MOVIES - Feb. 25, 1991

Beresford Defends New Film: “There are lots of movies made about whites and blacks at each other’s throats. I don’t want to make more horrific Spike Lee films,” said director Bruce Beresford, rejecting suggestions that his new film, “Mister Johnson,” revives racial stereotypes of black sycophancy and supremacist white attitudes. Instead, Beresford said, the film--which was shown Friday at the Berlin Film Festival and will open in the United States next month--illustrates the history of race relations. The film was adapted from Joyce Cary’s classic 1939 novel about a lowly black bookkeeper who tries to rise in British colonial Africa by assimilating European values, but falls into debt and thievery. Beresford also directed the Academy Award-winning “Driving Miss Daisy.”