Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 110

Frick shows loaned Fragonard drawings By Amei Wallach The Frick Collection already has the finest set of paintings by Jean-Honore Fragonard in this country. Now the museum has announced that its panels by the 18th-Century French painter will be joined from April 21 to June 3 by a loan exhibit of 50 Fragonard drawings organized by the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University. Loan shows are by no means common at the Frick. For decades the museum at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street in Manhattan has been content to enchant its 250,000 visitors a year quietly with its superlative old masters in the splendid setting that Henry Clay Frick built in 1913. But from time to time there is a ripple in that serene surface of stately opulence.

Since Everett Fahy took over as director a few years back, there have been more and more such surprises- a small loan show here, a new $5 million wing there. The Fragonard exhibit was Fahy's idea. He is a tor, Edgar Renaissance Munhall, painting whose scholar, field is unlike French his paint- cura- aces ing. But when Fahy saw "Drawings by Fragonard in North American Collections" at the National Gallery in Washington earlier this month, The Fragonard Room at the Frick Collection in he said he thought it was "one of the most beautiful exhibits of its type I'd seen in my the Fragonard Room at the Frick, were painted politan And he came back enthusiastic to have the for Louis XV's mistress, Madame du Barry. them.

Frick mount the show. However, she rejected them and about 20 years Not Fragonard (1732-1806) worked in an exuber- later, where Fragonard installed them in a house in show ant, graceful rococo manner. His often sensuous his cousin, Alex- curator Grasse, he lived with subject matter was of lords and ladies at play in andre Maubert. Fragonard also added the other the oil lush, delicately rendered landscapes. paintings to complete his cousin's salon.

The Eventually the paintings came into the strate Four of the 14 canvases on the theme, "The hands of J. Pierpont Morgan. And when Progress of Love," which decorate the walls of died, and the pictures were on view at the Metro- sionistic Morgan at his MOVIE under the Dutch MAX HAVELAAR (Unrated), A splendid re-creation of Java's natural beauty and human oppression, circa 1855, taken from a Dutch anti-colonial novel of the period. By Alexander Keneas "Max Havelaar," which opened yesterday at the Plaza in Manhattan, is like a good pulp adventure, fast and furious. If it were a book, it would keep your fingers turning until the very end.

From an opening segment in which a buffalo is pounced upon by a magnificent tiger (and its viscera exposed) to the poisoning of a Dutch functionary (graphically, biliously detailed) to a dog's fall into shark-infested waters (no blood, but by this time you're expecting the worst), "Max Havelaar" dramatic consists of strung-together vignettes-2 hours and 45 minutes worth. Max Havelaar, the film's protagonist (Peter Faber), is a picaresque hero: a naif, an idealist, not very complicated mentally, but endearing nonetheless for what he represents in terms of the outside world. He has a mission. He wants to do good, and possibly advance himself in the process. The story: Havelaar, a career civil servant in the Celebes, is promot- ed to a post in Java's Lebak Province (replacing the functionary who's been poisoned).

It's 1855, and Holland's own mission, as declaimed from the pulpits of Amster- Manhattan Museum, Frick saw them and bought only do some of the drawings in the Fogg relate to the Frick's Fragonards, but Frick Munhall is also negotiating to borrow sketches that led up to the Frick panels. sketches and drawings together demonthat Fragonard worked long and carefully major works, despite their speedy, impreslook. dam, is to save the heathen through exploitation. (Salvation requires that the national coffers are kept filled.) In Leback, Havelaar discovers by degrees what we've already glimpsed- a hierarchy of corruption and exploitation that extends from the region's Dutch Resident to its native Regent, an aged potentate with rotten teeth, wire-rimmed spectacles and lots of relatives to support. With the help of a small army of enforcers, the Regent exacts his tribute in livestock and labor from the peasants, who are left with so little that they're forced to find work in other areas or join a futile insurrection in Sumatra.

Director Fons Rademakers paints his characters with broad strokes, no shading. But it is the events that interest him most and he unfolds them, as we've noted, with a fine sense of the literary, (As an assistant director, Rademakers worked with Fellini, De Sica and--perhaps most significantly--David Lean). But Rademakers also possesses a cultivated visual style, one that, to put it in the artistic tradition of his own country, moves between Flemish gore and Dutch warmth and muted elegance, a mixture of beauty and terror that also takes in the splendors of exotic faces and landscapes. And before he's done Rademakers provides us through his imagery with a jolt of recognition about our own imperialist tragedies. 2054 Henry Fonda, left, and Hal Holbrook, playing two officers, welcome back a fleet of ships in the big-budget action movie about the pivotal World War Il battle on 'The Big Event' tonight at 8 on Ch.

4. The showing will be interrupted for the President's State of the Union Address,.