Critics’ Voices: Sep. 2, 1991

MOVIES

DOC HOLLYWOOD. An impatient young doctor (Michael J. Fox) stumbles into a serenely integrated community in South Carolina — “Hee Haw hell,” he calls it — and acquires a pig, a girlfriend and some scruples. It’s a feature- length attack of the aw-shucks, but Fox, world’s nicest star, makes it painless.

TRUST. Typical Hal Hartley dialogue: “Will you trust me?” “If you trust me first.” In this deadpan romance, the writer-director limns the palship of a pregnant high schooler (Adrienne Shelly) and a sociopath genius (Martin Donovan). Another fond sketch of losers from the down-scale version of Woody Allen.

ANOTHER YOU. A congenital liar (Gene Wilder) and his con man friend (Richard Pryor) get involved in an elaborate insurance scam. This comedy is complicated too — but a big why-bother. By now these two gifted farceurs are doing it from memory, not from inspiration. The parts keep moving long after the machine is turned off.

TELEVISION

DREAM ON (HBO, Sunday nights). Book editor and divorced dad Martin Tupper (Brian Benben) is trying to make sense of the ’90s. So why do scenes from – ’50s TV shows keep popping into his head? In its second season, this decidedly adult sitcom, which makes deft use of old black-and-white clips, is better than ever.

WHO WILL TEACH FOR AMERICA? (PBS, Sept. 3, 9 p.m. on most stations). In late 1989 Wendy Kopp conceived a sort of domestic Peace Corps to bring the best young teaching minds to underserved inner-city and rural schools. This intimate, uplifting account of the program’s first year is guaranteed to make you smile.

MUSIC

BOB DYLAN: THE BOOTLEG SERIES, VOLS. 1-3 (Columbia). Since its release almost five months ago, this mind-snapping collection of rare, unreleased or alternate takes of 58 Dylan tunes has racked up sales over 300,000 and has inspired everyone from Paul McCartney to Frank Zappa to scour their vaults. This collection ($45.95 for the 3-CD set) stands apart, though: it is the audio notebooks of rock’s greatest songwriter. Songs that Dylan leaves off a record would make history for anyone else. The last three tunes in Vol. 3, including the beautiful Series of Dreams, are the most recent and demonstrate beyond doubt that he’s still the guy to beat.

EMIL GILELS: PROKOFIEV & KABALEVSKI (harmonia mundi). Gilels was magisterial in both Prokofiev’s brilliantly fertile Concerto No. 3 and his Second Sonata, but the exuberant, captivatingly melodic Piano Concerto No. 3, with composer Dmitri Kabalevski conducting, makes this reissue irresistible.

GEORGE LEWIS WITH KID SHOTS/THE GEORGE LEWIS RAGTIME JAZZ BAND OF NEW ORLEANS (American Music, 1206 Decatur St., New Orleans, La. 70116). These two CDs bracket the first decade of the so-called New Orleans jazz revival, spearheaded by this lyrical and passionate clarinetist who inspired jazz traditionalists around the world. The first album is a remastering of the legendary 1944 sides recorded by jazz historian William Russell; the second is a previously unissued 1952 session. Both capture the power and drive of Lewis at his peak.

THEATER

PERCUSSION FOUR. Gwen Verdon restages a hit number from Dancin’, the Broadway delight by her late husband Bob Fosse, for Chicago’s esteemed Hubbard Street Dance Company this week at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Ill.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival at Ashland and its sister stage in Portland form the largest U.S. regional theater. New artistic director Henry Woronicz plays Petruchio in The Shrew through September; he * directs Jerry Sterner’s Other People’s Money, a satire of corporate raiders, through October; both at Ashland.

BOOKS

THREE BLIND MICE: HOW THE TV NETWORKS LOST THEIR WAY by Ken Auletta (Random House; $25). It’s no secret that CBS, NBC and ABC began hitting the skids in the mid-1980s; this long book reports the high-level pratfalls in meticulous and sometimes gossipy detail.

ETCETERA

STANDING IN THE TEMPEST: PAINTERS OF THE HUNGARIAN AVANT-GARDE, 1908-1930, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. More than 150 paintings, drawings and prints along with historical newsreels and political posters, many not previously seen in the U.S., explore the flowering of modern Hungarian culture in the years before and after the war that was supposed to have ended all wars. Through Sept. 8.

THE MOST HAPPY FELLA. Frank Loesser’s Napa Valley fable, done along operatic lines well before Andrew Lloyd Webber came along, has been a cult icon since its 1956 Broadway production. New York City Opera has a new staging. It stars Louis Quilico as the middle-aged lover of a pert mail-order bride.

MYTHIC PRESENCE

Marlon Brando’s emergence in the early ’50s registered a drastic change in the cultural weather. The masculine ideal reflected in the Hollywood mirror had been basically suave and gentlemanly. Brando, who grew up middle class, Midwestern and Wasp, radiated pure working-class alienation — an inarticulate promise of danger, sex and social abrasion. Which is why, as TIME film critic Richard Schickel tells us in BRANDO: A LIFE IN OUR TIMES (Atheneum; $21.95), he was a mythic presence for all the young urban professionals of the ’50s. Rude but sensitive, rough but anguished, Brando was their version of pastoral — a noble-savage counterpoint to the corporate rat race. The myth got lost in the series of unsuccessful movies he made after his greatest, On the Waterfront. Schickel concentrates on how and why this happened to the celluloid Brando, leaving the real-life actor to rut, brood and grow fat in some other, more scandalous, less lucid book.