Screen

...When Leopold Stokowski introduced it to the United States with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the thirties he asked Leonid Massine to choreograph it...

...It sounds inconsequential, and it w a s . More substantial fare was included in most of the programs...

...She remains clearly in charge of her company, which offered a three-week season at New Yor~ State Theater in early spring...

...The forms were originally created by Noguchi for "Alcestis", though the program omits mention of the earlier work...

...The Turner figure, Katherine Hepburn, grows a few jungle vines herself as she lets her hair down...

...But acting aside, the truth is that "they just don't make 'em like they used to...

...The film also contains a classic comical chase scene in, of all places, Bloomingdale' s, site of the defection...

...In Mazursky's universe, here actually means New York...

...The "Chosen Maiden" was danced by the then younger Miss Graham who gave, by all accounts, one of the great performances of her career...

...It has retained its powerful impact because of the rigorous logic of its construction...

...the film opens as she tearfully concludes her latest heartthrob epic, a last-minute nick-of-time rescue of an imperiled Pauline by a Clint Eastwood look-alike...

...The discovery of Miss Graham on stage standing amidst her dancers inevitably provoked audiences to demonstrations of warmth and enthusiasm during the curtain calls...

...Apparently, the prospect of uniting plot, spectacle, and character development was just too frightening for the makers of Romancing the Stone...

...After she is chosen she is tied with a winding rope and tossed about from one group of men to another...

...Yet a dramatic breather would have provided some contrast and allowed for explicit comment on the characters' emotional growth...

...While you laugh at the film, you also feel the loss...

...Miss Graham's gestures and vocabulary are there...

...The piece is divided into three sections -- "Hymn to the Virgin," "Crucifixus" and "Hosanna...

...Each has several channels incised on its face...

...With a small shift of emphasis in the screenplay, however, the film could have retained the sheer fun of such moviemaking and added a richer echo...

...The Chosen One" is plucked out by the Shaman the way someone would pull a grape from a cluster...

...his girlfriend puts down Italy...

...These were repertory pieces from the decades of the thirties, forties and fifties...

...The film stars Kathleen Turner, the femmefatale of Body Heat...

...In the old days, moviemakers sometimes had the guts to play that gambit...

...Phaedra's initial mistake was to conceive an illicit passion for her stepson Hypolytus, and was the subject of Miss Graham's previous and stronger work titled "Phaedra...

...Crying over her word processor - - implying only a true believer could write such trash - - Turner eventually recovers to feed tuna to her starving cat...

...Thus Mazursky celebrates both consumerism and equality, and glibly glides over their price and clash...

...and Mazursky -- in an interview at the film's release -- for good measure put down California, too: "There's more happening in an hour here than there is in Los Angeles in a month...

...Instead, another exile, a giant from Leningrad, across the coffee counter, straightens Vlad out by asking him where he would rather be...

...Much the same could be said for "Phaedra's Dream" choreographed to"Lux Aeterna" by George Crumb...

...Moscow on the Hudson views New York, in short, as the best of all possible worlds -- a world not just according to Ronald Reagan, as some have charged about the film's politics, but a world according to Mayor Koch...

...Goddamned insane country," he yells, and calls New York "brutal, crazy...

...The line is key, and Bloomingdale's is appropriate: director Paul Mazursky uses Moscow on the Hudson to portray America as a land of silk and money where Vlad can exchange long Russian queues for toilet paper for an American cornucopia of toilet water...

...Departing from her usual custom of commissioning music, she selected two scores from repertory...

...He views America as a land where you can buy whatever you want, and be whatever you want, with no concession to the conflict between economic freedom and social justice that so troubles our politics...

...I have a defector between Est~e Lauder and Pierre Cardin," a black security guard announces, a perfect expression of the film's jolly view of East-West relations...

...It makes you ask why such an opportunity to combine action and emotion should have been so wasted...

...A solitary woman in white enters in the midst of fourteen women in dark blue dresses...

...Miss Graham continues to choreograph new works, but they seem to be done more from memory than out of the passionate conviction that marks her great dances...

...The imaginative intensity that illuminates her best work is missing...

...On one occasion while she reprimands him for never looking at her while she talks to him, Douglas says nothing, then coolly machetrs a snake angling toward a nibble at her left e a r . Romancing the Stone is fun, without question: besides the gangsters, the treasure lures some villainous police...

...Mazursky's tired, huddled masses are always first cousins to Bloomingdale's clientele...

...We have in its stead a kit of dance movements that is Grahamesque in outline but not in content...

...Despite its aggressive tone the work has some beautiful moments for the corps...

...Vlad's black pal puts down the South ("I was a refugee from Alabama once...

...The set consists of three monumental stone shapes: one right-angled, another inclined, and the third a large wheel...

...At least in Russia," Vlad laments, "you knew who the enemy was" -- an interesting line about paranoia and the comfort of certainty, had Mazursky bothered to examine it...

...Similarly, Michael Douglas never reflects on his development from rough-and-tumble adventurer to p,rn~ring carer...

