Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 6-May 4,1972
Oeo’s First Voucher Experiment
Excludes Parochial Schools
160
NC
ON CREDITS FOR PARENTS
Taft Plans Constitutional Tax Amendment
WASHINGTON (NC) - The U.S.
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)
will exclude Catholic schools from
participating in its first long-term
experiment with educational vouchers,
because legislation allowing that
participation has not yet been approved
by the California legislature.
OEO announced here April 24 that it
would grant the Alum Rock Union
Elementary School District in San Jose,
Calif., more than $2 million within a few
weeks for the first two years of the
voucher experiment.
Under the plan, parents will be given
“vouchers” to present when enrolling
their children in a choice of educational
programs at any one of six Alum Rock
public grade schools this fall. Schools will
be reimbursed with OEO funds on the
basis of the number of vouchers they get.
The Alum Rock district serves some
4,000 grade school students-48 percent
Mexican-American, 11 percent black and
41 percent white, according to OEO.
The federal antipoverty agency
proposed vouchers-useable at any
participating public or nonpublic
school-in December of 1969.
Proponents of the plan saw it as
opening the door to real educational
freedom of choice, particularly among
the poor who might have been unable
previously to send their children to a
quality school.
Opposition came, however, from those
worried that vouchers might foster racial
CITY LIGHTS (Columbia) -- Vintage Charles
Chaplin - wonderful for all. If what Mr. Nielsen
says is true, that is, if 75 million Americans
were tuned in to the recent Academy Awards
ceremonies, then there is hardly anyone in the
country who does not know that Charlie
Chaplin is back after what amounts to twenty
years of exile. In typical Hollywood fashion,
the Oscar show simultaneously honored and
insulted Chaplin - honored him by bestowing a
special, nostalgia-drenched and doubtless
guilt-ridden Oscar, and insulted him by having
someone come out on stage and thrust a derby
and cane in the old gentleman’s hands.
Somehow the occasion just did not seem to call
for a hat trick.
The grossness of the television presentation
aside, Chaplin IS back, mainly to collect on a
moral and political debt owned him by the
nation in general and the movie industry in
particular, but ostensibly to celebrate and help
promote a Chaplin revival spearheaded by the
re-issue of a number of his full-length classic
features. MODERN TIMES (1936) was the first
of the releases, and now comes CITY LIGHTS,
which Chaplin wrote, produced, scored, and
directed in 1931 and in which he starred as the
familiar Little Tramp. CITY LIGHTS, the story
of Charlie’s continuing, cheerful bout against all
manner of adversity in the big city, was the first
of Chaplin’s full-length pictures to use sound
effect,s although not spoken dialogue. As such
it provided him with the time and room to
expand on a basically melodramatic plot line -
here involving his near-unrequited love for a
blind flower girl - and adorn it with a plethora
of alternateliy tender, hilarious, pathetic, and
always affecting episodes. There are some of
Chaplin’s best comic moments: the opening
sequence in which he finds himself the
unscheduled center of attention at a pompous
statue-unveiling ceremony and gets himself
impaled by the seat of his pants in the bargain;
a boxing match that brings truth to W.C. Fields’
description of him as “the greatest ballet dancer
that ever lived”; a bit in which the tramp,
slumming in reverse at a rich man’s party,
mistakes a bald pate with a party-hat brim for a
proferred plate of pate.
It does not really matter whether or not the
Little Tramp gets a slice of justice and the
lovely girl to boot (he does, both), but it does
matter how he goes about obtaining his
rewards. His steadfast cheerfulness, his innate
goodness and innocence are wonders for us
today, comic yet admirable. The rhythm and
timing Chaplin displays as a writer-director are
uncanny, the mark of the comic genius. And
yet perhaps what is most appealing about CITY
LIGHTS is the universality of the littly guy, the
underdog we all pull for because, way down, we
know he is a part of us. This quality is the same
thing that gave W.C. Fields, in his vastly
different way, his own enormous appeal.
Keaton and Langdon had it; no one around
today seems to have it, and perhaps that is why
we cherish films like CITY LIGHTS and actors
like Charlie Chaplin. (A—I)
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (Universal) - A
fine madness based on the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
novel. — Like the complex wildly serio-comic,
satiric novel that gives it its name,
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is an entity that
will thrill and entrance some, confuse and bore
others, and insult and outrage still others. The
respective proportions of these reactions are
uncertain, but their division is guaranteed.
