The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 106

CALENDAR Coo Amides (Times Television Listings Wednesday, December 18, 1985 Part VI HOWARD ROSENBERG HO, HO, HO-IT'S TV TIME FOR RONNIE I is the season to be Ronnie. Modern Presidents have 'Ti 1 Yv Ihmmvg'r always found a way to dominate TV. This year more than ever, though, Christmas time is Reagan time, and Frosty the Snowman lives in the White House. It began with last week's truly screwball "All Star Party for 'Dutch' Reagan" on CBS, followed by Sunday night's boggling "60 Minutes" piece on the President confusing movies and reality. Then came that night's "Christmas in Washington" on NBC, where the Reagans were serenaded and sang Christmas carols alongside such celebrities as Tom Brokaw.

Flash back to Dec. 8, though. The all-star party for Dutch Meryl Streep plays the role of an aristocratic storyteller in "Out of Africa." In her screen debut, Whoopi Goldberg stars as Celie in "The Color Purple." MOVIEREVIEWS TWO WOMEN OF SUBSTANCE IN UNLIKELY SETTINGS PETE SOUZA By SHEILA BENSON, Times Film Critic 'The Color Purple' Ti I he Color Purple," an intimate story of suffering, endurance and triumph set primarily in the rural South from him, Kurt Luedtke's tart script has Karen riposte by ordering her servant to "Fetch some wine for my lover's brother." Clearly, this is not going to be an evening with the Bickersons. Luedtke has been equally deft in sketching in the ineffable homesickness of these Brits abroad, as one of them feasts on Karen's perfume, thinking for a moment it's one he remembers rather well. Ah.

No. Very nice, but not the same. With enviable vitality, Karen sets about to establish a coffee plantation, a job her husband decides he is eminently ill-suited for. His talents lie more toward womanizing and the hunt. (And later there is the matter of his most vile gift to her, from which she never really recovered.) For her part, Karen occasionally entertains a pair of Englishmen, the delightful Berkeley (Michael Kitchen) and the elusive Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford).

There is one magical evening when Finch Hatton demands a story and Karen begins to unreel one magically, until candles gutter in their holders and the three repair to the fireplace for the end of it all. But if we are in a well-defined, faintly magical, perfectly appointed past (and Stephen Grimes's production design, Milena Canonero's costumes and David Watkin's photography make it just that), where a level of intelligence is prized, then Where's the problem? Particularly in this benighted year for movies. It comes from casting and from a sense of place. Streep may convince us utterly that she is in love with Africa, but our views of it Please see' Page 2 brutalizing marriage to a widower with four children. (Celie's father also repeatedly has raped her, first when she is 14.

She has borne him two children who are taken away by him at birth.) At the book's close, almost 40 years later, she is a woman who has at last come to feel her own great worth. Celie's remarkable transformation comes mainly from her exposure to two women: the outspoken, heroically scaled Sofia, who marries one of Celie's stepsons, and the charismatic blues singer Shug Avery. Proud, volatile, completely unpredictable, Shug, for Sugar, is the ex-mistress (and still occasional girlfriend) of Celie's husband Albert, and the only woman he can be said to love. Over the years, the bond that forms between the parched Celie and Shug is all-encompassing; they are confidantes, friends and lovers of long standing. Or they should be.

Newcomer Menno Meyjes' screenplay gives us an initial sexual encounter of the greatest delicacy between the two women, but he leaves out, to fatal effect, Shug's constant relationship in Celie's life over the next 20 years the very stuff on which Celie is nourished enough to grow. Celie must be the film's focus, but swirling around her are the stories of at least a half-dozen others, some here in rural Georgia, others in Africa, where Celie's beloved and long-separated sister Nettie has fled as a teen-ager to work with a missionary group. (This African material, meant to show Nettie's parallel story of female oppression among the Olinka tribesmen and her strengthening through this travail, was the Please see Page 4 'Out of Africa' We are starving just now for civilized films, for the play of intelligent minds in movies about something. In that frame of mind, "Out of Africa" with its intense civility, its irreproachable landscapes, the tensions of its faintly doomed love story, which is not about love, really, but about possession, and its twin superstars seems to be just the thing for famished culture mavens at Christmastime. Unfortunately, and through no fault of Meryl Streep, there doesn't seem to be enough electricity generated out there in Africa to power a love story 2Vi hours long.

