The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 16

MA Wednesday, Dec 15, 1993 Features news by telephone Health Watch Sterilization lowers risk of ovary cancer B4 ZD Peach Buzz B2 Comics B5 TV coverage BIO The Arts BH The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution On page B2, a guide to our pay-per-call service. 1 'SGHINDLER'8 LIST' Oscar's Pront-Runner Spielberg's masterful film is testament to an inhuman horror and an enigmatic savior It' 5V" -t Univaml Pictures German industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson, on platform) welcomes Jewish workers to his new factory. By Eleanor Ringel FILM EDITOR 1 FILM REVIEW "Schindler's List" Starring Liam Neeson. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Rated for violence, nudity and adult themes.

At Phipps Plaza. fJ chindler's List," Ste- 00 1 ven Spielberg's haunt- SOME THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE SEEING xJi 53 'SCHitt DLERS LIST!" Ifs In black and white. Spielberg wanted to give his drama a documenta- ry feel. "Virtually everything I ve seen on the Holocaust is In black and white," he says, "jo my vision of the Holocaust Is what I've seen in documentaries and books." 5 1 i ks ntzi ft The film 'mckxiss vi tT3 cf rr'i ti mgiy powertui hoio- (caust testament, begins, fittingly, with the image of a candle. The -nr't nuEy tj ifcbor era.

rtt Mountain music brings memories of rustic warmth No matter how flagrant it seemed, I really wasn't hinting. I sat at a desk beside a fragrant pot of narcissuses in the Book Cellar in Clarkesville writing on flyleaves for book buyers, sipping spiced cider and eating red velvet cake. That was pleasant enough, and then I started listening above the babel of voices to the gentlest, most haunting rendition of Christmas music I'd heard this year. It was played on a dulcimer, a banjo, a flute and, I think, a violin. "Pure mountain stuff," a customer said.

"Mike likes it. I think it comes from Appalachia, or maybe it's Great Smoky music makers and it's on a CD." Somebody told Michael Humphries, the proprietor of the store, that I liked his music. That night, when I got home to Sweet Apple, I found a CD in my bag. It was a surprise, and a great one. The next morning while I poked up the Are and had my first coffee of the day, my grandson John Steven put disc and CD player together and went on to school, leaving me to listen alone.

In the days when Herbert Tabor was alive and a photographer and I followed him over the Georgia hill country writing sto- ries about people who lived in remote coves in primitive conditions pretty much as their ancestors had lived, I was prone to feel sorry for them. They usually had no electricity, no plumbing, no money. They weren't given to lavish decorations at Christmas. Often the only things they had to share were home-canned vegetables and fruit, maybe something hand-woven on the loom by the fireplace and, if the weather had been right for a hog-killing, some middlings and sausage. But they were rich, I decided as I sat by the fire and listened.

They had firelight and lamplight or the light from home-dipped candles. A cabin as warm as mine with its fireplace and galumphing furnace would have been luxurious to them. And they had music; It's funny that I never knew a poor country family that wasn't rich in music. My first neighbors at Sweet Apple had a parlor Organ, a fiddle and a family who brought in banjos and guitars for any reason at all maybe to celebrate Christmas or maybe because it was a dark night and they needed cheering up. The nights at Sweet Apple were dark in our early time there, before the subdivisions brought in street lights, but we could open the door and hear wonderful music from our neighbors' houses.

And those who didn't have instruments to play sang. I still miss the sound of our closest neighbor, Olivia Johnson, singing "Barbary Allen." She knew the old words, not the ones that get in folk song books now. I remember especially that she sang of "Yonder's Town," which may have been the old English version. Sometimes a music maker would put down his instrument and take to his heels, dancing with surprising grace for a rough work-ingman, across the splintery, creaking floor. Sometimes they would tell us stories of real hardship, like when the whiskey runner took their entire winter crop of moonshine, their hope for Christmas money, and sped out of sight on the road to Atlanta.

And then they would strike up the music and it jas a festival agn. another night on the town. In his white tie, tails and swastika pin, he heads to a nearby nightclub where he easily charms a cadre of SS soldiers. War is tragedy for some, opportunity for others. Using the capital of disenfranchised Jews, Schindler buys an enamelware factory and sets up an operation manned by Jewish labor imported from the ghetto.

His right-hand man is a stern-faced Jewish accountant (an impeccable Ben Kingsley) who initially disapproves of this hard-drinking Party animal, then grudgingly becomes a close friend. Before long, word gets around. The factory is a haven. You are safe if you work for Herr Schindler (whose list of insisted-on "essential workers" includes everyone from a flame is lit, then extinguished. Spielberg's movie (opening today) is about how a light almost went out forever in Europe during the years of Hitler's Final Solution.

And how a man named Oskar Schindler became an unlikely keeper of that flame. Based on Thomas Keneally's prize-winning book and shot in stark black and white, "Schindler's List," a likely Oscar favorite, is the true story of a reluctant saint, of a man who became a hero almost in spite of himself. During World War II, this German-Catholic bon vivant a womanizing boozer, war profiteer and real life of the Nazi Party in Krakow, Poland saved more than 1,100 Jews from the death camp ovens. He did so at considerable personal risk and ruinous personal expense. For all the money he made off the war, by the time the Third Reich crumbled, Schindler was penniless; he'd spent it all to bribe the Nazis.

The year is 1939 and Krakow's Jews are already feeling the brunt of Hitler's heinous racial politics. Their homes and factories have been confiscated and they've been relocated to an overcrowded ghetto in a corner of the city. But for Oskar Schindler played with an elegantly remote and relentlessly seductive bonhomie by Liam Neeson it's simply time for Who was the real Oskar Schindler? PageB8 Please see B8 INSIDE New tests sought to track progress of HIV infection Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, performs for "MTV's Live and Loud," a New Year's Eve special taped late Monday in a waterfront warehouse in Seattle. A report from the scene. BIO IB -m m.

mbi.w I IH Mil 1H nique that expands tiny amounts of genetic material so it can be easily detected. The PCR technique has been used in sophisticated research to search for the HIV virus itself in humans. The AIDS virus, unlike most other forms of life, carries its genes as RNA rather than DNA. Both RNA and DNA are acids found inside cells and help produce the proteins that build and regulate the body. To make new copies of itself, the AIDS virus must convert its genes from RNA into DNA and then stitch them into the genetic material of infected blood cells.

Furthest along are tests that will spot viral genes that have become part of blood cells this way. These tests, which look for viral DNA, will reveal whether someone is infected with the AIDS vi- ASSOCIATED PRESS Washington Researchers are racing to develop the first simple, widely available and exquisitely sensitive blood tests that will disclose how much AIDS virus people harbor inside their bodies. The tests, when they reach the market, should help doctors monitor the effects of AIDS treatment and also may provide earlier diagnosis of AIDS infections, particularly in newborns. Current tests, available since the mid-1980s, reveal only the presence of AIDS antibodies, which are the body's reaction to an AIDS infection. But these tests do not directly detect HIV, the AIDS virus.

Two new generations of tests are under development, both based on streamlined versions of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a sophisticated ib tech 9 Blanca Francia, the former maid of Michael Jackson who said she quit because of his activities involving young boys, tells TV's "Hard Copy" the singer would rub the boys against his body. She also says she saw Jackson bathe and shower with naked boys. Bll The party city of New Orleans puts on quite a show for the holidays (those are carolers in Jackson Square, above), and new, low airfares from Atlanta put the festivities within Page B6 Please see TESTS, B4.