Short Takes

CINEMA

Rambling Through The Ratholes

HAS BRITAIN BEEN OVERRUN BY RODENTS lately, or is it just British movies? In Truly, Madly, Deeply, Juliet Stevenson spent a lot of time in bed with large, scruffy rats. The vermin abound too in RIFF-RAFF, a rambling comedy from director Ken Loach. Stevie (Robert Carlyle), an ex-con finding construction work in London, falls in love with a pretty girleen (Emer McCourt) who wants to be a saloon singer. If this sounds like the plot of The Crying Game, don't blame scripter Bill Jesse; Riff-Raff was made a year before Neil Jordan's gender bender. Loach's film is a hymn to blue-collar, multiracial mateyness, and you needn't plow through the thickly accented dialogue (subtitled for American ears) to guess his social agenda. The overlords of capitalism are Riff-Raff's real rats.

VIDEO

Sci-Fi Enigma

AS DAVID BOWIE'S SPACESHIP CRASH-lands in New Mexico at the beginning of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, so does director Nicolas Roeg's splendidly enigmatic sci-fi parable invade our subconscious, making a great, strange racket. It is a tribute to Bowie's eldritch skill and Roeg's eerie artistry that we feel immediately all the main character's displacement, fear and wonder in his new world. This laser disc (Voyager/The Criterion Collection) marks the first uncut presentation of the original wide-screen format for U.S. home video. Also on the disc: interviews with Roeg, Bowie and co-star Buck Henry. They offer no solutions to the film's mysteries, which is just as well. Figuring out The Man would be like unraveling a dream.

BOOKS

Death in the Sands

MICHAEL KELLY'S DEFT, IMPRESSIONISTIC reporting in MARTYRS' DAY (Random House; $23) of a journey around the Gulf War's edges is a useful reminder of what went on. Just before the shooting started, his travelogue of Baghdad ("unusually ugly lampposts") has the flip quality of a travel piece. In Amman, Jordan, violently pro-Saddam, the streets "hummed with a mean joy. At last somebody was killing Jews." In Tel Aviv, he discovers women who deck their gas-mask kits in velvet. After the 100-hour land war, incinerated Iraqi corpses burn off the vapors of his irony; in liberated Kuwait City, he tracks through apartments fouled by soldiers' dung. Back in postwar Baghdad: bullyboys, profiteers and "the total degradation of a people."

CABARET

A Tuneful Happy Anniversary

NO BROADWAY MUSICAL HAS INFLUENCED the form more than Oklahoma!, which integrated songs and dances into narrative. Its debut 50 years ago this month launched the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who went on to Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. Their words and music are lovingly recalled in A GRAND NIGHT FOR SINGING, a revue at New York City's premier cabaret, Rainbow & Stars. The show is one of hundreds of ways the anniversary is being marked -- from productions, concerts, CDs and books to a museum show of set designs in New York City; a gathering of original Oklahoma! cast members in New Haven, Connecticut; and the release of a U.S. stamp in, aptly, Oklahoma City.

THEATER

Free Fall

WHEN A GOOD STRAIGHT PLAY IS TURNED into a musical, the basic question is whether music adds anything. In the case of Arthur Kopit's WINGS, a 1978 succes d'estime about a former pilot and air-show wing walker whose mind has been frazzled by a stroke, the answer is an emphatic yes -- sometimes. In the new version off-Broadway, Jeffrey Lunden's score provides evocatively dissonant metaphors for what is going on inside the afflicted woman's head. But when Arthur Perlman's book and lyrics guide her into banal emotional bonds with a therapist and fellow patients, the sentimentality seems out of character for the tough, fearless old woman so vividly acted by Linda Stephens.