of Africa" opens today at the Cinerama Dome and the Avco Center Cinema in Westwood today, and at selected theaters on Friday.) Sydney Pollack's lush production takes us to unspoiled Kenya in 1914 with the aristocratic Karen Dinesen (Meryl Streep), a Dane, a storyteller of the first order, and enough of a snob to marry for a title. Actually, her marriage there in Nairobi only hours after she has arrived is not to the man she loves who spurned her but to his. twin, Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer, full of quicksilver charm, and who, if you look quickly, plays both brothers.) It's an amiable trade-off, the Dinesen family money for the Blixen baronage. (Isak was Karen Blixen's nom de plume.) Each knows just what the other wants from the marriage, although when Bror protests that the family money bought the title, but not 1910-1940, has arrived as a film, its story still distinctive and deeply moving. For the film's existence alone we can be grateful, and it contains at least three memorable performances, but the tradition has been at a harrowing cost to the tone and scale and even the underlying theme of Alice Walker's book.

While film makers must stretch their limitations or atrophy, nothing in direc-torco-producer Steven Spielberg's films even has hinted at an affinity for small-scale, interior, ruminative poetry nor for the complex emotional lives of noncontemporary characters. This time out, Spielberg has chosen to put an antic disposition on, and with the single exception of casting, his almost every decision has been disastrous. He has prettified or coarsened; he has made comic scenes broadly slapstick and tiptoed over the story's crucial relationship. The result, alas, is the film purpled. (At Mann's Plaza today, it opens at selected theaters on Friday.

Admittedly, shaping this story into a film is a heroic notion. Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was written as a series of letters, half of them addressed to God, the only person to whom some of these secrets could be trusted. In 1909, their writer, Celie, is a poor, unlettered, unloved, "ugly" Southern black girl. As her outpouring of letters begins, she is given by her father into a loveless, President Reagan is getting more TV exposure these days. inexplicably toasted Reagan's career as a movie star, recalling those days when everyone in Hollywood supposedly knew him as Dutch.

All of Dutch's pals were present, including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Burt Reynolds, Monty Hall, Charlton Heston and Emmanuel Lewis of "Webster." What a bof fo show it was. Martin did drunk jokes. Reynolds, who was not even around when Reagan was making movies, said "Hi, Dutch." Heston endorsed Dutch's performance in the White House. Hall said, "Hi, Dutch." Lewis let Dutch hold his hand. Dutch once again recalled his days as a baseball announcer in Illinois.

And Sinatra provided a shocker by disclosing what had been Hollywood's best-kept secret, that Dutch's movies were "great." Please see RONNIE, Page 1 1 MARSHA TRAPPER Lo Angelw TimeB i 0- Harry Dean Stanton's character, an angel named Gideon in "One Magic Christmas," has triggered unexpected warnings to parents. ffJ I -3, liisl fVK STAGE REVIEW WRONG NOTE IN MUSICAL METAPHOR By SYLVIE DRAKE, Times Theater Writer A merican Music" at 2nd Stage is not a musical in J. J. progress. It is not really about music at all.

Yet the fact that playwright Bennet Cohen uses those words for the title to a dark and violent drama about "the making of a soldier an American man," underscores the importance he places on the connection between music (in this case early rock and Elvis Presley) and the male ethos, American style. Hmmm. A lot of the play is also about what Cohen identifies as "a lack of choices. In America, if you're not an aggressive male, where do you go? For women, if you're not victims, then what?" Whoa. Cohen is clearly speaking for himself and it's important to juxtapose his statements with his piece, because the central problem with "American Music," despite its general right direction, is its inability to deliver on that premise.

