The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 280

to UJ 0. Movies Richardson Gibes 'Lifeguard7 Grapples With Life BY KEVIN THOMAS the Gentry in 5 "Joseph Andrews' UJ "Lifeguard" (opening Wednesday citywide) is one of the year's best pictures, sensitively directed and beautifully written, and it boasts a star-making role for Sam Elliott, a good actor with plenty of magnetism, who's waited a long time for a break like this. Elliott is Rick, a handsome, muscular Southern California lifeguard on the wrong side of 30. He loves his work, takes pride in doing it well and enjoys fully its special fringe benefits that consist of the steady stream of pretty girls he so easily attracts. He's an accomplished womanizer whom a pert stewardess (well-played by Sharon Weber) pegs accurately when she tells him the secret of his success is that he doesn't feel anything.

This is but the first of a series of incidents that causes Rick to reflect upon himself and his life. The catalytic event is that most unsettling ritual, the high school reunion. Not having anything better to do at the moment, Rick, somewhat to his surprise, finds himself actually attending it. His former classmates, settled down and already going to seed, cant believe he's still a lifeguard. Pretty soon he hears himself telling them that he's a car salesman, a job his upwardly mobile boyhood friend (Stephen Young) has been pressing him to accept.

Most important, Rick runs into his high school 3 Sam Elliott (O CO UJ -J a (0 'LIFEGUARD' A Paramount presentation. Exec, producer Ted Mann. Producer Ron Silverman. Director Daniel Petrle. Camera Ralph Woolsey.

Music Dale Menten. Film editor Argyle Nelson Jr. Featuring Sam Elliott, Anne Archer, Stephen Young, Parker Stevenson, Kathleen Qulnlan, Steve Burns, Sharon Weber, Lenka Peterson, George D. Wallace, Paul Kent, Susan Anderson, Beatrice Colen, Linda Glllen, Jody Gilbert, Russ Marin, Allan Gruener, James Beach, James D. Graham, Oaky Miller, Larry Mitchell, Bill Joyce, Running time 1 32 mln.

MPAA-rated: PG (some parental guidance advised). that to break fresh ground in making us think about how we regard work, especially the ways in which other people earn livings. On one level the film is virtually a documentary on the lifeguard and his job, which we learn entails considerable training, sound judgment and a strong sense of responsibility. A good lifeguard is no beachboy (even if he may look like one) but a man to be respected. "Lifeguard" subtly suggests that too often we overlook the job well done because we consider it menial.

Even with provoking such thoughts, "Lifeguard's" director Daniel Petrie gracefully marshals Koslow's script to an appropriately ambiguous conclusion. Some will admire Rick for his decision, some will think him a jerk and still others will realize that just about every decision extracts a price and often it's impossible to tell just how high it will be. For all this "content," "Lifeguard," an acutely observant, often-funny film, possesses a lyrical, thoroughly cinematic form that has been heightened by Dale Menten's score and Paul Williams' pleasant theme song. Koslow has written a large gallery of living, breathing people, and they have been played to perfection by a large cast under Petrie's guidance. Besides those already mentioned, others prominent include Parker Stevenson as Rick's likable young assistant, Kathleen Quinlan as a teen-ager with a painful crush on Rick and in whom he perhaps recognizes the younger Cathy and Steve Burns as a sex-obsessed adolescent.

Continued rom First Page Reid), the handsome young footman (Peter Firth) and the rest of the household. The plot, lyrical indeed, chronicles the survival of a pure and innocent love the footman's for his milkmaid lady, who is played by a 20-year-old unknown, Natalie Ogle, whom Richardson found after a long and exhausting search for the right glow of youthful beauty. And she does have the sweet-faced, flaxen-haired, waif like delicacy that recalls photographs of the very young Mary Pickford. "There are millions more young girls in America," Richardson says, "and there simply aren't any young English actresses, unspoilt young English actresses. They're all tired at 20; they all look worked over and done in." He is enchanted with Natalie; and he is pleased with Peter Firth, who first came to wide attention in the play "Equus" but who at 22 has already had long experience in television at the National Theater.

"He is the next great English star," Richardson believes. Firth's advance notices in "Aces High," a new movie about World War I aviators, suggest that he flies off with the picture in his pocket. But the love story is the thread on which to hang much else. The star in the constellation is Ann-Margret as Lady Booby in wide-hooped skirts and a waist that looks to be cinched with steel, forcing the decolletage almost shoulder high. There are black beauty marks on bosom (heart-shaped) and cheek, and she wears an auburn wig and dead-white makeup that looks vaguely Oriental.

