The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 75

THE OTTAWA CITIZEN WEDNESDAY, MAY 27. 1987 Pages D15-D19 What's on Television VJd15 Biiefe I 1 I I 1 ,11 I JF IMIII lllll IIMIIIIIW i 'm 47v By Derrick Toth The Canadian Press Lamour with actor Holt McCallany in scene from Creepshow 2, above, and right, as the movies' Sarong Girl of the 1930s Lamour at 72: Sarong, it's been good to know you share the experience of "social violence, sexual abuse and economic exploitation." Jamaica's traditionally patriarchal society, reinforced in modern times by Rastafarianism, has added to these problems, says Sistren member Beverley Hanson. Unfortunately, she says, most mothers are single mothers because men don't feel responsible for child rearing. "When we do a play like Bel-lywoman Bangarang, which is pointing to the fact that the men would get women pregnant and would leave and they don't want to pay any attention to the child we can't even get to speak to the men because they don't want to talk about it," she says. The unemployment rate in Jamaica is about 26 per cent, but the rate for women is around 37 per cent.

Those lucky enough to find jobs usually end up being paid far less than men. Hanson says no woman can survive on the typical factory wage. "At the present time, the minimum wage is like $60 or $80 Jamaican per week and that's finished, done, in the supermarket alone," she says. Then there's rent, water, electricity, and lunch money and bus fare for the children. In addition to family violence in Jamaica, there are also the so-called "rude boys" men who wander the streets toting guns or knives and frequently enter homes to harass women.

Hanson says every woman in Kingston will likely encounter at least one rude boy in her life. "But police don't bother to deal with things like that, they find it is petty," she says. "Even if at home you have a situation where a husband and wife are having problems, the police don't want to interfere with it unless one party is dead." Hanson admits that some men are beginning to change their attitudes, but the process is a slow one. When Sistren was formed 10 years ago, feminism was almost unheard of on the island, she says. The festival, funded largely by the Canadian government, is put together every two years by the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance, a rough coalition of theatre companies working for social change.

SYDNEY, N.S. In most theatre circles, when a company takes a beating it's usually at the box office. For some members of Sistren, a Jamaican theatre collective dedicated to helping women deal with poverty and oppression, the beatings have also been physical. The abuse has come from Jamaican men who misunderstood their message or felt threatened by their efforts to foster feminism, explains Lionheart Gal, a book written by and about the female theatre troupe. "One woman, locked into the bathroom of her house after a bad beating, made a dramatic escape through the window and down a drainpipe for a performance," says a passage from the book.

"Another, beaten up before a major tour, spent the night locked out of her house." That sort of violence against the average black Jamaican woman along with the overwhelming responsibility of raising children single-handedly is the collective's raison d'etre. In Sydney as part of Standin' the Gaff, an international festival of popular theatre that runs to Saturday, Sistren has played to standing-room audiences at the University College of Cape Breton. The festival features 27 companies from the Caribbean, India, the United Kingdom, Nicaragua, Brazil and Canada. In Jamaica, Sistren is most often found in rural communities or even women's prisons performing and conducting workshops. The troupe finds the material for its skits and plays by travelling the island asking women about their lives.

The encounters also allow women to realize their common problems and, ideally, common solutions. Sistren's current touring production is a reggae dance-drama titled Muffet: Inna All a Wi. It's at Alumni Auditorium at the University of Ottawa on June 3 in two shows, at 6:30 and 9:30 p.m. It depicts the lives of four women, all named Muffet, and traces women's issues back to the days of slavery. The title, translated from the island's Patwah dialect, means Muffet is in all of us, or as the program notes: Jamaican women In 4 ''5? By Kirk Honeycutt Los Angeles Daily News Bethune crew back on set in China Citizen staff and news services MONTREAL Work has resumed on the set of Bethune: The Making of a Hero, the $16-million film epic being shot in China, following a one-day work stoppage Monday by the 40-member Canadian production crew to protest poor working conditions.

"This is the first western crew to shoot in such difficult locations in China," Kevin Tierney, the film's publicist, said Tuesday in a telephone interview here. "They are shooting in rural locations where tourists would not be allowed to go. It's really roughing it." On Monday, producers Peter Cronenberg and Nicholas Clermont were on the set at Yenan, a city west of Beijing, to negotiate an end to the dispute which had threatened to seriously delay work on the film, one of the most expensive Canadian productions ever undertaken. To improve working conditions, a New York caterer was flown in to provide better quality food while a Montreal doctor was dispatched to the scene to attend to the crew's medical needs. Bethune, Canada's first co-production with China, stars Donald Sutherland as Norman Bethune, the left-wing doctor from Graven-hurst, who became a hero of the Chinese Revolution in the '40s.

