THE SCREEN

Hearts and Minds. A new cause celebre get its due: It won an Oscar Tuesday night. Sanctification always has its price. A couple of months ago it was natural for the media--a Vietnam film repressed by distributors, big cocktail party talk. Now it's been embraced, awarded, distributed, and in the words of the manager of New York's Cinema I, "business is lousy." They might have done better with it if they had kept it underground, low-priced and under high-pressure. If it is not a knockout the media has been touting, it is still a fine film, both very graphic and very suggestive. A lot of it was there for the picking: It is difficult not to move an audience with footage of a farmer pointing out the rubble which had been his house and the graves which had been his family. And if there had been any pretense of objectivity in the film, it would have been clear that the way Wait Rostow's segments are edited are pretty clearly worthy of the lawsuit he's bringing against the filmmakers. But the bulk of the film is so powerful as to make one feel that Rostow has no right to walk the streets, let alone sue anybody.

Play it Again, Sam. This is many people's favorite Woody Alien picture, probably because it is the most polished, conventional, sit-commy movie that he's made. People want a screen persons for Allen, to fit into the preconception that our favorites must be constants (Grouche, Fields Doris Day). So Alien becomes the schiap-master, packaged and ready for some USC Film Thesis in 1998, "Woody Alien Neurotic as American Hero," Pretty Soon we may want to cuddle him to death. Play it Again, Sam comes from Alien's earlier days (it was a Broadway play) when he needed the cuddling to establish himself, and it is the movie that made him a power and a star. It is wonderfully funny, but in no way indicative of the limits he can reach when he wants to.

Tevye, This 1939 Polish picture stars Maurice Schwartz, one of the great actors of the Yiddish stage, says my grandfather, Certain local incidents shortened his career. If you have never seen any Yiddish theater and you want to this is probably the only example you're likely to find in Cambridge this weekend (this year? this decade?) and I plan to catch if it probably bears less resemblance to Norman Jewison's. Fiddler on the Roof than does Jesus Christ Superstar (also by Jewison, or Christianson as they called him on the Fiddler set) which has a kicked-out-jams performance by Josh Mostel, son of the Emperor Zero.