant Rudolph in tow.

He a worse vehicle for her than Shanghai Surprise. There she played an unconvincing Salvation Army lass. Now she is a jailbird, fresh from the slammer and intent on breaking up the upwardly mobile world of Griffin Dunne's yuppie businessman. The film, made by James Foley, who perpetrated Reckless and At Close Range, purports to be a comedy, and you do feel that Madonna is at times accomplishing a passable imitation of the young Mae West. But the humour so frequently curdles through over-emphasis that one leaves the cinema wondering how major stars can possibly be so ill-advised as to take on this sort of script.

It isn't all bad, but most of it is. Among the supporting cast are a IGOlbs cougar. Sir John Mills and a huge assemblage of designer tat which Ms Madonna wears with what looks like increasing discomfort. didn't exactly reject it but felt the producers' version made the parable more sentimental than it might have been. He was right.

The story Rudolph originally shot had the lovelorn Hutton, having been killed trying to hook a drowning woman out of a submerging car, finding McGillis in the last reel and being done in by another accident. As it is now, there's a thoroughly sloppy ending to a tale that is otherwise well acted and well-imagined for most of the way. Nothing as original as Choose Me or Trouble in Mind perhaps, but full of Rudolph's familiar quirky humour and sense of irony. Maureen Stapleton, Ann Wedgeworth and Don Murray also adorn the cast. Since Desperately Seeking Susan, poor Madonna hasn't had much luck with her scripts.

And, if anything, Who's That Girl? (Warner West End, 15) is Jeremy GOOD MORNING, Star.mq VINCENT OESIREEBECKER Irons talks about aofeBi? sMe ft Nicholas de Jongh on loathing, love and urgency in the rebellious life of Derek Jarman 66 They don't make many films like that any more. But they still show them at the National Film Theatre. Styles of story telling, acting and film making, here and abroad, change. It's sometimes hard to keep up with what is going on today, let alone remember what was made yesterday. But, fortunately, I know a cinema (well, two actually) that shows the best world movies of the past, present and what is going to happen in the future in the centre of London.

The National Film Theatre shows over 1,700 different films a year as well as television programmes from across the world. LOfl SPANO 10AQUIM DE ALMEIDA GRETASCACCHI OMEROANTONUTTI CHARLES DANCE. the NFT Jeremy Irons SOUTH BANK CENTRE AT WATERLOO 031 NATIONAL FILM THEATRE If, like me, you enjoy watching the best films, from yesterday or today, I would urge you to become "I SUPPOSE." says Derek Jarman and the tentative verb emerges strangely from the lips of a man who has been hot with his own certainties these past 15 years "there's a small streak of anarchy in me. But then my mother always said, 'Break the rules, Derek'." And Derek did what he was told. His remarkable mother, who emerges posthumously in The Last Of England, his latest revelatory book of diaries and reminiscences, inspired him with the spirit for rebellion.

"Thank heavens our children are not normal. They are so much more interesting than their friends," Jarman recollects her saying in childhood to his authoritarian father. "A DFC with a kamikaze mentality, who boxed and sailed for the RAF," is Jarman's description in the book of his loathed and ultimately mad paterfamilias. "Yes," he says predictably, "he created my aversion to all authority, to the extreme patriotism with which he fought the war, which bounced back and destroyed our tranquillity." Looking back Jarman sees this dead figure, from whom his mother, dying slowly of cancer for 18 years, proved unable to escape, as the poisoner of his family's life. No wonder that the Jarman streak of anarchy is still alive and well, and that young Master Outrage of the 1970s has come fierce and unappeased into middle age.

ER AND VIOLESCE liti.ni HONEST. Fpoh ,1 a member. QQ Jarman: versatile and He says that filming The Last of England on Super 8, and then transferring it through video to 35mm was the cheap and only way it could be financed. Jarman is not a film maker to whom film financiers come running, if at all. "I'm the first in Britain to make a feature film this way." Jarman wants us to understand that he still views himself as engaged in a financial struggle to make films.

