The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 68

4 lively arts Monday May 7 1979 THE MIAMI HERALD Just Sloppy URUldMtiK 1 -u-l v- Vs- i 10651 Rise Blvd Miami 893-0635 3540 Main Flwy 1 Coconut Grove Ila l) 448 0633 TAURUS OPEN I OR I I NCH cwrlhp Jk Se1 Janet Margolin Roy Sclieitler in Call for reservations By BILL COSFORD Hraid Suit Wrlttr It's not your eerydav spy story The secret agent goes to his message drop a department-store cosmetic counter to pick up his next assignment iinwir After an fX' mil Vlt change of code phrases he leaves with a special lipstick dismantles it in a nearby phone booth and finds there's no message inside So he returns to the counter and in the best tradition of the dissatisfied customer says there must be some mistake and demands another lipstick not your everyday love story The young woman whose love affair begins a la The Goodbe Girl when a strange man says he is the rightful tenant in her apartment steps out of love long enough for a murderous fling in Niagara Falls where she dresses up as her late grandmother a New York prostitute AND NOT a very good movie either It's Last Embrace half thriller and half love story whose improbabilities and curiosities onlv begin with these unlikely scenes They end in a flurry of loose OPENS TOMORROW AT 8:30 vague sort of secret agent (his exact role and what side on are never revealed) He loses his wife to a hail of gunfire in the opening moments spends some time in a sanitarium recovering from the shock and returns to his New York apartment to find a young anthropologist (Margolin) living there She has sublet the place from his employers (whom we see only in the person of Christopher Walken in a small role) At one point dlrty-tricks associates decide too shaky and order him killed But bv this time a very different menace has arisen a threat delivered in Biblical Hebrew and having its roots In a passage from Deuteronomy on the visitation of death Tracing this mystery takes Scheider to Biblical scholars and a body of Jewush investigators trying to solve the deaths of other Jews who received similar messages all dow'nhill from there Despite some solid performances particularly and that of Sam Levene one of Last Embrace unravels quickly and sloppily The business of cloak-and-dagger background turns out to be a large and rather obvious red herring and is simplv dropped halfway through the film That the contract on life is never removed or resolved is onlv the most pesky of the loose ends on view The climactic chase scene placed out against Niagara Falls is hopelessly muzzy we leallv know just why Scheider is chasing and what do with his quarrv once he wins Perhaps he merely wants an honest plot LAST EMBRACE Is ratM It contains soma obscenity nudity end scenes suggesting sexual TONY AWARD WINNER! ends and confusion and In between we are left wondering Just what Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin are up to and hether director Jonathan Demme ever found out himself apparent is that Demme whose recent Band was one of the sleeper successes of 1978 has entered his Hitchcock phase Last Embrace is laden with ersatz Hitchcock and some of the classic devices double identity murder in the bell tower panoramic background for the climactic chase scene have been trotted out To his credit Demme manages the scenes In a physical sense But the screenplay by David Shaber (The Warriors) is so confused and confusing by turns that the best stuff goes nowhere Hence when Scheider his life already threatened by a mysterious message receives another directing him to meet an unnamed person "in the tower courtyard" we know just going to happen even while we struggle to divine hy the character SCHEIDER TLAYS a rather jrtusica1 Alas Nothing Nevr Soutt CALL NOW TO CHARGE BY PHONE siaSWij Open 7 Days 442-4000 Times Tiles Wed I Thurs Eves al 8 30 Sat al 6 Sun al 7 30 S12 50 S10 00 S8 50 Fu at 8 30 Sal at 9 30 $14 50 $12 00 $9 50 Sun al 3 S10 50 $8 00 $7 00 For Group Sales only call loll free 1 800 223 8052 i in 1 Qpiayltci 3500 Main Hiqhway Coconut Grove a V' Of El i BROILED or FRIED discard two men In a bar accost others (in a hilarious male-chauvm-ism-in-reerse sequence) and