Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 24

ft I SBB HW STANDARD THURSDAY APRIL 25 S'SiniEiiwr standard thdhsdatapbixJ stisat v- 7-1 pncef ot to be mht bo ive hasg give you alitv and value The Price Bight qu Right for you throughout the stores Vll: A IN BEDDING Choose from our great selection of famous name beds for comfort quality and exceptional value I PRIDE AND PEDIGREE Nastassia Kinski as Tess of the dUrbervffles GOD ON HIS SIDE Ian Cbaileson as Olympic runner Erie LiddelL TESS TERRITORY REVISITED an SOME movies are so out of Joint with the times they're made in that nothing prepares you for what you see on the screen This year's Royal Wan CHARIOTS OF FIRE (Cert 123 mins: Odeon Hay-xnarket) Is one of them It it fresh It Is original It puts you In direct touch with sentiments so long un expressed publicly that you wonder If they ever love of country fear of God loyalty to the team pursuit of honour becoming modesty in victory and that doesnt by any means exhaust the list I'd add It Is a wholly English another nre virtue If that didn't seem In the circumstances like boastful bad form It is also not aufte true Madeira Fine Bunk A strong well constructed bunk with mortice and tenon joints and double bolt fixings Complete with 2 full length spring interior mattresses Our Price only £15985 thev seem new (Uke Where Angels no longer care to tread by VALi HENNESSY DavenDort'a auote-aulr Lord Birkenhead or Patrick Jta'Bmneror'' Divan Set happy with their modern bungalow and wouldn't return to tine family farmhouse for all the dew in Dorset It amuses them to watch the incoming preservationists buy up all those pine dressers riddled with woodworm when they could furnish their kitchens with neat Formica units and the Studleys cant understand why they dont cover those freezing flag stones with Cushionflor vinyl They want to make it clear though that they heartily approve of permanent newcomers to the village As Leonard explains they bring life and children and new ideas and are always eager to support things Uke the WI the folk dancing club and the gardening society "You need new people and new ways It's not good to keep harMng bCk" Leonard is already familiar with film interpretations of old Dorset having been cast as an extra in that other Hardy classic Far From The Madding Crowd "It was all filmed around here I felt privately they made us look a bit picture postcard-like with our yokel smocks and plastic flowers stuck in the grass verges" Most of the Studleys' childhood chums are "over the churchyard wall" The thing Leonard misses most of all is the hushed reverence once felt by Dorset folk when God's name was mentioned We always spoke of Him as Thee Thou and Thine now He's been modernised and we address Him as You and it takes some getting used to" Though almost everyone on the screen and behind the production is British the money to make it was Twentieth Century-Fox's dollars Chariots of Fire Is set in the mid-1 an age when people like its two sportsmen heroes still did ttfpgs for themselves without show fuss subsidy commercial gain or narcissistic public preening Colin Welland'S screenplay Is like a cleansing breeze In the fug of high-pressure commercialism called sport today Without sermonising for a second about the friendly rivalry between its two champion short-distance runners Harold Abrahams and Erie undau it makes you feel better for the tangible exuerience of moral until after her redeeming marriage to tl3 clergyman's son Angel Clare (Peter Firth) who takes her for a child of nature While his bride wanders the countrysidj her husband purges his foHy though not his sexual hypocrisy In Brazil returning for a Hardy-esque showdown in which Tess plunges a knife favoured weapon in Polanskl films into her original seducer and simultaneously enlists husband as an in her own doom Polanskl has rightly understood that this is a pagan tale which has been by the social falsehoods of Hardy's Vic tori--' England The first view of Tess flqnring in ritual ring in the evening meadows is complimented by the last view of her sleeping rough on the boulders of druidical Stone-henge as the mounted police arrest her A high quality pocketed spring mattress on a deep 11 spring edge divan base Odginally Now 8V £23600 £159 4'6 £33540 £235 for £37520 £270 Headboard Exbxt by ALEXANDER WALKER I 1 ShnnBerland Serenade" Divan Set Koodness not