The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 353

CALENDAI LOS ANGELES TIMES FEBRUARY 20, 1977 He's a Stranger Jng Public Radio: Media Orphan Comes of Age H. G. Wells Meets AIP and DNA (PG) BY WILLIAM HALL BY JAMES BROWN 'if if' ST. CROIX, Virgin Islands Midnight. Above the crescent beach a yellow moon rides high in the velvet sky, sending fitful shadows reaching out across the talc-soft sand from the pines and shady manzanil-las.

Down in the forest, something is stirring. Strange sounds rend the warm night air. Cackles, yelps. Inhuman cries punctuated by growls and grunts If Columbus, who first sailed into Salt River Bay here Nov. 14, 1493, to look for fresh water, were to set foot on this same coastline today, he might be pardoned for thinking he had stumbled upon the Lost World rather than the New one.

Out of the jungle comes a startling sight: a torchlight procession filing down to the water's edge, a dozen shambling figures in clothes that hang in tatters like old skin. They are carrying a body on a makeshift litter, and when the moonlight catches their faces you see they could be man or beast but are neither. One has the face of a lion. Another, a bear. Yet another, a pig.

And a hyena, a tiger, a leopard, a just what is this? It's a movie, of course. Who else would be out here in the jungle on a remote island dressed up like a party of fancy-dress revelers who have lost their way in the coach? Two cameras, one on the WASHINGTON, D.C.-The cab driver couldn't find it. NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO, you said, searching for a sign in traffic. The radio was on and Mahalia Jackson was singing one of those sweet gospels that could just about send the devil to church. NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.

Over there, on the corner. It looked like a bank. The cab driver had never heard of it. He isn't alone. Roughly 35 to 40 of the population is beyond the reach of NPR's 201 stations.

In the areas that are covered, sometimes the signal is weak or the local format less than compelling. Then there are the people who still consider public radio a forum for culture vultures and political magpies where everyone speaks in deepest tweed, solving the problems of the world in a spate of throat-clearing, academic swamp gas. Perhaps there was a time when the public radio system yawned forth from the mountain with its collective nose in the air. No longer. NPR today, operating in the wide-open programming area where commercial radio fails to tread, is a high-class cafeteria of audio goods and services.

Producing and distributing its own productions, as well as drawing programs from some of Please Turn to Page Makeup wizardry transforms Bob Ozman into Bullman for sci-fi horror film. stentorian shout through a megaphone urges them to greater efforts. The bizarre group soft-shoe-shuffles through the Please Turn to Page 31 beach, the other on a precarious platform on stilts in the water, immortalize the scene for "The Island of Dr. Moreau." "Chant, you Hums, goddamit! A Jonah7: A Swiss Film That's Hardly Neutral BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN irtg for action, and there were queues at the banks. The Cannes Festival had been stopped on its third day by the action of young French directors, who stormed the stage and held the curtain to prevent the There is no precise equivalent in the American experience for the events of May, 1968, in France.

The student demonstrations at the Sorbonnc, and the brutal and bloody response by the riot police, were eehoed a few weeks later on the streets of Chicago during morning screening, to show solidarity with the workers and students instead. By then all the airports were closed down, and there was a wild scramble by film's fat cats to acquire 'JONAH WHO WILL BE 25 IN THE YEAR 2000' A Film by Alain Tanner. Producers Yves Gasser, Yves Peyrot. Script John Berger and Alain Tanner. Photography Renato Berta.

Editor Bri-gitte Sousselier. Music Jean-Marie Senia. Featuring Jean-Luc Bideau, Myriam Boyer, Myriam Meziere, Rutus, Roger Jendly, Jacques Denis, Miou-Miou, Raymond Bussieres, Jonah, Dominique Labourier. Running time: 1 hr. 50 min.

Times-rated: Mature. In French with English subtitles. the Democratic National Convention. But the Sorbonne riots, and a strike at a large automobile factory, escalated to a general strike that paralyzed the whole country cars and drive over the border into Italy. American tourists stranded in Paris were loaded on buses by the airlines and driven to Brussels to be flown home from there.

I was there, en route to a festival I never reached, and the feeling was not unlike the hours before a declaration of war. The strike was in fact its own declaration of deep dissatisfaction, among the young particularly, of Please Turn to Page 42 and for a few tense days left in doubt whether the government could survive or whether indeed the general strike was the first stage of a revolution. It was a strange and paradoxical time, gravely serious but with romantic and comic overtones. On the warm and lovely spring days, couples strolled the Champs-Elyses hand in hand, as ever, but the strolls took them past the blue vans full of hclmclcd special police, wait- r- Jonah is a symbol of tomorrow's hopes in "Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000.".