Dutch Filmmaker At Festival
Fons Rademakers was showered with prizes four years ago for his World War II classic, ``The Assault,'' which won the Golden Space Needle award for best picture and director at the 1986 Seattle International Film Festival. It then went on to collect that year's Golden Globe and Academy Award for best foreign film.
The 69-year-old Dutch filmmaker is back this weekend to show two more movies at the festival, which introduced his work to local audiences with the American premiere of ``Max Havelaar'' 13 years ago.
``The Spitting Image,'' which plays at 2:30 this afternoon at the Egyptian, is a wide-screen 1963 psychological thriller about a man coerced by his ``double'' to collaborate with the Nazis. (I was unable to attend an impromptu press screening earlier this week, but free-lance film reviewer Michael Upchurch saw it and calls it one of the best things in the festival.)
``The Rose Garden,'' which is Rademakers' first completed film since ``The Assault,'' plays at 9:30 tonight at the Egyptian. It, too, deals with the long-range impact of a World War II incident: the hanging of 20 Jewish children in Hamburg on April 20, 1945, just as British troops approached the city.
``But the only thing the two films have in common is the wartime background,'' Rademakers said yesterday. ``While `The Spitting Image' is a psychological story about human behavior, `The Rose Garden' is more in the form of a statement, a document, a way of saying `Isn't it a shame this exists?' ''
Although ``The Spitting Image'' was photographed by the French New Wave legend Raoul Coutard, and was a success in Europe in the 1960s, it was never sold to the United States for distribution. It made its American debut in January, as part of a New York archival series, ``Netherlandscapes: 85 Years of Dutch Filmmaking''; The Village Voice's Gary Giddins called it ``a lost classic.''
It's one of Rademakers' few wide-screen movies and he's particularly proud of how it looks. He said it's his favorite kind of picture because it blends ideas with a strong, complex narrative.
Rademakers' first English-language film to be released in the United States, ``The Rose Garden'' was begun by Cannon Films, which didn't have the money to promote it properly when it opened in Los Angeles last December. It has barely been seen elsewhere in the country, although Liv Ullmann earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as a defense attorney, and the cast includes Peter Fonda as Ullmann's ex-husband and Maximilian Schell as the only survivor of the group hanging.
Fictionalized as a contemporary courtroom drama, the script was inspired by the fact that parents of the murdered children tried and failed to get the ex-Nazi who ordered the hangings into court three years ago.
Since winning his Oscar, Rademakers has been trying to arrange financing for ``An Instant in the Wind,'' a historical drama about an affair between a bourgeois white woman and a poor black man in 18th-century South Africa. Two Oscar-winning actors have said they would play the leading roles (he calls it ``the ultimate story about racism''), but financing still hasn't come through.
Movie notes: General Cinema's Gateway eight-plex in the Seatac Mall is turning into South Seattle's art-house; it's currently showing the Italian-language Oscar winner, ``Cinema Paradiso,'' and the AIDS drama, ``Longtime Companion.'' The latter sold out nearly every performance last weekend on two screens at the Capitol Hill Cinemas . . . If the Rae Dawn Chong episode in the current theatrical film, ``Tales From the Darkside,'' seems familiar, that's because it's an unacknowledged remake of ``Woman in the Snow,'' one of the ghost stories in the rarely shown, uncut, Japanese-language version of ``Kwaidan,'' an Oscar-nominated 1964 film that turns up at 7 p.m. tomorrow on Ted Turner's TNT network.