endure a roust by police for sleeping on park benches They also fight and make up while challenging each conceptions of live love and happiness THE PREGNANT Kaja takes the brunt of much of this as she appears the more happily married and hence the more vulnerable to feminist rediscovery "I'm as liberated as I want to she says under attack by her friends though she has kept a nervous vigil for signs of her husband during their nights on the town unintended irony is the closest Wives comes to real revelation By its end we suspect that these women have somehow changed but we have not seen dramatic evidence aside from their occasional quarrels The three head home very little enlightened And so do we i 1 i i I fe- hibit and prohibit it is also secure and it provides a natural base for the growth of a family which can have unique rewards So Wives tells us IT TAKES the three central characters of Wives longer to find these things out than it does an audience to anticipate them and a' problem Anne Marie Ottersen Katja Medboe and Froydis Armand deliver attractive performances during their odyssey from oppression to momentary liberation but there is little more to the film than their presence onscreen Energized by the emotional confusion of a lOth-year school reunion (in Husbands the catalyst was the death of a mutual friend) the three wives decide not to return home but to try a few days on the town Mie (Ottersen) is the unhappily married mother of three Kaja (Medboe) is solidly married affluent the mother of one and pregnant with a second Heidrun (Armand) the most interesting character is childless separated and unhappily floating from Job to job During their outing they manage to drink a great deal pick up and By BILL COSrORD Hraid Staff Wntr It Is not quite fair to say that if seen Husbands you needn't bother with Wives But close to the truth Husbands John 1970 MOV film about three men off on a ben- REVIEW way lTZ spouses and homes is different enough in look and detail from Wives Anja 1975 Norwegian film about three women on a similar spree But in theme and sensibility the two movies are mates Wives opened over the weekend for a one-week run at the Cinema Take One in Coral Gabies and had the films been paired as a double feature we might well have had in one theater enough painfully extracted revelation about the nature of marriage to restart the Sexual Revolution As it is Wives has much to say about the female often feminist side of marriage but precious little of that is startling or even particularly fnsightful Marriage can be stultifying it can in t'i i w' Tl Gnu iG the vti me rio'icouj Pacific dolphui biouht tor you it the prsi ot it bount'fu! fUur You vdl is ft! in it tainj goodne gg ald bar delight in cl i the bt iesood barCain you Can tnd AficrJrtidi Hole cur thirt wrth our famoiij t-r 1 erroni! Gr03 rvnJ yo-j wni lM the Prince ot Pi! nr rand a'i fi be reiht itb the MON TUBS Consul the yellow tor your re-yreut locution V-xixg WIVES rated It contain om obictnttv and mei nudity It play at Cinema Take One 4120 Lacuna St coral Gable In Norwegian with English tubtt tie Gregory Brings a Treat to Miami tempi could have been synchronized better with the guest artists Both John Biaisdell as Widow Simone and Rich McCarthy as the doltish Alain gave convincing performances THE ECLECTIC Miami Ballet corps is composed of young dancers each trying very hard The girls expecially have very different movement styles good legs and not much continuity of movement in the upper body Also on the program repeated Sunday afternoon was Robert Sythians and the Serene which is nothing more choreo-graphically than a collecting of leaps and turns though I enjoved watching young David DeLoach who has great potential and incredible leaps Patricia Strauss gave a solid performance in the knifelike arm circles and spinning energy of Variaciones Concertantes Fernando Rujones perfect position makes him so Bruce conducting of the orchestra was musical but his ON STAGE am hi ALL MM'K -J A NUDE REVUE PLUS 3 xxx XIOVIRS COKT 10 AMTO 2 IM OPEN ALL NITE ADULT FILM FESTIVAL NJSSTCATIM NUDE REVUE FOR THE LADIES MR EXOTIC AIEXI ft the time to see what a big improvement a