Screen

...Former idealist, teacher Nick Nolte, reluctantly goes along with school board pressure to testify that the student was well-taught, and saves his remaining energies to prevent the automatic promotion of a new student, played by Ralph Macchio, who brings to his role of bored punk some winning, cocky freshness...

...In tone and texture (with superb cinematography by Nestor Alemandros), Places makes for a consistently fine film, but not a great one -- endearing but just not profound...

...His only significant statement is to accuse Shepherd of mismanaging the land, a claim made by no one else, not even the bureaucrats, who know the villain is the weather...

...Would it not be wiser to do what India did about ten years ago in almost the same kind of circumstances...

...But then he was falling toward earth, where her sympathies apparently so strongly lie...

...We never see anyone actually teaching: Nolte may have had the imentionl but classroom shots show him joshing the students, or yelling at them, or, at best, discussing the suit...

...once recovered, he's back in class, where he simply tests repetitively while reading the newspapers...

...Farmers tried to import Western plants, fruits, and animals (including snails and shrimps), most times with the intention of exporting them back to the very countries from which the imported flora and fauna originally came...

...India refused aid sent from the United States...

...Almost unglamorous in pincurlers, Lange is seen initially loading some burgers with mayo and mustard, then driving through dusk to feed her menfolk at harvest...

...Consequently, they never considered tree leaves as a serious food resource...

...Since this column last appeared, however, there have been several important openings: two major melodramas about farming, a surprisingly excellei~t comedy, and one disaster masquerading as social commentary...

...The plot of All of Me is grade-A ditzy, but the acting is so superb that you succumb to its cheeriness and end up singing the theme...

...perhaps, even a third, Sissy Spacek' s farm entry, The River, to be released later this fall...

...I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and Commonweal: 662...

...Tanzania will never get its farmers' union...

...The last perhaps, deserves the first comment, since it may do more harm than the more openly exploitative films now on view...

...I forgot to mention that the gym teacher, naturally, gets three girls pregnant...

...The town church -- present from the first in hymns sung over the opening images -- is seen as a house of healing and reconciliation, a source of social cohesion but not conformity...

...There were further consequences...

...The ultimate scene occurs when Roger falls asleep in court while representing his boss in a sleazy divorce case: "Edwina" is forced to take over and argue by doing her version of a male lawyer...

...The immigrants had not been used to eating the leaves of trees...

...At first glance nothing but coincidental timing and these personal touches seems to unite the two films, or...

...The Terminator is easy to classify and dismiss, but what do we do with Teachers...

...when another farmer is foreclosed, in a strange but affecting scene, she tries to save his sheep by outrunning a collie in a bank roundup...

...In our family," his title story begins, "there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing...

...But the worst aspect of the movie is its treatment of teachers...

...Ironically, when Edwina keels over, the swami handling the scare blows it and lands her soul in Martin's port bow...

...and Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (University of Chicago Press, 1976, $6.95, 217 pp...

...which tells of another prosperous society on the brink of disorder: the American Upper Midwest in 1939...

...Like Benton with Places, Lange intends the film as a homage to her native region (she grey) up in Minnesota) and its tradition of independence, family-owned farms and homesteads...

...Animal husbandry followed a similar pattern...

...Why did, you give me an F?" the student asked...

...neither is feminist, but both Country and Places in the Heart share a kind of matriarchal populism where mtthers are seenrallying the salt of the earth against injustice...

...The core could have been the basis of something useful -- the chance, perhaps, to provide a modem version of Up the Down Staircase or The Blackboard Jungle...

...But speaking of human rights in such terms is culturally determined...

...The strands are all there . . . . " Nobody untangles these threads and strands better than Nadine Goldimer, whose sixteenth book Something Out There (Viking, $15.95,203 pp...

...Local farmers started to cultivate and eat carrots, cauliflower, cabbage, onions, "Irish" potatoes, and maize...

...Her final dance, a distillation of Edwina's growth, is an ode to joy that transcends the limits of plot and character to give All of Me a genuine emotional force...

