Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 24

12 Section 2 Chicago Tribune. Tuesday. September 1. 1931 1 I McNichol keeps lights on in 'Georgia' 'McGonagall': A quaint look at pure British nonsense By Larry Kart By Gene Siskel Movie critic HERE'S NOT much to this TRIBUNE MINI-REVIEW: Kkldi drama "THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT IN GEORGIA" L'EEN VICTORIA'S most brated turn of hrasa fand rr. southern-fried soap opera other than the emergence of 18-year-old Krlsty McNichol as a poten haps Her Majesty's only lasting contribution to British lintml DiracM by WoiwM P.

Mam; tcrntfiy by Bob Bomy: (hotoonviMd by BM Buflar; sdnad by Ann ursaud; muaw by mvm snm; prooucao oy hi Goon Galamgar, Howan Kupwman, Ronald Sattnd, and How aid Smith; an Aveo Embaaay amii at nUghDornood thaatara. nataa ru. THE CAST Amanda ChHd u. Krtaty MeMlchol TravraCnBd PanmaOuakl Conrad Mark Harm sunny jonnaon Don Stroud Arian Daan Snydat Barry nonur 1 Georgia," like other movies on country songs, doesn't do much to dispel stereotypes of the South. According to this film, the South is a land full of primitives who love to drink and fight in bars.

Mark Hamill, best known as Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars," plays a puppy-love role of a good cop who becomes attracted to McNichol. Their relationship is one stormy scene followed by a cutesy scene followed by another stormy scene. There is very little real drama to this picture. You get the feeling it exists only to fill up a triple bill at drive-ins across the country. 'Saturday the 14th' THIS IS NOT the film I thought it would be.

Its title is a parody of the mad-slasher-in-a-summer-camp hit "Friday the 13th," but the film that this comedy sends up the most is "The Amityville Horror." Like that enormously successful haunted-house thriller, "Saturday the 14th" tells the story of an average suburban family that inherits a house full of spooks. Look sharp now, there's a four-armed creature with eyes on top of its head threatening Richard Benjamin's young son. And now there's a scaly green creature with a shark-like fin on its back that is terrorizing Benjamin's teen-age daughter as she coyly takes a bath. Ridiculous creatures are supposed to provide most of the fun in the story, but they end up supplying only visual vari- is a nooie beastThe Cow is a more forlornerStanding in the rainAVith a login every corner." The plot if the film can be said to have one concerns the poet's pathetic quest for recognition, which culminates in an attempt to read his verse to Queen Victoria. But "McGonagall," like the "Monty Python" TV shows and films, is really one large mm sequitur wrapped around a lot of little ones.

Some of the nonsense is inspired 1 1 almost fell out of my chair when Sellers, as Victoria, is discovered flailing away at a piano while Erroll Garner's bouncy version of "I'll Remember April" is heard on the soundtrack. But too often the nonsensical premises, once stated, are not open to elaboration, and we yearn for McGrath and Milligan to get on with the show. Yet if "McGonagall" were revved up to "Monty Python" speed, it would lose much of its charm, particularly the pathos that Milligan brings to the title role. Within his bewildered, hang-dog manner, there is a strange dignity, and at times Milligan who dominates the film makes the mad. ludicrously bad poet seem a first cousin to King Lear.

So although this is a far from perfect comedy the thick, often impenetrable Scottish dialect doesn't help), it is not just a precursor of the snooty. Oxbridge surrealism of "Monty Python-" The rhythms are slower here and the non sequituns are less snappy because Milligan, unlike the Python crew, hasn't ly suppressed the sadness that underlies the silliness. tial star. The only apparent problem standing in her way: She knows how cute she is In "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia," McNichol plays a precocious runaway who manages her singer-songwriter older brother's Nashville-bound career. Together with their loyal dog Boogie Woogie, they end up taking an incredibly circuitous route to Music City, with stops along the way for an assortment of bar fights, jail sentences, and brief romances.

Dennis Quaid stars as Travis Child, older brother to Amanda McNichol. The surname Child is quite appropriate, for these are youngsters who will be tossed into all sorts of trouble. WE DON'T BELIEVE a minute of any of this, because it's all so arbitrary. I mean, when a drunken Travis is rudely awakened on a city street bench, he just happens to rap the town's redneck police officer in the groin. Thus Travis winds up in jail, unless Amanda can quickly get him a singing job in a neighborhood tavern so he can use his salary to put up bail.

There is a long time out in all of this for McNichol to sing a couple of songs. Is it possible this movie was made to promote her singing career? "The Night the Lights Went Out in was, "We are not amused," which Vicky supposedly said whenever something offended her profound sense of dignity. But when those words are uttered once again in "The Great McGonagall," they have a rather different impact. After all, the Queen is being portrayed to smirking, empty-headed perfection by Peter Sellers. And as if that weren't enough, this time "We are not amused" is immediately preceded by "Oh, WE ARE.

at you may or may not have guessed, the world of the "Goon Show," the famous BBC radio program of the 1950s that featured Sellers, Spike Milligari, and Harry Secombe and that is widely credited with originating the brand of humor later popularized by "Monty Python's Flying Circus." "The Great McGonagall" on view at Facets Multimedia through Sept. 101 is, however, not a vintage radio or television show, but a 1974 feature film. And both the translation to the big screen and the passage of time have altered the humor quite a bit, and not always for the best. Directed by Joseph McGrath and written by McGrath and Milligan, "McGonagall" tells the story of William Topaz McGonagall Milligan, an actual 19th-century Scottish weaver who was the "greatest bad verse writer of his age." The following quatrain is a representative sample of his work "The Hen ety to a steady parade of predictable -horror sequences. "SATURDAY THE 14TH," which was written, directed, and produced by a couple of former Chicagoans, Howard Cohen and Jeff Begun, is the second horror spoof to be released this month, and it's so weak that it almost makes the first horror comedy, "Student Bodies," seem good by comparison.

