From the Archives: Stage Actress and Acting Teacher Uta Hagen.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JUNE 04, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 060401np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Uta Hagen
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR, I'm Terry Gross.

I've heard many actors say with reverence that they studied at the HB Studio in New York. That's the studio run by my guest, the celebrated actress and teacher Uta Hagen. The studio was founded by her late husband Herbert Berghof in 1945.

Some of the actors who studied there include Jack Lemmon, Stockard Channing, Matthew Broderick, Maureen Stapleton and Lily Tomlin. Many actors have studied Uta Hagen's books, "Respect for Acting," and "A Challenge for the Actor."

Uta Hagen started her acting career over 60 years ago, and worked with now-legendary people, including: Eva LeGallion (ph), The Luntz (ph) and Paul Robeson. She was born in Germany and moved to Madison, Wisconsin at the age of six when her father accepted a position teaching art history at the University of Wisconsin.

I spoke with her last November when she was starring in the off-Broadway production "Collected Stories."

GROSS: You're known as a great teacher as well as a great actor, and you've written a couple of books about acting. You write that there are hundreds of different people within you who surface through the day, within any one who surface through the day.

Do you recommend that actors find the person within them that's closest to the role that they're playing?

UTA HAGEN, ACTRESS; ACTING TEACHER: Well, there's only one person in you. In other words, when you create a role you are selecting from various aspects of your life and putting it together to create that new character. But all of that has to spring from your understanding of yourself, and that's what takes so long.

GROSS: You say that an experience that has served you many times including when you played Blanche in "Streetcar Named Desire," an experience from your childhood when you were pelted with hard snowballs by kids in the neighborhood, and you were called an atheist.

What is it from that scene that stayed with you so much from that experience?

HAGEN: Well, it was a cold winter night. I was hounded through the streets with snowballs by children -- that's terrifying. I've never forgotten it. It was like being in hell.

GROSS: What is it from that experience that you summon up when you need to for a role?

HAGEN: I don't know.

GROSS: OK. I'm wondering if there is a kind of experience that is so frightening or rich for you -- if you've used it to draw on several times for roles. Does the experience dry up? Does it lose its power to have that energy for you?

HAGEN: No. As a matter of fact, that experience might wear out because I've talked about it a lot. If you don't talk about it a lot it stays useful. When you explain to an audience -- to somebody, a friend or -- no, not a friend -- a colleague who's working with you -- what sources you're using, if you tell them that your secret is gone. Now they look at you with that knowledge of what you're using and judging it. And you can't use it anymore.

GROSS: That's interesting. So, you won't talk about these things with the people you're performing with?

HAGEN: No, no.

GROSS: But you'll talk about it with your students?

HAGEN: No, not when I'm using it in an immediate role. I give them examples like the snowball. Now that's used up for me because I've talked about it a lot.

GROSS: In one of your books about acting you talk about how you can't be inert onstage, and you have to find out what it is that you actually do while you think you're doing nothing so that you can do that kind of thing onstage.

Have you thought about that a lot, what it is your doing when you're not really doing anything?

HAGEN: I'm going to interrupt you right now.

GROSS: Go ahead.

HAGEN: Because, again, everything you're discussing you have read -- it interests you. Are you an actor?

GROSS: No, I'm not.

HAGEN: Then it's none of your business. Now, let me explain to you why. It may interest you, it may fascinate you, but if -- you see I feel that in the theater everybody thinks they connect -- everybody is fascinated about another human being onstage.

If it's very convincing they usually are sure that they could do it too, which is not true at all. If you would go to a violinist, you would not ask him about his bowing arm, about his elbow position, about his phrasing. And if he told you, you wouldn't know what he was talking about and you would be bored.

If you went to a painting class -- a watercolor class, and you saw a teacher showing somebody how to wash a piece of paper that is going to have watercolor put on it in a minute, and said, what do they teach here? How they're watering down a page?

It is not the secrets, but the craft itself. You wouldn't ask a scientist because you wouldn't know what he was talking about. And you must, I feel, an audience should learn to respect acting as a craft in the same way. That you -- if I do explain it, it might titillate you, you might understand a little of it, but the real impact, or import of it, for a fellow artist you would not get.

I don't say that to offend you, I just believe that with all my heart.

