The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

io ARTS GUARDIAN Friday December 21 1973 I omnipresent hamburger. Actually, Mr Richard acts personably enough as a young executive on the make and Hugh Griffith is as roundly bizarre as ever as the wicked capitalist he manages to humanise. Not too bad as British musicals go. But don't send them in my direction. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, (Odeon; Marble Arch, U) is chiefly notable for Ray Harry hausen's whizz-bang special effects which include human duels with a six-armed bronze goddess, a winged griffin, a flying homunculus, a centaur and a mpving ship's figurehead.

Doing most of the fighting is John' Phillip Law, a Sinbad, who seems rather less likely to be made of flesh and blood than most of Harryhausen's creations. The whole thing, in fact, elsewhere resembles nothing much better than an extended feature of 20 years ago, with Caroline Munro as the inevitable winsome slave girl who almost but never quite manages to burst out of her bra. Finally, the Academy has got hold of the first complete version of Kurosawa's epic Seven Samurai to be shown outside Japan. Those who saw it on BBC television will not need to be reminded how it amplifies the characters of each of the samurai and makes the film into very much more than just the best Eastern Western ever made. There are new sub-titles to help the uninitiated, It lasts 200 minutes, by the way.

Equipped with an certificate from the GLC after Gala Films had refused to comply with the censor's proposed cuts, Marco Ferren's Blow-out arrives at the Curzon on Boxing Day just in time to remind customers of their indigestion. The film, which won the international critics' prize at Cannes, is no masterpiece. But it can be said with some certainty that you've never seen, heard, anything like it before. Ferreri, whose Dillinger is Dead," shortly to be revived at the ICA, stamped him as a director of total seriousness, is clearly not solely after a success de scandale, though that is what he's got on his hands. The message is grave, even if he can't forbear to smile while telling it.

Four middle-aged gourmets, one of them a master chef, decide on a suicide pact They will eat themselves to death. One of them suggests a little sexual profligacy into the bargain and invites some whores to the secluded Parisian villa where the orgy takes place. A deliciously fat schoolteacher comes along too and proves the longest lasting of the lot. For her, food and sex are natural activities, not sacrifices to the devil. The exhausted and sick prostitutes leave but she remains, watching each of her partners collapse in turn.

The distinguished cast Marcello Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, and Phillipe Noiret plough through their parts with stoic abandon in Ferren's ill-lit villa. Mastroianni ends up first covered in shit when the lavatory bursts asunder under the strain and is then found dead at the wheel of his beloved Bugatti. Piccoli farts himself into oblivion, producing a veritable gale of wind from his distended willows. Tognazzi eats a mound of pate as the fat lady masturbates him into a final, fatal orgasm. And Noiret expires over two enormous milk puddings in the shape of his lady-friend's breasts.

What a way to go The central idea of the film, that man is still beset by his basest appetites, runs directly counter to the currently fashionable view that if he gave way to some of them more often he would on the whole be a healthier chap. It is thus a film that will grab or grieve you according to temperament and. let's admit it. shall merely give a little of mine away by saying that it is often pretty funny, sometimes horrendous but not what I'd call truly shocking until someone encourages one of the gorgers with the line Imagine you're a little bov in Bombay." And that was clearly the emotion Ferreri intended me to feel. Otherwise, the film is much too long for its content and suffers somewhat from the absence of the one man who could have managed it brilliantly Luis Bunuel.

TWITCHING as we are at the approach of Armageddon, it's comforting to report at least one movie opening over Christmas that's entertaining enough to send us giggling to our corporate doom. George Roy Hill's The Sting (Empire, Boxing Day) is a beautifully ironic thriller with Paul Newman and Robert Redford that echoes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid without succumbing to its innate pretensions. The film is about the setting up of an elaborate con-trick, masked as a betting coup, which will if successful divest a prominent New York gangster of half a million dollars of ill-gotten loot. He has to be led gently by the nose into the trap with a full knowledge of his psychological make-up and a daring that taxes to the hilt the ingenuity of the two men who plan the operation. One of them (Newman) is a big-time conman used to such stings, and occasionally pricked by them.

