Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 21

THE ARTS ST. PETERSBURG TIMES JUNE 25, 1977 5B ninniES BEnnoui Totie cleans up Home Box Office's act, temporarily 7P if vv wrf'ir- Ik I If (I i 1 til HBO "I work like a nun next to what is going on these days," Totie Fields says in defense of own brash humor when compared to low-grade material bo prevalent in show business. And that low-level trash, often focused on functions below the belt, can Bhqw up on TV sets. Totie makes that remark during her show which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on Home Box Office (HBO), the pay-cable television service offered locally by TelePrompTer Cable.

Titled simply Totie Returns, it is an unedited videotape of the incomparable comic's truly triumphant return to show business after a year in which she nearly lost her life and did lose her left leg. THIS IS a new Totie Fields, not the often obnoxiously rancid little dumpling that turned up periodically on every TV gab show. She's slimmer but no less sarcastic as she lays outragious slurs on her best friends in the first night audience. A charter flight brought 200 of them (many appear on-camera) to Las Vegas to share what comedian Jerry Lewis called "a historic moment in show business." The difference is that now Miss Fields' barbs are laced with love and understanding gained from her medical ordeal. She describes the discomfort of her friends who out of curiosity wanted to stare at her new leg but tried not to.

And she can laugh at herself, for instance, "buying a leg." Having choo-sen the finest craftsman of legs, she was appalled at the fat, short thing he made for her. Then she put it on. It matched. She muses that if she'd lost both legs she could have gotten the long legs she always wanted. But "I'm back walking the stores again; the economy will go up." LIKE A top club comic, her delivery seems off-the-cuff.

Unlike other jokers who make a dirty story into filth for sensational impact, Totie's naughtiness hinges on a natural view of ordinary situations or fantasies which might invade the most saintly mind. Her material is broad from clean lines like "Where do people who have no children go for aggravation?" to naughty thoughts about Walter Cronkite. Totie Returns is another HBO exclusive in its Standing Room Only and On Location series. These videotapes are stage and club acts exactly as they happened, recorded exclusively for some 600,000 HBO subscribers across the nation. Of TelePrompTer's 17,000 cable homes in St.

Petersburg approximately 4,000 buy HBO along with subscribers in other Suncoast cities. While obscenity, violence and sexual material on the commercial networks have probably peaked at our limit of tolerance, these homes may receive the dregs of immorality as depicted in some films today. A NEIGHBOR, who refuses to own a TV set, occasionally visits my home while I'm watching one of the first-run movies on HBO. "They put that on TV," he says with shock. We have heard every foul word, seen blood flowing by the gallon and watched sex in its most demeaning, unloving aspect.

Angie Dickinson and William Shatner nude in bed are only two of the stars we've seen in this situation in HBO movies. Jackie Gayle'a Las Vegas lounge act on HBO is filthy. Next to these, Totie Return is refreshing. However although HBO is simply distributor, not a censor, its monthy program guide for subscribers carries candid warnings about the adult nature of the programs. A teenager can encounter sleazy sensationalism without such warning at a drive-in movie.

It must be noted that HBO also offers fine children's programs and sports events. The adult material is usually scheduled in late evenings and, again as with all TV programing, parents must monitor their offspring's' viewing. NBC's late night news magazine, Weekend, usually seen on the first Saturday of each month, returns tonight with an unsettling investigation of England's "punk rock" and what may be in store for America's rock fans. WE HAVE our own punk rockers such as Alice Cooper, but nothing like The Damned, Sex Pistols, Stranglers and other such groups who are influencing young people in England. Torn and blood-stained clothing, bicycle chain and razor blade jewelry, safety pins for piercing cheeks and ears and outrageous makeup for both sexes are "punk rock" fashions already available in boutiques in New York as well as London.

Weekend, as thorough as usual, gets into the motivation behind this with Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols. "We're living in an economically depressed country where 60 per cent of the 18-year-olds are unemployed. They have a reaction against everything in Britain," says McLaren. "Part of their everyday experience is fighting, with their parents or the police who assault them because they are a little drunk. They're trying to substitute their own culture for one put together by people who had nothing to do with them." Are we immuned to this? Weekend isn't that prescient.

