MOVIE REVIEWS : A Documentary Trio Up for Oscar, Worth a Look

Starting Saturday, all five Oscar-nominated feature-length documentaries will be shown under one roof at the Monica 4-Plex. Screenings are Saturdays and Sundays through March.

At least three are worth seeing, but as in the case of this year’s foreign film nominees, there’s the feeling that some of the most exciting work--e.g., “Paris Is Burning,” “The Good Woman of Bangkok”--has been overlooked.

Joining Irving Saraf and Allie Light’s “In the Shadow of the Stars,” a delightful series of portraits of 11 members of the San Francisco Opera Chorus, which continues Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30, are Alan and Susan Raymond’s 53-minute “Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House” (1:30 p.m.). Also scheduled are Hava Kohav Beller’s two-hour “The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler Within Germany, 1933-1944” (10 a.m.), Vince Di Persio and William Guttentag’s 50-minute “Death on the Job” (10 a.m.), and Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey’s 53-minute “Wild By Law” (10 a.m.).

Although ‘In the Shadow of the Stars” is a charmer, “Death on the Job” has by far the greatest impact of the five films in competition. With clarity and economy Di Persio and Guttentag investigate three catastrophes within three high-risk industries: commercial fishing, tunnel construction and petrochemical refining. They argue convincingly that all three disasters, among the many that cost 10,000 American lives annually, could have been averted.

This is the way the filmmakers tell it: On March 22, 1990, the “Aleutian Enterprise” sunk in the Bering Sea within 10 minutes of sustaining an 80,000-pound load of fish, which dropped on the vessel when a huge net broke; had an alarm, known to be broken, been working, nine men sleeping aboard the trawler might well still be alive. Had the S. E. Healy Company spent $14,000 on a methane gas detecting device for use in a tunnel construction project in Milwaukee on November, 1988, three men might not have died in an explosion.

In July, 1990, 23 workers lost their lives in a raging fire at Houston’s Phillips refinery (which the filmmakers claim has been cited for 566 safety violations) in Houston because workers, hired as outside contractors, opened the wrong valve. De Persio and Guttentag indict not only industry for widespread and chronic indifference to human life but also the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration for its seemingly equally chronic leniency in punishing the offenders.

In “Doing Time” Alan and Susan Raymond, who created a stir with their “An American Family” on PBS back in 1973, take us on a fascinating, unprecedented tour of Pennsylvania’s Lewisburg Prison, one of the country’s three maximum security federal penitentiaries, and reveal that it is a clean, well-run institution, headed by an affable, plain-talking warden, but one that does little or nothing to rehabilitate its 1500 inmates, 45% of whom are black. We get a chance to discover the humanity of the prisoners but the Raymonds carry their objectivity to such an extreme that we’re left with no idea of how they actually feel about Lewisburg in particular or America’s penal system in general.

The other two nominated films suffer from a dated academicism. “The Restless Conscience,” which had a regular run at the Laemmle Grande last October, breaks some ground in its comprehensive survey of the often-overlooked resistance to Hitler and Nazism in Germany itself but is so dry that it does not come fully alive until Beller starts outlining the various plots to kill Hitler. Invaluable as an historic record, much of it is tedious to watch.

“Wild by Law” takes an important and potentially engrossing subject, a survey of the three men--Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall and Howard Zahniser--whose conservation efforts eventually culminated in the Wilderness Act of 1964, makes it a solemn collection of talking heads interspersed with the usual archival material and seals its dullness with one of those jaunty, distracting scores that used to accompany classroom “audio-visual aids” movies of the 1940s.