The makeup, husband Roger Smith explains, is a touch of Richardson authenticity. The gentry of the period believed, with considerable justification, that their water was the source of all ills and they never drank it or allowed it to touch their persons, except at Bath and in matters of last resort. They made do with perfume and ever-deeper layers of makeup, which also concealed the smallpox scars almost everyone had. The white lead in the makeup, the encyclopaedic Smith reports, had the unfortunate side effect in time of driving the wearers slightly dotty, like lead water pipes and pewter did the Romans. It may explain something of English eccentricity.

Ann-Margret, her stomach growling because the costumes enforce starvation diets, remarks that she coached for the part with Kate Flemyng of the National Theater. The role was a formidable challenge, since the rest of the cast constitutes an honors list of the British theater and screen: Michael Hordern (the narrator of "Barry Murray Melvin (the tutor in the same), Peggy Ashcroft, Timothy West, James Vil-liers, Jim Dale of "Sciapino." Hugh Griffith will return for a cameo as Squire Western, the 'Tom Jones" role that got him an Oscar. But Ann-Margret, a totally dedicated actress as "Carnal Knowledge" and 'Tommy" made abundantly clear, has evidently been up to the competition. Richardson unreservedly praises her for a great ear and the gift for catching accents instantaneously. The English accent she has this time is nothing so simple as BBC West End speech.

It is the speech of a city woman of indifferent virtue who has caught a rich husband and gone to the country ladylike, so that the pretentiously cultured tones are heard as a thin cover over something earthier and Cockneyed. As in her other excellent parts, she is asked to be unflattered. She chases her footman from first reel to last, but he won't play footsie, staying true to his love. The production moved from Bath to Stow-on-the-Wold, a charming ancient village in the Cotswolds, as headquarters for the country filming. A "Fish Chips" sign marks the Woodfall offices, and the art department is in a shop across the road.

Richardson's casting people have an elaborate card file, with photographs, of local country types from toothless babes to toothless crones. He shot his May Day fete, complete with maypole, greased pole and country dances, at nearby Upper Slaughter (pop. 89), invading the hamlet with a crew sweetheart, Cathy (Anne Archer), a sleek, assured beauty who just happens to be divorced. Once before Rick had backed away from Cathy because he realized she was the kind of girl you get serious about. Will Rick shy away again? And if he doesn't, what will be the consequences to the cherished freedom of his life at the beach? What makes "Lifeguard" so special is in the thoughtful questions its feature debuting writer Ron Koslow poses so deftly.

It's not just about a man beginning to wonder whether it's time for him to start growing up but rather about a man who's tough-minded and honest enough with himself to question what maturity really is. Is it really doing what is expected of you or is it having the courage to be yourself, to do what you want especially when you're fortunate enough to know what you want to do in the first place? "Lifeguard" is, of course, a comment upon our chronic obsession with youth but goes beyond nosed, dark-eyed, firm-visaged, hangs over a fireplace. Just along the wainscoting is a portrait of his son, still long-nosed and dark-eyed and in fact a near-duplicate, except that there is already amusement and relaxation around the mouth and cheeks, as if the struggle to achieve were in one generation already a bit less arduous. The manor and its surviving 200 acres are still in the private hands of descendants, just now Mr. and Mrs.

Alan Francis Clutton-Brock. He is a spry and merry long-retired art critic for the Times of London and some of his own paintings, excellent and in the Impressionist style, adorn the walls along with portraits of the Joneses and their favorite horses. Clutton-Brock, hair wildly askew, glasses perilously near the end of his own long nose, takes a visitor along the worn stone floors to the secret chamber where Walter Jones' grandson Arthur, a Loyalist supporter of. Charles II, hid from a platoon of Roundhead soldiers Please Turn to Page 47 of 120, several hundred extras and 43 support vehicles, all to the annoyance of equally nearby Lower Slaughter, which was not used. (The surrounding place names would make a litany if not a movie in themselves.

"Wold" is Saxon for hill, which explains where Stow is, as against Moreton-in-Marsh. To get here you turn off the Stratford road at Chipping Norton, and there are signposts for Adlestrop and Evenlode, Upper Swell and Lower Swell, Rollright and the Oddingtons, also Upper and Lower.) The company shot in Oddington Church, partly 12th century and, Michael Hordern was saying, containing a wall painting so spectacularly beautiful "that if it were in Assisi there would be a queue of tourists a mile long waiting to see it." This day the company is in residence at Chastleton House, a lordly manor built amidst its 4,000 lovely and rolling acres in 1603 (the year Elizabeth died, so the house is narrowly Jacobean) by a newly wealthy sheepman named Walter Jones. His portrait, long-.