LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 75

A WEEKLY Dacpmttpr iV 6. FILM 75 Rare and seldom does such a film appear that is so great, ennobling and enduring, where the spell does not fade nor the emotion pass away, Steven Spielberg has made more than a movie a sonnet, a song, an odyssey, an emotional surge into a triumph of blinding brightness. It should be against the law not to see The Color Purple? -TODAY, NBC TV, Gene Shalit Sugarbaby A movie you will never forget! -SNEAK PREVIEWSINN, Jeffrey Lyons 99 Remarkable! A powerful movie! CHICAGO SUN TIMES, Roger Ebert 99 SUGARBABY A woman, 38 yaaFSiOl.tvety alone and very taff tjeyelops 3 crush op a 26-year-old blond, god of a subway driver and, seduces him into a spun-sugar world of dreams and delights. The premise of German writerdirector Percy Adlons wonderful film is intriguing enough. But the execution is even more startling.

Sugarbaby combines the most inevitable of German cinematic- tendencies characters as symbols, the camera as merciless voyeur, obsessively peering at the tragic relationship between the individual and the impersonal industrial society with a singularly un-Germanic offbeat goofiness. Marianne Sagebrecht is remarkable as the lonely mortician's assistant, whose immobile face is as dead as those of the corpses she handles every day, until love transforms it into a veritable Las Vegas of light winking, beaming, blinding its prey with the force of desire. Eisi Gulp is the perfect complement to his overwhelming seductress gentle, wistful, properly appreciative of her considerable gifts. One of the most refreshing things about this film is the way Marianne comes to be seen: not. as fat but as alluring, a woman with so much love to give that, like John Merrick, the elephant man, she becomes beautiful from the inside out.

Although the ending is rather -a hastefully wrapped up disappointment, Sugarbaby is intensely creative, passionately alive in the midst of corpses both living and dead. And special mention must be made of the use of color, which becomes a character in its own right bathing' faces and interiors in neon greens, purples, reds creating moods and disturbances as effectively as a highly charged work of modern art. Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Mary Beth Crain A STEVEN SPIELBERG FILM Alice Wfalkerk Pulitzer Prize Winning Story WARNER BROS. Pre a STEVEN SPIELBERG Rim THE COLOR PURPLE s.amg DANNY GLOVER ADOLPH CAESAR MARGARET AVERY RAE DAWN CHONG and introducing WHOOPI GOLDBERG aSch. Director of Photography ALLEN DAVIAU Production Designer J.

MICHAEL RIVA Film Editor MICHAEL KAHN, AC.E. Music QUINCY JONES Based upon the novel by ALICE WALKER Screenplay by MENNO MEYJES Executive Producers JON PETERS and PETER GUBER Produced by STEVEN SPIELBERG KATHLEEN KENNEDY FRANK MARSHALL QUINCY JONES twa by STEVEN SPIELBERG 1 Soundtrack on Qwest Records and Tapes! Read the Pocket Book SHARE THE JOY NOW COSTA MESA UKEWOOD MONTCLAIR PASADENA REDONDO BEACH SAN BERNARDINO Edwards South Lakewood Center Pacific's Montclair Pacific's Hostings GCC South Bay AMC Commercenter Coast Plaza 531-9580 714624-9696 818796-7111 Cinema 370-6396 714888-1400 714546-2711 CHECK THE AIR! DIRECTORIES 0 CAU FOR SHOWTIMES SHERMAN OAKS Pacific 4 818990-4140 OUT OF AFRICA Surprise! A movie I thought I'd hate has turned out to be one of the smartest, most enjoyable big-screen romances in years. Out of Africa has everything going against it, going in. Based on a famous book (by Isak Dinesen), starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, directed.by Sydney Pollack all the ingredients of the Hollywood "mausoleum effect," blockbuster safety and Oscar-baiting respectability. Yet it works.

Karen von Blixen (later known to the world as Isak Dinesen) was a woman of tremendous complexity; sensuous, strong, archfeminine, fiercely independent, steeped in old-world values. She needed a continent the size of Africa to overwhelm her, just to get away from herself. She was one of life's great actresses, and Streep gives her most ingenious performance to date just keeping up with her. Similarly, Karen's lover Denys Finch Hatton was a 21st-century man born a hundred years too early: intensely private, wide open like a lens set at infinity, proud in his solitude but hungering (more than he knew) for a home, he needed a place the size of Africa to become himself in. He was one of life's natural heroes, and Redford is in his perfect element playing him.

He is always at his strongest when he is at his most watchful, drinking in the world with that big blue stare and not giving anything back (for if he did, the world would devour him). There is a particularly sad, stirring authority in his voice when he says, late in the film: "I don't want to die discovering I've lived somebody else's life." All the dialogue in Kurt Luedke's screenplay has the bright, succinct gravity of familiar things said afresh. Likewise, director Pollack loads on the gorgeous scenery and in passages of languorous, veldtlike stillness but he never sends us any picture postcards. It may be that Africa is so otherworldly that it simply overpowers visual cliches, but I credit Pollack for being alive to the place's surprises. The link binding all his films Electric Horseman, Tootsie is that, even at their most farcical and preposterous, you are always inside them emotionally.

The same holds true here: Again and again. Pollack locates the human feeling under all that majesty. fAvco Center, Cinerama Dome, Hlywd.) F.X. Feeney Rttunlad in BALDWIN HILLS Baldwin Complex 290-1991 ORANGE CHiedome 714634-2553 SANTA BARBARA Riviera 805965-6188 PALM DESERT Town Center 619340-6611 DOLBY STEREO SOtltV. NO PASSES ACCEPTED THIS ENGAGEMENT kVlJt 1 1 ttt i-.