Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 6 - December 14,1972
o being betrayed. And when you open your eyes to see the smile of a faithworthy
i person, you know the risk was worth it because of the new-found love or
f friendship,
o
When a man surrenders to another he makes a crucial choice. If he surrenders
* to power alone, even the subtle power exerted by people who dominate or let
A themselves be dominated by the personality, good looks or material possessions
f of the other, the relationship will always bear some degree of fear of the other.
? It is only when he freely offers himself in trust and in hope to one who even has
I the power to do him harm that love has any chance of developing,
o
A When one surrenders to power, something is always lost; when one surrenders
f to love, he doesn’t fear losing because he knows he has everything to gain. Only
? in a love relationship is it possible to imagine surrender as sweet.
(Direct all correspondence to: The Dameans, St. Joseph’s Church, 216 Patton A ye., P.O.
$ Box 5188, Shreveport, La. 71105)
And you sweet thing in my life
I surrender to von
By David Gates
(c Screen Gems-Columbia Music, Inc. (BMI))
How can surrender be sweet? When you think of the word you usually
associate it with images of defeat and weakness. Someone surrenders when he
has been overpowered by another.
We fear surrender because we are so conscious of how much there is to lose
when one is overpowered either by an enemy or by those people in our lives who
try to get us under their power. We want to avoid surrender in any form because
we don’t want to be inferior, weak or afraid in the relationships we form.
because our reaction to each is different. Power demands response and breeds o
fear in the one who surrenders.
Love invites response and fosters trust. We’re afraid of power because we
know what it can do to us. We’re skeptical of those who say they love us because
we can’t always tell whether they’re acting from power or love.
to distrust everyone and never be betrayed than to trust another and risk finding I
yourself suddenly alone. It’s easy to keep on running away, to isolate yourself o
and live like an oyster, trying to be so self-sufficient and yet closed off to love |
and growing old and crusty on he outside. I
Love and friendship are constant risks because it is always possible for the |
other to use power to hurt instead of love to help. That’s why it’s the closest c
friends who can inflict the greatest hurts. Risk and pain are part of such |
relationships, for without them love is impossible.
“Sweet Surrender” is the song of a person who took the risk of friendship and I
won. “Now that it’s done ... it never hurt me to fall.” That’s easy to sing after ©
the pain that led to the present relationship proved worth the effort. But there A
LIFE IN MUSIC
Sweet Surrender
Baby I’m through
Runnin’ it’s true
I’d be a fool to try to escape you
Maybe I’m beat
But oh what a sweet surrender.
You keep your rights
I’ll take your nights
No one can lose when we turn the lights out
Tastin’ defeat
Lovin’ that sweet surrender.
I’m givin’ up myself to you
But I didn’t really lose at all
I gained the only love I’ve known
And it never hurt me to fall.
Now that it’s done
So glad you won
I know our lives have only begun now
No more retreat
Only my sweet surrender.
I may be beat
But 0’ what a sweet surrender
BY THE DAMEANS
CATHEDRAL IN WATERCOLORS -- The sharp Gothic lines of the Milan
Cathedral are softened in this watercolor picture by American artist Cecile
Johnson. It is part of a new display at the American Bible Society in New
York City. (NC Photo)
Three TV Specials on Christmas
Christmas is a very special holiday for
Americans who, even amid all the
commercialization of the season, still
manage to keep alive the diverse
richness of its traditions and rituals.
Public television has put together an
hour-long program that shows what
Christmas means to different
Americans. It is a potpourri of new and
old hymns, poems, and stories that
illustrate some of the very personal
feelings that are aroused in each of us
by this season.
A few of the highlights include James
Earl Jones describing a slave’s
Christmas, Mark Twain’s letter to his
daughter about a visit from Saint Nick,
and Burt Lancaster narrating Robert
Frost’s “Christmas Trees.” Perhaps best,
though, is Grace Paley’s story about
little Shirley Abramovitz who gets the
leading part in her school’s Christmas
play to the understandable distress of
her Orthodox Jewish parents. Produced
by Playhouse New York, “An American
Christmas: Words and Music” will be
presented on public television Saturday,
December 23 at 8:30 p.m. (EST).
A more specialized look at the
traditions of one section of the country
can be seen in “A New England
Christmas,” a half-hour program filmed
in Maine. It captures the nostalgia felt
by a man who has returned to his
childhood home to spend the Christmas
season with his family. It is a journey
back in time as he recalls what
Christmas meant to him as a boy on a
small farm. If you like those Currier and
Ives prints so traditional to this season,
this is the program for you. It will be
aired Wednesday, December 20 at 8:00
p.m. (EST).