...As farmer's wife Jewell Ivy, Lange is the major force attempting to keep the old way of living intact before the onslaught of modem finance...

...The film hasail the appeal, and all the limits, of its sweet sentimentality and the good-evil contrasts at its center...

...The school psychologist goes berserk one morning and squirts duplicating fluid all over a teacher named "Ditto" for his semipermanent occupation of the mimeo machine...

...Jessica Lange, however much she overreaches here, has come a long way from her role in King Kong...

...The parents of an ex-student bring suit against the Midwest school (named John F. Kennedy High, to conjure up some sixties ghosts) for passing the child despite his illiteracy...

...When Tomlin appears in mirrors, moreover, a different sort of teamwoi'k starts to evolve...

...A NTHROPOLOGICAL literature is all very well, sometimes, but after more than five years of research in that realm (as background for Margaret Mead: A Life, Simon & Schuster, $19.95, 527 pp...

...The society in which they live has the duty to provide those means, to which they have a right...

...A GREAT DEAL of nonsense has been written about the left and right side of the brain, but none so sublime as the screenplay for All of Me...

...Jewell is a plains-state Edna who holds the farm together when the federal Farmer's Home Administration refuses to offer continuing loan extensions to her husband Gil (Sam Shepherd), a policy which, when repealed, the film celebrates in an added postscript...

...From the first, Jewell is presented as the family mainstay...

...But in the second half, he has to turn surly, get drunk, and start bashing his children...

...But in time the jokes are upgraded as Tomlin gets her chance at physical farce, sticking her tongue in cheek, for example, to help Martin while shaving...

...Nowhere does anyone raise the issue of school finance and how it affects teacher performance and morale...

...The first is a tribute to Texas farmers during the Depression, when and where Benton grew up...

...The predictability of this plot, however, is redeemed by superb ensemble acting, some tart dialogue, and -- at each point where the film mighthave become conventional -- some touch that saves it...

...Country belongs to its star and co-producer Jessica Lange...

...Played by Jobeth Williams, the cute lawyer is given to repetitive, shrill preaching about the rights and wrongs of the case (even, we're supposed to believe, to her bigwig boss...

...The left here is Steve Martin, the right Lily Tomlin, and their splendid teamwork in this screwball but.tender farce is enough to justify a Siamese-twin Oscar...

...In the movie, however, the hard-nosed approach replaces older customs of deferring to agricultural cycles and the ups and downs of profits, or relying on "the man" (the independent farmer) to make good in the long run...

...She has never enjoyed life, she claims, and is determined, for once, to use her money to buy some real pleasure...

...Macchio, naturally, is given a friend marked for early doom, an epileptic whose taste for drugs is used for some false, contrived climaxes...

...I could never be talked into believing," he writes, "that all a fish knows is hunger and fear...

...In describing those events, Patricia O'Toole tells of "a kind of philandering complete with generous payoffs to salve hurt feelings when the romance is over...

...Shepherd, who had been in danger of making understatement into overacting in The Right Stuff, actually comes across as quite human in the first half of Country...

...Country and Places in the Heart both depict farmers enduring grueling hard times: both imply that if tornadoes don't get you, bankers will...

...Wheat was dumped into the ocean...

...Would it notbe better, they ask, to refuse the American and European cereal -- and milkpowder -- aid...

...Nolte is saddled with a relationship with a beautiful ex-student who has become a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the illiteracy lawsuit...

...Considering this scattershot satire, it's amazing that Teachers has a major missing target: public funding for American education...

...All of Me, in short, is a sassy and endearing tour-de-force...

...Benton's blind great uncle, who made a living twining brooms and caning chairs, appears in Places as a bitter blind man, Mr...

...Gil Ivy has to be blamed, however, to raise Jewell's value...

...it is a heady relief to rediscover other approaches to human mysteries...

...but here they seem contrived in order to give Lange the role of prime non-mover...

...There has been but one exception of considerable interest: the cassava plant~ European farmers have discovered it as an excellent, cheap alternative fodder for their cattle, and are buying it from many third-world countries...

