MOVIES

...The China Syndrome is finely acted (even Lemmon's overdone angst passes muster), its nuclear plant looks and feels chillingly authentic, and its concerns are as timely as possible, especially in light of the recent "accident" at Three Mile Island near Har-risburg, Pennsylvania...

...She sold her personal story to Barbara Kop-ple, who directed the Oscar-winning documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A...

...this is a potential holocaust taken directly from today's newspapers' Simply put, The China Syndrome is an incendiary piece of work that promises to cripple if not destroy whatever effect two decades of Nice Mr...

...The producers of Norma Rae bought the film rights to that book, but Jordan, supported by North Carolina law, refused to allow them to film it...

...to answer, especially in the light of the filmmakers' attempts to shun responsibility for what they had done...

...However contrived they may seem at times, they are real enough to be involving as well as involving enough to influence the real life events that inspired them...

...Her Norma Rae is that most unusual of screen personae, someone who matures and changes before our eyes in a way that is neither cute nor forced...

...Bridges deserves better, but this film is uninterested in giving it to him...

...One of Hitchcock's rules for using a MacGuffin is that a clear explanation of it is not only unnecessary but undesirable...

...It's competent enough, with a fair number of scary moments, but the 1956 version still beats it going away...

...The result is flat, monotonous, and sadly unconvincing...

...Why, the question is asked, can't films deal with anything more gripping than John Travolta's sex life...

...MOVIES Anchored to reality Kenneth Turan Some 30 years ago art anthropologist named Hortense Powdermaker decided to lavish on Hollywood the kind of intense scientific scrutiny usually reserved for the darker reaches of New Guinea...

...Anyone who still thinks of her as The Flying Nun will be surprised and moved by the forceful-ness and range of what she does...

...Nuclear ads have had in making the public receptive to nuclear power...

...Invasion of the Body Snatchers — Was this remake necessary...

...Their relationship deepens but stays platonic — Norma Rae marries someone else during the film — and culminates in her becoming a fervent organizer and voting to unionize the mill...

...Norma Rae has one superb asset, and that is the performance of Sally Field in the title role...

...Such is the power of the Dream Factory...

...In the context of The China Syndrome, the nuclear accident is a classic MacGuffin — a word Alfred Hitchcock coined to describe a plot contrivance that is merely the pretext for making an exciting film...

...The story of Crystal Lee has yet to be told...

...Naturally, the evil nuclear people don't want anybody to know this, and The China Syndrome shows them going to great lengths to suppress the evidence, even threatening the life of poor Jack Lemmon, a plant supervisor who gets religion and wants to cooperate with the forces of truth and justice...

...Melodramatic or contrived, the bottom line on both Norma Rae and The China Syndrome is that they are eminently watchable, entertaining motion pictures...

...What Norma Rae is interested in is wearing its liberal credentials on its sleeve...

...Anyone understanding why is invited to contact me at this address...

...Bridges, unfortunately, is only half right...

...Her conclusion, published in a book called Hollywood, the Dream Factory, was that the town was "engaged in the mass production of prefabricated dreams," nothing more, nothing less...

...It stars Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas as two television types who surreptitiously film an accident at a nuclear plant...

...The second film, The China Syndrome, which deals with the possibility of an accident at a nuclear power plant that could explode the proverbial hole all the way to China, is also a creation of Hollywood progressives and has been involved in, if anything, more controversy than Norma Rae...

...The film is definitely a thriller, and a highly effective one at that...

...Though Hollywood has altered considerably since then, to people committed to social action and social change it remains as bubbleheaded a place as ever...

...Even if nothing had happened at that Pennsylvania plant, no one who sees this film would feel safe about having such facilities on the planet,, let alone in their own community...

...Hits and Misses Hardcore — screenwriter Paul Schrader had a great idea for a film — father searches for lost daughter in L.A.'s tawdry porno underworld — but unfortunately he insisted on directing the thing himself...

