FILM

...The Great Muppet Caper Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, etal...

...intensely erotic lovemaking...

...The characters are neither repulsive nor idealized...

...In 1978 it was exhibited for a few weeks in Los Angeles—just sufficient exposure to qualify it for Oscar consideration—but apparently it generated little attention...

...Arthur Delightful, wittily scripted screwball comedy...

...For all its shifts in style and tone it is neither confused nor incoherent...

...but complicated...

...Lili's star, Hanna Schygulla, a member of the Fassbinder stock Company since his first feature film, came to the attention of American audiences in The Marriage of Maria Braun (.1978...

...Supporting roles are ably handled by Trevor Howard and Alec McCowen...

...In Jackson's portrayal, the poet—who lived an interior life, residing (with her aunt) for all but three of her sixty-nine years in an unfashionable London suburb, drawing her inspiration from the commonplace— emerges as an ex-traordinarily full-bodied, full-spirited character: thoughtful, vulnerable, sometimes a bit exasperating, and fiercely independent...

...Hits and Misses S.O.B...

...This dense, intimate work Stars Glenda Jackson, who knew Smith and ad-mires her writing, and co-stars Mona Washbourne, one of England's most en-dearing character actresses, as Stevie's be-loved aunt...

...A two-day booking this year at a small New York rep-ertory theater brought some rave reviews, and the news that more than a thousand people were turned away at the door...

...Fassbinder's films have contained many of the best female parts in any current movies...

...Lili Marleen was originally made with English dialogue, and an additional dubbed Version was prepared for release in Germany...

...On the most superficial level, Cutter's Way presents itself as a murder mystery, al-beit one which provides fairly little in the way of thrills or suspense...

...The action goes back and forth between the grungy bars and run-down suburbs of the lower classes and the marinas, nightclubs, polo grounds, and haciendas of the rieh...

...Alex's self-pity and rage occasionally verge on cra-ziness (not the Steve Martin variety, but the real thing), Mo's self-destructiveness is not especially appealing, and Bone's disengagement is clearly a Symptom of imma-turity...

...This is just about the only con-vincing portrayal of a writer I have ever seen in the movies...

...As Willie, the cabaret singer of meager talents who becomes identified with the most popul?r song of World War II, she gives a most compelling Performance—somewhat in the style of Marlene Dietrich, minus the latter's tran-scendent glamour...

...Cutter's Way, as directed by Czech emi-gre Ivan Passer, is an engagingly quirky, sexy film, which views the American scene from an unaccustomed perspective...

...The heavily accented English of several of the actors, however, was ap-parently a source of unintentional comedy...

...But it is a fascinating work, with un-usually liter?te Scripting and strong acting: filmed theater at its best...

...His recent rclease...

...this is notably more persuasive than the simple-minded representation of an an-guished writer tearing paper out of a type-writer, as in Jane Fonda's Lillian Hellman in Julia...

...Marleen...

...German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been one of the most strikingly original filmmak-ers of the past decade, and by all counts the most prolific (now thirty-five years old, Fassbinder has made forty films...

...The film has since been running in one of New York's art cinemas, where it is breaking all box office records...

...Lili is reminiscent of Hollywood wartime romances and of such postwar movies as Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die, yet it is informed by a dis-tinctly modernist, self-conscious sensibility...

...wounded people struggling to maintain some sort of iden-tity and pride on the margins of society...

...This is probably all for the best: Lili is a distinctly German film, and the German dialogue gives it an added measure of credibility...

...Their relationships and interaction, and the Intervention of circumstance, permit the filmmakers to mine several weighty themes: friendship, loyalty, responsibility, and the possibility of heroism in an unheroic world...

...There are many films which disappear from view before almost anyone has a chance to see them...

...The characters of this disaffected trio are complex, and we are made sufficiently aware of their weaknesses to discourage fa-cile sympathizing or identification...

...It is thus the German dubbed Version which is being released in North America...

...his only friend, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges), an ag-ing beach bum who walks away from all commitments...

...The set-tings themselves thus provide an implicit social commentary...

...The setting is Santa Barbara, California, whose extremes of grubbiness and luxury are represented in Cutters Way in much the manner of post-war film noir...

...is his most lavishly mounted film to date, and in some ways the most accessible...