Those who find the film entrancing,
particularly the young who have made Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr., a hero of youth culture, will
doubtless read the film as a deliciously biting
but nonetheless loving case for opting out for
positive values as an alternative so sticking
segregation, draw students and funds
away from public schools, and violate the
constitutional principle of church and
state separation.
As a result, some cities chosen as
experimental cites for the voucher plan
backed out of the project.
Thomas Glennan, OEO research chief,
told newsmen he would have preferred
testing the full voucher plan-allowing
both public and nonpublic schools to
participate.
Glennan noted that legislation
allowing the distribution of public funds
to nonpublic schools is still pending in
the California state legislature, but he said
OEO decided to start a “transitional”
experiment with vouchers in Alum Rock
because it was the only public school
district ready to go ahead with any
version of the plan.
Another OEO spokesman told NC
News if the California legislature
approved the “enabling legislation,”
Catholic schools could be included in the
voucher program by the fall of 1973.
The spokesman added, however, that
local Catholic school officials themselves
have expressed some misgivings about
participating in the program.
Father Pierre DuMaine, assistant
school superintendent of the San
Francisco archdiocese, confirmed that
some pastors in the Alum Rock area are
worried about restrictions which might be
placed on their schools under the plan.
around to fight against negative realities. This
message, at once shallow and arcane (in terms
of the way it is presented in the book and now
the film) will completely escape those not in
the Vonnegut know, or will simply strike others
with its banality. Yet the story of Billy Pilgrim
- defenseless warrior, passive witness to outrage
and horror, middle-American optometrist and,
finally, traveler to the distant realm of
Tralfamadore - is to a college generation of
today what THE CATCHER IN THE RYE once
was to a now slightly wiser generation of
readers. Namely, it tells them all they need to
know (now) about life, reality, adults, and
particularly themselves.
Beginning, if that is the word, with a
time-trip backwards to World War II and the
frozen fields of
Belgium, SLAUGHTERHOUSE traces in its
fragmented way the story of Billy Pilgrim’s
advance from POW chaplain’s assistant, to
witness at the Allied firebombing of the lovely
open city of Dresden in February of 1945, to
participant in the American Way of Life (fat,
fecund wife, rich father-in-law, white colonial
house, white Cadillac, presidency of the local
Lions Club, conventions, etc., etc.), and, at last,
to captive in an eternity of bliss in the arms of
Hollywood starlet Montana Wildhack, the girl
of his erotic dreams, who like him has been
transported to a Bucky Fuller geodesic dome
atop the friendly planet of Tralfamadore.
Do not worry, the plot defies both
unravelling and rational analysis. It is rather a
vehicle for Vonnegut’s fascile philosophizing
about American manners and mores, and as
such it carries everything in director George
Roy Hill's film along quite nicely. Using a script
adaptation by Stephen Geller, Hill has gotten
the sense of the
wild dislocation and helplessness Pilgrim is
subject to as forces beyond both his ken and
control take him in and out of time. His
visualization of the wartime scenes is often
brilliant, aided mightily by the skills of
cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek and editor
Dede Allen, who have made the POW’s march
into and through Dresden, for example, a visual
poem to structural beauty and urban harmony
- something we know very little of these days.
Many people, however, will merely be
confused by the seeming chaos and will have
little patience for the apparent lack of direction
of the narrative. There should be enough in the
film, though, to interest Vonnegut novices in
the many excellent characterizations
beginning with Michael Sacks, a sadsack G.l. if
there ever was one, as Billy Pilgrim; Ron
Leibman as Paul Lazzaro, the
venegeance-crazed soldier who finally catches
up with innocent Billy; Edgar Roche as a kindly
middle-aged G.l. who befriends him; Sorrell
Brooke as his indulgent father-in-law; Valerie
Perrine as the pneumatic Miss Wildhack, and
Holly Near as his plump dartin’ daughter.
Another matter of importance is how the
film relates Vonnegut’s intriguing message
about life and time - namely, that life be
extended in another state (here, on a sci-fi
planet like Tralfamadore rather than in the
Christian vision of heavenly or hellish eternity)
and that time itself really makes no difference
since a lifetime is just a dot on the long line of
infinity. Thus it makes no difference to Billy
Pilgrim that his life is gragmented by
time-tripping. In fact, the only thing that
inconveiences him is that he has no control over
his timeless ins and outs.