The other (Redford) is a greenhorn bee learning the game from a master. Both are totally dependent on one another and working in a hinterland between crooks and police where one false move will betray them utterly. Set in the Chicago of the thirties and photographed with considerable panache by Robert Surtees. Hill's film succeeds best not as a rather self conscious period piece decorated by glamorous actors (is all that book-leafing and chapter titling really necessary?) but as a stunning piece of narration which gets tighter and tighter as it progresses. The complicated plot is clearly laid out before us bit bv bit.

and the director ultimately man-asc the feat of thoroughly conning us too. It could perhaps be argued that you can't go wrong with a movie that has Newman. Redford, and Shaw working in top form. But they can't do that without assistance and, good as they are. it's very much a director's film, full of dramatic devices that could fall apart in other hands.

Watch the poker game in which Newman first fleeces Shaw and you'll see a control as purposeful as in the best sections of "The Hustler." And the eventual denouement, which I won't even hint at. is a masterpiece of cinematic cunning. The rotogravure look of the colour photography, the use of Scott Joplin piano rolls and first-class art direction from Henry Bumstead add to the pleasure of the piece. Maybe it's a parable about human greed but its real worth, as with Charley Varrick," is that it so clearly demonstrates the efficacy of the old saw the best message you can have is generally contained within the proper use of the medium itself. Joseph Strick's Janice (Bloomsbury, X) is arguably his best since "The Savage Eye." It is also his first from a non-literary source since then, if you discount the short My Lai Veterans." which may or may not have something to do with it.

It's culled instead from the director's own early experience as a long-distance lorry-driver and you can easily feel that it's been lying in his guts for some time. Janice is a tough but waif-like whore, picked up by a couple of drivers to pass the time on the road, who proves the strongest of the three from a position of intense weakness. Her method is simple. She has to get them to rely on her more than she on them. Accordingly, she smashes the lorry's refrigeration unit, thus forcing them to dump their load of frozen meat in Pittsburgh Through a contact of hers, they take on stolen goods instead.

But the story ends tragically when a quarrel forces her to go one step too far. If she ever had a real chance, we don't see it. The film is notable for two things its forlorn image of the girl and its depressed view of America. There is an extraordinary performance from Regina Baff who gives Janice an intensity that brings her disgust at her condition and her brave attempts at survival in spite of it into the sharpest Paul Newman and (top right) Robert Redford in The Below right Marcello Mastroianni Blow Out Ms aim fiflll wfiimdl tllmatf lfeIlnws Derek Malcolm reviews the week's new films new dimension in the circumstances. It becomes a story of the most painful bravery, yet it filled me.

the week after Magnum Force and Gordon's War," with manic foreboding. Pusser, brought over for the occasion, does not consider his attitude to have been extreme What's right is right. You've got to draw the He did what he had to do, considering the tion he faced, the only way he knew how. But God save us from ever becoming a society so twisted that it takes a man like him to unravel the knots. To move, albeit gingerly, from "Walking Tall" to the new Cliff Richard vehicle Take Me High (ABC Shaftesbury Avenue and selected release, U) is like plunging from a particularly sticky frying-pan into a large basinful of pink blancmange.

Directed by David Askey as if he has seen nothing but television commercials, the film is set in Birmingham and appears to be an extended advertisement for (a) a series of interchangeable Tony Cole songs and (b) the Brunfburger, a local version of the Robert Merle novel, the story concerns a scientist ho teaches a dolphin called Alpha to speak, only to find that the foundation financing him is full of Fascists determined to harness the newly discovered mammal intelligence to their plot to blow up the President's vacht. I wouldn't tell that much of the storv were it not that the clues are so elliptical that you might not get it for yourself. Otherwise, one could recommend the film as a treat for children which adults could suffer reasonably gladly as well. The dolphins on display are endearing. George C.

Scott lends a monolithic authority to the main role and the moral of the piece man should stop dabbling with animals because he'll only infect them with his own corruption is just pertinent enough to set one thinking. The film, if you'll forgive the allusion, adds the rather easy rider that dolphins are a mixture of instinct and energy whom man should copy. But it didn't impress me, since the entire footage sets out to show how marvellous it is that Mr Scott has made them into something else. TIME AND THE CON WAYS in Manchester THE HALLE in Manchester by Gerald Larner In all, it's not a bad entertainment, made with a certain elegance that transcends "Flipper." But its muffed plot lines aren't made any clearer by the fact that the dolphins are somewhat easier to understand than some of the humans on display and it looks as if Nichols and Henry, having flexed their muscles on the project, decided not to put much sweat behind it. Walking Tall (ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue, X) is an astonishing movie, not because of the way it's made but because it is substantially true.

