The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 13

Theatre FILMS Strong silent Kid The Daily Telegraph Friday August 31 1973 Film industry must stand on own feet By ROM AID HASTINGS Arts Staff THE National Film Finance Consortium helped to finance four British films in the year 1972-73 All were films of modest budget and the total support from the consortium amounted to £350000 Concert preservatory (dare I suggest unsporting?) determination to do the mean callous thing at cost If death can be made pretty Mr Peckinpah achieves it If ruthlessness can somehow be rendered lovely here it handsomely is James Cobum gives the elegant indecisive sheriff-in-black a dangerous air of sharp-shooting indolence and Kris Kristofferson conveys with alluring smugness a world of youthful scorn for an orderly-minded older generation w'hich fears that freedom means chaos Bob songs from which the film derives its might-is-right-if-Leftish tone plug various gaps in the narrative as we wonder when the new unlikely sheriff is going to do his duty and track down the murderous Billy Had I been able to track dow-n the dialogue more often to take some joy in its usually vigorous idiosyncrasies this often gripping and sometimes beautiful film might have seemed more worthwhile The scorn of youth: Kris Kristofferson as Billy the Kid Scottish pern HELGA VIVID ISOLDE Rv ROBERT HENDERSON VISITING London for the first time Scottish Opera has cunningly brought to the Wells Theatre for an all too brief season two intimately related operas Tristan and Isolde and Pelleas and Facetious sex farce of familiar kind Bv JOHN BARBER latest at the Cambridge Theatre Two and Two Make is a British sex farce of a familiar kind That is insofar as it is a farce it is quite funny Insofar as it is about British sex it is lamentable Unfortunatelv it is about this most of the time Patrick Cargill plavs a middle-aged business man at the virility He zooms around in a snorts car buvs teenage discs and hides from his wife a secret affair with a girl of 20 It never occurs to the authors Richard Harris and Leslie Darbon to make the rela-tionsbin real And so it cannot be tmlv amusing as sav A Girl in My w-as amusing about a wittilv observed couole of the same kind Being sex for British audiences everything here is kept false and facetious The girl undresses but at bedtime the man recalls another engagement Thev plan a weekend in Paris but thev only pack their bags is like a bath: the longer vou stav in the colder it Ouips like this sustain the evening and amused an audience for the words dirty old man were the height of bliss Certainly it w-as joyously received One reason is that Mr Cargill though somewhat charmless deploys a limited hut expert battery of nods becks winks and tortured smiles As he lies to his wife or ogles his girl he yammers with embarrassment while seeming simultaneously to fall out of a chair get entangled in a chest-expander replace his false teeth and sneeze through a colossal cold You might think he was trying to win some Olympic Games The farcical sub-plot takes time to get going about the affair between the wife and a boy posing as a psychiatrist Towards the end the characters all meet up in a merry-go-round of misunder-standings and the dreary sex jokes give wav to some agreeable insults and surprises Barbara Flynn is deft and vivacious as the girl and Terence Alexander makes a rewarding late appearance a her father Director: Jan Butlin CALLAS RECITAL FOR BBC TV By Our TV and Radio Staff The BBC is to televise on Sept 30 the first public performance by Maria Callas for eight years It will record her recital at the Royal Festival Hall on Sept 22 This will include songs and duets with Guiseppe Di Stefano the Italian tenor When tickets went on sale for the concert more than 60000 people balloted for the 6000 available Another one was arranged for November Edinburgh Festival Bv ERIC SHORTER 0 WE HAD good said Dr Johnson There is Boswell to prove it There is no oae that I know of to remind us of the quality of talk in the Wild West a century later No one except the writers of dialogue for Westerns and they can only be guessing But I cannot help suspecting that for all its famous pointedness brevity and urgent simplicity the talk should be more ylish than in Sam Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Empire Two Not that one would wish for what these men who lived bv the gun might have described as deep talk Everybody knows how that ran hold things up and bog a good Western down Psychology- is especially apt to do just that And I regret to say that it enters Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid rather a lot Theirs you see is a father and son relationship The ageing outlaw Pat has derided to plump for a safer quieter life He wants as he puts it to know what will happen next So he becomes to gloomv amarement a sheriff Which means that he must go immediately straight and inculcate