...This smashing success should earn it bookings elsewhere in the country...

...Blake Edwards's poisoned Valentine for Hollywood: a comedy about motion picture produetion, laced with occasional doses of rather black humor...

...The major characters are Alex Cutter (John Heard), an irascible, deeply embit-tered Vietnam veteran who has lost an arm, a leg, and one eye in the war...

...It subsequently reeeived much praise from other quarters and is now being released again by United Artists Classics, the specialty branch which handles old movies and foreign films...

...I suspect that it is the difficulty of getting a handle on the film which aecounts for some critical perplexity in the initial reviews...

...This was almost the fate of Cutter's Way...

...It is, at the same time, a story of a song, a sentimental drama of love doomed by circum-stance, and a tale of precarious survival in Nazi Germany and of the desperate efforts of the Jewish Underground to get Jews out of the country and to provide the Allies with evidence of the Holocaust...

...This aspect of the film, however, is largely a narrative pretext for what is essentially a drama of character, firmly set in the contemporaryAmerican scene...

...The film has been shot largely within the set of Stevie's Palmer's Green row house, which was indeed the focal point of her life...

...But this is largely Glenda Jackson's movie—and Stevie's...

...Director Robert Enders has also exploited the resources of cinema by intercutting sepia-toned flashbacks of Stevie's childhood, although these add little to the impact of the work, and seem a bit corny, and he has supplied a discreet musical score...

...The film (under the title Cutter & Bone) was treated to a half-hearted release by United Artists last spring, when the Company was staggering under the massive financial losses of Heaven's Gate, and was promptly withdrawn from distribution after rather poor reviews in the daily newspa-pers...

...Basically kid-die fare (although my aging kiddies, who grew on the more pointed, irreverent humor of Mad Magazine and the National Lampoon, found it less than scintillating...

...bits of camp comedy...

...The filmmakers have wisely elected not to "open up" the play and "make cinema," thus preserving much of the stage work's dramatic concentration and sense of intimaey...

...Both Jackson and Washbourne had appeared in the original London stage produetion...

...DEATH...

...But the gags for the most part are predict-able, and the humor is much less sophisticat-ed than it might have been...

...extravagant musical produetion numbers (including four renditions of "Lili Marleen," in arrangements which sound increasingly like the most inflated scores of Burt Bacharach), and continual reminders of war's disruptions of the normal patterns of life...

...AND POETRY Stevie is a British film which almost never got shown in this country at all...

...Yet it is an ex-ceedingly difficult movie to characterize...

...The main>attraction is that it provides a relatively rare glimpse of petit bourgeois French life...

...The film's authenticity results both from Jackson's inspired Performance and from the incorporation into the script of much direct quotation from Stevie Smith's works...

...This rather aimless film, directed by Pascal Thomas, combines elements of Sitcom and soap opera, a la fran-caise...

...and Alex's wife "Mo" (Lisa Eichhorn), an acerbic, tough-tender alco-holic...

...The film contains scenes of romantic poignancy, often underlaid with bitter irony...

...in a cute, amiable pastiche of numerous old movies...

...The amalgama-tion of all its disparate elements, master-fully orchestrated by Fassbinder, make it one of the most bizarre yet engaging movie musicals ever made...

...Heart to Heart Three French sisters grow up in Paris during the 1960s and 1970s, somehow quite un-touched by anything going on in the world about them...

...The film is made up of Stevie's reminis-cences (at times addressed directly to the camera, as though it—the viewer—were a guest in the room), the narration and commentary of Trevor ("the Man," who em-bodies Stevie's male companions), and dramatized sequences of telling moments in her life...

...We do not experience the Performance in quite the same way as we would a stage produetion, however, as the motion picture camera is able to liberate the viewer from a fixed theater seat and represent the action from a variety of perspectives...

...There's much here that is indeed quite funny, but the film is de-cidedly parochial (Hollywood on Hollywood), and the targets of Edwards's satire are mostly easy marks...

...with Dudley Moore scoring at least "10" and John Gielgud scoring "100...

...Stevie is an adaptation of a play by Hugh Whitemore who also wrote the screenplay on the life of British poet Margaret ("Stevie") Smith...

...Stevie does not represent the height of film art...