The Los Angeles Times du lieu suivant : Los Angeles, California • 68

Consumerism: On the Threshold of Clout Co0 Attflelee SUtnes Issues Switch to Energy and Rent PART IV FRIDAY, JULY 27, 1979 pip iJ CRITIC AT LARGE BY DON G. CAMPBELL Tlmn StiH Wrltw From no-point 14 years ago to high-point, to something in between, consumerism today (those most actively involved in it believe) is sleek where it used to be fat, knowledgeable where it used to be naive, directed where it used to be drifting. And, in all likelihood, standing on the threshold of influence that it could only dream of attaining a few years ago. Flushed with Ralph Nader-induced realization in the mid-'GOs that a single consumer can, indeed, make mighty waves against the faceless Establishment WHAT BUGS BUYERS Consumers who are bugaboos include, from left, Glen Fujikuni, quizzed by The Times about some of their Cynthia White, Steve Urrutia, Donna Swartz. Timet photos by Tony Barnard Don Campbell's consumer column in Sunday's View.

AN INFORMAL POLL The Caveats Consumers Buy By -be it General Motors, local retailing groups or utilities, or indifferent public agencies grass-roots advocacy groups mushroomed in the late '60s and early '70s. Typical was the 1973 Los Angeles meat boycott sponsored by the loosely knit Fight Inflation Together group (FIT). Spontaneous, unrehearsed and, to some degree, successful. Today, of course, FIT is no more, but BY DIANE ELVENSTAR The consumer movement helped improve product packaging and made buyers more aware of their purchases-that is the consensus among Los Angeles-area consumers surveyed in an informal Times poll at the downtown Los Angeles Mall. The most important issues facing consumers, say those polled, are product quality and high prices.

Other concerns are climbing housing costs, the gas crisis and false advertising. Few of the more than 30 persons interviewed admitted to being active in the consumer movement, though shoppers said they have boycotted items or businesses they felt were overpriced. Most recalled filing complaints, but feared that other buyers lack the assertiveness to stand up for their rights. Frequently mentioned sources of dissatisfaction were car repairs and broken appliances, treatment by salespeople and public utilities. Almost all those polled had expressed displeasure by returning defective or low-quality merchandise to the dealer.

Jim Florio of Alham-bra, for example, said he returned a jogging platform that broke in early use. It was guaranteed, "but a lot of businesses rely on the fact that people won't return guaranteed merchandise," he said. Don Culbertson of La Canada took action when his new automobile turned out to be a "brand-new lemon." Talks with the dealer and letters to public agencies and radio stations did little. "But in the end," he said, "the credit union was most helpful. They told the dealer 'either you fix the car, or we won't go ahead with the Kyle McElroy, 9, of Pacific Palisades returned to the hobby shop Please Turn to Page 10, Col.

1 ARLINE MATTHEWS meat to gas boycotts. Times photo by Joe Kennedy A Bill of Frights BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN Tlnwt Arts Editor Woody Allen used to offer a routine about making an uncomplimentary remark to a self-service elevator, which retaliates by whisking him to the basement and throwing him out. "I thought I heard you pass an uncomplimentary remark," the elevator said, according to Allen. The story was in support of Allen's idea that inanimate objects strike back. There is a great deal more support for Allen's idea in "The Amityville Horror," in which a whole Long Island colonial strikes back, revealing a split personality instead of a split level.

"The Amityville Horror," loosely based on a book by Jay Anson which was in turn based, how loosely it is not possible to say, on the facts of an actual situation, is a damnably clever exercise in fright. As scripted by Sandor Stern and directed by Stuart Rosenberg (whose previous works are as various as "Cool Hand Luke" and "Voyage of the the movie is boldly and shamelessly manipulative and as full of misdirection as a magic act. What "The Amityville Horror" does, scarily well, is make a very attractive three-story colonial (which would go for 300 thou easy if only it had a different case history) the villain of the piece. The horror is all the more effective because it arises not in some cobwebby and batty castle nor on an unlisted planet in an unnumbered millennium, but around the corner and up our street. A man's home turns out to be not his castle but his captivity, with a sadistic persona of its own.