The reasons are many, starting with Cohen's central character, a nebbish named Miller (Eric Douglas), pathologically unable to know his own mind, who hero-worships Elvis Presley. His brutish squadron leader, Heiser (Steve Bassett), marvels that Miller ever made it through boot camp. This cracker's astonishment is not farfetched. Miller develops one friend, Sanchez (Billy Zane), a decent but troubled guy who tries to help him grow up form an identity. Unrealistically, Miller sets his sights on Marie (Kathy Graber), a waitress with unfocused longings who falls in love instead with Sanchez.

It is symptomatic of the hapless Miller that, rather than get mad or even, he finds a way merely to rationalize the event These are three men Miller, Heiser and Sanchez in various stages of discontent thrown together in the seething boredom of a pre-Vietnam Army. The year is 1963. Horror is being hatched. (A FILM CLIPS 'CHRISTMAS' ANGEL MIXES MESSAGES By JACK MATHEWS, Times Staff Writer What do you tell your kids to do if a stranger comes along and tries to start a conversation? Simple. "Never talk to Strang-ers.

Now, what if a stranger comes along and says, "Hi, I'm an angel. I used to be a cowboy but I drowned trying to save a kid like you and now I live in heaven. Would you to like to go to the North Pole with me and meet my good friend Santa?" That one is really simple. "Run and tell Mommy and Daddy and they will get the people with nets to come and take the stranger away." In Walt Disney's "One Magic Christmas," a G-rated movie that has grossed about $11 million since Nov. 22, there is an angel like this.

His name is Gideon, and he has such magical power that you may not notice that he is dressed more like a guy out to flash a Camp Fire Girls' bus than to whisk a tyke off to the North Pole. In the movie, Gideon is the real McAngel. He can deflect hockey pucks with a simple lighting bolt. He can make letters dance right out of a mailbox. He can even turn back the hands of time.

But, as played in heavy overcoat by the leathery Harry Dean Stanton, he looks seedy, and some people are concerned that small children who see the movie will be encouraged to forget what their parents have told them about strangers. "I can just see some guy following this up, going up to a child and saying, 'I am an angel, come with says Kathy Grimes, who does volunteer work with sexually abused preschoolers in Long Beach. "A little child cannot differentiate the reality from the movie. If the man says he's Gideon, the child may believe him." i A Disney spokesman said there have been few complaints about "One Magic Christmas," a Christ mas Eve fantasy fashioned after Frank Capra's classic "It's a Wonderful Life." The movie is in 827 theaters across the country and is scheduled to run through Christmas. Grimes said she objects more to what the angel says in the movie than how he looks.

"His appearance doesn't bother me," she said. "Molesters generally aren't seedy. They dress nicely. What I don't like is that he asks the child to keep a secret and then to go somewhere with him. Those are the things we are desperately trying to get children not to do." Philip Borsos, the film's director, said this particular issue wasn't raised during the writing of the Please see FILM CLIPS, Page 7 Steve Bassett as Heiser, left, and Billy Zane as Sanchez in "American Music," a "dark and violent drama" at 2nd Stage.

-Off INSIDE CALENDAR FILM: "Sheer Madness" reviewed by Kevin Thomas. Page 9. POP: Saxophonist Clarence demons docs the vocals on his solo album "Hero." Page 2. TV: Tonight on TV and cable. Page 10.

Hanna SchyguUa discusses directors Margarethe von Trotta and R.W. Fassbinder. Page 8. fourth man, D'Antone, remains so superfluous to the action that Darin Taylor who plays him cannot escape self-consciousness. Frustrations predictably turn to poison and violence inevitably erupts.

When Sanchez reports Heiser for brutality, Heiser takes care of it the only way he knows how. And Miller, a horrified bystander, having lost his one friend, chameleon -like, takes on the coloring of his enemy. He is potential ly more dangerous in his weakness than is the bully in his spite. If this sounds like shades of "A Man's a Man" and "The Good Soldier Schweyk," stirred with a dash of Woyzeck," you've got it. Cohen's derivative statement is at once sweeping and remarkably narrow.

It may be his view of the quintessence of American life, but he doesn't make a persuasive case for it. He has not created an Ugly Please see Page 6.