Crime book award MONTREAL Montreal writer Edward O. Phillips has won this year's Arthur Ellis Award, presented by the Crime Writers of Canada, for his novel Buried on Sunday. In winning the award which carries a $2,000 cash prize and a jeroboam of champagne, Phillips beat out such well known authors as Timothy Findley, Ted Wood and Eric Wright. The Arthur Ellis awards for 1986 also went to Memorial University professor Elliott Leyton for Hunting Humans, a non-fiction study of serial killers, and Medora Sale for the best first novel of the year, Murder on the Run. Dance scholarships Three local dance students have won scholarships from Dance Ottawa Danse on Bank Street.

Chantal Bissonnette, a 15-year-old student studying classical ballet at Ecole secondaire De La Salle, has won a $200 voucher. Louise Leroux, 23, a modern dance student at Le Groupe de la Place Royale, and Christina Blake, 21, at National Capital Dance Educators Inc. will each receive $50 vouchers. The awards will be presented by dancer Karen Kain in a private ceremony after the premiere performance of the National Ballet's production of The Merry Widow at the National Arts Centre tonight. Opry vets aided NASHVILLE, Tenn.

A private veterans' assistance centre will be able to expand its services, thanks to a benefit concert by Grand Ole Opry stars. "They really got into it," said Opry singer Jean Shepard. "It was a heart-touching thing. It just went great." Sunday's concert raised about $10,000 (U.S.) for Base Camp a non-profit organization that provides free counselling to veterans and their families, Shepard said. Penn charged LOS ANGELES Actor Sean Penn was charged with impaired driving after failing sobriety tests, police said.

Penn, 26, the husband of singer Madonna, was stopped by a patrol car early Monday. He failed both a field sobriety test and a breath test, and was booked and released on his own recognizance, police Lieut. Dan Cooke said Tuesday. Hands recalled LONG BEACH, Calif. Actress Lily Tomlin said on the first anniversary of Hands Across America, which raised $15 million U.S.

for the hungry and homeless in the United States, that the event had more than monetary value. "What happened was undoubtedly the proudest thing we could do, and the most saving thing for the planet," Tomlin said at a U.S. Memorial Day ceremony LOS ANGELES In her first film in more than two decades, Creepshow 2, Dorothy Lamour wears a plain dress and an apron, with no makeup and her hair in a mess. This, remember, is the woman who put on a sarong in 1936 and became a South Pacific pin-up for millions of men. "Well, at my age you can't lean against a palm tree and sing Moon of Monakoora," Lamour said recently.

"People would look at that and say, 'What is she trying to So there she is in the "Old Chief Wood'nhead" segment of Creepshow 2 which opens in Ottawa Friday playing the wife of general store proprietor George Kennedy and getting brutally murdered by three punks for all her trouble. "I got killed when I played a bag lady in the TV show Crazy Like a Fox too," she noted. "Are they trying to tell me something?" In an interview in her modest North Hollywood home, the spry and quick-witted veteran of 50 years in show business conceded she wasn't at all sure she wanted to perform in Creepshow 2 when the offer first came along. "But everybody talked me into it. Who's everybody? Well, my kids, my secretary Donna, my friends oh, and my agent." While movie appearances may be few and far between, Lamour's schedule is increasingly busy.

Since her husband's death nine years ago, the 72-year-old actress has performed her one-woman show all over the U.S., has made numerous personal appearances and has acted in plays such as Barefoot in the Park. "I want to work. When I retire, they should start digging my grave at Forest Lawn." Lamour's fan mail, which continues to flow steadily from all over the world, still focuses on her South Seas image. Yet this South Seas maiden is actually from New Orleans. Beginning her career as a singer in New York, she landed on NBC radio in a program called The Dreamer of Songs.

When NBC moved the show from New York to Los Angeles, Lamour went with them. At night she played the Clover Club in Hollywood, where a Paramount talent scout saw her and arranged a screen test. She was put in a sarong in her first movie, The Jungle Princess (1936), and even received star billing. Later, Paramount loaned her to Samuel Goldwyn for another island picture, Hurricane (1937), and by then she was known as the "Sarong Girl." (Her original sarong is now on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.) Lamour worked steadily in musicals, the famed "Road" pictures with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (beginning in 1940 with Road to Singapore) and in an occasional dramatic vehicle. But the sarong image remained despite the fact she wore the costume in only six of her 60 pictures.

"People think I wore a sarong in the 'Road' pictures. I didn't except as a joke I came up with for Road to Utopia. We were out in the Yukon, and I was dressed in a heavy parka. In one scene South Sea island music suddenly plays, and I fade from a parka into a sarong. Bob and Bing stare at this and say, 'Haven't we seen her somewhere "But thank God for that little piece of cloth.

The sarong I wore in pictures was like long underwear. In one picture (costume designer) Edith Head said to me, 'Let's do something different with your So I said OK. She made it into two pieces a bra and a skirt that covered the navel and went to mid-thigh. We shot with it that way for two days. Then the censors in the Hays office saw the rushes.