...In a ghoulish way, The China Syndrome has become the beneficiary of that infamous leakage...

...was so central to that character that she is considering an invasion of privacy suit against the film...

...Two new films, Norma Rae and The China Syndrome, resulted from just such looks and have immediately generated real world controversies of their own as well...

...K.T...

...When Reuben first arrives in the small southern mill town — supposedly in Georgia but actually Opelika, Alabama — interest in him and his union is nonexistent...

...It turned out, however, that one woman Kenneth Turan reviews films regularly for The Progressive...

...Admittedly his role, with his having to walk a narrow line between arrogance and likeability, is a difficult thing to pull off, but the character as Liebman plays him is too much of a cliched New Yorker to be believable...

...Tirelessly given to dropping references to eating at Nathan's, seeing Aida at the Met, and reading The New York Times as if they were so many pearls meant to dazzle the rural swine, Liebman's character wears thin faster than you can say Rockaway Parkway...

...The film's principals struck back with cries of censorship, with director Jim Bridges, for instance, telling The Los Angeles Times, "The film is not political — it is basically an entertainment, a thriller...

...What that means for The China Syndrome is that trying to follow what goes wrong with the plant is difficult but not impossible for the average movie-goer...

...Flaw number one is Liebman...

...What happens in our movie could happen in the car industry...

...The more you see of him, the more you want to see, but her saintly husband is simply a plot construct to assure you that the Reuben-Norma Rae relationship doesn't stray into the murky realm of hanky-panky...

...The story as Ritt has told it centers on the interaction between Norma Rae and a fast-talking New York labor organizer named Reuben, played by Ron Liebman, television's "Kaz...

...Every once in a great while, then, the movie industry bestirs itself like a cranky giant and takes a look at civilization and its discontents...

...Is it too much to ask a medium that reaches and influences millions of Americans to concern itself with matters of substance and depth...

...It is the performance of a lifetime, and it more than makes up for what would otherwise be enough small flaws to incapacitate the picture...

...Norma Rae, however, a bored, promiscuous young widow with two children, is intrigued by his differentness and befriends him...

...The conflict began when General Electric abruptly withdrew its sponsorship of a Barbara Walters television special in which a brief reference is made to the film because the company felt the show contained "material that could cause undue public concern about nuclear energy...

...That would be Crystal Lee Jordan, late of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina...

...The Norma Rae people went ahead anyway, infuriating Kopple, who is still raising money for her film and was quoted in Daily Variety as quite pointedly saying that director Ritt "will have to live with his own politics and morals...

...If Liebman is not quite good enough, Beau Bridges as Norma Rae's new husband Sonny is much too good for his small part...

...That is the price that filmmakers feel must be paid to attract and hold a mass audience...

...The incident at Three Mile Island has turned a sus-penseful piece of fiction into a roman-a-clef, and has covered up the film's most nagging flaws...

...Jordan and her battle with a J.P...

...Every Which Way But Loose — this amiably moronic Clint Eastwood film co-stars a monkey named Clyde and is making embarrassingly large sums of money all over the country...

...Though his sentiments are sincere, there is something of a paint-by-the-numbers approach here, an attitude that is not obtrusive enough to destroy Norma Rae but does succeed in marring its surface...

...When director Martin Ritt was first interviewed about Norma Rae, the story of a working class heroine who is instrumental in the unionization of a southern textile factory, he called the title character "a fictionalized composite of several such women...

...Frankly, no...

...Even worse, until Three Mile Island made the point moot, the much more important question of whether such an accident could occur was even harder Yet despite thaf tendency toward melodrama, both of these films hold our interest precisely because we know they are anchored in a potentially awful reality...

...Director Ritt is an old hand at this kind of movie-making — his previous films include Sounder, The Front, and The Great White Hope...

...It is true, as the two films demonstrate, that Hollywood tends to skewer real life and real life issues when it deals with them...

...Stevens plant were turned into both a magazine article and a book...