And for those of us who can recall
the excitement of the special Christmas
radio shows that were our home
entertainment in an age before
television there is the recreation of
Norman Corwin’s classic 1938 radio
drama as the Theater of the Mind with a
story that could only be visualized in
one’s own iimagination. Television
would be hard put to create visuals to
match this description of the attempt to
destroy Christmas by the Devil and
some of his more infamous followers --
Nero, Ivan the Terrible, Lucretia Borgia,
and Simon Legree. The cast is made of
veteran radio actors showing us how
they created illusions for millions with
only their voices in a dramatic form that
died with the birth of television. This
unusual televised radio show will be
broadcast on Saturday, December 23 at
9:00 p.m. (EST) (Please check local
listings for exact dates and times of
broadcast in your particular area.)
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
Review of TV Movies
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17 — 9:00 p.m.
(ABC) PORTRAIT: THE WOMAN I LOVE --
A one-hour special historical dramatization of
the circumstances surrounding the
renunciation of the British throne in 1936 by
King Edward VIII to marry a twice-divorced
American Wallis Warfield Simpson. The
teleplay stars Richard Chamberlain and Faye
Dunaway in the central roles and covers the
period from the first meeting to the
abdication of the King. Paul Wendkos
directed the special.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 18 — 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) - WORLD PREMIERE: THE SNOOP
SISTERS - in this original, two-hour
name-cast TV drama, sisters Helen Hayes and
Mildred Natwick who write murder mysteries
find themselves in the middle of the real thing
when retired movie star Paulette Goddar turns
up dead shortly after her daughter (Jill
Clayburgh) has shared her fears for her
mother’s life with the quaint sisters. The
supposed motive: a scandalous autobiography
KAMPALA, Uganda (NC) - The
conflict between the Catholic Church
here and Uganda’s President Idi Amin
took a turn for the worse as Amin
accused Archbishop Emmanuel Nsubuga
of Kampala of geing implicated in Israeli
and South African plots against Amin’s
dictatorial regime.
Archbishop Nsubuga called on Amin
with two other Catholic bishops to ask
him to reconsider his decision to expel
58 European Catholic missionaries here.
Before this subject was discussed,
however, the president gave a warning
against “people who tried to bring
confusion in the country” and produced
the movie star was writing. Minor characters
in the drama include Craig Stevens, Art
Carney, Lawrence Pressman and Fritz Weaver.
TUESDAY, CECEM8ER 19 — 9:30 p.m.
(CBS) - YOUR MONEY OR YOUR WIFE -
A made-for-TV suspense-comedy about a
kidnap caper that backfires when TV script
writer Ted Bessel I and friend Elizabeth Ashley
concoct a plot to carry off Betsy Von
Furstenburg, a TV serial star whose marriage
to a wealthy program sponsor has temporarily
ended Bessell’s writing career. The
kidnappers, it seems, become the victim of
their own crime.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20 — 9:30
p.m. (ABC) - WEEKEND NUN ~ Described
as a true story, this made-for-TV drama stars
Joanna Pettit, Vic Morrow, Ann Sothern and
James Gregory in a film about a young nun
caught in a conflict between the responsibility
of her religious commitments and the
demands of her job as a juvenile probation
officer.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 21 — 9:00 p.m.
copies of two letters, rie said one nad
been addressed to the archbishop of a
Ugandan lawyer living in Nairobi,
Kenya, and the other purportedly was
written to a Dutch-born Catholic bishop
here by a representative of El Al, the
Israeli airline.
Amin said the first letter urged “the
archbishop and his group” to foment
tribal and religious divisions in the
Ugandan army and to work to frustrate
the government’s objectives. It also
referred to “military comrades” and to
support from South Africa and NATO.
Amin told the archbishop the letters
were very dangerous and “could have
caused bloodshed in the country.”
(CBS) -- WILL PENNY (1967) - Fledgling
director Tom Gries has recreated in Will
Penny (Charlton Heston) what in all
likelihood is an accurate protrait of the cow
puncher as he really existed on the plains and
mountains of the pioneering American West.
Briefly, the film deals with an aging, illiterate,
but still capable cowhand who, with his
comrades, finds himself at the mercy of the
narrow social and economic system of cattle
ranching. Will’s travels in search of work after
a roundup lead him to the defense of a
cultured woman (Joan Hackett) and her son,
who by accident become settlers. If the basic
plot is not obviously complex, the number of
themes it suggests certainly is, with hints of
conflict between seasoned age and reckless
youth, between labor and management, even
between love and marriage. And therein lies
the film’s problem: it’s lack of control over a
proliferation of themes, locales and
characters. But even in this flawed effort,
Heston’s Penny maintains a stature and
suggestion of complexity within a code of
morality that reflected the rigors of the life,
the shortage of marriageable women and the
rudimentary nature of frontier justice in the
early West. (A-ll)
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22 — 9:00 p.m.