GROSS: I want to say I totally respect what you're saying, but I just beg to differ on a couple of things. For example, I would be asking the violinist about their phrasing and the bend of their arm and all of that.

HAGEN: Why?

GROSS: Well, because I think...

HAGEN: Do you play violin?

GROSS: No, but...

HAGEN: Then I think you're -- you might ask him, but I think the violinist would look at you like you were nuts. And I think you are.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: What I have found, as someone very interested in these things, is that, for instance, if the violinist talks to me about his or her phrasing it might help me hear music -- hear things in music that I didn't hear before.

I find that actually understanding more about craft is not only interesting in its own right, but helps me perceive things that I didn't perceive before, which I like.

HAGEN: That's a very valid point, and maybe I'm just in reaction to so many people who ask these questions without -- the misunderstanding of the layman in terms of an acting technique are so profound that I think I've pretty much had it in my life with that. I think that's probably part of my rebellion.

GROSS: I'll tell you another reason why I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about acting, though I respect you for not wanting to talk about this. Is that I think really good actors have great insights into the body and how the body is used, how the body communicates, how the voice communicates.

And also that great actors are great observers of other people, and they just have great insights into how people move.

HAGEN: That's true, but you see the body, again, which I am gung-ho about and talking about it all the time. I believe that the body as an instrument of communication is all-powerful, and the biggest influence in my life for that training came from modern dance.

Without being balletic or dancerish, but it very strongly influenced me. However, very fine actors very often cannot define themselves what it is they're doing. Lorette Taylor (ph) could not tell you what she was doing. She had no -- she was intuitive, instinctive, great performer.

GROSS: Actually I've noticed that as an interviewer that some of the great artists I've interviewed...

HAGEN: Oh, God some the best ones can't -- and I happen to have -- because I've been teaching I found in my own work that very often when I couldn't explain something it was because I didn't understand it myself. When I couldn't articulate it, it was because it was fuzzy in my own head.

Now, I do know that I can do it, nevertheless, but I may not be able to communicate it to someone else.

GROSS: Perhaps you'll let me ask you about the voice inside "Do Speak on the Radio."

LAUGHTER

HAGEN: Yes.

GROSS: I know that you've recommended singing lessons for people who aren't necessarily going to be singing onstage but are just going to be speaking. What do you feel you've learned about your voice from studying singing? I'm assuming you've studied it.

HAGEN: I did -- it's the same with -- when I say dance, modern dance, for the body of the actor which does not make them self-conscious about stage movement, but gives them a sense of alignment, a sense of -- an awareness of their body in space.

In the same way, singing rather than voice for the theater, makes them not listen to themselves. It prepares the vocal instrument -- the diaphragm, the whole tone of the voice in the head. Without making -- now listen to yourself when you talk. Do you understand what I mean?

The self-consciousness -- when it makes you listen how it sounds you're going to be a bad actor. Your voice has to be there for you to serve you when the time comes.

GROSS: Right. So, you're not worrying about how you're doing your lines.

HAGEN: Exactly.

GROSS: You're learning about the sound, and physicality of your voice.

HAGEN: Exactly. It's there from the singing, it serves -- the instrument is ready - it's primed.

GROSS: We're listening to a 1998 interview with actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen. Sunday she'll receive a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement. We'll hear more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guest is actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen.

Your acting career was launched by what I perceived to be as a very bold gesture. When you were, I think, 17 you wrote a letter to Eva LeGallion asking if you could work with her.

HAGEN: Yeah.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: And I think that's a very brave thing to do.

HAGEN: I didn't even think it was brave, I just -- I was also very stupid. I thought she still had the civic repertory which I knew had read a great deal about and heard about. And it was the only repertory company in America at the time. There hasn't been one since, I don't think - a real repertory company.

And she was doing great plays and contemporary new playwrights, and Ibsen (ph), and Chekov, and Shakespeare. And that's what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a part of that. And based on that, I wrote her and I said this is what I want and could I audition for you, and I want to be a part of your theater.

And didn't realize that the civic had already folded, and she was still functioning but not in that capacity. And then she was working on a production of Hamlet, which I didn't know, and I went home after my audition with her in spring of '36 -- no '37.

And I was -- my father wanted me to go to college because at that time you couldn't get a job that Macy's if you didn't have a degree - it was during the Depression. And I was itching to just go into the theater. I didn't want to do college.