phone can make in just about any room in your house discover how our many different phone styles and colors can add a special decorative touch to your home Explore some new phone services that will make your everyday living more convenient and pick up all sorts of useful phone aids and information Come in now dunng Phone Improvement Time Because every home has a room for improvement By LAURIE HORN Harald Stall Writ Cynthia Gregory prima ballerina of the American Ballet Theater chose Miami for her premiere as Lise in La Fille Mai Gardce Satur- day night and ninr her experiment UANlt was treat On television Miami audiences had been able to see supple fluid Gregory and high-leaping hometown prince Fernando Bujones go through their high aristocratic paces in ABT's Sleeping Beauty just three days before their guest visit with the Miami Ballet at Dade County Auditorium But Fille is about as anti-aristocratic a ballet as you can get a fluffy French provincial charmer in fact Watching the ABT couple shed their courtly manner here to take up petty-bourgeois farce was a real lesson in stylistics GREGORY DID it with superb artistry Her performance as the giddy pouty naively love-happy Lise was an unbroken stream of elegant simplicity It was a tasteful fusion of virtuoso lyric technique and convincing character acting Her movement is precise but it has a soft edge about it When she slips away from supporting finger to hold an arabesque for an impossibly long length of time the audience does not see her harden the balance into a rigid form poised in space Instead she carries no excess tension She is a human a peasant girl in love who happens to pause in arabesque at the highest level of her energy The choreography for Lise does not focus on balances and pinpoint rapid-fire toe work Despite its revision in the court of the czars it emphasizes little jumps and hops It is all transition and Gregory keeps each gesture growing until the next one starts The role requires as much acting as dancing and mime is clear and simple But she conveys most of the emotional changes through her facial expressions from a pout to a glare to a conniving look to a sweet blushing gullible smile BUJONES IS less comfortable with the comic acting required from the enamored peasant Colin although he seemed glad to be basking in the warmth of an audience of hometown fans His interpretation of Colin in acting passages is growing We see a peasant lad with a country swagger a bit diffident still but certainly far less formal far more relaxed than the crisply perfect prince of Sleeping Beauty But transition between acting the enamored youth and the dancing of his astounding airborne variation in Act I Scene II is still too sharp Bounding into the air crisscrossing his legs in blinding beats he is still gorgeously the prince Something in the high lift out of the hips the emphasis on PLUS ADULT MOVIES -W mw w-j i I'Jt fin IMPROVE YOUR FRII PARKING IMPROVE YOUR BEDROOM 4isywwaB IMPROVE YOUR FAMILY ROOM Anwk an (awiii 11 'iis The Gindlestu pi ione adds a touch of the flair of the 30s to the fashion of the 70s TheTnmlme waliphone puts a lot of convenience in a little space The Antique Gold phone is an unabasl ledly ornate version of tl ie classic cradle phone P(x'Unp( Trade-t of Ai roncr obons Corpci fltion fi-Restercd Trademark of American Tuephone Tt rraph Company Trademd4 Of Anencanle econ muniacorts Corporabon tv 4 Southern Bell BE CHOOSEY SHOP YOUR PHONECENTER STORE MIAMI: At Bodega when the sun goes down so do our prices VI i it i It Ik uv u-n tn en i rkr Jn ti 10 on Sun atij i-t ft tl The bunJ tuner dir ner -pr dv Sirkh wiki dinner -iJ I tint: the O' (tne-t qinlirv 1 1 el nj iei- 'merit in 1 re-V Gtr i It urlt nr h' plm dll the truni'iit dtavuy from vunnp sun Jim ter'ipnnj pru KM Surh Dixie Hi 1 me l-emeen 5ai J6 30 uav South lnnn G1I MnnJa' through Tliursdi or 4 30 30 St Miami Tire American Express Card leave home without if 10 ne Bkd 18301 Miami Avenue 1390 1st Sheet CORAI GABLES: 2300 Ponce de Leon IT PILRCL: 3300 Okeci hohee Hoad I HAIi iM I 190 Hialeah Duve- lfGOW Obth Sheet MIAMI BLACI 1500 Lenox Avenue NOR! 1 1 MIAMI: 8 J23 2nd Avenue STUART: S21 Join son Avenue 3ul Court.