straightness in others This is not easy for example with the anarchic Billv for whom the law is an ass lawmakers asinine and law abiders exploited simpletons whose simpli-cifv enables the rpal rogues landowners to get rich cruellv quick Tt easy because the two heroes used to be such buddies Clio's lLtcnin" But it so much the classical Western situation of senior wold one obliged by honour to tame junior wild one which gives this lyrically violent film its disappointing sense of riuffed-out cliches it is the iterary poverty the grunts and murmurs which pass for dialogue There is no relish in the idiom (so traditionally rich in its colour rurtness and instinctive masculinity) and in many crucial scenes there is a dismal presumption that we are not even trying to listen Subtitles might have been a solution to the problem but from what I heard I doubt if the talk was worth translating Still Westerns are perhaps not meant for listeners The thing to do is just to gawp at the violence and the gunfire and to thrill to its anticipation Never mind the politics the psychology the chatter Never mind even the sex (so casually and gracefully on tap) What reellv seems to count is the amoral romanticism the self- Managing the consortium is now the main function of the National Film Finance Corporation whose annual report was published yesterday The funds available amount to £1750000 of which £1 million is a loan from the Government the last which will be given and the remainder comes from 10 City sources mainly merchant bankers Our policy is entirely different from earlier years of the said Mr John Terry managing director yesterday Formerly we were a national film aid scheme with losses which were expected Money was required from public sources because it was not available elsewhere and British film production and the industry had to be kept up Now the present Government takes the view that the film industry should stand on its own feet and that £1 million is a final advance We are now operating solely as a small investment group and not at the moment making anv large contribution to the pioduction of British The four films chosen for support were You are The Cobblers of Urn-bridge" The Final Programme and Steptoe and Son Ride In what Mr Terry called the halcyon days between 1950 and 1967 the corporation advanced an average of about £1500000 a year The receipts during 1972-3 amounted to £89313 GO-AHEAD FOR SHEPPERTON CLOSURES Plans to close part of Shep-perton Film Studios which are being bitterly fought by the film unions were given the go-ahead by the National Film Finance Corporation yesterday Lion International owners of Shepperton wrant to develop a large part of Shepperton to make it financially viable but the film unions have said they will fight any closure or redundancies Mr John Terry managing director of the corporation which formerly owned the studios said the Lion plans were probably best compromise we could hope to achieve Lion contemplate dosing three of the 11 studio stages and developing 40 of the 60 acres Choir superb in Monteverdi Vespers performance of Monteverdi's Vespers in Westminster Cathedral was one of the most memorable events of last year's Promenade concerts and last night in the same building conducted magnificently as before by John Eliot Gardiner it again made a superb impression The Monteverdi Choir sang with finelv focused sonority and the rhvthmic ensemble and verbal articulation were a joy to hear The discipline and passion of their performance was heard to fine effect in the Nisi Dominus with its nimble sequences and swinging rhythms What manv listeners will surely have carried awav from this performance however is a memory of the magnificent use made of the cathedral's spaces providing tonal varietv structural articulation and moments of visionary splendour as in the dumbfounding final Gloria thrown from tenor to tenor across a vast area In fart the solo singers appeared in a varietv of places around the cathedral singing the Concertos with continuo s-ipport from the side pulpit as well as the front and back of the building The echo words in the Concerto Audi coelum floating from far behind the choir benefited especially from the procedure which emphasised the musical punctuation as well as the verbal concepts involved Of the soloists Robert Tear and Philip Langridge tackled the prominent tenor duets splendidly as did Jill Gomez and I Felicity Palmer the soprano rts while Charles Brett was a me counter-tenor The Monteverdi Orchestra Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and the Mon row Recorder Consort were also outstanding Wednesday concert at the Usher Hall Edinburgh conducted by Andr Previn was given by the London Symphony Orchestra not the London Philharmonic Orchestra S10 Truly international Strange strains in percussion concert Bv PETER STADLEN ES Percussions de Strasbourg appearing at the Leith Town Hall yesterday in the