(CBS) -- GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS (1969) --
Not the original James Hilton novel nor, for
that matter, the Robert Donat-Greer Garson
masterpiece of the thirties, this CHIPS is
nonetheless a pleasant old-fashioned romantic
film that most people will find quite moving.
In this musical version Peter O’Toole plays
the distracted, unbending schoolmaster who is
set upon, conquered and finally humanized
by the lovely Katherine, here portrayed by
Petula Clark. drector Herbert Ross has
shifted the focus from the school and the
schoolmaster to an examination of the happy
marriage between these unlikely opposites.
This Katherine is a hoydenish music hall
performer who, back in the staid confines of
Brookfield School is a mixed blessing, making
friends and committing social gaffes with
equal enthusiasm, a personality trait that
leads to the film’s melodramatic highpoint,
the attempt by a wealthy trustee to get Chips
fired because of his wife’s allegedly unsavory
past. Leslie Bricusse’s songs are pleasantly
unobtrusive. (A-l)
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23 —9:00 p.m.
(NBC) -- MAYERLING (1968) - Mushy,
overlong, lavishly costumed ‘‘women’s film”
starring Catherine Deneuve and Omar Sharif
in the “tragic” legendary tale of royal
romance between Austrian Crown Prince
Rudolph and his mistress Maria Vetsera. Has
all the trappings of a real tearjerker, but
comes big and empty, unintentionally
underscoring how anti-human and futile a
gesture is suicide. You won’t shed a tear, so
why waste your time? (A-l 11)
THE VALACHI PAPERS (Columbia) --
based on fact not fiction, but a Godfather it’s
not. This film about the revelations Joe
Valachi, Mafia soldier-turned-informer, made
to Federal agents in the early Sixties has the
distinction, so the ads say, of being based on
“fact, not fiction.” This obvious allusion to
the origins of THE GODFATHER appears,
unfortunately, to be the present film’s ONLY
distinction.
Directed by Terence Young, an action film
maker of some note (WAIT UNTIL DARK,
THUNDERBALL, RED SUN), THE
VALACHI PAPERS has, first of all, the
defects of its OWN sources: Joe Valachi was
at best a tertiary figure, a driver for the bosses
in the Mafia’s New York activities of the
Thirties through the Fifties. Valachi’s arrest
on a drug rap and his discovery that Vito
Genovese had placed a price on his head, the
two incidents that led him to testify before
the McClellan committee in 1962, seem to be
the man’s only claim to recognition.
Attempting to structure a film around
Valachi’s participation in those earlier events
is an impossible task, made even more
difficult by screenwriter Stephen Geller’s
decision to artificially interrelate each
segment of the film with an official time
reference. Caught between the conventions of
the documentary and a fictional film’s need
to involve the audience in some identification
with the characters, Young’s usual fast-paced
direction simply defuses itself into a violent
series of repetitious, undistinguishable
Mafia-type initiations, rubouts, castrations,
etc.
As Valachi, Charles Bronson struggles
unconvincingly to bring to some consistency
and motivation to what one can only
conclude is the unintelligible portrait left us
by Peter Maas’ book. Of the scores of
recognizable figures from the history of New
York’s underworld, only that of Vito
Genovese as played by Lino Ventura is
believeable. In perhaps the film’s worst
performance, Joseph Wiseman as Salvatore
Maranzano, the man originally responsible for
uniting New York’s five families, looks and
sounds like a computer readout of a
programmed Mafia chieftain.
Unlike THE GODFATHER, THE
VALACHI PAPERS pretends to some broader
social comment on the nature of our political
processes, a statement that would be
disturbing in a film of more clarity and
coherence. After Valachi returns to his cell
having testified before the Senate crime
committee, both he and and Federal Agent
seem to conclude fromsome bits of
conversation that Valachi’s revelations have
been a waste, that the members of the
committee have used the hearings simply to
advance their own political climactic moment
of the film, causes one to wonder what,
indeed, the makers of THE VALACHI
PAPERS hoped to advance. (A—IV)
BLACK GIRL (Cinerama) directed by
Ossie Davis is a black film not simply because
of the actors and production staff responsible
for it but because it probes a genuinely and
exclusively black situation, one that has
grown out of the black experiences of
discrimination, poverty, deprivation, and all
of the rage and frustration that go into them.