...As a Russian circus musician, Vladimir Ivanoff, who defects while on tour in New York City, Robin Williams delightfully turns his talent at mimicry into perfect Russianized English, and transforms his normally antic energy into quiet strength, portraying Vladimir's mixed feelings of exile and hope...

...The points are there to score, but the script sweeps past them, as if to pause -- for anything but sex - - would somehow ruin the pacing...

...There are almost no WASPS in the film and nary a view of the hinterlands...

...Sniffling, garbed in a flannel robe that looks three books old, Turner thus introduces us into her real life and its disheveled but charming domesticity on Manhattan's upper West Side...

...As her name in the movie indicates, Turner has to grow "Wilder," and must embark on a journey to Colombia to bring a treasure map to gangsters holding her sister captive...

...If Miss Graham were a building, some government agency would have already affixed a commemorative plaque to her...

...besides the snakes, there are some waterfalls to cross and crocs to brave...

...But Mazursky also sees America as a world where all men are, as we are reminded in somewhat obvious refrains from the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights throughout the film...

...This season she offered" Phaedra' s Dream" and" The Rite of Spring...

...He escapes serious injury, but bruised and bloodied, rampages against America in a coffee shop afterward...

...Now twenty years later, Phaedra dreams of this same stepson engaged in a homosexual eacounter with someone known simply as "The Stranger...

...Unfortunately, this prelude - - rich, evocative, and potentially useful as a source of ironic contrast - - is left hanging...

...Moscow on the Hudson doesn't so much contrast Russia and America as New York and the rest of the world...

...and between Turner and Douglas there is some eventual and affectionate body heat...

...For example, there is no notion of hostility among immigrant groups and no reflection of the difficulties of legal immigration if you come from the wrong country, as in the recent masterpiece on Guaten El N'orte...

...Moreover, 18 May 1984:301 Mazursky shows no sense that the pursuit of unequal stereos doesn't help to sustain an egalitarian society...

...The Stravinsky "Rite" has exercised an incredible attraction to choreographers, starting with Nijinsky who produced the first ballet to the score...

...At no point does Turner reflect on the difference between what She had imagined her he-man would be like and what he actually is, or between her own passivity in New York and her vine commuting in the jungle...

...America is envisioned here as a spicy melting pot where Vlad is befriended by the security guard (Cleavant Derricks), becomes enamored of an Italian salesgirl (Mafia Conchita Alonso), and is guided through immigration by a Cuban exile lawyer (Alexandro Rey...

...Only once is a real question raised, when Vlad, predictably, gets mugged...

...Here she resembles a girl next door with a twist of lemon...

...and attempts to make him behave according to her peculiar romance writer's code of chivalry...

...The movie's poster, appropriately, takes off from the brazen New Yorker cover that collapses the United States to Manhattan and California...

...The first scene in America is a shot of an ad for electronic equipment hovering over Times Square: "All stereophones," the ad declares, "are not created equal...

...The film is an adventure fantasy, and is clearly patterned on the harum-scarumthrills-a-minute approach of Raiders of the Lost Ark...

...Turner plays Joan Wilder, a writer of Harlequin-type romances featuring endangered damsels and vigorous he-men...

...In her own version, the story of human sacrifice to assure successful growth of the tribe's plantings is told with a certain arbitrary brutalness that is a little shocking...

...I ' d rather be here," Vlad acknowledges...

...Overall it lacks any strong imaginative impulse...

...each the group marches Commonweal: 302...

...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...

...It gives one the sense of rape rather than rite...

...Nevertheless, Romancing the Stone wastes the opportunities that it raises and scuttles the chances its text implies...

...Love becomes a meeting of two minds, not just a bumping of two bodies...

...Turner is not yet Hepburn, and Michael not even Kirk Douglas, much less Humphrey Bogart...

...That movie, in short, made you care, and thus gave you more than your money's worth...

...Dance NARTHA GRAHAN A MASTER AT NINETY M ARTHA GRAHAM celebrated her ninetieth birthday on May 11, 1984...

...The earliest piece presented was "'Primitive Mysteries" which in 1931 was one of Miss Graham's earliest successes...

...M OSCOW ON THE HUDSON is a happy but troubling film...

...neither Main Street nor most of the American working class (remember Silkwood) are Seen here, nor does anyone except a single Soviet Jewish refugee appear to have any religious attachments -- Protestant, Catholic, or Russian Orthodox -- despite their ethnic identities...

...In The African Queen, for example, the Douglas he-man, played by Humphrey Bogart, acknowledges the need to be less crusty and to meet the missionary schoolmarm half way...

...There is no sense of inevitability or fore-ordination but the workings of chance...

...After some greenhorn comedy (taking the wrong bus, which then hits a car in the mountains, which then requires her to carry her 1.uggage high-heeled on a tropical back road), she finally meets Michael Douglas, certified he-man...

...They spend a great deal of time thrashing about while Phaedra dashes to and fro quite upset...

...they, too, could have gone for treasure, but didn't dare...

...Screen I I SIMPLE FUN MOVIES THAT JUST FALL SHORT R OMANCING THE STONE is a big box-office winner that could have been so much better - - one of those films commonly described, but too often simplistically defended, as "good of its kind...