to mention physi- lunicates eal prowess It commi Featuring the unique posture spring mattress on a deep sprung divan base Qrilginafy eVXBV £12795 4'6X6V £17293 HeadboardExira ENRAPTURED by Polanskl's ravishing images in Tess nostalgia freaks in search of Hardy's Wessex might find present-day Dorset disappointing Council houses Space Invaders and Heavy Metal evenings do not accord with the romantic notion of village life Certainly the Rev Timothy 1111681 'modern- centrally- heated rectory at Toller Por--eoruin near Beaminster (Em-minster the home of Angel's parents in the film) is some-fining of a let-down He was only too delighted he declares to leave the creeper-clad 17-room old rectory with its 4ft of water in the basement and its £20000 roof repair bill He knows all too well that Toller Porconun being a working village disillusions the just as Cheding-ton several miles up the road sends city types into ecstacles In fact it bears an uncanny resemblance to a film set with Its High Street flanked with mellow stone cottages whose window boxes explode with tulips and daffodils Brass knobs and knockers glint on pine front doors where roses ramble and there's even honeysuckle twining round the rusty village pump Quagmire Yet Chedmgton has only looked this way says Mr Biles since local farming folk had the sense to move away into labour-saving damp-proofed council accommodation leaving speculators with the opportunity to doll up the cottages and sell them off as holiday lets and second homes la Hardy's day Chedington was a reeking Quagmire where pigs foraged and chickens scuttled around ill-shod feet Residents scratching a meagre existence from the land were too fatigued to bother with hollyhock-growing or planting petunias In fancy hanging baskets How many people realise these" days that very few villages even have tfcelr own vicar? Mr Biles is one of a team a sort of group practice of priests and only recently he called an emergency public meeting to discuss the future of Chedington'S crumbling cburdh "It needed £8000 spent on repairs and although 72 people turned up only two of them bad been baptised there No one currently living in the village has links with toe church or family buried in the churchyard we sadly decided the church must be closed" Dorset-born people grow impatient with city-dwellers who weep crocodile tears for vanished rusticity According to Mr Biles the old farming famine are glad to scrape the dung Demon Abrahams son of a Lithuanian Jew and a Cambridge undergraduate took to running as a vindication of his faith because he felt the subtly prejudiced world of Cambridge anti-Semitism Iidtfell Scottish son of the manse and the lay-preacher after the rugby matches he played in ran for the love of the God he served Now £8995 £13595 Bigots (or re-created by landscape artists) with unfaltering care for lighting weather season and crop rotation It' is a radiant film rather than a raw film I'm sure this will make it also a popular film with people who like tragedy to give them the sensation without afflicting on them the pain Polanskfs achievement Is considerable I'm not so sure that Thomas Hardy would feel quite so comfortable or well-served by being brought down off the library shelf and placed conspicuously on the coffee table Extraordinary what makes a mm an international hit these days Filmgoers axe supposed to be young people between 15 and 24 reasonably heterosexual in their preferences for a mate St La Cage aux Folles one of biggest world-wide successes was about two homosexuals undergoing a mid-life crisis They Just had to be brought back for more of the same and they have in LA CAGE AUX FOLLES II (Cert AA 99 mins selected cinemas) This time the Joke is to put Ugo TognazEi and Michel Serrault as his transvestite partner in among gangs of spies which at times compels Serrault to go butch in painter's overalls and the cops to go fey in gauzy pastels As the laughter in the cinema came predominantly from women maybe they are the ones who appreciate the crude parody of their sexua- ognazzl as the gay who's tiptoed out of the closet throws away his plausibility by having to play foil to Serrault's screaming stereotype queen The movie's best stretch comes when the couple flee to rural Italy where Serrault has to Join the ranks of un-liberated women slaving domestically away in the kitchen or the fields while Tog-nazzi