He sees himself battling against the entrenched odds of the status quo, and the "airless atmosphere" of Mrs Thatcher's Britannia a country which he He writes vividly of the waves of panic and the "tangle of fear" which have coloured his life and imbued him with a wish to travel swiftly, to ensure that there is no waste of time. In the past year he has gone back. to painting the untrivial pursuit of his years at the Slade. His Paintings of A Year come up on view at Richard Salmon Ltd from October 30. Salmon, a private dealer who is joint owner of the new Karsten Schubert gallery, sees them as complementary to Jarman's new film.

"He's an extremely gifted painter. And he did these paintings in the course of a year when he needed to express a number of things very quickly. They're powerful, witty social documents." Jarman explains how his return to painting acted as a form of therapeutic release after the impact of his HIV-positive status had seeped in. And the paintings "angry but positive responses to despair" in Salmon's words bear testimony to a thoroughly disturbed twelve months. In one painting three condoms and two wedding rings are bonded to a picture.

In another the Prime Minister is seen partaking of a vampiric meal. It will not be difficult to relate these lurid, extreme depictions to the violent terminations of The Last Of England. "I see it as an allegory," Jarman says, and then euphorically "It's a wonderful to have made a film like this. Everything I think is in it." Since he has, for all the good opinions of critics, been so much under attack it is not surprising that he still seems to lack a listening, responsive voice his instinct is to ignore or not even to hear well-meaning criticism as if it had to be by its very nature hostile. He is I believe, the most visionary and versatile film maker of his generation, with the rarest and most exciting of imaginations.

But to fulfil all the promise perhaps he now also needs to listen to voices other than his own. Paintings From A Year by Derek Jarman, at Richard Salmon Ltd, Studio 3, 59 South Edwardes Square, London W8, October 30-November 13, 10 am until 6 pm, Monday-Saturday. The Last of England by Derek Jarman is to be published by Constable on November 11 at 10.95. I Only members of the British Film Institute can buy tickets for any one of the over 1,700 different films (each with programme notes) shown at the NFT, with up to 3 guests. There are two main forms of membership.

Full Members get sent the fully illustrated NFT monthly programme booklet in time to advance book their choice of films and a copy of 'Sight Sound', the world's foremost film quarterly. Associate Members will be sent the NFT booklet with the same booking privileges. Every member who joins now will be sent a voucher (worth 5.90) for two free tickets for any performance at the NFT (subject to availability). visionary. Picture: Frank Martin pictures in terminal decay.

Jarman's own mood has darkened. It is a matter of politics and of great personal pressure, faced with courage and grace. For Jarman who feels wrongly in my estimation, that he was excluded from the film financiers' hand-outs in the early 1980s, "on grounds of my sexuality" reveals in his new book that he has been diagnosed as HIV positive. This does not mean that he will contract Aids in the future, but it does show that he has been exposed to the virus. And this fact must and does frame his life with question marks.

l'Klll)l tl) hi JAMESMACKAV tMHX)N BOVI) VBSBBI Joining couldn't be easier. Just send off the completed coupon below. DEREK JARMAN'S Membership Dept. 65, Film Institute, Dean Street, London DAZZLINGLY LOVELY" Name: Address: Please enrol me for: FULL MEMBERSHIP, including ASSOCIATE MEMBERSHIP, There are two ways to pay: 1. I enclose my cheque for at A A A I Allow 28 days I POLITICS.

AND GRATUITOUS SEX Kuim.lt mi I mm HEART-RENDING AND NK.H.TERHY MH NI) DESIGN hi SIMON TI KNm 1 if ilTKEH To: 15.00 p.a. INSTITUTE, membership hi 1 mr British 81, 11711 lor delivery A i I am over lb. i. 1 authorise the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE to charge my ACCESSVISA account with the subscription of Postcode. free copies of quarterly "Sight Sound" 9.70 p.a.

made payable to the BRITISH FILM material sent toyou that concprns your chosen Date at Name of cardholder Credit Card ACCESSVISA No. Please tick here if you only want category Signature m.TIUM MMNTON. HUSH FR tEKiM SMtlNC..