...Country is a topical, gritty protest...

...In one encounter, Nolte yells back at Williams, telling her she "doesn't have to walk naked through the school corridors every day" -- a signaling line that made me uneasy until, alas, my fears that it 30 November 1984:659 would be literalized came true at the end of the film...

...TOM O'BRIEN Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES Jane Howard I I _ JANE HOWARD is the author of Families and A Different Woman...

...While the populist tone recalls The Grapes of Wrath, the portrayal of women's devotion to inherited land looks back to a different thirties' film: Gone with the Wind...

...Edna is based on Benton's great grandmother, whose husband, like Edna's, was killed as a deputy sheriff, and whose turn-of, the-century struggle to retain her Tara is here updated three decades...

...is a collection of nine stories and a novella about her native South Africa...

...New foodstuffs, introduced from Europe, made African farmers dependent on Western markets for seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides...

...When the blind man asks Edna what she looks like one evening, Sally Field's response is spoiled by some ridiculous violin music...

...Westerners were not familiar with these animals, and tended to overlook their breeding...

...Later, when -- on cue, it seems -- the Klan shows up to teach Moze a lesson, Mr...

...flexible and rounded, he even displays a sense of humor...

...Martin, in turn, finds someone worth caring about, although the constant witplay prevents this theme from turning overly sentimental...

...When he dies at his desk, no one notices...

...Though camels oaake human survival possible in marginal desert areas, there is scarcely an official camel market in Eastern Africa...

...I RONICALLY, Jessica Lange is both the source of Country's great strength and one weakness...

...Benton first filmed Texas in Bonnie and Clyde (another satire on bankers...

...Places in the Heart belongs to its writer/director Robert Benton...

...The film also turns deeper as Edwina discovers more about real life by experiencing hope and disappointment in a new body: her prison thus becomes a route to freedom...

...the second is a protest on behalf of Iowan farmers in the early 1980s, when Lange, revisiting her home, witnessed the wreckage caused by some harsh federal farmloan policies...

...fortunately, we are spared a Hollywood style romantic follow-up...

...Her latest book, a biography of Margaret Mead, appeared this fall...

...Many of the action groups which favor food aid to Africa speak about the right each human being has to sufficient food and drink, a right that is most compelling in a world with a surplus of food...

...Both films testify to the values of patience, hard work, faith, and the ability to forgive, values by which the heartland, in Commonweal: 660 sentimental mythology, is supposed to function...

...Within a more traditional justice pattern such rights are considered quite differently...

...Kenya will never build necessary storage...

...Certain themes, however, unify both films...

...Martin plays a dissatisfied lawyer, Roger Cobb, who is supposed to help Edwina, in effect, inherit her own wealth in a bizarre transmigration scheme...

...Writing fiction," as Eudora Welty says in her beguiling collection of three lectures One Writer's Beginnings (Harvard, $10,104 pp...

...The film is a Mad magazine version of A Nation atRisk, but the only problem is that it's not funny...

...If Places is too sweet, Country turns unconvincingly sour...

...Most importantly, as financial pressures increase and her husband col30 November 1984:661 lapses, she assumes the farm's leadership...

...Places in the Heart leaves you with a good feeling, but for me, at least, this didn't last...

...Norman Maclean's classic memoir of his young manhood in Montana was published after his retirement from the University of Chicago's English department...

...The perceptions come from an exceptionally observant nine-year-old named Tommy McAllister, who has two much older brothers, a devoted but sometimes distracted mother, a father who is a model of capitalist rectitude, and growing doubts that things are what they seem...

...Scenes in which the son hides love letters his mother gets from another man, and goes with his father to investigate an accident at the plant, are especially affecting...

...And isn't that our final aim...

...Finally, most curiously, both are female Westerns...

...The rest of the profession is here represented as a menagerie...

...A bureaucrat succinctly explains the bottom line on farming: "It's not a way of life anymore, it's a business...

