Screen

...For Angel, it is a symbol of an imaginary past she would like to create...

...Angel (Liza Minelli) comes home to the skating rink which her mother (Chita Rivera) has just sold...

...The second of these is the whole plot of The Rink...

...when they arrive, however, they must settle in a squalid Los Angeles motel for migrant workers...

...It looks like a simple case of the dictatorial father, the old curmudgeon who is ripe for a heart-wringing cure, when suddenly at the end of the second act, the father gets a chance to unburden himself to the considerable surprise of everyone on and off stage...

...As a result though routed politically, Enrique and Rosa never exactly leave Guatemala, the subject of El Nome's best cinematographic poetry...

...the other is Nacha (Lupe Ontiveros) who saves Rosa from police raids on garment sweatshops, gets her cleaning work, and disguises her as a local with a trip to Sears...

...I did not ask if you had heard the latest Fleetwood Mac, etc.: I asked if you had seen them...

...Or the latest Madness...

...The acting throughout is superb ensemble work...

...It is understandable if wrong-headed that he should find dancing demeaning to his race, but it is difficult to understand why that should lead him to a preoccupation with material goods and appearances, to a tendency to condescend to his wife and daughter and to an inability to hug his children...

...takes place...

...That is, unlike many recent films about the struggles of third-word peoples, El Norte actually concerns them, their viewpoints, their hostilities, their backgrounds, and even the distortions crucial to their survival...

...That is what I would like to believe -- harking back to the Ebb and Kander of Cabaret and 70 Girls 70 -- but The Rink is a flaccid show like their Woman of the Year...

...When first considering flight from their village, they see the United States as pictured in Spanish editions of Good Housekeeping...

...all this with the aid of a helping of musical treacle called "Mother...

...It is hard not to fall in love with their naivetb, and feel both pity and fear for its consequences...

...According to Nava and Thomas, they approached some Hollywood studios with El Norte and were told to remake it with anglicized protagonists as human fights activists, casting, as one producer suggested, Brooke Shields in the lead...

...El Norte, on the other hand, looks at some of the hearts from the dark world (dazing to be particular and really discriminate) and finds them bright, sympathetic, and inspiring...

...But in California their principal sidekicks are spunkier father and mother figures: one is Monty (Trinidad Silva), owner of the motel and a requisite Fernando Valenzuela sweatshirt, who tries to guide Enrique to new jobs...

...But I trust you are at least hip enough to know that Fleetwood Mac, Madness, and Def Leppard ate all rock groups-- the first now, unfortunately, defunct and the latter two, with rather ambiguous means for rejoi.cing, still alive...

...Nevertheless, El Norte is a remarkable film...

...Well, if you haven't, I can't really say that i blame you (much as I might be inclined to do so...

...From the bottom up, the view is different: not a mass of foreign faces, but a tangle of jealousies among Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Central Ameri, cans (not to mention the recent Asian arrivals...

...Villalpando and Guttierez are ably assisted in El Norte by Ernesto Gomez Cruz as their father and Alicia del Logo as their mother...

...In the end, the women are reconciled, the past laid to rest, the rink torn down...

...The movie is dominated by the contrast of two sets of images...

...I do not know what happens in the Louise Fitzhugh novel on which the show is based, but her title, Nobody' s Family Is Going to Change, is not very prophetic...

...its central characters are a brother and sister -- an unromantic twist on Hollywood formulas -- named Enrique and Rosa, who flee their village when soldiers murder their father for talking up land reform...

...To their great credit, they resisted such blandishments...

...There is terror there, to be sure, especially in scenes set at a picturesque, catacomb-like old hacienda where soldiers murder and mutilate their father...

...it is enough that his family be able to see the aching heart beneath the pin stripe...

...The scene in the sewage tunnel at the border -- before Enrique and Rosa emerge to see San Diego -- outdoes in power and terror the heroism of pasteboard martyrs and the suffering of faceless casts of thousands...

...The woman who ran away to find herself and the now grown deserted daughter meet, trade recriminations and begin to understand one another...

...Two Guatemalan refugees are emerging from a harrowing trip through a sewage tunnel between Tijuana and the United States...

...Liza Minnelli belting out her numbers as her fans expect, the sob of regret or defiance under the boom, and the admirable Chita Rivera denying the victimized Anna just by the way she takes the stage...

...Commonweal: 212...

...To be sure, there are defects in El Norte: Indifferent filming of Los Angeles and some hackneyed melodrama at the close...

...On one level, the scene is bathetic, almost vapid" we know this plastic paradise is no magic fairyland...

...not a foreign film since it was made by Americans, it still might qualify as the best "nonEnglish language film" next year...

...As John Powers observes in a recent American Film, the plots of such movies can be seen as implicitly racist -- not in the Kipling but Conradian manner: they concern no white man's burden to save the "lesser breeds," but document the need for the white man to be saved from a heart of darkness...

...But El Norte verges on the cliche only to redeem it: the bathos only underlines the earnestness, the desperateness of the migrants' desire...

...The stem, cold lawyer father does not want his son to be a dancer like his uncle (without whom there would be no show) and does not even notice his overweight, overwrought daughter who wants to be a lawyer like Daddy...