There are problems with the film beyond the
conceptual and structural ones that will bother
The priest said the pastors fear that
curriculum programs, teacher-hiring and
other school procedures might be
restricted, and that admission school
policies under the plan might mean
Catholic schools could not always “give
preference to members of the parish.”
)
The pastors are concerned “not
because they don’t want to include any
member of the community,” the priest
said, but because they might have to
exclude, for example, brothers and sisters
of children attending a parish school.
Martin Milrod, a senior researcher at
OEO, said “one of the hallmarks” of the
voucher plan is that there is no
substantive requirement laid down on
curriculum content or teacher-hiring
practice at participating schools.
Milrod said the basic concept of
admission requirements at voucher plan
schools “is that everyone gets a fair crack
at the vacancies that are there.”
He noted, however, that a “siblings’
right” clause is included, giving
preference to brothers and sisters of
children already attending the school.
Father DuMaine noted that many of
the questions Alum Rock area Catholic
school officials were raising stem from
confusion over exactly how the voucher
plan works.
The priest predicted a more favorable
response from the Catholic community
“as the plan unfolds.”
the casual moviegoer. Chier among tnem is the
inclusion, in the characterization of starlet
Montana Wildhack, of an over-abundance of
Miss Perrine’s phsyique in a series of nude
scenes. The sense of the scenes does not depend
upon the nudity, and it is clear that a certain
amount of exploitation is being offered. This
more than anything else mars
SLAUGHTERHOUSE, but for mature
audiences interested in other, absorbing
elements of the film and its philosophies, the
nudity can be overlooked if not quite ignored.
(A IV)
THE GREAT NORTH FI ELD, MINNESOTA
RAID (Universal) Cliff Robertson and Robert
Duvall star in a gritty and violent re-creation of
the last great bank robberty attempt of the
notorious Cole-Younger-Jesse James gang. The
film follows the outcast outlaws from their
native state of Missouri, where they have been
denied amnesty, to the northern frontier town
of Northfield, Minn., wherein lies the biggest
bank in the territory. Unfortunately, the bank
has its assets on paper only, and Robertson as
YOunger is forced to devise an elaborate hoax
(in league with the greedy unsuspecting banker)
to get people to put their hard-earned cash into
the vault. The plan works, but some
new-fangled machines and plain old human
double-crossing make a fiasco of the job. The
movie, fraught with bloodletting and far
fetched plot turns, is nonetheless fascinating for
its little details of character and setting in
particular. Robertson is fine as the intelligent,
complex Younger, and Duvall is appropriately
demented as Jesse James. There is too much
violence and gratuitous (and mainly male)
nudity to warrant a general audience. (A—IV)
DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE (AIP)
The latest variation on a proven money-making
theme casts Dr. Jekyll as an intense young
medic bent on capturing the “elixir of life” that
will prolong human existence - something
which these days may not appear to be such a
boon to mankind. To go about his work Jekyll
at first buys spare parts from the local charnel
house but, lacking enough supplies, takes the
fatal step of killing off a few London tarts in
order to get the female hormones needed in his
experiments. When he finally concocts enough
distillate and drinks it - viola! - he turns into a
beautiful woman, the sister Hyde of the title.
For a while his double-identity and strange
drinking habits provide a cover-up for his evil
research, but the movie has to end somewhere
and so the law closes in. Most of the film is
played for campy laughs, and everything
operates in the horror-fantasy level, with the
goriest effects gratefully kept out of camera
range. The film, because of its horror theme
and because it injects a heavy erotic atmosphere
when Mrs. Hyde is on the scene, is for adults.
(A—III)
CARRY ON HENRY (AIP) - The CARRY
ON series of low British comedies began in
1958 with CARRY ON SERGEANT and has
been carrying on ever since. The latest offering
from director Gerald Thomas concerns two
previously undiscovered wives of Henry VIII
and their topsy-turvy effect on the beleaguered
monarch and his court. Kenneth Williams,
whose ruddy face combines the best features of
a W.C. Fields and a cauliflower, plays Henry
with all the conviction of a stand-up burlesque
house comic. He is ably assisted by scrawny
Sidney James as his Archbishop and assorted
other low types playing assorted members of
the high court. The humor is characteristically
coarse, trading heavily on undisguised
double-entendres and rarely, if ever, rising
above the groin level. The effect is mildly
amusing at first, then irritating, and ultimately
both boring and generally offensive. It is the
sort of thing that would make even Archie
Bunker wince. (B)
BY SUE CRIBARI
(NC NEWS SERVICE)
WASHINGTON (NC) - Senator
Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio has joined the
parade of legislators offering federal tax
credit legislation for parents of
non-public school children - but with one
significant addition.