So, I thought, I'll do it in a three-year plan and take summer school. And I went to enroll in summer school and came home and there was a letter from Ms. LeGallion asking if I would be interested in coming East and working with her on Hamlet. And that was my debut in the theater, Ophelia.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Now, was that letter based on her having seen you or just based on your letter?

HAGEN: No, based on my letter -- my letter to her.

GROSS: What did you say in that letter about yourself, that's a good invitation (ph)?

HAGEN: I don't know. I really don't know how I used to persuade people that I was fabulous because I guess I believed it. And I don't know how I interested -- my agent said to me, who was my agent at the time, she said, "I don't know, when you walked in, you knew you were great so we believed it."

LAUGHTER

And I don't think I had egomania at all, I just believed I had a big talent and I was going to be a great actress.

GROSS: So, what was it like for you playing Ophelia so early in your career?

HAGEN: I don't remember. You see, it's all like a haze and blur, it was a wonderful experience and in essence I studied with her. Because I worked with her on the play and that whole company with fencing lessons and we had all sorts of extracurricular things we were asked to do.

And we wove our own costumes at her looms, and it was a phenomenal experience for me. And then when that was finished which went very well at Dennis (ph) -- we played in Dennis, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, and got wonderful reviews from Elliott Norton (ph) and all the fine Boston critics.

And then she was going to do eight plays in repertory, and work on it for three years. She had a huge grant for that, and I was going to be part of that, and then I rehearsed with her for three months and she abandoned the whole thing because she felt the company wasn't good enough, which I don't think it was.

And so, I worked with her on the "Sea Gull," I worked with her on other roles in the fall, and then at Christmas the whole thing was collapsed. And then I went on to do the "Sea Gull" with the Luntz (ph). I don't believe it. When I laugh, it's because it's like some fairy tale.

GROSS: Now you worked with Alfred Lunt (ph) and Lynn Fontaine (ph) on Broadway in the "Sea Gull." These are like great names of the theater but most people today have never seen them perform and know them only through legend. What were they like? What was so special about them?

HAGEN: Well, they were an enormous influence on my life. They just, if I say only one thing of discipline -- I've never -- what they pounded into me in terms of theater discipline has never left me. And I've tried to pass that on because I'm very shocked, most of the time, at young actors who don't understand what a disciplined performer is like. In terms of the simplest things of your own health and your rest -- readying yourself for work, of the hours you put into work.

I never -- I can work 12 hours in a row and not fall down, and the respect for the craft -- for the love of the theater, the need to make it into a true offering for an audience. I mean I knew some of these things before, but they were kind of reconfirmed and I saw it in practice -- they were phenomenal.

GROSS: When you say they taught you discipline, could you elaborate on what it was that they taught you that helped you with discipline.

HAGEN: Well, they were disciplinarians in the toughest sense of the word. You were -- if your curtain was at 8:30 in those days and your half-hour was at 7:00 -- at 8:00, you were in the theater at 6:30 and not a moment later.

Somebody like Clarence Derwood (ph), who was the president of Equity at one point, a very prominent actor, played with them in "The Pirate." And he played the part of the pirate who didn't appear until the third act, and that was at 10:00. He was still in the theater at 6:30.

And the -- no-nonsense backstage. Never -- you don't drink during the day. You don't come to the theater in a messy state. You look after your costumes. Ms. Fonatiane used to sit with me trying to teach me a decent makeup, which I had classes in for years.

And she would smack my hands if my -- while I was putting on my eyebrow pencil, and say, no, no, no. She would say you make up for the -- not for the last row gallery with opera glasses, but for somebody in the front row with opera glasses.

LAUGHTER

And that's what I'm talking -- that you don't have on a beautiful costume and have a malted milk and spill it in your lap.

In other words, everything had to do with true care about everything you did and everything you brought to a performance.

In 1943, you played Desdemona to Paul Robeson's Othello. What was it like to work opposite Robeson?

HAGEN: Well, it was wonderful. He was unbelievably, overused term, but charismatic man with a great presence and enormous intelligence -- sense of humor. He was a great, great man.

GROSS: Was there anything that was considered controversial about the production?

HAGEN: Everything was considered controversial that's why...

GROSS: Because so often Othello was played by a white actor in black face.