The captives are James Brolin and his new wife Margot Kidder and her three children from a previous encounter and they took the house, knowing it was cheap because of its bloody past: a young man who lived there before had shotgunned his parents, brothers and sisters to death in the middle of the night. From first sight the house bathed in a blood-red light, the eccentric attic windows glaring like crazed and bloodshot eyes the movie cries, "For God's sake, shiver!" and the first statement of Lalo Schifrin's superb score intermingles the plaintive innocence bf a nursery tune in the violins with ominous and discordant rumblings down below. The musical tension is eerily effective then and throughout. And such goings-on: doors slam (and later are blown off their hinges by no human or natural agency), flies swarm out of season, windows lock, chairs unoccupied rock, one of the children (Natasha Ryan) seems as near to being possessed as any child since Linda Blair, the bad vibes are so strong that a priest (Rod Steiger) and a family nun (Irene Dailey) are made physically ill and have to flee the house. In their very good performances, Brolin and Kidder are progressively seen to be nice people driven to the edge of gaunt-eyed insanity, snarling at each other out of their fear, in hysteria over the inexplicable events.

It is necessary, I think, to be an incorrigible as well as an incurable romantic to accept the movie as anything but a fright-ride, whatever the origins in real life. But in a curious way skepticism makes "The Amityville Horror" not less scary but more interesting. The script drops clues but (wisely in terms of its own intentions) makes no attempt to explain anything, or to sort out (as the rationalist mind wants to) the coincidental from the hallucinatory from the genuinely inexplicable. Some things do seem to be empirically unexplainable oozing walls and erupting floors but these are also the least satisfactory aspects of a spooky study in psychological terror. There are wild murmurings about Indian burying grounds and refugees from the Salem witchcraft trials and even a physical resemblance between Brolin and the mass murderer, but these, I think, are script teases.

More to the point is the Catholic context (the family is Catholic, the husband a recent convert) that may make (or have made) the satanic and supernatural explanations more quickly conceivable. Murray Hamilton as a tough-minded post-Vatican Council priest puts Steiger down cruelly, however, as a hysteric for his distraught warnings about Satan. Poor devil. But it may well turn out that there are no atheists in the mezzanine because "The Amityville Horror," with its overlay, however dubious, of being factual, is a real chiller, whose most potent source of suspense is not what the rotten house will do, but what fears of the house will have done to the nice people who thought walls couldn't talk. There are good performances in support by Val Avery as a curious detective, Michael Sacks as Brolin's surveyor partner, Don Stroud as a young priest.

Steiger's portrayal of the old priest is from the start so rigidly theatrical as to invite speculation that the good father was collapsing emotionally even before the house got to him. This may Please Turn to Page 26, Col. 1 mlimi mi m' i Jt RALPH NADER we're worse off now." Times photo by Ken Hively ml Urn r-fini. PETTY PASSION Rock singer Tom Petty drew a "lawsuit tour" that ends Saturday and Sunday with tumultuous response at Santa Cruz Civic during his sold -out appearances at Universal Amphitheater. Times photo by George Rose Petty Courts Fans on 'Lawsuit Tour' the spirit of it lives on in the Coalition for Economic Survival and that is fairly typical of what has happened to consumerism in California, a state long noted for its enthusiasm in embracing causes-both lost and noble.

It's been a period of consolidations, shake-out, tightening and the emergence of a new brand of professionalism that is rallying under still-new banners today rent control and the energy crisis. Nader spun off a dazzling flotilla of consumer groups: Congress Watch (handling most of his lobbying activities), the Litigation Group (Nader's in-house law firm that has won most of the cases it has argued before the Supreme Court), the Health Research Group (remembered best for its successful fight against Red Dye No. 2, the widely used food coloring agent), the Tax Reform Group (which Please Turn to Page 6, Col. 1 BY ROBERT HILBURN Tlmn Pop Muilc Critic SANTA CRUZ-This picturesque beach-front town of 39,000 has lots of attractions to lure young people into making the 75-mile drive south from San Francisco. The Chamber of Commerce boasts of this being one of the state's premier surfing spots and claims that the local boardwalk roller coaster is ranked among the 10 best in the world.