We had to re-shoot everything. I was showing too much skin!" Yet Lamour believes the film-makers of old, restricted though they were in terms of portraying sexuality, knew more about true eroticism than today's directors. "Let me say first that I am not a prude. But I don't approve of the nudity on the screen today. I think a woman is far more attractive in an evening dress, low cut in front so the cleavage shows, low cut in back, fit to her figure but leaving something to the imagination.

"I've been to colleges and asked young guys about this, and they say the same thing. The imagination is greater than the reality, I think." Asked whether her image as the Sarong Girl hurt her in gaining better roles, Lamour said, "I'm sure it did as I look back. But it didn't get in the way that much. I never thought I was a great dramatic actress. I liked to do drama, but I was no Bette Davis or Joan Crawford.

And now I do what I want to do." What she won't do but someone should really talk her into doing is her one-woman show in the Los Angeles area. "I won't do it here," she insisted. "I'm scared of the critics." The show consists of Lamour's singing, reminiscing and hosting a question-and-answer session with audiences. Some of those questions can be outrageous. "In Philadelphia somebody asked me if I wear stockings with garters or pantyhose.

I said, 'See for and pulled my skirt up. Then I said, 'That's the end of the porno for "Another person asked me once, 'How do you feel with so many of my leading men either bald or I said, Stratas named best actress for role in New York musical NEW YORK (AP) Fences by August Wilson was named best new play of the 1986-87 New York theatre season Tuesday by the Drama Deskr T-rrr association, which also i named Toronto-born singer Te 1 resa Stratas as best actress in a musical for her Broadway Bound. Robert Lindsay, star of the vintage British musical Me and My Girl, was named best actor in a musical. The Drama Desk is an association of New York drama critics, writers and reporters. The awards will be presented June 4.

Afe and My Girl and Les Mi-serables won five awards each. They shared an award for outstanding music, which went to Noel Gay for Me and My Girl and Claude-Michel Schonberg for Les Miserables. Howard Davies was named best director of a play for Les Liaisons Dangereuses Featured acting awards went to Mary Alice of Fences and John Randolph of Broadway Bound. role in Rags. Les Miserablesl I flmWl was nirkpn" as the season's out- Stratas standing new musical.

James Earl Jones, who plays an embittered ex-baseball player in Fences, was named best actor and Linda Lavin won the top actress award for her portrayal of a neglected mother in Neil Simon's Film board expands video program to cash in on VCR boom By Ian Bailey Citizen staff wnter i If Sweetheart, Canadian director Donald Brit-tain's hard-hitting docudrama about renegade labor leader Hal Banks. NFB shorts are being packaged as compilation films; a collection of brief movies on similar topics or by the same film-maker. Among the first is Eugene Levy Discovers Home Safety, which features the Canadian comic as an accident-prone victim of household mishaps who learns caution after watching three NFB cartoons on safety. "It's the kind of thing that people can take home and watch with their kids," says Richmond. The compilation packages 43 are now ready for distribution with 30 more being prepared for release solve a more fundamental problem, says Riche.

"The public is conditioned to look at long Hollywood features, but the NFB has short films, so we have compilations," says Riche. For more information on NFB video rentals, phone or visit the NFB at 150 Kent St. (996-4861). Reservations can be made between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.

and pickups made between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Rental fee is $2 a day plus tax. user. In the past, most NFB films were seen on 16mm film in schools or libraries.

Now, even those institutions are likely to have VCRs, says Richmond. The NFB has been involved in video rental since 1983. Last year, 15,000 to 20,000 titles were rented across Canada, a figure that Fred Riche, the national video officer for English programs, agrees is not high. But he is confident that the NFB is justified in the move to video for several reasons. As the video has surged, home users have grown tired of Hollywood products, he says.

It's a conclusion he bases on comments and inquiries from video retailers seeking new products. And now there are more machines in more homes, he says. "If we have a lot of visual material and our mandate is to interpret Canada, what could be more obvious than to put it in video form and make it available to the he says. Among the NFB productions now available are 90 Days; military historian Gwynne Dyer's The Defence of Canada series; Dark Lullabies, a documentary look at the impart of the Holocaust on a post-war generation of Jews and Germans; and Canada's In a move to take advantage of the increased number of video cassette recorders in Canadian homes, the National Film Board of Canada has expanded its video rental program. The number of NFB offices across Canada offering videos for purchase or rent has been boosted from nine to 23 and the number of English-language titles available here has been increased to 420 from 200 as old NFB films are transferred from film to videotape.

In Ottawa, more than 450 titles are available French as up from 360. New productions are being offered on both film and tape. NFB productions are still available in their traditional format on 16mm film, but the new emphasis on video represents an acceptance of the new way Canadians see films, say NFB representatives. "When the film board started in the '30s, we were the only game in town," says Terry Richmond, the Ottawa-based English programs distribution representative. "Now we're operating in a market where few people have projectors, but over 40 per cent have video cassette recorders.

So to reach people, we're getting into video to make it more accessible to the home faa MwwiiiiH I I ii mtmmi urn Jacob Siskind's The Arts column returns next week Eugene Levy as accident victim.