The freshman Republican senator
announced April 26 that he also plans to
propose a constitutional amendment “to
remove any doubt” about the power of
BY GODFREY GRIMA
VALLETTA, Malta (NC) - Almost
four years after the publication of
Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul Vi’s encyclical
on birth control, Archbishop Michael
Gonzi of Malta told Maltese Catholics
that it is up to them to decide how best
to plan their families.
After discussions with the 1,000
confessors on this Mediterranean island
the 86-year-old archbishop announced his
decision to allow Catholics to make up
their own minds about which duties come
first in family planning.
The archbishop’s instruction says that
a Catholic couple who in their Christian
conscience determine that in their
situation “it is impossible for them to
realize completely the ideal of married
life as expounded” in Humanae Vitae
“will not be guilty of sin” and “should
not consider themselves unworthy of
receiving Holy Communion.”
Archbishop Gonzi’s instruction says
that a number of married couples
acknowledge the teaching of Humanae
Vitae as the Christian conduct for
married life but nevertheless find
themselves in situations beyond their
control where it is difficult to act
according to the spirit of the encyclical.
As an example, the instruction cited
the case of a married couple who because
of prudence and love decided that they
will be shirking their responsibilities if
they increase the size of their family. This
couple, the instruction said, feel they
cannot make use of the safe period
method to express their conjugal ldve
because they know that “abstention from
the physical act may constitute a serious
and real threat to the unity and stability
of their family and love.”
In such cases, the instruction
continued, the married couple find
themselves in a “moral conflict: they will
be acting against prudence and love
(against their children or against one of
themselves) if they choose the physical
act of love with the possibility of creating
life” and “they will be acting against the
stability of marriage and family if they
abstain. They will be going against the
teaching of the encyclical if they choose
any contraceptive means or methods in
the marriage act.”
Congress to approve tax credits for this
purpose.
Legislative sources indicated such an
amendment might be the first of its kind
proposed in the Senate.
Taft said at a press conference held in
his Senate office here that tax credits
“appear to be the only route left for early
and vital help” for the nation’s nonpublic
schools in light of recent court decisions.
He noted that a three-judge federal
Catholics
A couple in such a situation, the
instruction says, must “try to find in
front of God and with a Chrsitian
conscience . . .which in their particular
case and situation is the most urgent duty
and most important moral value they
must safeguard.”
The instruction says that if in their
enlightened conscience “the married
couple conclude that in their case the
more urgent duty and the greater moral
value which they must safeguard are the
unity and stability between them and of
their family and that they recognize with
penitence and humility that in their
particular situation it is impossible for
them to realize completely the ideal of
married life as expounded by the Pope’s
encyclical, they will not be guilty of sin
and as such they should not consider
themselves unworthy of receiving Holy
Communion.”
SUNDAY, MAY 7 — 7:30 p.m (CBS) -
ENTER LAUGHING (1967) - A cheery,
book-to-stage-to-movie autobiography based on
comedian Carl Reiner’s first break into show
biz. Stronger direction might have raised the
various styles of humor to a single high level,
and it might have overcome the “bit TV show”
feeling of a few scenes, but overall the Jewish
humor consistently tickles. Elaine May’s
mannerisms and caricatures create a thoroughly
unsympathetic but outlandishly laughable
neurotic, and Michael J. Pollard adds a fine
folksy touch. There is nothing everlasting about
the humor, but any audience will thoroughly
enjoy the film.
