Screen

...Unfortunately, as industry supplanted agriculture as our primary economic activity we lost that notion...

...Hovering over these infested private worlds is the doomed author himself, passionately recreating his own alienation...

...The point is made quite explicitly in the finale when all the characters join in a grand promenade as if to say they have played their parts but it's just a story, that nothing should be taken too seriously...

...Because Anthony Andrews is equally hazy and mute, impor- tant contrasts --Hugh's political idealism and Yvonne's romantic longings pitted against Geoffrey's voracious cyni- cism --evaporate...

...Nor did he bring it up...

...A scene with cobblers from THE POPE SPEAKS TO CANADA The COMPLETE text of the addresses of Pope John Paul II during his visit to Canada will be published by the Canadian Catholic Review Ideal for individual reading for study groups, for the class room...

...Melville Straus replaced Donald M.Ken- dall as chairman, and Herman Krawitz resigned as Executive Director...

...Today, employee ownership may just help bring us back to our roots...

...Bloodless, without poetry or intellect or emotional power, Under the Volcano is nonetheless a work of unfaltering control, of pro- fessional discipline, signed unmistakably by the same terse, hard director who made Treasure of the Sierra Madre thirty-six years ago...

...As in the novel, though, the consul is a solo performance...

...Lowry hasn't written other characters for his alter ego to play against, and Huston hasn't helped by casting Finney opposite Jacqueline Bisset and Anthony Andrews (as the consul's half-brother Hugh who has had an affair with Yvonne...

...This is his idea of the novel, a romantic triangle that demonstrates (as the ads proclaim) that "one cannot live without love...

...The space between them doesn't crackle with the weight of their entangled pasts and of the Commonweal: 438 unspoken, and as a result Finney too begins to seem remote, a miniature observed under glass rather than the tragic under- achiever of Lowry's mythic vision...

...Often photographed against walls or in cramped spaces, they seem trapped by the director's steady, pitiless, finally accusing gaze...

...Artistically, Mikhail Baryshnikov's position in the company was enhanced, although his formal ties to ABT seemed to have weakened...

...The shorter running time is better...

...It's here that we see fleetingly the character's gnarled torment, the self-created hell in which he inevitably drowns...

...To remove the author as the conductor of his own inner epic, as any film must, and to separate the characters from their inner monologues, is to strip the work of its validity...

...But there isn't anything valedictory about it, nor is it the work of an old man holding on to his power, however precariously, as if for the last time...

...action is so constricted that a walk from house to garden is a major event...

...The Board of Directors underwent a number of changes...

...Between the opening in Washington and its first appearance in New York the production was cut by about twenty minutes...

...The cost of the production is placed at $925,000...

...So chaste are his ,methods that he even denies himself atmospheric em- bellishments...

...When it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, journalists seemed eager to label Under the Volcano the swan song of a Hollywood master...

...Avoiding any attempts to duplicate the novel's self-enclosed reveries --there are no voice-overs or narration, and only a few brief point-of-view shots -- Huston remains outside the characters...

...And yet like Remembrance, like Ulysses, for that matter like Moby Dick and Wise Blood which Huston tried and failed to wrestle into film shape, Under the Volcano is exactly the kind of novel which will resist translation: what it has to say is inseparable from its literary form...

...Where Lowry celebrates subjectivity, Huston is his usual detached self...

...During the company's recently completed national tour, it has been given extravagant costuming and elaborate settings, ABT's largest number of alternating principal casts, and ex- tensive advertising exposure...

...At times, it seems to be a comment upon the preposterousness of the fairy tale itself rather than a whole-hearted exposition of it...

...and time itself seems lost in thought...

...Coating his dialogue with scathing irony, Finney doesn't allow Firmin a single sentimental moment...

...It was he who fought for "Cin- derella" and co-choreographed it with Peter Anastos...

...FOSTER HIRSCH (Foster Hirsch, one of the guest critics reviewing movies for Commonweal, is the author of Film Noir...

...Occasionally Lowry's daydreamers come up for air, talking past each other in a way that only enforces their solitude...

...Coif- fed and dressed like a high fashion model Bisset is inappropri- ately elegant, and she has no assurance as an actress, no emotional resources: she's exquisite and totally inexpressive...

...His neutral, eye-level camera stares at them as if they are laboratory specimens...

...I yr: $25 2 yrs: $40 The Canadian Catholic Review C 1437 College Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S6N 0W6 10 August 1984:439...

