The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 9

ARTS GUARDIAN Tuesday December -11 1979 TRIBUTE 3' CINEMA Eieces is superb, mixing rackish comedy and bideous farce with furious 'energy. Kilgore, in' fact, becomes a monstrous symbol of misapplied American energy, "his villager victims the mute representatives' of everything that energy first. destroys and then patches up with. Band-aid. The desperate vision of the final American outpost- in Vietnam runs into the pure fantasy ot Kurtz's Cambodian fastness an extended passage that sticks- closest to Conrad and contains most of the other "literary luggage Richard- Rous spoke of from Cannes.

Here Dennis Hopper's frenetic, nervy performance is not a help, and Brando's monotone playing almost grinds the narrative to a halt. Yet the transcription is not without honour. Willard's errand boy," facing horror piled upon horror, now becomes "the caretaker of Kurtz's memory," an effective enough symbol of the "darkness lurking deep within enlightened man." In making the film this way, Coppola may well have become confused in his assumptions about Vietnam as the outward manifestation of a sickness that has much deeper roots. Perhaps he carries the wrong luggage. But the surface brilliance of his film cannot be dismissed merely as pyrotechnics, with the best helicopter shots in the business.

Not, at any rate, if you believe Conrad's dictum that the meaning of his stories can be perceived hazily on the surface and not in the kernel. This, in my opinion, is exactly how film tends to operate. Not all film, but certainly Apocalypse Now. Note: The film, which opens on December 19. can be seen in 70 mm and under optimum sound conditions at the ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue.

This version suggests Willard's eventual escape from Kurtz compound and has no credits. The 35 mm version, available for cinemas without 70 mm facilities, has a final credit sequence in which Kurtz's compound appears to be destroyed by an air strike Willard's escape is left open to doubt. THE SEAL penalty for making super-colossal and controversial blockbusters like Apocalypse Now (ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue, 'X); apart from the well-adver-tised and painful wabble it gave Francis Ford Coppola's physical and mental equili-brium, is the hype that, attends its opening. Without it, it is apparently impossible' to get youi money back. With It, how can you get your massive audience to see straight The fog of publicity, expectation, praise and censure is as difficult for critics to penetrate as for the ordinary film-goer.

But I do know that I am basically on this extraordinary movie's side. While it seems to me to be ultimately broken-backed both as a "statement about Vietnam and a Conradian argument about moral choice and the human soul, Coppola's grandiose epic, viewed purely as film, remains obstinately Intact. On a gut level at least, it is something like a masterpiece. The reason for practically all the controversy is that the film starts out as one thing, and ends another. For a hundred minutes or so, it is about Vietnam with Michael Herr, of Despatches writing and speaking the voice-over.

The rest is Conrad's Heart of Darkness in another setting, seasoned with T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, Jesse Weston's From Ritual to Romance and even Sir Fraser's The Golden Bough and traversed with enough accuracy to suggest that, if you don't like the Conrad, you won't like the Brando part of the film. Any progress from the physical to the metaphysical, unless totally seamless which this is not, means an uncomfortable change of gear for the watcher. Would the great mass of film-goers, for instance, like Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God 7 The answer is probably not; but that is virtually what in the end they are treated to.

Klinski's mad conquistador is closely paralleled by Brando's Kurtz. But at least Herzog's manic odyssey was all of a piece. Some of Coppola's mid-sec- Brackish comedy, hideous farce the Gis prepare or surfing under fire Coppola's epic oE Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, opens in London next week. Derek Malcolm reports The heart of darkness, lit up by napalm Shining light Michael McNay on the death of the painter Sonia Delaunay GUILlIaUME ApoJlinaire, the poet of the twentieth century revolution in painting, reviewed the Salon des Independents of 1913 and bestowed on Robert Delaunay the accolade for showing the most modern painting in an assembly dedicated to modernism. This particular picture, Apollinaire wrote, not only vibrates with the contrast of complementary colours discovered by Seural, but every shade calls forth and is illuminated by all the other colours ot the prism.

This simultaneity. A sug- festive, not merely objective, ind of painting, which acts on us in the same way as nature and poetry 1 That says it all about Robert Delaunay's approach to non-figurative painting. Or nearly all what it omits is that Delaunay's wife Sonia. whose death on December 5 at the age of 95 was reported yesterday, got there first. She was born Sonia Terk, in the Ukraine in 18S4, but came to the West as a student and married Delaunay in 1910.