More than 23 million people have ridden on the half-mile track since it was built in 1924 for $50,000. (Inflation statistic: it cost $80,000 last year just to paint the coaster. The three informally dressed people in their early 20s looked like candidates for either the beach or the roller coaster as they walked through the town's downtown mall. But something else had brought them from San Raphael, north of San Francisco: rock star Tom Petty. "We met him just after his first album came out in 1977," said Valerie Silba, 21.

"He came to the record store where we worked to autograph his album. He was real nice and I loved his music right away. There was something different about it-something fresh, the kind of sound that everyone now is calling new wave. He was like a pioneer." Silba and her friends had driven here because it was the closest Petty was coming to San Francisco on a brief California Please Turn to Page 27, Col. 1 HARLEQUIN OF HAUTE COUTURE Saint Laurent Thinks Luxe "I BY PAT MC COLL THE VIEWS INSIDE tZYv BOOKS: Victoria Fyodorova and Haskel Frankel's "The Admiral's Daughter" by Robert Kirsch on Page 8.

DANCE: "Romeo and Juliet" cast changes by Lewis Segal on Page 32. L.A. Ballet by Chris Pasles on Page 18. MUSIC: George Benson by Leonard Feather on Page 18. Dixie Dregs by Stephen Pond on Page 20.

STAGE: "The Skin of Our Teeth," and other theater, in Stage Beat by Sondra Lowell on Page 25. "Little Mary Sunshine" by Sylvie Drake on Page 22. "Big Time A Musical Visit Into Vaudeville" by John C. Mahoney on Page 31. TELEVISION: "Pros and Cons" by Howard Rosenberg on Page 30.

PARIS Is there a woman thin enough and rich enough for the winter 1979-80 couture collection that Yves Saint Laurent showed here Wednesday? Think luxury. Think opulence. Think fabulous furs. Think jewels. Newspaper headlines may be screaming recession but either Saint Laurent doesn't read the papers or he is offering us a fabulous dose of fantasy.

Standing Ovation At the end of the almost two-hour show, Saint Laurent's fans gave him a standing ovation, applauding with that rhythmic clapping usually reserved for opera tenors or soccer stars. A beaming Saint Laurent, in a navy blazer, white shirt, narrow black tie and white ducks, came down to center runway twice to acknowledge the cheers. In a program note, he described the collection as a homage to Serge Diaghilev and his collaboration with Picasso. Sitting in the front row was Picasso's daughter, Paloma, who arrived in a floor-length white veil with a red rope tied around her head. Everyone mistook her for Arab royalty.

It wasn't until she dropped the veil that Paloma emerged. Others in the front row Roland Petit, Zizi Jeanmaire, Betsy Bloomingdale, Lynn Wyatt, Estee Lauder and the Baronne Alain de Rothschild. What Saint Laurent does in this collection, and what makes it so special, is his deletion of the sportswear and the man-tailored pantsuits that have become his signature. Except for velvet knickers, two pair of lame toreador pants and harem bloomers, there are only two real pairs of pants in this 150-piece collection. His "homage" to Picasso is stated with the first three numbers of the collection.

Take No. 3 a big-sleeved seven-eighths coat in a harlequin-patterned patchwork suede. Its subtle color mixes of gray, black and smoke blue are lavishly trimmed in black mink, and the coat is worn over a royal blue silk damask tunic and mid-knee black velvet skirt. From this understated beginning the harlequin theme goes all through the collection, erupting into brilliant bursts of patchwork satin and lame for evening. Bullfighter Suits Another important theme, also inspired by Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, are the bi- and tricolor looks.

Saint Laurent calls these his bullfighter suits. A dramatic one No. 33-had a jacket in white ribbed wool and velvet worn with a slim skirt, the front and back paneled in white wool and the side paneled in black velvet. Suits and the seven-eighths coat over a Please Turn to Page 11, Col. 1 AND OTHER FEATURES PEPLUM Yves Saint Laurent's peplumed herringbone check suit gets oblong velvet scarf.

BI -COLOR Panels of black and white alternate in Saint Laurent's fall bullfighter suit. Photos by Cynthia Hampton Bernheimer Page 18 Jody Jacobs Page 2 Bridge Page 11 Dr. Solomon 14 Comics Page 33 Television Pages 29,30 Family Film Guide Page 34 Tish Page 4.