HAGEN: It was the first time in this country, no maybe not, maybe in some -- I was trying to think of who else had played it, I don't want to have history cockeyed here. But it was, for a Broadway production, way ahead of its time in that sense. And that made it very controversial and very exciting, and no trouble at all. Everybody was thrilled with the idea that this was finally happening.

GROSS: Now, am I right in saying that you were later blacklisted?

HAGEN: Oh, yes I was blacklisted for 10 years. As a matter of fact, I was graylisted -- in 1970 I did a production for CBS, and I said to -- there was a woman producer called Barbara Schultz, and I said, "did you have any trouble getting me on?" And she said, "oh, God, yes." That was still in 1970.

GROSS: And do you think that that related at all to your work with Robeson?

HAGEN: It did.

GROSS: And your friendship with Robeson?

HAGEN: It did, no question about it. I also was a progressive, and a political -- I still call myself a liberal - left-liberal Democrat. I always was and I always will be. And it was at one time in my life when I would say I was very proud to be an American citizen because I felt I was very active as such.

And the blacklisting and the -- what happened to me as a result, I say the government still owes me an apology.

GROSS: So, you lost a lot of roles that you think you would have had.

HAGEN: Well, of course. Oh, I know. It was at the kind of the most fruitful part of my career, I had just done Blanche for two years, I had done the "Country Girl," I had done "St. Joan." And suddenly I was beginning to get big television offers. I never got another television, I never got another film offer.

"St. Joan" was supposed to go on the road, I couldn't go on the road because they were writing the guild protest letters from Indianapolis -- from all over the country. And they -- and the worst thing they did -- I don't really care I say about that. Because I think in a way maybe it prevented me from being tempted by movies and stuff that I would have been sorry I did afterwards.

But what they did to me spiritually was that it's the only time in my life I was ever frightened. I've never been frightened of anything in my life, and that scared me and that's what I resent most.

GROSS: Did you have to testify?

HAGEN: Twice. I mean I had -- I was called twice, I only testified once eventually in private session. But those were horrible days, those were days when you sat in restaurants and if you started to talk politics you looked over your shoulder to see if a waiter was listening and was going to report you.

My phone was tapped, I was followed by the FBI. And nobody ever even asked me to be a communist. That's what's so ironic about that whole time.

GROSS: Uta Hagen recorded last year. Sunday, she'll receive a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement. We'll hear more of the interview in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with more of our 1998 interview with actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen. Sunday night she'll receive a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Hagen runs the HB acting studio, and is the author of the book's, "Respect for Acting" and "A Challenge for the Actor.

She started her career over 60 years ago and worked with such theater legends as Eva LeGallion, the Luntz and Paul Robeson.

In 1947, you worked with the director Harold Klurman (ph), and you say that he took away all your tricks and brought you into a more modern approach to acting. What were the tricks that he stripped you of?

HAGEN: Well, the tricks -- what you learn - actually, he stripped me of stuff that I had acquired as a professional, which was pretty junky, you know. But Broadway tricks, you tell a funny joke just before you go on - enter the stage, that makes you into a professional, which is junk.

And slick entrances, and how to sit, and how to move gracefully, and self aware, and theatrically -- externally theatrically funny, which I did not begin with, by the way, as an amateur. Klurman led me back to being a good amateur, which is that I believed who I was, I believed where I was, I had faith in what I was doing, I was not dishing it out front for consumption.

And he wouldn't let me do -- I learned to fix line readings, to fix gestures, and he didn't let me do any of that. And I got back to where I'd been, and only now I believe that it could be done that way and wasn't amateurish but was true.

GROSS: You met your late husband, Herbert Berghof, in the theater. He was an actor and teacher and you run the studio that he founded. Did you meet him in a play? Were you on stage together?

HAGEN: Yes, we were in a play with Klurman, as a matter of fact -- it was the same play, called "The Whole World Over" by Konstantine Sirminov (ph), not a very good play. And he was a replacement, and I had heard about him through many of my acting colleagues. Many of them studied with him, I thought he was a phony and was a guru.

At the few meetings I had with him I thought he was a strange man, and then we started working together and there were love scenes. And a couple of kisses, and a couple of hugs and a week later we hit the sack and we never left -- 44 years later.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: I imagine that it's a very kind of intensified experience to be in love with somebody on and offstage, to enact this dramatic love onstage and to also feel it offstage.