It's the story of Sheriff Buford Pusser who cleared McNairy County, Tennessee, of crooks by taking the law into his own rather large hands. This cost him the murder of his wife, 200 stitches all over his body and a face still distorted in spite of 15 plastic surgerv operations. According both to the film, in which he is portrayed by the giant Joe Don Baker, and to history, the wounds he inflicted on the other side were worse. Phil Karlson's fairly obvious action melodrama takes on an uncomfortable business and property. With it, we cannot help understanding the precise causes.

Braham Murray directs the Theatre 69 company at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, with close concentration on Priestley's purpose. Possibly too close in the first act, which emerges as too awfullv jolly to convince a game of family charades in terribly articulate and breathlessly excited voices that is bumped clumsily into some social relevance by such phrases as, What the miners want is nationalisation But, in the second act. the cast mature unbelievingly. Rachel Herbert's gauche, peremptory enthusiasm as Madge has stiffened into grasoing, self-righteousness. Marion Lines dreamv resolution as Kay has sobered into big-hearted but defeated acceptance.

And Dilys Hamlett's frail charm as Mrs Conway has melted into stubborn self-indulgence. So astoundingly do the cast mature that the mood and depth of Priestley's view are firmly clinched. Vie To hold in one's mind several conflicting propositions is the sign of a first-rate intellect and playwright; which, on the evidence of this and Griffiths undoubtedly is. But he does not simply present us with disembodied ideas he also shows us the intimate relation between the private and public man. Joe Shawcross, the radical, telly-man, has a neurotic self-hatred and hinted impotence that explains his political ineffectualness.

Tagg. however, (in Laurence Olivier's rock-like performance) is a man of iron self-discipline who regards his own impending death merely as a waste for the cause. 1 I hope to write further of this complex, gritty, intellectually fascinating play. But I must extol Olivier, phrasing his long speech like a piece of music with slow and fast movements and clarifying the argument with every gesture of his great butcher-sized hands; Frank Finlay as the grizzled mutinous toper Ronald Pickup as the reedily helpless host and John Shrapnel as his bull-necked, under-educated brother who simply wants privacy and independence. The minor role are very thinly written but John Dexter has orchestrated the arguments superbly and reminds us, through slides and film of France in '68, that while Britons endlessly talk about social uprising, other countries actually experience it of focus.

She is forced, in fact, into the almost legendary r61e of the woman who destroys after making contact because that is what society seems to decree. It's merely bitch eat dog. There is also a real feeling for the hideous sub-culture the film portrays, evidenced not only by the attitudes of the semi-literate protagonists, charging after what remains of their own version of the get-rich-quick and devil-take-the-hindmost society, but the harshly evocative camerawork of Den Lenzer who photographs the grindingly noisy juggernauts passing through the urban landscape of central America with the eye of a disillusioned poet. I have seldom seen a country look so beautiful, or so ugly. Stanley Myers, very fine score adds to the merciless sense of dislocation.

There's no way, Strick seems to say, for any of these people to achieve redemption. If it's a mihilistic film, that's just the way it is. Direction by Mike Nichols and screenplay by Buck Henry clearly ought to presuppose rather more than we get in The Day of the Dolphin (Leicester Square Theatre, A). Taken from the British television, they had new and startling allegations by former employees that the company, Purle (since acquired by the Redland Group), had paid a local government official 10 a week for them which tips to dump on. and that the' company, in spite of grand PR claims, did not really know how to handle the substances it was increasingly being hired to deal with.

This was new and so was the interview with Mr Tony Morgan, the man who made Purle, denying it. But what was the outcome I felt I was being invited to do more than say We must be ever vigilant," but could not on the conflicting evidence do it. Yet that in the end was all the programme said. Perhaps it needed more time. Certainly it needed some sense-of grappling more closely with the argument if what we saw were the highlights, the most salient points of Peter Williams's interviews were the protagonists, then they got a pretty easy ride.