Given the broad scope of the Burlington House Post-Impressionist exhibition, she and Robert Delaunay might at least equally as well have been included as cnnleinpciraries like Mondrian and Ealla, since their use of colour developed from the scientific theories of Chevreul via 1he painterly practice of Seurat and Signac. Sonia Terk arrived in Paris from Germany in 1905 and her early work was very close to the Fauves. She was said to have been prompted into making her first totally non-figurative painting when she was stitching a patchwork quilt a nice adaptation of a "minor" art into a major one she was never to recognise the distinction between the two herself and all her life worked noL only at painting but aso on book illustration, textiles, and ceramics. The Delaunays were originally thought of as cubists. In fact, critics called their work colour cubism until ApDllinaire, in the review quoted above, called Robert Delaunay's painting Orphism.

because its abstraction was close to the abstraction of music (compare Walter Pater All art constantly aspires to the condition of It is difficult now to see the influence of cubism in the best-known canvases, though before he married Sonia, Robert Delaunay was influenced by Cezanne and around 1910 his pictures were a blend of cubist organisation and his own colour theories. It now seems clear that Sonia's was the main impulse towards the condition of music total non-figuration, though who actually did what when is not as important as the fact that the deed was done. Bliss was it that dawn to be alive, and to be 'in Paris very heaven. Apollinaire hailed the breakthrough to a "people's art." He was wrong, tragically. But the incandescence of their absolute abstraction made the Delaunays influential with Klee, Kandinsky, the Blue Rider group, and to this day, the international spread of so-called colour-field painting.

has all the best tunes and can be relied upon to play them ravishingly. As orchestrated by Coppola, Vittorio Stnrarn. his magnificent cinematographer, and David Rubinson. who produced a score that includes Wagner, The Doots. Mnong Gar music from Vietnam, synthesisers and percussion, Apocalypse vouchsafes a whole series of images and sounds that stick liilii FIRST NIGHT TELEVISION Peter Fiddick Magic of Dance IT WAS ONLY the roar ot the crowd that was missing, and not just because' in the' final act of The Magic of Dance (BBC-2) Margot Fon-teyn so consciously held back from mentioning it.

"The smell of the greasepaint was evoked more than a few times as she celebrated her passion for the art and the career she won in it, but the other half of the showbiz tag was usually withheld. But then, so was the applause and it was one of the stylistic problems of an otherwise graceful and pleasing series. The dance was there in abundance, but there was just that silence, marking the difference between the expectant hush of the theatre extracts and the void of the special studio presentations, a hollowness that the performers didn't deserve. With ballet, you hear it louder. That said, it has been a rich sampler, even for people who are not consumed by the dance, and Margot Fonteyn herself proved a persuasive in the memory as Capt Wil-lard's prepresses.

WiSlard (Martin Sheen) is an almost burnt out case, hooked on the war, whose mission from High Command is to terminate with extreme prejudice the career of the maverick Colonel Kurtz, waging genocide from his Cambodian fastness with the aid of his worshipping Monlagnard tribesmen. "Totally beyond the pale of Players and William Pleeth excelled themselves in a performance so deeply contemplative, so little self-conscious, that in the massive twin spans of the first two movements there was no need whatever for underlining. For once a performance genuinely observed Schubert's reticent dynamic markings it is only at the end of the First Movement that the first fortissimo appears) making dramatic points by the tensions of understatement. It was a mark too of the players' commitment that the slow trio of the scherzo gave us the darkest meditation of all, until the finale resolved all conflict in Viennese charm, with pauses and hesitations that are the stuff of light music. It was the merest bad luck that within seconds of the end the leader.

Norbert Brainin broke a string, but excellent good luck that he had a spare in his pocket ready lo fit hefore the tensions of the occasion evaporated. The question now is will the BBC engineers edit that hailus out when the repeat broadcast goes nut on Radio 3 tomorrow night ROWAN GALLERY Waldemar Januszczak Keith Milow THERE IS something inherently portentous about works of art arranged and conceived in sequence. The obsessive, paranoic exploration of a theme, the squeezing dry of a fragment of imagery, naturally directs our attention away from the subjecl-matler towards the work's more efusive components. Rembrandt's own blotchy face, Cezanne's Mont St Victoire, Monet's Waterlil-ies and Mondrian's primary colours are triumphs achieved by imaginations in search of self-discipline. Keith Milow has just completed his 118th, Cross, an exercise in single-mindedness which deserves an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.

Nos. 134-118 now hang solemnly in Rowan Gallery. The harsh, uniform whiteness of the gallery's walls provides an effective stage for them, picking, out and exaggerating the subtle differences that distinguish cross from cross. The gnarled, wooden relics of last year have finally turned into concrete (fibre-glass actually, hellbent on maintaining the illusion, so that instead of crosses which belong above a rude altar we have crosses related to those which cling to the exteriors of most modern chapels. But somewhere along the US-step journey they have relinquished their status as time any acceptable human conduct," says G.

