The Province from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 167

The Province Friday. OCT. 19, 1990 11 AT THE MOVIES THE MAKING OF BETHUNE ENDS WRITER'S LIFELONG OBSESSION has yet to be told, says MICHAEL WALSH If But the real story he opening is I borrowed from Gandhi. In their thousands, the Chinese gather to mourn "Bai Chu En," the Canadian battlefield surgeon who worked and died with Mao 3 Tse-tung's Eighth Route Army. We see them in silent procession, following his body as it is borne down from the Wu Tai mountains.

In 1982, the motion picture Gandhi chronicled the life of an Indian lawyer, the moral force behind his nation's drive for independence. Bethune: The Making of a Hero is the story of a doctor who combined medical skills with social ideals to become a symbol of selfless service to the Chinese people. Little known in his own country, Dr. Norman Bethune is honored as an official hero of Mao's revolution, a secular saint revered by a quarter of the world's population. The process by which the Bethune film came to be made also recalls Gandhi.

Like Gandhi producer-director Richard Attenborough, Bethune biographer Ted Allan was obsessed with the idea of bringing his hero's story to the screen. Attenborough struggled for 20 years to realize his dream. For Allen, a left-wing journalist who had served alongside Bethune in the Spanish Civil War, it would take the better part of his life. In 1941, two years after Bethune's death in the Sino-Japanese conflict, Allan produced his first film treatment, selling it to Twentieth Century-Fox. Canadian-born actor Walter Pidgeon was studio boss Darryl Zanuck's choice for the Bethune role.

Not unexpectedly, Fox lost interest in the project during the post-war "red scare." The writer persevered, publishing his Bethune biography, The Scalpel, the Sword (co-wntten with Sydney Gordon), in 1952. Allan, lacking Attenborough's administrative genius, could not produce or direct a feature film on his own. The realization of his dream would require other hands and more than 40 years of deal-making and disappointment. Attenborough's story has a Hollywood ending. A popular triumph, his Gandhi feature swept the 1983 Academy Awards.

The Allen saga lacks that sort of wow finish. Bethune, the film based on his original screenplay, is less exciting than its subject, a rather pedestrian historical biography that suffers from the apparent absense of any grand artistic plan. A book could be written and probably will be on the Bethune project's long and troubled history. What matters to the film-goer, though, is the film that ultimately reaches the screen. In its final form, Bethune is a reminder of better movies.

The Gandhi opening is used to set up a Citizen Kane-like situation. "My name is Chester Rice." says the picture's host-narrator. "I'm a journalist." To get the story on citizen Beth, Rice (Colm Feore) conducts interviews that segue into flashbacks. Bethune's widow Frances (Helen Mirren) recalls their two marriages. Various other associates describe incidents from his life in Montreal, Saranac Lake and Madrid.

Interwoven is the tale of his heroic efforts on behalf of the beleaguered Chinese. The awkward, occasionally confusing narrative structure subverts Donald Sutherland's intense, dynamic performance in the title role. An artist as obsessed with Bethune as Allan, Sutherland appreciates the complexity of the character. His Bethune reflects the passion and commitment of the man, an Ontario-born son of missionaries who found his own inner strength and used it to break free from the closed, colonialist Canadian mindset. A humanitarian and medical innovator, he was a doctor with a devotion to life and an appetite for love.

Bethune's need to make a real difference found expression in physical bravery and intellectual achievement. For the most part, these elements are lost in director Phil Borsos's depressingly clinical tip-toe through the tale's dramatic highlights. Lost, too, is the essence of Bethune. Everything that Bethune was '-'V 1 Zhang Ke Yaw (Chairman Mao) and Donald Sutherland (Bethune) in Bethune: The Making eff a Hero, which opens here today. proceeded not from political ideology, but from the fact that he was a healer.

This was at the core of his being and is the key to his greatness. It is the story that remains to be told. Rated Mature with the warning "occasional violence and coarse language," Bethune: The Making of a Hero opens today at the Vancouver Centre, Dunbar, Richport and Station Square Cinemas..