And, after all. we were not being offered revelations of infringements since that original row, but a deeper probe into it. I had a sense of statements being put on record, against some future development, but published ahead of time. That doesn't much advance the cause of investigative journalism. But the willingness of the parties to the dispute to come before the cameras and speak, on the other hand, might by example be a small blow for press freedom, from a different but equally important angle.

with plenty of fresh theatrical ideas. And ho has an equally creative production team Ian Adleys sets and costumes are thoughtfully pretty David St John's lighting is brilliantly sympathetic and the movement choreographed by Christine Keogh, swings along. And Peter Graham has the right bouncy sort of personality for Kipps. But and there had to be a but you just can't do a musical on this scale with four musicians the preponderance of piano makes it sound like a Monday morning read-through. You can't dispense with amplification if your male lead tackled his most dynamic solos as if he were trying to avoid disturbing anybody.

And you can't do romtiddlyompom musicals if your company doesn't project beyond the second row. of the stalls. THIS WEEK on television by Peter Fiddick THE year of the Watergate affair, one of the questions the British media have faced is whether we should emulate or at any rate learn from our American counterparts. The capacity of the American press for exposing private dealings to public knowledge is something we cannot know because of the law, but neither have we always sought to know it, because of tradition. Only this week, with that amazing tale of the Washington lawyer playing the Nixon tapes at a cocktail party, we have seen the extreme of openness that must seem repellent.

But we have our scandals, we must have others unknown, and we are bound to ask whether we should not be more brutal than we are in discussing them. No one has come up with any definite answer, but a new balance is, certainly, being forged. Last night, "This Week (Thames) was in this sense the most American programme I recall seeing on British television, for its reporting of charges made by individuals against a public company, together with blank denials by the head of the company, and leaving us to make what we could of it. The principle of the programme was admirable. Eighteen months ago, This Week played its part in the national row about the dumping of toxic chem-ical waste on council tips in the Midlands and North.

It is an abiding weakness of journalism that a story once done is forgotten; "This Week" went back. With a bluntness astonishing for by Merete Bates "TIME AND THE CONWAYS has been forgotten in the wings for long enough to emphasise freshly that it embodies not only J. B. Priestley's shrewd, penetrating and, when necessary, hard observation of character and class, but also a dramatic idea as original as it is successful. Priestly uses time much like a telescope.

Opens on the family Conway through a bright, blurred, and generalised lens. Focuses down relentlessly to the same people, twentv years" later. Then, in the last act, uses this lesson of experience to clarify and recognise the qualities of the first vision. For example, Mrs Conwav could be Interpreted as merely affectionately critical when she remarks how untidy and shiny-nosed is her daughter, Madge. Yet, with experience, it is clear that she is really maliciously destructive, without Priest-lev's dramatic idea or method, the play would simplv be a study of the decline in fortune of a proud, philandering, middle-class family with money in THE PARTY at the Old by Michael Billington IT IS A revolutionary duty to tell the truth," said Antonio Gramsci.

And the first thing to be said about Trevor Griffiths's superb dialectical drama. The Party at the Old Vic, is that it does precisely that. Set in a radical tellv-producer's swish SW 7 home during the uprising in Paris in May, 1968. it confronts the revolution in our own society with a bleak, painful, pessimistic honesty and it reflects the division in English society between the liberal intellectuals and the working-classes more accurately than any play I can recall. In technique ''The Party" is Shavian.

The first half contains two speeches as long as the Inquisitor summing-up in "Saint Joan, and, like Shaw, Mr Griffiths delights in setting up a seemingly, impregnable argument only to have the next speaker blast it to simtereens. Thus a group of Left-wing (foregather in South Ken under-the klieg lighte to discuss revolution and a Gower Street writer and lecturer lengthily argues that the Marxist idea of a proletarian dictatorship has been overtaken by history and that it is now one's functions to endorse any source of militant unrest from blacks, students, or where- eVJohn Tagg, a granite-hard Glaswegian Trotskyite, counters with a withering attack on the bourgeois intellectuals who will never sacrifice their own prestige and power in a common cause. Much the same could be said of Shostakovich's First Symphony not ideally tidy in the actual playing but more authentically Shostakovich himself, as distinct from those who are said to have influenced him. than in most performances. The well coloured anticipation of the Fifth Symphony in the middle of the last movement was illuminating, and it was appropriate ithat Jack Gledhill, who had just been awarded his 20-year-service medal, could demonstrate his skill in the even more remarkable foreshadowing of the Fifteenth Symphony in the timpani solo not much later.