Have you heard: 1) Baa Baa Black Sheep will be back. It isn't in NBC's fall schedule although it won modest ratings against ABC's hits Happy Days and Lauerne and Shirley and, after a move to Thursdays, it topped CBS' venerable The Waltons. Some critics supposed NBC accepted its revival to placate Universal Studios for canceling Universal new series Off the Wall. AP's TV writer, Jay Sharbutt says Sheep will be back because its feisty star, Robert Conrad who is well-known for his aggressiveness on and off camera, Totie Fields makes a triumphant Totie Returns. has fought continuously for it.

2) NBC has agreed, again with Universal, the biggest TV production house, to a series pilot based on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. No, it won't star Robert Redford who avoids TV exposure. But veteran action-master Glen Larson will produce it. 3) News documentaries are duds in the ratings. In the same week that a show like CBS' rerun of Circus of the Stars took 11th place in Nielsen's weekly tally (8 of the top-10 were repeats, too), Fidel Castro Speaks with ABC's Barbara Walters was in 56th place.

One of TV's most important revelations, CBS Reports: The CIA's Secret Army occupied the 58th Russ Byrd's show canceled after 1 3 years on the air A I 11 1 A Russ Byrd's local television show, Good Morning Florida, shown weekdays at 6:30 a.m. was canceled Friday by WLCY-Chan-nel 10. For nearly 13 years, Byrd has been host for Channel 10's morning talk show. Originally called The Russ Byrd Show, the name recently was changed to Good Morning Florida. That show was replaced with Lassie reruns May 27 when Russ Byrd went on vacation.

TOM SPAULDING, Channel 10 spokesman, said the station IS. The Damned (above) are among the loudest purveyors of "punk rock," a new musical craze in Britain. of Midnight' how does sags as saga return to the Las Vegas stage in rank, ABC's Salute to Elizabeth II was 61st and ABC New Closeup: Nuclear Power Pro and Con at 62, was the bottom, the least watched show. What does that tell us about ourselves? 4 4) Despite the figures in above, CBS is installing its top-quality news and informational show, Magazine with reporter Sylvia Chase, as a regular daytime feature. Magazine has been aired irregularly since its premiere in 1974.

Starting in October, an edition will be shown the first Thursday of each month. 5) My favorite actress, Bette Davis, is a guest on the September 12th premiere of NBC's Laugh-In. made a reevaluation during that' time and decided the show's ratings didn't warrant ite production costs. "Because Byrd is involved with many activities in the community, not necessarily associated with the station, we still maintain a working relationship with him and if any- thing comes up we will call upon him first," Spaulding said. Herb Malsman, spokesman for -Russ Byrd Associates, said Byrd hadn't had time to formulate future plans, but that a similar show on an- other local station "is certainly; something he would want to dis- cuss." I approved contest sponsored by the St.

Petersburg Transit the Fla. Central Chapter of AIA (St. Petersburg section), and the St. Petersburg Arts Commission. Glazunov, 41, has made his way into prominence, despite criticism from both right and left, through the patronage of foreign dignitaries like Indira Gandhi, the late Chilean President Salvador Allende, the kings of Sweden and Laos, and President Urho Kekkonen of Finland.

He has painted an official portrait of Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, but will not say whether Brezhnev posed for him. HE SAID the parliament official was trying to make him withdraw his controversial painting. "They'll talk and threaten," Glazunov said, "but I will insist." He said dozens of art students were prepared to demonstrate at the exhibition hall if his show does not open, and some were hanging posters in the streets advertising his show, although this has been officially forbidden. Because of his success with foreign dignitaries whose portraits he has painted, Glazunov says the artists' union has been forced to give him membership, and authorities have provided him comfortable studio space and the freedom to work.

2J a cab driver, the penniless Noelle is befriended by handsome, debonnaire Larry Douglas (John Beck), an American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Larry is charming, but he is also a rat. After a short affair of idyllic intensity and a great deal of conventional sight-seeing, Larry leaves Noelle without a forwarding address, though he has promised to return in three weeks to marry her. In six weeks she gets the word: She's how does one say? with child. Though The Other Side of Midnight contains lots of other characters and moves earnestly from Paris to Washington to Hollywood to Greece and back to Paris again (and again), it's mostly about Noelle's elaborate St.