...The same thing happened to practically all the indigenous vegetables, seeds, berries, and nuts...

...But he has not been given much to do in Country except stand around as an icon of authenticity...

...So personal is Benton's touch that the creepy banker eyeing Edna's property and threatening foreclosure on her loans is named after his least favorite contemporary New York film critic: so much for the metropolis...

...Even that movie she distinguished by her last words, a plaintive "Kooooong," to the beast (after all, he did love her), just before he took the plunge...

...Because," the professor answered, "I couldn't give you a Z." It's plain slapstick at first, but powered by the extraordinary mimicry of Martin...

...At first the humor in these scenes is banal, "involving some predictable bathroom situations...

...But if that aid is given only in the form of food, it will only worsen the situation...

...On busy mornings and even languid ones I tend to toss aside the business and sports sections of the Ti~es unread, but this year I came across two books that made me wonder what this habit has cost me: Patricia O'Toole's Corporate Messiah: The Hiring and Firing of MillionDollar Managers (Morrow, $15.95,320 pp...

...Aid has to be given to them...

...Inspired by advice from an itinerant black worker named ~oze (superbly played by Danny Glover), Edna conceives a plan to raise a prize cotton crop to pay her bills, With this ex-sharecropping assistant, her handicapped lodger, and two young children, Edna mounts, in effect, a "rainbow coalition" of the dark and disadvantaged to make the meek inherit the earth...

...Until very recently, money was not invested on the improvement of the indigenous animals and edible plants...

...Will saves him in a surprising way uniquely appropriate to his handicap...

...its defects are only evident in the second half...

...In the traditional Gikuyu society in Kenya, for example, justice means that every family has the means to be able to be selfreliant...

...But the film actually reminds me of a line from a college teacher to a student complaining about a falling grade...

...Often we hear that the lawsuit is "all about money," meaning that the parents of the illiterate student only care about a settlement...

...has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists...

...Finally, director Carl Reiner not only keeps his lead duo in deep sync, but also knows how to use a bit role -- in this case, the swami, played by Richard Libertini -- to sustain interest with some climactic crackpottery even when we know how the story will end...

...Africa will become more and more dependent on the West and the North...

...The Ivys try to fight, a struggle set against a cold, gaunt, elemental, Iowan landscape (the film was made on location last winter, and feels i0...

...If Teachers had been content to explore these relationships, it might have made for a solid, even searing bit of social criticism...

...Of course, such things do happen...

...Places in the Heart involves a conjunction between the earlier films: a subplot involving Edna's sister (Lindsay Crouse) and her husband (F~ Harris), who has an affair with the local schoolteacher (Amy Madigan), seems an attempt to underline the family values that Edna personifies...

...when waking, slaps himself with a right hand seemingly detached from the rest of his body...

...Will (John Malkovich), who lodges with Edna and then slowly becomes a friend and aide as she tries to stay solvent...

...The world community should make it possible for Africa to take care of itself...

...Benton's reminiscences and satiric jabs in Places mix with some clich6d plot material that, nevertheless, retains excitement and freshness...

...Don't hold your breath until a single recommendation on pay, from any of the multiple reports on schools issued in this last year, gets implemented...

...Nolte also has some good moments reminiscing about ideals with friend and vice-principal, Judd Hirsch, whose haggard face, even through laughter, telegraphs just how soon he will sell out and make a separate peace with bureaucracy...

...The answer is simple: two dedicated individuals have brought their memories and faith in American farmers to dignified, if not perfect, cinematic life...

...Africans are starting to become more and more suspicious of Western assistance...

...Is not that the reason that India can feed itself at the moment...

...So is William McPherson's, in his affecting first novel Testing the Current, (Simon & Schuster, $15.95, 348 pp...

...later, he initiated the new vogue for films on family life with Kramer v. Kramer...

...With Tomlin ensconced inside (Roger hears her voice, but sees her only in mirrors), he walks jaggedly down streets, breaks periodically into an effeminate stalk, or...

...Her eye for detail is masterly...