relaxes with the macho males Finding women's work Is never done is the quickest argument for being a man A correction that tmfortw nately did not reach the column last week would have made it dear that Brian Tester who was Quoted as author of an interesting fore-oast about cable TV uxu not Thames TV's managing director He is London Weekend's Apologies Storm iiagee's dour Lord Cadogan) Hugh Hudson holds atmosphere athletics and contenders' attitudes so firmly and sensitively in balance that It's amarang to learn this is the first feature he's directed Chariots Of Fire is the kind of film I'd almost given up hope of ever seeing made again in Britain It shows they do still make them like they used to only better Roman Polanskl's TESS (Cert 2 hrs 50 mins: Empire from April 8) was described by her creator Thomas Hardy (who added "of the d'UrbervlllesM to her title) as "A Pure Woman" Purity is a virtue inconspicuous in Polanskl's earlier films and even though this Anglo-French production English co-finance French- Normandy locations is dedicated to his wife Sharon who was murdered by the Manson gang it must be doubted Jf he found it the attraction this time Two years ago Polanskl called a Press conference at the Cannes Film Festival at which he promised in answer to the Inevitable question that once Tess had finished production he would go back to America to face whatever sentence was thought appropriate for his admitted illicit relationship with a child The promise hasnt yet been a fact that has oddly gone largely unreported in recent weeks while Tess's Oscar nominations have been put forward as a mitigating factor for Its maker's but Tess is now on the screen What makes it a compellingly watchahle film is the element of social hypocrisy and moral persecution and Inevitable injustice which I suspect are more to Polanskl's sympathies at the moment than the heroine's loss of her purity at the hands of the first man to lake advantage of her It is a story of pride and pddgree for Teas (played by ttieGerman actress Nastassia Kinski) is urged to Improve herself "by her father the crag-end of a gentlemanly KneTby laying claim to kinship with the tfUtterriUes up at the big house The rakish son Alec (Leigh Lawson) deflowers her and she too trustingly keeps the news of a stiUborn child to herself Rex "LondonH Sofa Bed A dual purpose all foam Sweater settee which easily converts to a 5'tfX6'6" double bed Size closed 2'6" 6'e! MOT Upholstered In a choice of coversOur Price only £12795 i off their boots and toast their toes in front of their imitation-log gas fires lie introduced me to two of his most senior parishioners Leonard and dive Leonard's family having fanned Tess territory for generations Ask them to recall the good Id days and they chuckle and tell you they may nave had sunnier summers and a lot more butterflies but they also had ring-worm and whooping cough and horrible hob-nau boots that cut round the ankles Farming families accumulated doctor's bills they couldn't 6 ay no one nad any teeth after ie age of 35 and old people dreaded dying the workhouse "I remember a local girl who became an unspoused mother like Tess in the film" says Leonard recently retired after 82 years as a churchwarden was dumped in the workhouse all busn-hush and died In our village adultery was a terrible disgrace there was great prudery in those days Even married women tried to hide their condition when they were with increase ashamed even to tell their husbands and mothers Olive recalls how she fetched all household water from an outside pump I'd boil the babies' nappies over a Primus stove and neat my flat irons on the oil fire Twas guesswork getting them the right heat Nowadays I've got my twin tub and It's so much simpler The old times were happy times but they involved us women in a lot of drudgery Nowadays we get more leasure and I woukint want to be without the colour teUy" The Studloys are extremely INTEREST FREE the Master of Calus (Lindsay Anderson) pressing Its prejudices on him at The dinner table the Scottish runner's tenacious defence of his Christian principles in defiance of the Prince of Wales (David Yalland) the Englishman's unseen win wafting to the ears of his doughty old trainer (Ian Holm) as the 'thin uncertain strains of the national anthem rise from the distant Btade de Colombes The movie carries you fleet-footedly through such scenes