Spradlin's General. The hypocrisy of this is what Willard's adventure then illustrates, and the final encounter between the two lands him face to face with his own mirror image. Willard's patrol boat, with four semi-stoned young grunts as crew, lands first in the patch of Robert Duvall's Lt-Col Kilgore (a brillant portrait), who calls an air less symbols they are far too concerned with their own appearance on the walls to spate a thought for Christianity. These burly grey crosses cast burly shadows and Keith Milow uses the resulting black and white contrasts In build up loud patterns on the walls Keith Miinw nt. linwnn Gallery, 31 A Brutnn Place, London Wj, unfit December 20.

BANQUETING HOUSE Mozelle Moshansky Deller Memorial ALTHOUGH no longer a young man, Alfred Deller's sudden death while judging a singing competition at Bologna earlier this year came as a heavy and unexpected blow. Here, after all. was that rarity a modest, unassuming, musician who partly through native talent, partly the good fortune of being discovered and subsequently taken up by figures as distinguished as Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippelt was responsible for hatching perhaps the greatest single musical renaissance of the day: the virtual rediscovery after years of neglect of the music of Purcell and his contemporaries and, additionally, the revival of the apparently dead art of countertenor. By the time young Alfred Deller joined Canterbury Cathedral Choir as a lay clerk, this latter accomplishment in particular had all but vanished, dodo-like. When he died, the fruits of the'Deller-Jed revival were all round us, while Britten's creatinn of the part of Oberon for Deller in A Midsummer Night's Dream stands as the most important contribution to countertenor in 200 years and more.

Especially moving in last night's Deller Memorial Concert was a brief but penetrating sequence of unaccompanied medieval songs, exquisitely presented by Sir Peter Pears. Quite why a French hymn, three English carols and the ubiquitous I Wonder as Wander should prove so affecting is at first difficult to define. In the end. the answer surely lies in the acute sense conveyed of a paradise lost of the essential simplicity and devotion of men still close to the earth and their God. Here, in short, is the spark of faith made real.

Impressive ton werp a series of Monteverdi madrigals, richly harmonised. Si Ch'io Voriei Morire has the reputation rightly of being among the most sheerly erotic outpourings to have flowed Hon episodes are more like, a bitterer version of M.A.SiH, The gear-change, one might well conclude, may be at the point when Coppola's statement that he was no longer making the film, the film was making itself finally became operative. Be that as it may, the whole thing is still a tour de force, a kind of cinematic opera 'about hell on earth in which we come to realise that the Devil indeed and entertaining guide, bright eyes holding the camera and a remarkable naturalness carrying through even the most carefully constructed links an ease which certainly did much to help Patricia Foy's production hold together all the various strands of history, performance and personality. EMPIRE BALLROOM Robin Denselow Joe Jackson JOE JACKSON had all the angles covered. Back in" Britain after extensive tours in the States where he is reportedly the latest success in the "new British invasion he made sure he followed every trend going.

For a start he was playing in a dance hall, which is now the correct thing to do following the example of the Specials and Talking Heads. In principle I entirely approve but squashed at the back of the hall in Leicester Square, trying to watch the show across a sea of pushing, sweating and non-dancing bodies, I had my doubts. His image seemed equally calculated. Even Mrs Jackson must agree that her son is not the best looking performer in history (which is obviously no disadvantage in the days of Parker, Dury and Costello), but he now looked like a youthful salesman, unsure whether his hero was Gary Numan or Madness. So he wore a black suit, white shirt, thin black lie and very short hair.

To cover the mod angle as well he had a large black and white Union Jack covering the back of the stage. When he first emerged, early this year, Joe.Jackson was one of the freshest newcomers around, mixing the gusto of the Parker school of beat balladeers with the tune-fulness one might expect from a student of the Royal Academy of Music, mixed with some enjoyably cynical lyrics. Maybe it was because of the poor sound quality in the hall, but this time the attack was sadly missing, at least for the first half of his late night set, and even his best song. One More Time, seemed lame and formless. MANCHESTER Gerald Larner Gabrieli Quartet THE Gabrieli String Quartet, one of the Manchester Chamber Concert Society's strike on a village largely because it finnts the best surfing waves in 'Nam then at another station where a gaudy troop concert, pushing scv at the soldiery without, of course, letting them touch it, ends in disorder; and finally passes the nightman image of the last zapped-out American base on the river before reaching Kurtz's compound Each of these long set- from the pen of this remarkable man and so it proved again.

