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These days Japan ranks as a major stop on the international concert circuit. Pierre Boulez and the BBC Symphony have just finished a three-week visit; Rafael Kubelik and the Bavarian Radio Symphony are playing now. Next week Native Son Seiji Ozawa comes in with the San Francisco Symphony. On a refueling stop in Anchorage, the Met crowd encountered the entire company of Britain's Royal Ballet in the airport waiting room. They were on their way home to London from Tokyo...
...pleasurable. It was in a London pub in 1969 that John Cleese and Graham Chapman, gagwriters for the Frost Report, teamed up with Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle, similarly disaffected writers from Britain's then booming satire business. They decided to start their own program. The BBC did not balk when told that the show would be "anarchic and free." Recalls Cleese: "They thought they were getting another latenight satire show. It wasn't that at all." Constantly testing sketches on one another, the Pythons were bent on turning English literary and verbal humor into...
...adventures reach no logical conclusion. They are simply brought to an abrupt end when a police car rolls up and the entire Round Table is rounded up. The knights are charged with being accessories to the murder of the historian who popped up midway in the movie - BBC style - to supply some useless background on the traditions of medieval romance. The intervention of the bobbies also leads to the fine sight of a fully armored knight spread-eagled against the squad car and being patted down for concealed weapons...
...result of all this anger and obfuscation is that audiences are likely to see a major film-perhaps a great one-only in truncated form. The BBC and Polytel have already approved the Becker version. David Puttnam says V.P.S. will sell the Ophuls version for "any serious offer in the region of 112,000 pounds sterling" ($263,200), a forbid dingly high figure for a documentary based on V.P.S. 's accounting of the film's cost. It is also an estimate heatedly contested by Ophuls, who says that he has not been shown the budget since last July...
Ophuls has notified Puttnam and Lieberson that he wants "no credit at all" on the aborted version of The Memory of Justice, and if they use his name he will "sue the pants off them." The backers -particularly the BBC - still may use Ophuls' name, perhaps in some nebulous phrasing like "Conceived by Marcel Ophuls." No one who has seen any of Ophuls' previous work would ever believe...