The Sacramento Bee from Sacramento, California • 89

Jf Ji Ml i ock Is Better Than Ever By George Williams Bee Reviewer Rear one of the late Alfred Hitchcock's finest movies and most gripping thrillers is back in a new Technicolor print with a first-rate soundtrack and Just as satisfying as when first released in 1954 The stars Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly are at their best with this sophisticated crisply written script by radio dramatist John Michael Hayes Movie Review probably best collaborator Just the idea of an expert writer of pictureless dialogue married to a master of camera movements is in- triguing Hitchcock was also a master in knowing his audiences and "Rear is the best example of a Hitchcock movie that Involves those watching it in the criminal conduct of its protagonist and in the dark side of human nature that wishes with all its might that an innocent person be killed In "Rear Window" Stewart plays a magazine photographer confined in his apartment in a wheelchair recuperating from a broken leg To break the boredom he spies on his neighbors across a courtyard through a rear window using binoculars and the supertelescopic lens of his camera As he watches he becomes convinced that one of his neighbors (Raymond Burr) has killed his ill wife He involves his visiting lover (Kelly) and his nurse (Thelma Ritter) in his investigation of the suspected killing when his detective best friend (Wendell Corey) refuses to get into it at all accusing Stewart of voyeurism and invasion of privacy Of course by now we are right with him spying away and hoping the wife has been murdered not only itchy about the murder but about the secret lives of a childless couple devastated by the death of their little dog an energetic young dancer a lonely woman (Judith Evelyn) thinking about suicide a failed composer (Ross Bagdasa-rian) young newlyweds who make love all day long As Ritter says all abunch of peeping By the time reaches its climax all guilty either directly or by encouraging the criminal act of burglary and breaking-and-entering trespassing peeping Tomism and at least a dozen counts of invasion of privacy And of course we are in the grip of a mountain of suspense and irresistible entertainment created by Hitchcock In the sets the music the acting the script this is a nearly perfect film by one of the best commercial filmmakers in the history of the movies commercial meaning that he made his films with his audience in mind that he always knew what they wanted drama in England suspense in the United States and he delivered A Hitchcock film regularly brought in at least four times as much money as it cost to make The reason we seen it either on television or at the theater in more than two decades is that Hitchcock himself ordered withdrawn from circulation All prints were destroyed and the negative was locked away He thought it had been seen enough He was wrong REAR WINDOW Producer-director: Alfred Hitchcock Screenplay: John Michael Hayes from the short story Had To be by Cornell Woolrich Photography: Robert Burks Music: Franz Waxman Editor: George Tomasini Sound: Harry Lindgreen and John Cope Cast: Jimmy Stewart Grace Kelly Raymond Burr Thelma Ritter Wendell Corey Judith Evelyn Ross Bagdasarian (PG) Tower Special to the Bee Timothy Hutton visits Amanda Plummer portraying his sister who has been institutionalized following a suicide attempt in Film Address Guilt Of Rosenbergs 6 5 Fine Screen Performances save By George Williams Bee Reviewer Sidney is a fictionalized telling of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg story with a first-rate performance by young Oscar winner Timothy Hutton as the surviving son trying to prove his innocence The Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair in 1953 after being convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians movie is based on the 1971 book by EL LUMET DOES VERY LITTLE in to quiet those critics who say his movies are just series of loud angry conversations But though there is no point of view about the larger question of the guilt there is plenty of fingering at the hyposcrisy and injustice in American life that is at the heart of all Lumet movies from Angry his first through Fugitive of the and the documentary he made with Joseph Mankeiwicz about Martin Luther King He is a great filmmaker whose movies should be seen and seen again Again Lumet uses natural settings in the city of New York to great advantage in telling his story The photography by Andrzej Bartkowiak is terrific Especially memorable for those whose childhood was spent in finding nocks and dark corners as hideaways from the meanness and unreason of adults is a scene in which the young Daniel and Susan escape from an orphanage and walk from the Bronx to Brooklyn to find their home They find the building but as Susan says "It (their home) Movie Review yer are wonderful and as a result painful to watch The story is told in a series of multilayered flashbacks from the point of view of Daniel Isaacson (Hutton) The fate of his parents has driven him into a state of surface indifference especially telling in light of his activism and continual pressing for the truth about the charges their parents were Russian spies When Susan is driven to madness and to an attempt at suicide Daniel finally breaks out and launches a major attempt to uncover the facts about his parents Included is study of capital punishment to discover how his parents must have suffered when they died He finds that each new method of capital punishment adopted through the centuries was intended to be a progressively more humane attempt to relieve suffering For example he finds that drawing-and-quartering was used in England against commoners that the victims were first hanged then disemboweled Their entrails were burned in front of them Then their bodies were hacked