Between them Monteverdi and Alfred Deller. one fondly imagines, must have been well pleased. EMBASSY CLUB Nicholas de Jongh" Bits of Lenny Bruce I tiUSHED superlatives when Bits of Lenny Bruce, a selection of the dead comedian's outraging material selected by Danny Brainin, was produced in May at the King's Head. Now the show is lining produced at the Embassy Club, which is not the sort of place 1 imagine Guardian readers would normally frequent. It is discoish country where the contemporary equivalents of Evelyn Waush's Vile Bodies drink and disco.

But now the Embassy intends to mount regular review and satirical entertainments at the price of 3.50 per seal for tne general public. 1 fine! it hard lo maintain my Maytime enthusiasm for these sketches, directed by Mv Brainin in an insistently directorish manner: Look, the lighting changes. Look the spotlights. Look the movements. It would be pleasant if the actors could relax from the hectic artiness of things and concentrate on the words, though the first night audience was almost as cold as the critic's champagne.

Brace's method of thoughtful ridicule helped to espnse raw and jangling nerves. He was never afraid In use forbidden worrls to emphasise our gift Tor hiriins hypocrises beneath nlannblp vrneef. But though his aliunde to race and iclicinn remains trenchant, angry and funny, his attitude in sex 1ms dated. Surrealism is his best weapon Cardinal Spcllmnn alarmed in church by the news that the Messiah is wailing at the door Maybe they came to audit the books," and George Wallace finds a new minor: to hate by electing that tightly-knit group, the Midgets. Hitler, in one of two sketches where mime, movement and words are beautifully combined, is created from a Charlie Chaplin look alike.

Perhaps there is a little too much emphasis on sex and. not enough on the sourer, sadder versions of Lenny. Bruce. But it still makes an amusing and pleasing ninety minutes for aficionados and thp arrival nf Barbara Kuhl to replace Deborah Norton an. advantage.

Denis LawsDn and Danny Brainin as the other two performers remain accomplished but could do with a little more zing. TUnitoJAraitit EXCLUSIVE PRESENTATION FROM THURSDAY 13th DECEMBER ADVANCE BOX OFFICE NOW OPEN GATTt CINEMA-NOTTING HILL 2210220 727-5750 favourite ensembles, attracted a big audience to the Royal Northern College of Music. The presence of a clarinettist and quintcls by IVclier and Brahms helped, of course, but it was the intriguing combination of these works with First String Quartet which made the programme so difficult (o resist. It was just unfortunate that this performance of the Jana-cek seemed pale in comparison, even with some given by the Gabrieli Quartet. The first movement was almost cautious, the frequent changes of tempo apparently weakening the emotional impulse rather than charging it with extra energy.

It was only in the last movement that, inspired by excellent violin playing, they found an equivalent to the intensity of the piece and with violent effect that they rescued the performance in the course of a few crucial bars. John McCaw is a refreshingly straight clarinettist, with no obtrusive vibrato and no extra special charm to turn on in his phrasing. Weber, whose Quintet in flat was the first work in the programme, might have preferred a more operatic temperament, though he could scarcely have wished for a more accomplished technique. Brahms, whose Quintet in minor ended the concert, would surely have been moved by the direct, truthful and finely balanced performance we were fortunate enough to hear. ST JOHN'SRADIO 3 Edward Greenfield Amadeus anniversary WHEN IN I960 St John's, Smith Square, was translated into its new role of conceit hall, one of the first clients was the BBC with its regular series of Monday lunchlime concerts, which has remained a mainstay not only of the hall but of Radio 3.

The very first concert on December 8 of that year had the Amadeus Quartet with William Pleeth playing the greatest of all Schubert's chamber works, the Major String Quintet, and for this tenth anniversary programme we had not just the same work but the very same performers. ft has been the special quality of this lunchtime series to provide just the fare needed for this time of. day. If any music is designed to restore lagging spirits, to give in notes the spirilual refreshment the churchgoer gets from his Communion, then this Quintet is it. Inspired no doubt by their anniversary, the Amadeus ram BRITISH ART AND DESIGN BEFORE THE WAR mum SOUTH BANK LONDON SE1 UNTIL 13 JANUARY ADMISSION 1.2 0 (60 PENCE ON MONDAYS AND 6-8 TUESDAYS TO THURSDAYS) A i.

il STUDENTS, CHILDREN, OAP's 60p TIS LlOUIlCll CLOSED 24, 25, 26 DEC AND 1 JAN OF GREAT BRITAIN.