9:00 p.m. (ABC) - MORITURI (1965) -
Unwilling Marlon Brando is forced to commit
sabotage abroad the German ship of Yul
Brynner during World War II. Although the film
is a little confused about whether it is an action
story or an allegory, the direction by Bernhard
Wicki of its ship scenes is first-rate. With Trevor
Howard, Wally Cox, and Janet Margolin. (A-lll)
MONDAY, MAY 8 — 9:00 p.m. (ABC) -
WATERHOLE NO. 3 (1967) - Craggy James
Coburn is the fastest con artist in the West, in
this souped-up and flashy mod Western. One of
the things he coii„ is the wallet containing a
map showing the location of a cache of stolen
gold, lifted from the thief. With the robber in
pursuit (and the Army in pursuit of him),
Coburn races to snap up the gold. Tone of the
film is coarse, bawdy, and frequently just plain
crude. (B)
9:00 p.m. (NBC) - THE LOST FLIGHT -
Made for television. A kind of flying “Ship of
Fools,” with Lloyd Bridges as your pilot. A
passenger jet makes a crash landing on a remote
desert island, and the catastrophe naturally
brings out both the best and the worst in the
passengers who survived the trip.
TUESDAY, MAY 9 — 8:30 p.m. (ABC) -
WHAT’S A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU...? --
court in his own state recently declared a
nonpublic school tuition reimbursement
program unconstitutional.
A member of the Senate labor and
public welfare committee which considers
education legislation, Taft said he plans
to introduce soon a tax credit bill
allowing parents to subtract from their
final federal income tax assessment up to
$400 per child for tuition paid to a
nonpublic elementary on secondary
school.
Nineteen education tax credit bills of
various types are now pending in the
ways and means committee of the U.S.
House of Representatives, where tax
legislation originates.
Only one such bill has been introduced
in the Senate this session, however - a
proposal submitted by Senator John G.
Tower (R., Texas) on Feb. 15.
Taft said his bill differed from some of
the others because it contained stronger
civil rights provisions and stated clearly
that credits were applicable only to
secular education at nonpublic schools.
The constitutional amendment Taft
plans to propose says Congress “may by
law provide for the allowance of a credit
against any income tax imposed by the
United States on individuals for all or a
portion of tuition payments for secular
education made to nonpublic, nonprofit
educational institutions.”
A reporter asked Taft whether he
wasn’t afraid that approving an
amendment on tax credits would be
“cluttering up the constitution with
trivia.”
Taft responded that he felt the plight
of the financially strapped nonpublic
school system was not trivial but “a very
serious national problem.”
President Richard Nixon’s panel on
nonpublic education has proposed federal
income tax credits as one of four major
recommendations to aid the nation’s
nonpublic schools.
Repeat of an original 90-minute TV film, with
Brenda Vaccaro, Jo Anne (Laugh-In) Worley,
Jack Worden, Vincent Price and Roddy
McDowall, Miss Vaccaro is a slum child from
the Bronx who aspires to greater things. To save
some time, she decides to impersonate a
prominent socialite, with predictable
complications.
THURSDAY, MAY 11 —9:00 p.m(CBS) -
ARRIVEDERCI, BABY! (1966) - What might
have been a bright, springtly marital comedy
starring, say, a Cary Grant, is instead a dull,
tasteless, and vulgar vehicle for clownish Tony
Curtis. The big issue seems to be whether or not
the marriage in question (an aged Italian
count’s to lovely Rosanna Schiafano, con-man
Curtis’ girlfriend) was valid. (B)
FRIDAY, MAY 12 — 9:00 p.m. (NBC) -
THE STORY OF A WOMAN (1969) - Were it
not for a lush msucial score, this tangled marital
melodrama about a woman reliving a past affair
that threatens to ruin her happy present would
be a guaranteed sleep-inducer, especially for
thosy watching from soft easy chairs. Our
advice: listen to the television and watch the
radio instead. (A—III)
9:00 p.m (CBS) -- MURDER ONCE
REMOVED -- Original 90-minute television
melodrama presents a tale of woe centering on
a scheming doctor's, clandestine relationship
with the wife of one of his wealthy patients.
John Forsythe, Barbara Bain, Richard Kiley
star.
SATURDAY, MAY 13 — 8:30 p.m (ABC) -
A TASTE OF EVIL - Original 90-minute
television film stars two Barbaras - Stanwyck
and Parkins. Miss Parkins plays a young woman
recently returned home from “being away” at a
mental institution, and discovering that
someone nearby, perhaps in her own family, is
trying to block her path to full recovery. Miss
Stanwyck is her too-warm mommy.
Film Classifications
A — Section I — Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage
A — Section II — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults Adolescents
A — Section III — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults
A — Section IV — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Reservations
B — Morally Objectionable in Part for All
C — Condemned
Maltese
Told To Follow
Consciences
T. V. Movies