...It even turned up in Doonesbury...

...So much positive power trapped in saccharine therapy sessions...

...They all rally round in a teary bout of mutual understanding, and the curtain comes down with the four of them doing a reprise of "Class Act," the club number that the mother, the uncle and the ghost of the grandfather did in Act I. The daughter of The Tap Dance Kid has a number of fat-gift songs (done with a fine belting style by understudy Tracey Mitchem the night I was there) which indicate that she wants her father not only to recognize her embryonic legal mind but to tell her she is pretty...

...The best that the score has to offer are some affectionate aggression duets that are momentarily sprightly but end up feeding the bromidic mushiness of Terrence McNally's book...

...Significantly, the villain of EINorte is not a "gringo," but another member of the California Latin community, whom the "gringos" see as "all alike...

...III l/Ill I Media II II I I I I I!11 I INFANT ART THE VIDEO IS BORN H AVE YOU SEEN the latest Fleetwood Mac...

...for Anna, it is a lifetime of being put upon...

...But there is something I hope you noticed...

...GERALD WEALES l l I Screen TRUE NORTH A THIRD-WORLD FIRST O NE SCENE from El Norte sums up its rare surprising strength...

...But the country is lushly presented at the beginning and never forgotten...

...The two siblings pass through Mexico to reach Los Angeles and there, despite setbacks, combine luck, hard work, and unconscious charm to win comparatively decent jobs...

...we can't all, after all, know everything (I, for one, have never been certain of the precise reasons for Walter Mondale...

...Hinton Battle, the uncle in The Tap Dance Kid, leading Alan Weeks (the ghostly grandpa), Alfonso Ribeiro (the boy) and the chorus in celebratory tap numbers...

...El Norte is unusual" although made in Hollywood, eighty percent of the screenplay is in Spanish, showing how seriously its makers took the realities of migrant life...

...El Norte's Guatemala is mountains and mist, turkey vultures capering in village doorways, candlelit altars in every cottage, women dressed in stark, neat ponchos dyed vivid yellows, reds, and indigos...

...It was just a case of the likable Doonesbury kids getting together for a song--an impression heightened by Elizabeth S wados's innocuous music --and it was about as pointed as You're a Good Man Charlie Brown...

...Ruth Brown coming in on "In His Own Good Time" and "Leanin' on the Lord" to lift those already jubilant numbers to new heights...

...The children are not yet grown in The Tap Dance Kid, but for most of the evening they appear to be neurotics in the making...

...In the course of this long, painful number, he counters the showbusiness dreams of his son and brother-in-law with his own dream about achievement that will enhance the status of the blacks...

...El Norte is no f'wst-world version of a sanitized third-world saint...

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

...Unlike Under Fire, Missing, or The Year of Living Dangerously, El Norte does not concern an Anglo hero and/or heroine who is plunged into a barely comprehensible jungle melodrama and Who evolves from partial sympathy toward this alien world to final rejection of it...

...There's no propaganda in the movie, just visual poetry, suspense and 6 April 1984:211 emotional force...

...Given the circumstances in which she sings it --to her husband just before he deserts her and to her daughter shortly before she runs away -- the conventionality of Kander' s music and the embarrassing obviousness of Ebb's words seem almost intentional, a satiric touch...

...El Norte' s power is thus not political, but personal...

...The scene, like the whole movie, gives us new eyes...

...The result is a minor masterpiece with a rich sensual texture and vibrant heart...

...The heart comes mostly from two Mexican novice actors, David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Guttierez, who play Enrique and Rosa, with simplicity, grace, and grit...

...I mention it in this familial context because in the middle of the second act, the long promised confrontation between Joanie and J.J...

...El Norte has the real stuff...

...Directed by Gregory Nava and produced by Anne Thomas, both of whom wrote the screenplay, El Norte was made independently, without the help -- interference --of a major studio...

...If you didn't know that, you can keep on reading anyway...

...Rational analysis has no place in a consideration of "William's Song," however...

...Despite an occasional sharp one-liner, the satiric heart had gone out of the material...

...Perhaps El Norte deserves more: certainly it compares favorably with 1983's best picture, Gandhi...

...When they finally climb out -- after surviving darkness, stench, rats, and the border patrol -- they see the lights of San Diego's freeways spread out before them and their eyes dilate with happy wonder...

...They have also caused a controversy about what category El Norte belongs in at the 1985 Academy Awards...

...and that, increasingly, is what will alter both American popular music and American television...

...Fred Ebb and John Kander provide Anna with a chin-up number called "We Can Make It...

...That, I think, is increasingly what kids are asking one another about their favorite groups...

...Or the latest Def Leppard...

...Although sharply realistic on the whole, El Norte uses dreams, hallucinations and reminiscences of Guatemala as expressionist brushstrokes to highlight the pathos of uprootedness -- as, for example, when Rosa fantasizes her mother preparing tortillas in her dingy motel room...

...What one remembers from the shows are performers...

...In short, Under Fire and the others are first-world third-world films, El Norte is thirdworld first...

...Garry Trudeau's attempt to make a musical out of his cartoon characters was not particularly successful...