Benjamin costars with his actress-wife Paula Prentiss, who continues to impress me with her ability to overact. She thinks anything she does is cute, probably because her husband tells her so. "Saturday the 14th" might have worked if it had been about only the children. After all, young people are the primary victims in the mad-slasher movies, and it would still be very funny to see a bunch of wiseacre kids fight an assortment of monsters. Kristy McNichol in "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" Potential star knows how cute she is.

BUT BY CASTING Benjamin and Prentiss, Cohen and Begun may have helped secure financing for the film, but they also gave up any real chance for a parody. This is simply a feeble comedy with a husband-and-wife star acting team mugging in front of the camera. Comedies don't need stars. They just need jokes, and "Saturday the 14th" doesn't have many. Rating for "Saturday the 14th" at the Chicago and neighborhood theaters: 1 star.

1 Frankfurt's 'famous ruin' is the site of musical splendor with Solti and the CSO Chicago Symphony Europe '81 f3 RANKFURT, Germany A widespread case I Gof edifice-complex and the Chicago Sym- I I phony has gripped this burgeoning hub of Li finance and commerce. Perhaps it required nothing less than Sir Georg Solti and his orchestra to divert proud Frankfurters momentarily away from the splendors of their "new" old opera house, a 101-year-old cultural landmark that was reopened Aug. 18, after years of notoriety as "Germany's most famous ruin." For Solti it seemed a particularly appropriate base from which to launch his fourth European tour with the orchestra. In 1952, long before London, Chicago, and knighthood, he took over as side of the balcony and found a "typical" modem hall sound idmirbly clear and well-defined for projection of various instrument textures, but harshly brilliant in a way that did no service to the spacious sonorities, and warm spirituality of Bruckner's "Romantic" Symphony. Neither did Solti probe as fully as he migbt have into its serene ethos, despite a gorgeously dusky Andante and a hunting-call Scherzo made exultant with rich trombones and pealing trumpets.

If the brutal brightness of the Grosser Saal was unfriendly to the Bruckner Fourth, it well suited the hyperkinetic Solti treatment of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, wearing its virtuosity in such a way as to wrench loud cheers from an audience obviously unaccustomed to this kind of thrilling frontal assault. Later, at a dinner for orchestra members hosted by First National Bank of Chicago, a smiling Sir Georg told his men. ''You are really marvelous when it comes to the crunch. Play damn good tomorrow in Salzburg you will be in the lion's den." No one could mistake the grit in his Hungarian growl. gave Saturday at the Alte Oper.

ONCE THE TEMPLE of amongst other gods Wilhelm Furtweangler, Hans Rosbaud, and Paul Hindemith, the huge building was gutted by Allied firebombs during World War II and only its four walls were left standing. With the postwar economic rebirth, the Alte Oper became a cause celebre, pitting those who sought to rebuild the theater against those who hoped to turn the site into an office block. What grew into postwar Germany's first major citizens initiative for rather than against something finally was decided, after 30 years of public wrangling, on the side of the preservationists. Scores of Frankfurters contributed 15 million Deutsche marks, out of a total cost of roughly 150 million $60 million Such an outpouring of civic passion might have made Mozart eat his words when, after several unsuccessful concerts in Frankfurt, he complained that "the people here are even greater penny- BUT THEN YOU enter the main auditorium a host of smaller halls, conference rooms, salons, and two restaurants also reside under the vaulting roof, and you enter the 20th Century. The Grosser Saal is a panorama of reddish mahogany over which a huge canopy of wire mesh seems to pull sound from the pros-ceniumless stage up to the distant rows of the wraparound balcony.

But Ulrich Schwab, the general manager, knows he cannot afford to cater to bourgeois elitist tastes alone. Coming weeks will bring to the Alte Oper Santana, Benny Goodman, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and an exhibition of postwar art. Schwab plans an expensive campaign to eradicate Frankfurt's provincial cultural image. Unfortunately, the opening night "gala" of Mahler's Eighth Symphony failed to soar to perfervid glory under Michael Gielen's bloodless direction, leaving you to wonder what kind of "Symphony of a Thousand" Solti might have produced in his stead, had anybody thought to reunite him with his former orchestra and chorus. This listener sampled the acoustics on either pinchers than in Vienna." In any case the way was clear for the city to convert a silent shell into one of the World's largest and most ambitious cultural-convention centers.

Like Frankfurt itself, the rebuilt opera house is sleekly modern within an exterior that has kept its pact with the past. Everything about the imposing neo-Renaissance facade, from its statues of Mozart and Goethe to the portico inscription "For the true, the beautiful, the good" has been lovingly restored to its original elegance. You walk through the French neoclassical foyer, with its medallion portraits, marble flours, and elaborate moldings, and you sense, how envious Kaiser Wilhelm I must have felt at the 1880 dedication when he snorted, "Only the Frankfurters could have afforded this." cruei conductor ot tne raniuun opera ana museum orchestra. When he left nine years later, the urnrlrt Irnmv him aa a molnr mndnntni Not surprisingly, Solti has kept a strong sen- over the years, and he allowed quite a lot of that feeling to emerge when he was presented with a i caiuviut I. uigiicai.

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