Film

...Harvey joins the issues through intervews with more than sixty people: military experts, scientists, politicians, informed activists (including Sidney Lens, The Progressive's Senior Editor), union leaders, Navajo uranium miners, workers at commercial and military nuclear plants, and others...

...The filmmakers assume that we already know enough about nuclear arms to be properly frightened by the prospects of their continued production and deployment, and the picture thus concentrates on what one can do to translate concern into effective action...

...But the film is perhaps most notable as a marvel of novel-to-screen translation, and for the quality of its scripting...

...Ronald Reagan is neither seen nor heard from, and his name barely gets a passing mention...

...But serious readers are in ever shorter supply, and it is important that arguments against the projects of a bellicose government be laid out before the broadest possible audience...

...This limited-budget independent film is not, strictly speaking, a current release...

...It is as well a study of men and women whose attitudes and sensibilities were formed in the 1960s, and who are now in their late twenties, yearning for stability and commitment...

...Siberiade Andrei Konchalvosky's lengthy (better than three hours) epic chronicling the entry of a remote and forbidding region into the modern era...

...and the resurgence of red-baiting as a response to dissent...

...An undeniable cinematic achievement in spite of some notable historical evasions, simplistic allegory and symbolism, stagey acting and a clumsy striving here and there for the picturesque...

...Silver has rewritten, reshuffled, invented new incidents (some funnier than anything in the book), and still managed to remain faithful to the spirit and texture of the novel...

...These good people, newly come to protest in any form, are especially affecting because their testimony is weighed down neither by didacticism nor self-righteousness, and because their commitments reveal private struggles with difficult moral and political questions...

...FILM Michael H. Seitz Low Budgets, High Achievements One of the best films of the year is Chilly Scenes of Winter, written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, and based on a novel by Ann Beattie...

...Crisply and intelligently edited, it packs a surprising amount into a short film...

...Gods of Metal may be rented for $25 in sixteen-millimeter format from Maryknoll Films, Maryknoll, NY 10545...

...Its Christian perspective ought to make it unusually effective in presentations to church groups, but because the issues it raises are in no way sectarian, the film should prove a goad to action for almost any general audience...

...Although a good two-thirds of the Beattie novel is dialogue, little of the original give and take has been retained...

...America . . . does, however, seek to make clear that many of the same corporate and banking interests which stand to profit from the Pentagon's spending spree also made a few bucks from the rearming of Germany...

...the ominous U.S...

...The only thing not thoroughly abominable here is Laurence Olivier's campy impersonation of Douglas MacArthur...

...Nothing significant is gained by seeing them perform, as opposed to simply hearing their owners' words on the radio or reading them in print...

...nuclear policies has inspired two new, strong, and useful documentaries, focusing on these subjects from different perspectives...

...One of these is the feature-length America—From Hitler to Reagan, from Parallel Films, conceived and directed by Joan Harvey...

...the vested interests in arms production...

...A group of clerics file their tax returns at an IRS office, explaining patiently that they've felt obliged to withhold from the Government forty cents of each of their tax dollars they know are earmarked for the Pentagon...

...In fact, almost any serious reader will have encountered in books and periodicals sturdier considerations of most of the matters treated here...

...nicely tuned performances that include the last film appearance of Gloria Grahame, as Heard's crazy, periodically institutionalized mother...

...The film eventually passed into the hands of United Artists Classics, underwent some re-editing, had a name change (it now shares the novel's title), and is beginning to draw an appreciative audience...

...Chilly Scenes of Winter is a depiction, presented from the point of view of the male protagonist, of a love that doesn't work...

...Xica This bit of semi-exotica from Brazil, set in the Eighteenth Century, gives promise of dealing with colonialism and slavery, but it is essentially a soft-core sexploitation comedy...

...He's turned his life around to witness against the work he did (but that others keep at, only too happily), and we see him and some former colleagues walk out of Rockwell's corporate offices...

...Amercia—From Hitler to Reagan is available for purchase or rental (in sixteenmillimeter film and videocassette formats) from Parallel Films, 314 West 91st Street, New York, NY 10024...

...212) 580-3888...

...Each form of protest is compellingly illustrated by ordinary men and women explaining why they've become committed to their chosen courses of opposition to the nuclear status quo...

...Silver's engaging film is an exemplary exception...

...Issues are more often than not sacrificed for cheap, salacious gags, and the film finally proves to be utterly without conviction...