The orchestral playing was rather better in the Shostakovich than in Ravel's Piano Concerto in which is a tricky work, for the orchestra, particularly for wind soloists in the outer movements. However, Mr Loughran and the Halle" provided an accompaniment adequate to a solo 'performance which stole most of the attention anyway. It was given by Jean-Philippe Collard, a young French pianist deputising for John Ogdon, superbly equipped in technique, with the clear brilliance this work needs, and stylistically so sensitive as to achieve just the right balance between sentiment and irony. Manchester Unfortunately the real substance of the concert, the Brahms Horn Trio, seemed to suffer from the very dilute concert atmosphere. Much of the edge disappeared from the vivacious finale and scherzo, and the A flat minor trio provoked even more tentative horn playing than usual.

One very, positive moment, however, was the dignified melancholy of the adagio. THE WORLD OF RUGS The first in a series of Exhibitions of Antique Rugs will be shown at 12 Bruton Street, London W1X 7AH. Telephone 01-499 56251830. December 12Uv to January llth. Closed Christmas to the New Year.

A fully illustrated Catalogue is available on request for 90p, including postage 'and packing. Hugh Moss Ltd. IT WAS a brave man who got up at the Halle Concerts Society's annual general meeting the other day and complained that the orchestra plays better for gust conductors than for James Loughran. He could be right, in a way, but it is not as simple as that it depends wlio the guest conductor is, in the first place, and then it depends on whether he is performing one of his specialities, as he usually is. So long as Arvid Yansons, for example, sticks to Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, as he usually does, the Halle plays well for him.

So far this season we have had particularly good performances conducted by Lawrence Foster, Meredith Davies. John Pritchard, and Mr Loughran too. The point about a resident conductor is that he cannot afford to restrict himself to his specialities. One of Mr Loughran's qualities is that he communicates the essential spirit of most of the music he presents, even if the performance is imperfectly finished. The performance of Beethoven's Second Symphony in the Free Trade Hall last night was substandard, most obviously in the slow introduction to the first movement.

But it was a thoroughly likeable interpretation with a marvellously characteristic outburst of joy at the end of that same first movement. PRO ARTE ENSEMBLE in by Helen Tetlow LAST NIGHT'S concert at, the Royal Northern College of Music was an unfortunate demonstration of bad concert planning tactics. Horn trios have never had a good marketable reputation the main reason being that apart from the Brahms Horn Trio, there has been very little written for this medium worth selling. Instead of fighting this initial handicap, the Northern Pro Arte Ensemble seemed to resign themselves to financial disaster. The first item of padding Lennox Berkeley's Horn Trio a fairly anonymous musical ramble.

Apart from the first movement, where acoustical hazards were not always successfully negotiated, the Ensemble did at least extract a number of sonorous pleasantries from this characterless work-Unearthed from even more out-of-the-way musical archives were the Three Contes for Piano by Nicholas Medtner and Martinu's "Five Madrigal Stanzas for Violin and Piano." As twentieth-century musical anachronisms, both pieces were shown to have a discreet, if somewhat retarded sense of originality. HALF A SIXPENCE in Harrogate by Robin Thornber BRIAN HOWARD should given a prize for trying. And I mean that us kindly and gently a it oan be meant. As artistic director of Harrogate Theatre he tries so often to do so much more than his resources will allow. This is the first professional production of Half a Sixpence 1 since Tommv Steele and that alone might have made him think twice.

To make the most, to make anything at all of a big. brassy musical based on H. G. Wells's Kipps needs a couple of noughts on the budget. Whatever that was.

Mr Howard is not only what is known as a thorough-going pro who knows all the moves for the big; production numbers. He's also an imaginative and inventive director.