I saw *Schindler's List* yesterday and I think it not only does not develop characters, it fails in numerous other ways. It's more like ET goes to the concentration camps. Spielberg's exploitation of the Holocaust is just that--the atrocities he films were relatively minor compared to their reality. Watch instead, Lina Wertmuller's *Seven Beauties*, which I came home and watched afterwards. Instead of Itzhak Perlman's schmaltzy faux- Jewish nostalgia music, you'll find Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyrie" juxtaposed over images of the camps--highlighting the irony of the "highest" point in German culture meeting its true manifestations in the camps. Instead of children jumping in the latrine to save themselves, you see a man consciously choosing to do so in *Seven Beauties* because the world is that terrible. Instead of tremulous old folks now in Israel, survivors who march together (looking ever so much like the folks in *Salt of the Earth*) victoriously, you see what really happened in *Seven Beauties*: a man looks himself in the mirror, and we look deeply into his eyes and when he says "Yes, I am alive," we know he survived, but at what cost? Spielberg ends the film saying, "Ah, yes, we are all here now with our children," but is he really speaking for the dead? And worse yet, I think, is Spielberg's insistence on making an upbeat movie in the face of current world politics. Do you think anything less is now occurring in Bosnia? At least, when Alain Resnais made *Nuit et Brouillard *--the most powerful of films about the Holocaust, especially because it is a documentary and doesn't allow us to construct some fictional alternative, like *The Diary of Anne Frank* and *The Sound of Music* and *Schindler's List*--he had the courage to draw parallels with the then-current situation in Algeria. With all the money that Stephen Spielberg has made making movies, you would think that he might have had the courage to at least point out that the same situation is now happening in the Balkans--the systematic killing of certain minorities. But Spielberg will win Best Picture and Best Director for having done his little bit in convincing that two-thirds of the U.S. population who are not sure the Holocaust occurred that perhaps it did. Too bad he wasn't MORE convincing. Just incidently, despite my not appreciating this bit of fatuous filmmaking , I was upset enough about the trailer which played beforehand to get into it with the theater manager. "Were you offended by the preview for *Naked Gun 33-1/3*? Was it dirty or something?" he asked me. There oughta be a law.... Kathleen Ely Eastern Montana College