into quarters The parts were fed todogs But this was considered more humane than the previously accepted method Although search for the truth is an impossible quest he does finally realize that his pursuit of social justice is part of a great family tradition and that his own life now has a purpose and a meaning that is worthy of selfesteem That Hutton is able to get this across is the mark of a terrific actor confirming the Academy Award won by the young actor for Doctorow about a couple named Paul and Rochelle Isaacson who are executed in the electric chair in 1953 after being convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians Both Lumet and Doctorow who also wrote the screenplay for say they are not telling the Rosenberg story but of course they are Although never gets to the heart of the case whether the Rosenbergs-Isaacsons were guilty and thus will be accused of having no guts no passion it does present a gripping account of the story And it presents screen performances that are awesome In addition to Hutton as Daniel Lindsay Crouse as Rochelle Amanda Plummer as Susan sister) Mandy Patinkin as Paul and Ed Asner as the Isaacson family friend and law DANIEL From Paramount Pictures Producer: Burtt Harris Executive producers EL Doctorow and Sidney Lumet Director: Lumet Screenplay Doctorow from his novel "The Book of Photography: Andrzej Bartkowiak Production design: Philip Rosenberg Editor: Peter Frank Costumes Anna Hill Johnstone Cast: Timothy Hutton Edward Asner Mandy Patinkin Lindsay Crouse Joseph Leon Amanda Plummer Ellen Barkm Tovah Feldshuh John Rubinstein Maria Tuccl (R) Tower Heston Not A Saint In four decades in the history of Delano a fictional southern town that serves as a microcosm for the drastic sociological changes taking place all over the South Linking the individual stories of the chiefs is a string of unsolved murders And linking everything and everyone is Heston who is first seen in 1924 as a young banker and state senator who founds the town of Delano Through 1962 when the story ends he is the steadying force to whom all of the protagonists come for advice He also narrates the film By Lawrence Eisenberg Newsday Charlton HESTON attacks his steak with the same zeal he displayed while reducing his opponent Messala to the human equivalent in the classic chariot race in mostly play saints and geniuses says the man who has been Moses Michelangelo John the Baptist and Presidents Jefferson Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt Fans who want to see him in a very different kind of role will get their chance at 9 pm Sunday Tuesday and Wednesday on the CBS six-hour mystery-drama character Hugh Holmes is not the central Heston says over lunch in the dining room of New Regency Hotel the guy the story is about but in this case the mover and shaker in the town The story is about the He is referring to the three police chiefs who span I UGH HOLMES represents an absolutely unique says Heston are four acceptable categories of villains in prime-time network programming: bankers businessmen politicians and military men over the rank of major the higher the rank the worse they are not villains jerks Hugh Holmes is a banker a businessman a politician and yet a good guy And One wonders whether Heston is rationalizing whether he have preferred playing one of the chiefs (portrayed by Wayne Rogers Brad Davis and Billy Dee Williams) role is more he says I a sucker for parts where I get to age 40 years and put on rubber wrinkles and white wigs and the accent all that stuff Holmes has a line near the end that kind of sums up his somewhat detached structural function in the story (Heston assumes a Southern accent): always get my way but I always get my Heston has managed to do just that throughout his career In 1963 he joined a group that included Marlon Brando James Baldwin Paul Newman and Harry Bela-fonte in a civil-rights demonstration in Washington was the civil rights he says was very proud of Newspapers at the time quoted him as saying here as private citizens rather than public a statement that seems self-defeating for world-famous figures was a phrase I used often" says the star had been active in civil-rights demonstrations for two years by then but I was also president of the Screen Actors Guild and I wanted to make it clear that I was not speak- fnr lha iininn hnt nnlv fnr mvcplf ns I had a richt to mg 1U1 ItiV WtivU do is the point been making to Ed Asner for two years" (In 1982 after Asner was elected to the presidency of the union Heston challenged him for not See HESTON Page F5 An Irreverent Comedy By William Glackia Bee Reviewer If COMMEDIA is going to work in the late 20th century it is people like the Arte Players Company whose Tlipntpr they necessarily go around in the traditional guise of Harlequin Pierrot and the other stock characters of the classic Italian style or the Best obviously has a script and a rather crafty one But those early Italian improvisers would certainly recognize the targets And so of course would Moliere The program says that this play is by the comedies of Moliere" and the great 17th century master of comedy would most certainly have relished the ideas since See MALPRACTICE Page which operates its own theater and school in of all places tiny Blue Lake in Humboldt County and which also tours to such places as San Francisco and Los Angeles (where one of its shows sold out for five weeks) is dedicated to the same kind of buffoonery trickery irreverence and slapstick for which commedia has been well- 1 At 1 iU Tm ai miuwii since me iuiu cciuuijr uu time we know it best from the San Francisco Mime Troupe to which some of the Players have a connection Like the Mime J'roupe however 7 -A is playing at the Eaglet Theater through Nov 27 who are going to do the trick This small professional troupe Special to the Bee a) Charlton Heston.