...1 - 10 copies: $5.00 each 1 ! -20 copies: $4.50 each 20 plus: $4.00 each You may wish to subscribe to the Review and receive the Special Papal Issue as your regular October issue...

...What of the production itself...

...Presumably performance fees, choreographic royalties and the like will continue as previously...

...Under the Volcano is Lowry's one sustained achievement, a testimony rescued from the ruins of his alcoholism, and it is written as if the novelist's life is indeed on the line...

...Once postponed because of a 1982 dancers' strike, it has become a knight in shining armor sturdily protecting the fiscal integrity of the company...

...on December 20, 1983 and its first presentation in New York on April 24, 1984 at the Metropolitan Opera House, the invest- ment was paid back many times over...

...Dance THE GOLDEN SLIPPER FROM ASHES TO ASSETS W HATEVER ELSE it may be, American Ballet Theatre's production of "Cinderella" is no stepchild...

...Lowry fans will inevitably be disappointed by the missing pieces, while to moviegoers unfamiliar with the novel or its cult reputation, the picture is likely to appear fragmentary or perhaps even incoherent, an oblique story of a tiresome drunk...

...He's so meticulous in revealing the way an alcoholic moves and speaks --erratic rhythms, blurred gaze, lumbering gait, sudden leaps of bile, bemused private monologues, the char- acter communing with his own inner voice -- that people have asked Huston if his actor was actually drunk...

...That, of course, is exactly what most people say American companies need to do...

...Broad ownership of wealth is good for the economy, the society, and the polity...

...He downplays details of weather and landscape: the Mexican humidity that seeps through walls and clothes and that influences the characters' moods, and the lush scenery, are curiously deadpan...

...It may be wrongheaded, but this version of Under the Volcano is exactly the film that Huston wanted to make...

...Between its opening at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C...

...When the three actors are on screen to- gether, there's no tension...

...Finney may well be the most modest of the great British character actors...

...As it weaves among the perceptions of four characters during what turns out to be the last day in the lives of two of them --the alcoholic British consul Geoffrey Firmin and his divorced wife Yvonne current images trigger a network of memories...

...The latter's post was abolished, its operations de- volving on Charles Dillingham who remained as General Manager...

...It is, first of all, not a traditional telling of the tale with emphasis on Cinderella's innate nobility of character shining through the tatters.This production maintains a certain emotional distance...

...The result has been the sort of box-office success ABT badly needed but could scarcely have anticipated...

...At present the most he will say is that he may appoint someone to share his duties since he has the option of pursuing private projects which may include performing with other companies...

...And where Lowry calls attention to his ingenuity, Huston is stubbornly self- effacing...

...Screen DOWN & OUT IN MEXICO 'UNDER THE VOLCANO' W ITH PERVERSE perfection John Huston has made a film of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano that seems guaranteed to please no one...

...Like Remembrance of Things Past, Lowry's monumental book has long been a Mount Everest that filmmakers ha~e wanted to scale...

...His character, as Lowry intended, is bent on befouling himself and the woman who has been foolish enough to love him...

...The book isn't about what characters do or say, but about how they think and what they see...

...Huston and his scenarist, Guy Gallo, have turned the novel upside down...

...Where Lowry's language heaves and swells, Huston's approach is lean to a fault...

...Lowry's voluptuous book is dense with symbols and mythic overtones while Huston is an imperturbable realist who blandly denudes such motifs of poetic resonance as the vol- cano, a reappearing white horse, and death masks...

...Scrutinized by the relentless close-ups, the actors have to carry the show, and Albert Finney as the soused, terminally embittered consul is indeed prodigious...

...it's hard to see him at all beneath the masks he builds for his characters...

...Huston lets his actor take off in two scenes, a wry comic interlude with a stuffy British tourist where Finney strikes echoes of Ralph Richardson at his most deliciously droll, and a poisonous outburst where the consul lashes Yvonne...

...Baryshnikov has agreed to remain as Artistic Director for art indefinite period without a contract...

...Workers, on the other hand, are more concerned with the future of their jobs than their stock dividends, and would, logically, be more disposed towards making long-term investments at the cost of short-term profits...

...To Lowry's modernist bravura Huston opposes his seamless Hollywood classicism...

...During the financial crisis that occurred after the disastrous Spring '83 season, no one seemed to have noticed that Baryshnikov's contract had expired...

...At the conclusion of the Spring '8~ season, he requested that he not be paid for adminis- trative duties...

...The Dark Side of the Screen and the forthcoming A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio [Norton...

...Faced with a mammoth deficit from the poorly attended Spring 1983 season, ABT responded vigorously...