...The problem is that Gil's breakdown is simply unbelievable -- forced, it seems, to fit the movie's need for matriarchal heroism...

...This is a very difficult dilemma: people are dying daily in over twenty-five African countries...

...It is frequently compared with Tootsie, but in truth Steve Martin outdoes Dustin Hoffman: he has to be both male and female without benefit of costume change...

...I think a critic gets to say this at least once a year, and this is my turn: whatever its defects, don't miss this film...

...Brimley has become one of the major supporting actors in film recently: in The China Syndrome, Absence of Malice, Tender Mercies, and The Natural, he has become a symbol of middle-American shrewdness and kindness -- with his firepump body, his no-nonsense demeanor, and his aw-shucks integrity...

...In Malawi the diet will grow further and further away from local food production...

...The ad for Teachers features an apple and an "A+" sign...

...The closing scene provides an extremely powerful, if surreal, version of this as Benton attempts, in effect, to film a communion of saints...

...To this populist-bourgeois mix Benton has added religion, though not of the fundamentalist Biblethumping sort...

...After a tornado, she leaps to find her son buried beneath an overturned grain truck...

...I realize Teachers is a film, and a Hollywood product, but even with admissible exaggerations it is just plain nonsense to depict the situation of high school teachers without addressing the source of their problem: America just doesn't want to pay them well...

...It would be good if the world community would apply that traditional African idea of justice when helping that continent...

...Screen I I ALL OF THEM CATCHING UP ON FALL RELEASES BK II~K~ STRIK~ AGAIN: its's a good title to cover a II number of new releases, the group of sexand-violence f'dms now dominating the box office, like Body Double, Crimes of Passion, Terror in the Aisles, and biggest box-office hit of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger's new incarnation as The Terminator...

...Then the real fun begins...

...Tomlin comes across far more powerfully than Tootsie's pallid women...

...God has permitted Armand Hammer many things," O'Toole writes of one of her corporate subjects, "and anyone gauche enough to suggest that immortality is not among them should be reminded of the astonishing events of 1976...

...instead he insults her by commenting frankly on her plan...

...A Presbyterian minister's son, Maclean also kept youthful company with an assortment of cartographers, lumberjacks, card sharks, pimps, cowboys, and warmhearted waitresses...

...Benton's matriarch is Edna Spaulding, played with Norma Rae-like true grit by Sally Field...

...But the plot is saddled with too many other relationships and absurdities to make a serious, and finally even intelligible, statement about the problems of teaching or teachers...

...Unfortunately, her heroism requires some forced maneuverings with the screenplay that weaken the film...

...Her strength is not just outer but inner: Lange convincingly plays Jewell as a powerful introvert whose spiritual resources make her a still center in a chaotic world...

...Tomlin plays Edwina Cutwater, a rich, chronically sick, Beverly Hills eccentric who vows to come back from the dead in the healthy body of a beautiful young woman...

...She could -- like so many glamorous Hollywood stars -- be doing much worse...

...That is the only type of help that will out-help help...

...She portrays the tensions of her world through the eyes both of wretched blacks whose houses are "arranged inside and out to hold the number of people the ingenuity of necessity provides for" and an overprivileged "generation of white South Africans in the know, dumped by their elders with the deadly task of defending a life they haven't chosen for themselves, the singular heritage of their whiteness...

...T O WHAT DO We owe this fall's harvest of films about farming...

...But each family has the duty to be self-reliant, once those means are provided...

...The seriousness of her intent is evident in the name of her production company, Pangea, the geologic designation of the original land mass of the earth before it broke up into continental plates...

...It's Martin doing Edwina doing a parody of his own role, a walking three-layered fruitcake chockful of nuts...

...The only teacher worth his salt, the film implies, is an escaped mental patient who gets hired by accident: he recreates "real" history by donning the disguises of famous heroes and delighting the kids, who of course boo when the men in the white coats arrive, maybe because they never had to open a book...

...A similar sign of the problem is evident in Wilford Brimley's role as Jewell Ivy's father...