Turnoff for Ballet

Childhood Productions, specialists in the tacky packaging of grim fairy tales for the kiddie film market, is inching up in the world. Not many inches, though. Dr.?? Coppelius!!. Childhood's version of the venerable ballet Coppelia, has Walter Slezak as an actor and Dame Alicia Markova as a consultant, but it still seems calculated, as far as ballet is concerned, to turn young audiences off.

The story--one of 19th century Romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann's famous tales--is the one about a guy (Franz) and a doll (Coppelia). Coppelia is the handicraft of a sinister genius of a toymaker, Dr. Coppelius, and her clockwork is so clever that she seems alive, reading a book on a balcony and gesturing occasionally to the villagers below. When Franz is smitten, his enraged fiancee Swanilda invades the Coppelius premises, disguises herself as her mechanical rival and astonishes the toymaker by performing a variety of dances and wrecking his studio before the inevitable reconciliation with Franz.

The 98-year-old ballet is traditionally noted for the gaiety of its music by Leo Delibes and the opportunity it affords a ballerina to showboat her versatility as both Coppelia and Swanilda. Childhood's 97-minute version, however, is notable for its scratchy sound track and the generally lumpish dancing/acting of the company (Barcelona's Gran Teatro del Liceo). The sets, enlarged by 70-mm. film to fuzzy garishness on a wide screen, have all the finesse and elegance of the model villages that come with toy trains.

Walter Slezak, mugging and waddling through the part of Dr. Coppelius, steals what there is to take of a show that is bound to look better when it finally gets to television--providing the reception isn't too good.

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