...A variety of courses are advanced: support of public resolutions calling for a nuclear freeze, mass demonstrations (there's some stunning footage of the June 12 rally in Manhattan), traditional organizing, refusal to work for the arms industry, and civil disobedience—tax resistance, draft resistance, and confronting arms manufacturers...

...This is an earlier work of Carlos Diegues, whose exuberant Bye Bye Brazil, released here last year, was a much more penetrating picture of the problems and contradictions of the filmmaker's troubled country...

...As in Harvey's earlier film, We Are the Guinea Pigs, about Three Mile Island, the subjects here do not naturally lend themselves to the screen: How, after all, does one show the dangers of nuclear contamination, or make the point that high-tech military spending means many fewer jobs than spending in other sectors of the economy...

...restrained but expressive production design and cinematography, and sure-handed mise-en-scene...

...The political perspective in this "epic" of the Korean war is that of the notorious Sun Myung Moon, whose credits as "Special Adviser" head the list of production people, and who is said to have bankrolled the thing...

...retreat from comprehensive test ban negotiations...

...Pesticides and Pills: For Export Only), with Father Roy Bourgeois as executive producer and financing from the Maryknoll order...

...It is a work intended for use in consciousness raising and antiwar organizing (a study guide will accompany distribution), and I imagine that it will be a most effective tool in both regards...

...Harvey hit upon no new means of resolving this narrative problem, and so the film is largely given over to "talking heads...

...914) 9417500.m Hits and Misses Inchon The mega-production turkey of the year— so bad that it is often howlingly funny...

...Common judgment has it that it's easier to bring a bad novel with a strong narrative to the screen than a quiet work of literary distinction...

...Distributed in 1979 with little to-do as Head over Heels, it died a quick death at the box office and was promptly withdrawn from circulation and allowed to languish in a studio vault...

...America— From Hitler to Reagan is packed with vital information and argument, and is likely to be beneficially upsetting to many who see it...

...policies: the consequences of a strategy based on first-strike strength...

...It is especially successful in tying bloated military spending to cuts in essential human services...

...I think it is almost certainly because the film resisted easy categorization...

...Chilly Scenes enjoys inspired casting in its major (John Heard and Mary Beth Hurt) and minor roles...

...the threat to the safety of the globe posed by both the "peaceful" uses of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons production (and the dependency of the latter on the former...

...the peril for us all in missile systems geared to launch on warning...

...Movie publicists don't know what to do with a work that fits no convenient label—Whacky Comedy, Space Fantasy—and the predominantly young movie-going public does not pick up on offerings not so authoritatively designated...

...The intelligient insertion of stock newsreel footage and blown-up clips from newspapers makes for good additional documentation...

...Directed with positive malfeasance by Terence Young (maker of Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline and other masterpieces), and written by Robin Moore, author of The Green Berets...

...Gods of Metal is a twenty-sevenminute film produced and directed by Robert Richter (Vietnam: An American Journey...

...In tone and sophistication, it rivals the most embarrassing anti-Japanese flicks of World War II...

...Withal, it is quite affecting, the sequences of fantasy and hallucination and the vast aerials especially so...

...the myth that increased "defense" spending means more jobs...

...But while the subjects of the film are late arrivals to the peace movement, the film itself is sophisticated...

...Yet in content and cultural context, this is a thoroughly American work: Its characters and idiom spring from the domestic experience of the past couple of decades...

...The galloping concern over military spending and U.S...

...Gods of Metal, moreover, is highly professional filmmaking...

...The production values are of a very high order, not always the case with low-budget documentaries of social concern...

...America—From Hitler to Reagan, a work of information and opinion, tackles the most significant issues raised by current U.S...

...One day," a former employee of Rockwell International recalls, "I realized that what I was doing was wrong...

...The title of the work alone ought to create a furor, but it should be said at the outset that the film does not seek to establish a simplistic equation between the late Fuehrer and our current President...

...The film's virtues are those often associated with the best European imports: intimacy, psychological subtlety, literate scripting...

...One of the most interesting and revealing Russian films to be distributed here in recent years...

...A modest young grandmother tells the curious at a family gathering that she subjected herself to arrest (for literally seeking to beat bombs into plowshares) because it seemed to her a moral imperative to do so, something vital to the future of her offspring...

...It remains to be asked why, in its previous incarnation, the picture bombed...