up tothe end titles that tell us Abrahams became a VIP In the sporting Llddell died a missionary in China in a Japanese PoW camp Such terminal home-truths Uke the ending of a British Qrfaflitl have the power to pull tears of retrospective emotion out of you The' actors dont place a foot wrong on or off the track Ben Cross's brilliantly nuanced Abrahams ruefully appreciating that the Establishment Is against him not Just for being a Jew but also for not being a far would a gentleman hire a professional trainer? And Ian Oharleson as Llddell giving an enormously likeable honestrto-God performance David Watldn's distancing photography supplements David Punnam's enormously detailed yet wholly fluent and relaxed period production peopled with new faces dike Nigel Havers as an aristocratic sportsman whose butler bal-ftnofj ftHmnriTig champagne classes on the hurdles mi master- nudts) or old faces used to such advantage that The mistletoe over the newlyweds' dinner table is echoed in the sharp blade of the carving knife poised sacri-flcdaily over the domestic breakfast table the early shot of Angel playing his flute at dusk reveals the suppressed demon of Pan Inside the vicar's son that finally leads him on the cross-country dance of death with Tess The film is as agile in sidestepping every like the murder which is seen only in a symptomatic blood-stain beginning to drip through the ceiling so that no rough action disturbs the sense of slow inevitable fate Nastassia Kineki's Jrf-mance has as much to do with her nakedly sensitive Dorset voice as her ravishing (and ravished) looks If this is her own voice and not one subtly dubbed by an English actress then she Is a talent to reckon with Geoffrey Unsworth died during shooting and this master photographer's work has been replicated with the utmost skill by Gblslain who both deserve the Oscars that EXTENDED CREDlT(adyourpaymenUovef periods up lo30 months TyplcsiAPR24JJ BUDGET ACCOUNTStraam Polanski-style shafts of sunlight have always streamed through the beech trees around Toiler Porcorum Ragged cow parsley still borders the thyme-scented bird-twittering lanes but until recently life in these villages could be harsh and country folk were often bigots Farm women were for the most part hessian-shrouded slaves whose ruined weather-beaten complexion bore testimony to such outdoor drudgery as hacking through frosty fields to cut frozen cabbages and swedes In such "good old days" peasant girls like Hardy's apocryphal Tess who became victims of what he delicately terms a well-known catastrophe'' were ostracised reviled and occasionally stoned When an illegitimate infant died as often happened it was permitted only a furtive burial in some weedchoked unconse-crated corner of the churchyard As Mr Biles says: "Thankfully attitudes today are more enlightened A twentieth century Tess even in Dorset would be offered free antenatal care a single-parent CHARGE ACC0UNTS(MR2Mv The Intent I rsttt may nry from time to Urn Written details maybe obtained from the Stom Their stories follow lines as parallel as the running tracks that brine them into rivalry until united by King and country as well as their respective Gods they represent Britain at the Paris Olympics of 1924 As It a matter of record-book history not screenplay suspense I can reveal that both Abrahams in the 100 metres (and for 56 years (be only Briton to do so) and Llddell in the 400 metres (to which he'd switched with a caeualness that's breathtaking today after finMry that the shorter sprint conflicted with hta Sabbatarian principles by being run on Sunday) Tt doesnt matter if you cant bobble a step Tfcds film's touching affected overwhelming triumph is oatcning you up In the collective experience through the honesty of the Snmvidual achievement and Intention LiddeU doggedly preacMns a touchfine rainstorm Abrahams finding academic Cambridge in the paittnaed persona of trie Provost of Trlntty (John: GJelgiid) and suSjSEuSI MS bEB came to them this wee Tt la almost too mnA AnmtlniiraiJrtv tx heal VICTORIAr VU1aStLondonSWlE6QXM 01-834 1234 IJhJiryojrdloYldwtacra 4 Minutes fromVIctoria Station £OKIINaT0N KindHStrLondQaW85SS tX AHouNdFrutrllorab film Just as all the violent elements of drama rape murder sex have been fi tered out tfae countryside of She 1880s has been captured allowance and probably a decent council fls 1 "fi1 1 Tr li1 't 1' A.