Edinburgh Festival are a team of six outstanding soloists who have done much in recent years to further the emancipation of their medium Collaborating with sovereign precision Les Percussions offered an opportunity to assess the chief problem posed by music written exclusively for percussion the listener's resistance to prolonged pitch starvation We were broken in gently with eight Inventions by the Czech Mihoslav Kabelac In the first of these corale drums and such-like merely provided a discreet background to immediately attractive melodic material that was presented on eloquent vibes and xylophones It might have been on the piano that venerable percussive instrument Indeed the contrast with pieces such as Danza or relying predominantly on instruments of ambiguous pitch tom-toms tam-tams bells or gongs established what might be called by way of sinister analogy the difference between soft and hard percussion Hard percussion is used almost exclusively in the late Edgard Varese's Ionisation of 1931 a classic in this field and the only work of the programme not to have been written for the Strasbourgians Its sirens and tambour mili-taire made one realise that as in electronics functional noises easily turn cliche Another taboo was brought out by Georges Krvpto gramma (1970) whose regular metric schemes proved the need to avoid anything that percussion is traditionally used to emphasise Perhaps the most rewarding was Serocki's Continuum with the audience encircled by the sources of sound A pity that the use of literally hundreds of instruments renders it impracticable to insert such a piece into a programme of fully-pitched music TITLE NOW OFFICIAL Independent Television Authority officially became the Independent Broadcasting Authority yesterday as the Government transferred its broadcasting licence The change in title was made when the authority was given responsibility for the forthcoming radio stations Television Clash of brain poiver viewers By RICHARD LAST TT has long been my con-A tention that what television needs is more en-thusiastics talking about subjects on which they are expert and fewer all-purpose pundits More Betjemans Clarks and Moores fewer well you may fill in the blanks according to taste This belief is borne out by the remarkable ability otf Controversy (BBC 2) the top-level science discussion programme to command attention even the subject-matter is disappearing over the threshold of lay understanding The trick I think is in the gladiatorial clash of high-powered brains Knowing that the academic eminences deployed on both sides must have a pretty strong case you feel drawn into the contest even if you understand precisely what it's all about The formula tried us pretty hard last night when the subject was robots or to be precise general purpose It proved so recondite that even the opposition speakers who should have been arguing had to begin with tlheir own minilectures one accompanied by elaborate film to establish basic principles If I understood oorrectlv the general proposition put by Sir James Lighthill a Cambridge professor was that specialised automation and computer processes are fine but the idea of a robot which can do everything means a waste of resources I imagine I was not the only one who found it difficult to know where one concept began and the other ended The jargon was intense and formidable universe of discourse and came round with the regularity of roundabout horses There was one light moment supplied by a puckish American professor who explained that he had coined the term intelligence to stimulate interest when his research organisation had been running short of funds Most television like and the sharplv explorative (I TV) on the mortgage crisis puts words before pictures A Fight to the Fastnet (BBC-1) a film record of the recent 600-mile ocean yadtt race offered the rare experience of hearing the human voice reduced to mere burble under the impact of outstandingly beautiful phrtographv Love or dislike of the sea envy or admiration for the well-heeled racers became an irrelevance as one contemplated the grace of these beautiful expensive objects Mr Heath the real object of much of the camerawork explained at the start fiat the sport's attraction for him was its contrast with his everyday round Ironic indeed later he was defending Morning Cloud's poor showing in the bad conditions: It was a race where you could make decisions which at the time seemed sensible but a little while later made no sense at all" i when they broke into a massive waste tip from a sizable Much of it has lain undis-I turbed since it was harrowed-I out as rejects from the kilns and it will provide an invaluable comparative record said Mr Miles Kilns within castle As the the site of revealed resent dig continues the pottery must be A search of town records has turned up a reference to kilns within the For the first time evidence of the sophisticated technique