Pmriburt Tim STEVE DOZIER June I J. NBC plans for revenge on Larry. It grows into an obsession as she becomes, with no great effort, first a successful fashion model, then the most famous movie star in France and, finally, the mistress of Constantin Demeris (Raf Vallone), a Greek shipping tycoon who also happens to be the richest man in the world. The Other Side of Midnight is fiction of the sort that sometimes becomes immensely popular because it satisfies both the people who want to believe it and those who feel superior to it and like to giggle helplessly at cliches of an elephantine scale and solemnity that one doesn't often see And the winner is This is the shape of things to come in the way of bus shelters for St. Petersburg.

Designed by Carl Abbott of John Howey Associates, Tampa, it was chosen from 26 entries in an AIA- opinion 'Other Side one say? Th0 Othtv Sida of Midnight (rated R), tmrt Marit-Franc Plaiar and John Bach; consult tha Movia Timacloctt for thaatart and showtima. By VINCENT CANBY Waw York Ttmaa NEW YORK Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight is one of those best-selling novels that all too soon has become not a major motion picture, but a lengthy, expensive one. Written in eau de cologne by Herman Raucher and Daniel Taradash and directed by Charles Jarrott, who seems to have been paid by the yard, the movie takes almost three hours to tell us how miserable it is to be rich, famous and powerful, to be showered with jewels, to have a private airplane O'Jays hit high fly Soviet officials ban artist's portrayal of forbidden figures to go with your private Greek island, and to sleep in gigantic beds mounted on raised platforms that are, of course, sacrificial altars if? fiction of this sort. The Other Side of Midnight is about sweet, innocent Noelle Page (Marie-France Pisier) who, when still in her teens, is apprenticed by her father to the lecherous middle-aged owner of a dress shop in her native Marseilles. The time is 1939.

War clouds are how does one say? gathering. When Noelle realizes that she's been sold into concubinage, she runs away to Paris, where the war is suddenly on, the clouds having apparently broken while she was taking the train north. IN PARIS, after being fleeced by note for month of (ftm By SETH MYDAMS Auociatad Prats MOSCOW Soviet authorities have prohibited an official painter from exhibiting a picture that breaks all the rules of Soviet art, and threatened him with expulsion if he insists on showing it. But Ilya Glazunov says that if the painting on which he worked over a period of 10 years and three others also proscribed are not included, he will not permit his scheduled show to open. While an official from the Soviet parliament sat in the artist's living room, Glazunov took a reporter into his kitchen to say the Ministry of Culture told him Thursday his painting "will not be shown." The picture, 7 feet high and 14 feet wide, is called "The Mystery of the 20th Century" and forms a partition in his studio.

IT IS A panorama including such forbidden figures as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the murdered Leon Trotsky, the last czar holding the body of his slain son, Josef Stalin's embalmed body floating on a sea of blood, a ghastly Nikolai Lenin glowing in the red light of revolutionary fires. There also is "a surprise" Glazunov planned to paint into the picture at the last moment The painting was to have been shown at an official exhibit of nearly 300 of Glazunov's works due to open Monday. Glazunov said he was called in Thursday to the Ministry of Culture and told he could not show the painting, or three others that depict Soviet life in a way that also defies the rules of socialist realism. The artist said he replied that the show would not open without the paintings. "THESE are the most important works of my life.

If they are not included, the show will not open," Glazunov said he told Vladimir I. Popov, deputy minister of culture. He said another official warned him that if he persisted in this attitude, he could be expelled from the official artists' union, could lose the lavish apartment and studio the government has supplied him and could even be expelled from the country "like Solzhenitsyn." The second Bayfront Center Arena sell-out crowd for the month of June boogied Friday night to the sound of the O'Jays' 20th Anniversary Show. This popular group, blending the talents of Eddie Levert, Walter Williams and Sammy Strain, sang and danced their way into the hearts of the youngish audience with such well known hits as Work on Me, Message to the Music. Feeling, and Wild Flower.

Priming the audience before the O'Jays took the stage was an increasingly popular group named Brick led by the multi-talented Jimmy Brown singing and playing sax, flute, trumpet, trombone and flugelhorn..