HAGEN: I don't think it's that so much. It's working together, I think it needn't have been a love scene for us to fall in love with each other. But what was extraordinary about our relationship from then on was that we truly did everything together. I mean he got me into teaching, he's the one who started me teaching.

And I said, "I don't know how to teach. Why do you want me to teach?" And he said, "you know how to act, can't you learn how to pass on what we've learned?"

And when he put it that way, I thought that will be fun, and from then on I loved it. And we had the studio together and we played together for many, many years. And he directed me in many plays, and it was a unique, fabulous life that I still can't believe is gone.

GROSS: My guest is actress and teacher Uta Hagen.

Did you ever study, you know, the method?

HAGEN: No, never. I mean I've read all of Stanislovsky's (ph) books avidly when I was young, and I still have my old copies that are all underlined with "so true" on the side.

LAUGHTER

I didn't really know why. And I also remember thinking why can't I do what he's telling me when I get onstage?

As a matter of fact, when I was asked to write my book, I was actually commissioned to write the first one by Macmillan (ph), I said it can't be done. Because -- and it drove me crazy, because I said I can demonstrate something in one second that it takes me 30 pages to write -- that's so boring.

But the -- my books are actually based on things that gave me problems as an actor. Every exercise, everything I came up with was based on my own problems sharing those with other actors which I think most of those problems every actor has had himself.

When people say, "how do you know that?" I say, "because there isn't a mistake I haven't made." There isn't a mistake in the book that I haven't made 10 times, 100 times. So, then I see it in someone else and I can help them get rid of that problem.

GROSS: You mention that first book about acting that you wrote. You've, in a way, disavowed that book, and you have a second book about acting. What was the problem with the first book?

HAGEN: Well, when somebody -- I was watching an exercise in class and I was appalled, and I very rarely get impatient and this time I did. And I said, "my God, what's the matter didn't you read my book?" And she said, "yes." And I said, "where does it say to do what you just did?"

She brought me the book, and there was some sentence there. I said, "oh, no." And I hadn't look at the book in 12 years. And I took it home, I reread it, and I said this has got to go. And I immediately started to revise it and spent another five years writing the new one.

And theoretically I agree with many of the things in the first book. But it's cute, it's superficial, it's convenient, I think it can be misinterpreted -- I teach all of -- I've taught a lot in colleges. They say I'm working from your book and they're doing the opposite of what I say. They have managed to say what I wrote and interpret it the opposite.

So I thought, this mustn't be. So I wrote the new one and I think you might not -- people might not like it as much, but they -- and they might disagree with it. You can't even disagree with the first one it's so general.

GROSS: I wonder if you have actors who you've taught who you've seen changed by working in Hollywood and achieving stardom there?

HAGEN: I've seen -- well, if they're talented and manage to get over the idiocy of Hollywood, they usually change for the better. But if they -- or they improve. But if they -- I've seen professional actors -- stars whom I've worked with who were theater actors who were quite extraordinary and wonderful.

And they go to Hollywood for six, seven, eight years and they do sitcoms or they do nothing but movies, and they come back and they are scared to death, they cannot sustain a performance, they tense up, they have not used their bodies, they're all used to close-ups. And have really lost their ability, and that's a fact. I know four very specific examples that -- where you shudder.

GROSS: Uta Hagen, recorded last November. Sunday night she'll receive a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.

This is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, D.C.
Guest: Uta Hagen
High: Stage actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen. She's taught acting for more than 40 years. She is considered one of the most important acting teachers in America. This Sunday, she will receive a lifetime achievement Tony award. She taught such actors as Jason Robards, Jack Lemmon, Sigourney Weaver, Matthew Broderick and the late Geraldine Page. Her first book about acting, "Respect for Acting" was published in 1973 and is still in print. Her follow up to that is the book "A Challenge for the Actor." Since 1947 Hagen has taught acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York.
Spec: Entertainment; Lifestyle; Culture; Uta Hagen

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Uta Hagen

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JUNE 04, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 060402NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: John Powers Reviews John Sayles' Film "Limbo"
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:50

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Independent filmmaker John Sayles has a new movie. It's called "Limbo," and our film critic John Powers says that's where it left him.

