Calgary Herald from Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 73

CALGARY HERALD Feb. 6, 1986 F7 Chinese approve script showing hero's failings Lady Jane's launch worries maker ill Vvm y. 1 'If A I was able to help Allan elaborate on certain scenes in the script, including a meeting in a cave between Mao and Bethune during which the Chinese leader teased the Canadian by offering him wine and hot peppers. Allan has chosen to tell the Canadian doctor's life story through the characters of Bethune's wife, Frances, and the character of a journalist based on Allan himself. "Bethune and I had a very stormy father-son relationship.

I had hero-worshipped him, but became totally disillusioned in Spain his heavy drinking he got violent, and abusive and unpleasant." Allan admits that for years, he did not believe that Bethune had changed during his stay in China and had even stopped drinking. "But I have spent a lot of time in China and there is no question that he stopped drinking, totally. In China, Bethune became this man of legends that the Chinese hold him to be." Recalling Frances Campbell Penney, whom Bethune married three times and who died years later in an Edinburgh mental hospital, Allan related in a soft voice: "She was an exceptionally intelligent woman, she was the daughter of an Edinburgh chief justice and grew up very The Chinese green light on Allan's script is a significant development in the mounting of a Bethune movie, a saga which has long obsessed a competitive clutch of Canadian film-makers, principally Kotcheff, John Kemeny and Norman Jewison. Allan's own involvementas a script-writer goes back to 1940 when he began writing a 180-page treatment of Bethune's life, which he sold to Twentieth Century-Fox. His personal involvement goes back even further.

Allan met Bethune when he was just 18 and later served as the battlef-ront surgeon's political officer in the Spanish Civil War. "I just couldn't be more pleased that the Chinese approved," crowed the 70-year-old, silver-bearded playwright, novelist and Hollywood screenwriter who is back in his hometown to meet with the Chinese. "Because this time, I haven't held anything back about Bethune. I was obsessed with him while he was alive and became even more obsessed after his death." Completed earlier this year, Allan's script traces Bethune's life in Montreal as a brilliant thoracic surgeon who became so outraged by fascism that he joined the Communist party and went off to aid the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, he went to China to join Mao Tse-Tung's guerrilla fighters and in the space of two years is credited with saving countless lives, training Chinese doctors and uplifting the soldiers' moral by his dedication.

Bethune died in 1939 at 49 of blood poisoning after cutting his finger during an operation on a Chinese soldier. Chinese screenwriter Li Bai MONTREAL (CP) China has approved a movie script by writer Ted Allan which will reveal the mercurial temperament, alcoholism and stormy personal life of Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian surgeon revered as a hero of the Communist revolution. Chinese movie star Wang Xin Ging, who doubles as head of the Peoples Liberation Army film studio, agrees that Allan's script, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, will show the Chinese people a side of their hero they were unaware of. "In this film he will be a great hero," observed Wang during an interview, "but he will also be a man with shortcomings and weak points." A Chinese film delegation, headed by Li Zhimin, head of China's Film Co-Production returned to Peking after reaching an agreement in principle on a $10-million movie epic and TV mini-series which could go before the cameras in China as early as September.

Donald Sutherland, who played Bethune in a CBC television production, and has lobbied for years for the movie role would be a shoo-in to star with Hollywood-Canadian Ted Kot-cheff as director. Partners in the proposed Bethune project are Montreal's Filmline International the China Film Co-Production and French producer Jacques Dorfman (Quest for Fire). A broadcast agreement has been reached with the CBC, but Telefilm, the federal agency, has not yet committed itself to financing. The movie would be shot in China, Spain and Canada with the Chinese providing actors and technical and logistical services during the four-month shoot in their country. Gary Elwes and Helena Bonham Carter in Lady Jane THE BAY CORRECTION Roto 1-2 delivered with paper Feb.

5th. Page 2223: Item 1, Reg. price should be $22.00, not $24.00. Items 2 and 3 will be arriving late. We regret any inconvenience this may cause our Bay customers.