of double-firing to achieve high-qualitv decoration has been found on a West Country site At the end of the 16th-century potterv was an unexceptional local industry- Then for some reason we have not discovered there was an explosion in development and technology which transformed it into the important export industry we ri a knan can now show it to have said Mr Miles Visually its Tristan is unpromising Though well adapted to small stages Ralph hollowed-out oval saucer for the first act his grassy mound for the second and white and green almost art deco ramp for the third give only a partial hint of this usual imaginative flair Nor did there seem to be any hard core to Michael simple but sometimes curiously inconsequential production There may have been a slight confusion between the epic and human qualities of the characters but everything was very properly focused on the inner drama of the music itself played by the Scottish National Orchestra with a splendid lucidity and tension at quite brisk tempi under the direction of Alexander Gibson The principal excitement however was Helga vividly sung Isolde superbly portraying the heroine's conflicting emotions in the first act floating beautifully the eloquent phrases of the love duet and showing just the faintest sign of tiredness at the close of the Liebestod A robust but unexceptional Tristan in the first two acts Pekka Nuotio cleverly husbanded his resources for the great monologue of the third in which he displayed an unexpected richness and flexibility of tone David Ward was an impressive deeply moving King Mark Ann Howard an accomplished Brangaene and John Shaw an experienced Kurwenal South African churchmen face jail By DAVID LOSHAK In Cape Town 'J'HE South African Government is preparimg to prosecute several leading Dutch Reformed and Anglican churchmen and other prominent members of two organisations under investigation because they are refusing to give evidence to a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry The two-party commission known by the name of its Nationalist party chairman Mr A Schlebusch was set up last year to inquire into the activities of the National Union of Students the Christian Institute and the Institute of Race Relations Mr Vorster the Prime Minister said there was a prima facie case against them on security grounds though the Institute of Race Relations was the least Those refusing to testify sav they are prepared to go to prison rather than do so because the commission amounts to a secret trial which hv-passes established legal procedures The Government view is that this stand is a challenge to the sovereignty of parliament and the rule of law South African Radio has described thnsp who are refusing to give evidence as morallv and intellectually Students banned An interim report bv the commission in February recommended againt some students on the grounds that their activities were Though few details were given This led to fivp-vear banning orders against eight student leaders A further interim report attacked church-sponsored meetings at a fellowship in the Transvaal Rut a subse-ouent committee of inquiry into the charges headed bv a former judge exonerated the centre Rlack Rond JOHN Shaft in Africa (Empire 2 is more audible intelligible honourable and slick It is also less interesting The hero is of course the black James Bond: impregnable fearless witty kindly handsome a good shot and sexy This time Richard Roundtree finds himself in Africa on a mission vaguely meant to suppress the transportation by rofiteering whites of illegal ack immigrants to Europe In his wake he leaves a trail of corpses most of whom were people who tried to block his noble progress And the onlv time he shows a twinge of human grief is when someone fells a stray dog he befriended Naturally amid the international deference to his powers various women are discernible notably the lusty mistress of the arch-villain (Frank Finlay) who runs the slave trade very grandly from a Parisian chateau and who being something of a potentate has to be sexually impotent Although most of the action in Stirling screenplay seems to have been manufactured by computer it at least moves swiftly and with a shrewdly cynical understanding of what its audiences will want THE FILM Visions of Eight (ABC 1 Shaftesbury Avenue is the result of eight moderately eminent directors being invited to comment on the 1972 Olympic Games Each evidently needed a script who ought to be there or at any rate it can only attract them briefly beoause it cannot afford to foot their hotel and food bills It can hardly manage 1 its own That is to sav its director Lynda Myles does not travel as much to other festivals as she should to keep up with rivals She has to work a lot from hunches and hearsay Even so the results have been exceptionally impressive I Of course the great scoop has been Andrei Rublev already noticed by Patrick Gibbs Then there is