JOHN POWERS, FILM CRITIC: Let me tell you what I like about John Sayles. I like his independence and integrity. I like the way he puts political ideas into his movies. I like the way he tells stories about the working people that Hollywood ignores.

I like the way he films in parts of America you never see on screen. Places like the Texas border or West Virginia coal mines. I like the way he doesn't give a hoot what people like me say about his work. And having once interviewed him, I like him personally.

In fact, I like everything about John Sayles except his movies. Now, if you're one of his loyal fans, and after 11 earlier films you'll know if you are, you may well enjoy "Limbo." Which displays his usual idealism and sense of geography.

But if you're not, this new movie highlights much of what's unsatisfying about his work.

"Limbo" takes place in an Alaskan fishing community where canneries are closing and champagne guzzling yuppies dream of turning the area into a tourist Mecca. Sayles regular David Strathairn plays Joe Gastineau (ph), a gloomily decent ex-fisherman who's been tiptoeing through life ever since an accident 25 years earlier.

He perks up when he meets Donna D'Angelo (ph), played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, a small time singer whose come north looking for work. Donna's dragged along her alienated teenage daughter Noelle (ph), that's Vanessa Martinez.

The three seem primed for a kind of redemptive family psychodrama. But the story suddenly pivots when, after trouble on a boat, they wind up stranded on a deserted island well off the beaten track. Now their story is about survival, and the clash between Donna's life-affirming optimism and the existential glumness that suffuses both Joe and her daughter.

It's long been an article of faith that Sayles, unlike a studio hack, writes rich, complex, character-driven screenplays. But in fact, his scripts lack the mess and mystery and unpredictability of life. They're all about making points.

This whole movie is crawling with caricatures. The angry fisherman who lost his boat, the transplanted lesbians who own a sushi (ph) restaurant, the deadpan Native American like Marilyn from "Northern Exposure," Dan the smug developer who literally talks of turning Alaska into a theme park.

They're all sociological types, and horribly acted I might add, who exist solely to make it seem that we're getting a sharp portrait of a changing Alaska. But the movie's social observations are as glib as the interaction between Joe and Donna, whose bi-play owes less to real life than to the tradition of Hollywood banter.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- SCENE FROM THE JOHN SAYLES FILM "LIMBO")

MARY ELIZABET MASTRANTONIO, ACTRESS: I've never slept with a drummer.

DAVID STRATHAIRN, ACTOR: Is that good?

MASTRANTONIO: Probably. It probably indicates a level of self respect I've never found below.

STRATHAIRN: So, ex-fishermen rate higher than drummers.

MASTRANTONIO: Certain types of fungus rate higher than drummers.

POWERS: To put across the script to "Limbo" would take a great director. But a dozen movies in, what's most frustrating about Sayles is that he's still so lousy at thinking in pictures, to use the title of a book he once wrote about filmmaking.

Although the movie boasts the great cinematographer Haskel Wexler (ph), there's not a memorable image in it. In fact, most of the staging is as clunky as a home movie. And the acting's grotesquely uneven.

Although Mastrantonio knocks herself out to bring Donna to life, she even shows off the singing voice of a small time crooner, she's pulled down by the doleful performance of Strathairn, who has refined his trademark stoic minimalism to the point that he now resembles a barnacle.

In the end, "Limbo" wants us to see how Joe and Donna and Noelle are transformed by being caught on the island. How the extremity of their situation leads them to transcend pettiness and learn to bravely accept their destiny, even if it's a dire one.

This is a perfectly reasonable theme. But in an exasperating touch, the movie builds to a "Cape Fear-ish" life or death climax and then doesn't show what happens. When the movie premiered at Cannes, Sayles spoke about this open ending as if it were a daring artistic gambit. "Real daring," one viewer snarled. "Just like `The Lady' or `The Tiger.'"

GROSS: John Powers is film critic for "Vogue."

I'm Terry Gross.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, D.C.
Guest: John Powers
High: Film critic John Powers reviews "Limbo" by director John Sayles (Lone Star, City of Hope, Eight Men Out). This is the story of an Alaskan fisherman who has been away from the sea for years because of a tragic accident and falls in love with a travelling lounge singer
Spec: Entertainment; Movie Industry; Lifestyle; Culture; John Sayles; John Powers

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End-Story: John Powers Reviews John Sayles' Film "Limbo"
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