By Jamie Portman (Southam News) LOS ANGELES Can the old-fashioned historical romance make the grade with today's predominantly young film audiences? That's the burning question facing Canadian-born producer Peter Snell, who admits he's edgy about the upcoming launching of a sumptuous new costume epic called Lady Jane. "Naturally I'm nervous about public reaction to Jane," Snell tells reporters. "You end up saying to yourself: 'you have a wonderful romantic story here involving kids who are. in their teens is it going to end up playing to a Snell, whose past producing credits include the cult thriller The Wicker Man and the Charlton Heston version of Antony and Cleopatra, admits that the salvation of Lady Jane could be its built-in teenage component. The central character of this 16th-century Tudor drama is an adolescent Lady Jane Grey, who at the age of 15 was bullied into marriage with 17-year-old Lord Guilford Dudley and then manoeuvered onto the throne of England.

She reigned as Queen for nine days before she was deposed by the forces supporting the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor. She and her husband were later executed in the Tower of London. Snell, a native Calgarian who has been producing film and television in England for more than 20 years, admits that the historical genre hasn't really worked at the box office since the triumphs of Fred Zinne-mann's A Man For All Seasons and Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in the 1960. He's painfully conscious of the disastrous attendance figures for the recent King David (a historical clinker that boasted a supposedly sure-fire box office commodity in Richard Gere) and for director Hugh Chariots Of Fire) Hudson's Revolution, which flopped despite the presence of Al Pacino. But Snell also bluntly states that Lady Jane is a good deal better than either of those and that the production can be sold to a wide range of audiences from teens to Masterpiece Theatre buffs.

Furthermore, there's a lot of impressive talent involved in the making of this film. It features two gifted newcomers 18-year-old Helena Bonham Carter and 23-year-old Gary Elwes as the star-crossed young lovers. It marks the motion picture directorial debut of theatre giant Trevor Nunn, the man who staged Cats and Nicholas Nick-leby. The screenplay is by David Edgar, the man who adapted Nickleby for the theatre. Nunn's involvement was a decisive factor in Paramount's decision to finance Lady Jane.

"There was a problem in finding an American studio with the guts to risk money on an English costume movie," Snell says, "but the youth element in the story did help me when I was putting together the project. "But the major breakthrough was getting Trevor Nunn. At the start, Trevor was terrified at being in such an alien medium. Now he wants to make more films. He's been bitten by the bug." The stunning supporting cast has been enlisted largely from the ranks of Nunn's own Royal Shakespeare Company.

For example, award-winning veteran John Wood plays the crucial role of the anti-papist Duke of Northumberland, the ambitious schemer who marries 15-year-old Jane off to his son as part of his plot to make the reluctant girl Queen of England and thereby keep Mary Tudor off the throne. Finally, the movie is a visual knockout: in order to ensure authenticity, filming took place in no less than 11 Tudor castles and stately homes around Nevertheless, Paramount is marketing the film carefully, with an initial limited release this weekend in only 12 North American cities, including Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. The aim is for the film to develop a reputation through good reviews and word of mouth before advancing to further engagements. Snell became enthused about the forgotten tragedy of Lady Jane Grey several years ago when he was researching a television series on the lives of Britain's monarchs. Shakespeare never hesitated to fudge on some of the facts in his history plays, and neither do the makers of Lady Jane.

Snell admits that although the basic historical narrative involving Lady Jane Grey's forced marriage and her brief nine-day reign is accurate, the film's central thesis that the relationship between these two teens, wed to each other against their will, moves from one of hostility to profound love is more legend than fact. "What we have is a romantic legend of two young people who were so in love they preferred to die together rather than betray one another," Snell says. Furthermore, despite its 16th-century setting, the film's' concerns sound a common chord with many preoccupations of today's young people. Its two teenage lovers are depicted as innocent victims of their parents, of the ruling establishment and ultimately of religious and social conflict. HeyKuk! Herald carriers earn excellent fi i If you're over 12, you can start your own business and earn good money delivering Calgary Heralds.

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