As such BLACK GIRL makes a contribution
to a genre of films that, to date, has been for
the past the territory of B-grade artists and
exploitative film makers. Adpated from the
off-Broadway play by^J.F. Franklin, GIRL
the film concerns a young girl named Billie
Jean (Peggy Pettitt), who dreams of becoming
a dancer and who rejects the fecund indolence
of her half-sisters Norma (Gloria Edwards)
and Ruth Ann (Loretta Greene), who in turn
violently resent Billie Jean’s ambition to
“make something” of herself. Mama Rosie
(Louise Stubbs, repeating her stage role)
appears to be the head of the household but
when the climactic moment comes it is the
oldest member of the family, a true
earth-mother type named Mu’ Dear (Claudia
McNeil), who sweeps the fog aside, gets to the
real meat of the conflict over Billie Jean, and
settles the thing once and for all. What makes
the situation in BLACK GIRL particularly
BLACK is the psychology of Norma and Ruth
Ann, who see no valid role for Billie Jean in
intellectual or artistic pursuits, simply because
these are not fitting things for black women
to get tangled up in. By seeing and hearing all
of this in the tight confines of BLACK GIRL,
many whites, perhaps for the first time, have
an opportunity to understand the burden so
many black youngsters have to bear in trying
to realize their dreams through the system.
(A-l ID
COMPANEROS (GSF/Cinerama) is an
Italian-Spanish-German coproduction shot
mostly in English and set in
tu rn-of-the-century Mexico. Swedish
gun-runner Franco Nero delivers a boxcar of
goodies to bandido general Francisco Bodalo
in San Bernadino. Bodalo cannot open the
town’s vault to pay Nero, however the
combination resides only with professor
Fernando Rey, who has spread his own
revolutionary ideas too far and is languishing
in a Texas jail for the effort. Bodalo orders
greedy aide Thomas Milian to accompany
Nero on a mission to rescue Rey. Their
journey forms the better part of the movie,
through snickering and bickering they become
COMPANEROS who find themselves
weighing loyalties during one encounter here
with Mexican federal soldiers, another
encounter there with Iris Berben and her
army of Rey-inspired student revolutionaries,
and painful encounters everywhere with
Nero’s old nemeses: pot-smoking bounty
hunter Jack Palance and his pet falcon,
Marcia. Director Sergio Corbucci, intending
this film to be a sequel to his 1970 oater,
THE MERCENARY, clutters the story with
plenty of loudly-staged massacres, a fair share
of unusual tortures, and a bit of sexual
roughness -- all of which will not surprise
adults who have latched on to spaghetti
Westerns as a steady diet. Some may actually
enjoy the picture as a spoof, others will
dismiss it as an exercise in discordant
confusion. (A—III)
THE DIRT GANG (AIP) is an old-style
motorcylce flick that tries its hand at being
contemporary by the introduction of “lots o*
sex ‘n’ violence.” A group of rampaging bikers
invades a western movie set and proceeds to
terrorize and otherwise debauch the movie
makers until ex-biker-turned-movie stunt man
Michael Forest pummels the gang’s leader to
death in a bike duel. Perfectly awful. (C)
1776 (Columbia) is that rather rare
example of a musical that takes as its subject
a serious theme or historical moment and
endeavors both to entertain and, pleasantly to
expose the significance of human events.
Granted the subject matter of 1776 -• the
personalities, deliberations, disagreements,
compromises and, finally, the courage of the
members of the Second Continental Congress
in their debate over the American Declaration
of Independence -- it would be positively
unpatriotic to be too severely critical of the
effort. But though producer Jack Warner has
retained most of the talent from the smash
Braodway play the effect of this 1776
depends on how amused his composition of
the famous document for a much-needed
romantic interlude with his wife, or by a
gout-ridden Ben Franklin (Howard Da Silva)
who could pass as the cutesypoo original of
the dirty old man; or by a John Adams
(William Daniels) historically the prime
agitator for independence, who is as
soft-hearted as he is blusteringly hard-headed,
or, finally, by a ‘comical’ court custodian
(William Duell) who continually interrupts
the lackadaisical proceedings with the
charming exclamation, "Swe-e-et!” Granted
the frequently serious subject matter, the
general buffoonery of the principals will leave
many viewers with a sweet and sour
aftertaste. As light entertainment, 1776 is
mildly diverting. (A-11)
THE VIRGIN WITCH (Joseph Brenner
Assoc) Runaway sisters Ann and Vicki
Michelle hitchhike to London, where they
meet Patricia Haines, the lesbian proprietress
of a modeling agency. Madame Haines
moonlights as high priestess for a conven of
rural couples who dabble in orgiastic
witchcraft, and the girls become willing
initiates. Director Ray Austin exploits -
everybody relentlessly in this R-rated British
pot-boiler. (C)
Uganda Archbishop Accused
Of Involvement in Plots