Jean-Luc Tout Va Bien which has Yves Montand and Jane Fonda as a couple of media-minded trendies wondering to what extent politics ought to enter their private lives This strikes me as Godard's most enjoyable film yet partly be- I cause it seems so balanced and honest as if Godard were no longer so sure that a dose of Marxist anarrbv would put the world to rights and partly for its warmth and wit On a similar theme but more agitatingly Leftist Marin Coup Pour Coup shows French workers at factory level since the events of May 1938: and a Japanese film bv horei Imamura Historv of Post-War Japan As Told By A Bar Hostess also illustrates the gap between what ordinary people feel about politics and what thev are presumed to feel though the form of the film as the heroine talks about the things that matter to her while matters of great moment are taking place in the background grows monotonous The same director's Hoes and Warships again concerned with the squalors and struggles of urban life in modern Japan adopts the style of an old mrriran gangster enic during Prohibition: cops and robbers routines fast furious and bleakly funny Rut two of the most extraordinary films of the festival came from West Germanv Hans Jurgen Svberberg's Ludwig chronicles at great length in theatrical terms the temperamental tribulations of the last Bavarian king: a slow strange unattractive sounding film marked out by a style of such singular assurance and ponderous simplicity that either it strikes vnu as absurdly stagv or a excitingly original Mvself 1 was riveted Less novel in its approach but equally absorbing Werner Herzog's Aguirre is another imaginative treatment of historical character: this time thp man who took over the leadership of a lfithcenturv Spanish expodi tion up the Amazon a film full of tension silences fear mistrust and (again' faith in its own stvle Onlv the dubbing into mericanese spoils it Altogether this festival ap pears to have found a footing which should place it firmlv among the leading international I festivals His face could save yours IBAlfilERS CHEQUE FOR TEN DOLLARS five IF EVER a Cinderella deserved to go to the ball it is the Edinburgh Film Festival Indeed it ought to have a ball of its own True it has an annual cocktail party True it seems to thrive artistically speaking on a meagre £5000 True also that no one wants to see its serious traditions damaged by starlets and publicity ruses But after 27 years of official exclusion from the Festival proper it is ironical that the films have become this year the most and perhaps only conspicuously international event of a festival which used to pride itself on imports from abroad As for its quality in film festival terms Edinburgh easilv bears comparison with the better-known European efforts but it cannot attract the visitors Just 3 from fabulous rnq Send for colour leoflots and comp off list of showrooms ht ci P'oducts ltd Dt'amare Rood Aj Cross Hefts Reg Off-ct Reg Kts 10388:3 Tl As thorn Cress 23477 hi jm Add'ess £32-046- torrsar BROKEN POTTERY MARKS 17ih-Cent EXPORT DRIVE -1 Uyrr 30 3 a 00 Daily Telegraph Reporter TWO tons of broken pottery now being examined by archaeologists at Barnstaple Devon afford clinching proof that a flourishing export trade existed with America almost 300 years ago Fragments of ware showing superb craftsmanship and technique are identical with items excavated in the United States Research in port records for the 17th centurv has shown that manv ships cleared the North Devon ports for the New World with their holds crammed with tons of Devon-made dishes porringers jugs and ovens As tobacco imports rose so did the demand for return cargoes The earlv American settlers manv of whom were descended from Devon stock provided a readv market To meet their 1 needs potteries sprang up along the North Devon coast and existing The face of Thos Cook on a travel cheque is recognised and trusted all over the world By banks of course but also by hotels restaurants shops car hire companies Even the stall-holder in the marked If you lose Cooks Travel Cheques you lose your money The cheques or the money are promptly replaced So wherever you go take Thos Cook Travel Cheques His face could save yours Available in sterling and US dollars from Cooks offices appointed travel agents banks Trustee Savings Banks and Post Offices operating National Giro ThosCook Travel Cheques The spotlight is presently on the Christian Institute an interdenominational anti-apartheid body which be- lieves that protestations of outside the former offL carry initials perhaps those of Christian faith are no use ces in Barnstaple looking for the thrower or the intended unless put into practice I the old Norman castle rampait customer ones turned from utilitarian to decorative design Archaeologists under Mr Trevor Miles were excavating Much of the pottery being examined bears the year of manufacture mostly between 1669 and 1683 Some pieces.