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PAGE 6—December 21,1972
LIFE IN MUSIC
BY THE DAMEANS
Silent Night! Holy Night!
Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin Mother and Child.
Holy Infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.
Silent night! Holy night
Shepherds quake at the sight!
Glories stream from heaven afar,
Heav’nly hosts sing: Alleluia,
Christ, the Savior, is born!
Christ, the Savior, is bom!
Silent night! Holy n it
Son of God, love’s p e light
Radiant beams from thy holy face,
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.
For about a year now we have been writing this column in which we take
contemporary songs and comment on the words. Music has emerged today as
one of the main vehicles for transmitting values in our society and has been a
prime means of expressing what people think and feel about themselves, others
and our society.
Charles Reich in THE GREENING OF AMERICA calls our age Consciousness
III and states that this age “has not yet developed a widely accepted written
poetry, literature, or theatre; the function of all of these have so far been
assumed by music and the lyrics that go with it. Music has become the deepest
means of communication and expression for an entire culture.”
Throughout the year the music market has run the gamut from songs with
deep meanings, reaching the core of a person’s life and experience to the light
songs with very little depth and content. Then there’s Christmas! It is in a
category all by itself. We forget all rules about good music or criticism about
words or phrases.
In a time where many traditions have been put to rest, the result of
reevaluation and refocusing, we can find ourselves in the middle of friends and
strangers just singing away on songs like Silent Night, Joy to the World, 0 Little
Town of Bethlehem, or 0 Come all Ye Faithful. If we really stopped to analyze
the words to these songs, especially the third and fourth verses, we would find
ourselves saying “what in the world does that mean?” “How does this fit in with
my experiences?”
Just look for a moment at the second verse to Silent Night or even the first
verse of The First Noel:
“The first Noel the angel did say
Was to certain poor shepherds in fields were they lay;
In fields where they lay, keeping their sheep,
On a cold winter’s night that was so deep.
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Born is the King of Israel.”
Yet, there we are singing away, enjoying every minute of it and with a heart
full as a basketball. Standing there in the group, there is a spirit present that no
contemporary song could ever hope to duplicate. There is a spirit which cuts
across age barriers, religious denominations, differences in races and nationalities.
In a most unique way, these songs transmit the true spirit of Christmas -- the
remembering and celebration of the birth of Christ and the impact that he has
made on the world and its peoples. That impact which has been present for two
thousand years recalls and revives in us through sharing those traditional songs
the spirit of real love, joy, peace, brotherhood, forgiveness, and understanding.
It is one thing to say these words or to define them in clear, rational
terminology. It is an entirely different experience though, to feel their presence
and to put them into practice as the Christmas season with its songs and general
spirit inspires us to do. Then Christmas songs remind us that music goes far
beyond words to stir within us a spirit that has been building for two thousand
years.
From the Damenas, our wish and prayer is that the true spirit of Christ will
not only fill your hearts during the holiday season but will flow into the lives of
others during the coming year.
(All correspondence should be directed to: The Dameans, St. Joseph’s Church, 216
Patton Avenue, P.O. Box 5198, Shreveport, Louisiana 71105)
(c 1972 NC News Service)
Review of
TV Movies
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24 — 8:30 p.m.
(ABC) - GIDGET GETS MARRIED - What
can you say about a movie with a title like
this? Nothing, other than to point out that it
is the latest, self-explanatory extension of the
presumably endless "Gidget” series. We can’t
wait for “Gidget Has a Family’’ “Gidget Goes
to Reno,” etc: Monie Ellis is oh-so cute in the
title role, and Joan Bennett and Paul Lynde
steal the show with their mugging as the G’s
parents.
9:30 p.m. (CBS) - A DEATH OF
INNOCENCE - Repeat of a made-for-TV
courtroom drama. Shelley Winters is cast as a
Midwest mamma who comes to big, bad New
York City to sit in on daughter Tisha
Sterling’s trial for murder. Just another day in
Fun City.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27 — 8:30
p.m. (ABC) - MR. AND MRS. BO JO JONES
- Repeat of a cutsie-poo light (weight) young
love comedy (???) has a young couple and
their respective families thrown into an
uproar because of the girl’s sudden case of
pregnancy. What's the matter with kids these
days? And, what’s the matter with TV?
8:30 p.m. (NBC) - LET'S HEAR IT FOR
A LIVING LEGEND - Aside from the nifty
title, all that recommends this formula
missing personality adventure is its star,
George Peppard “as Banacek.” In the days
before Howard Cossell and instant replay,
millions of TV fans witness the disappearance
of a pro football player after he is tackled on
camera. Banacek is called in to solve the
mystery play.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 28 —9:00 p.m.
(CBS) - J.T. - Peabody Award winning drama
about a young boy in Harlem who is in danger
of being crushed by his environment and led
into delinquency by his peers when -
meeooow! - out of a vacant lot comes a
battered cat that the boy takes care of and
thereby finds a purpose and direction in life.
The answers may be a little too pat, but the
dramatization does have great appeal, and the
performances of Kevin Hooks as J.T.,
Jeanette DuBois as his worried and
exasperated mother, and Theresa Merritt and
his wise and understanding grandmother are
outstanding. A very enjoyable, occasionally
enlightening, and only slightly maudlin
melodrama for the family.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29 — 9:00 p.m.
(CBS) - HOOK. LINE. AND SINKER (1969)
- Informed by his doctor that he has only a
few months to live, Jerry Lewis embarks on a
trip around the world in order to indulge his
favorite sport - fishing. The alleged comedy
also involves Lewis' wife Anne Francis and
doc Peter Lawford in attempts to cash in on
the peripatetic fisherman’s rather large
insurance policies by pulling a switcheroo in
the local morgue. For hard-core Jerry Lewis
fans only. (A-ll)
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30—9:00 p.m.
(NBC) - MOUSE ON THE MOON (1963) -
Rolicking British comedy with Margaret
Rutherford, Bernard Cribbins, and
gap-toothed Terry-Thomas. The plot revolves
around a tiny principality’s efforts to repair
its hot-water heating system. The government
is stumped until it hatches a scheme to apply
for U.S. foreign aid “to send a rocket to the
moon.” (A-l)
Network TV
Christmas ’72
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24 — 1:00 p.m.
(ABC) - DIRECTIONS: “Christ is Born” -
Special one-hour “re-creation” of the Biblical
story of the Nativity, filmed in the Holy Land
and Rome, and with readings from the Bible
by John Huston, narration of filmed
sequences by J.H. Secondari.
10:00 a.rn. (CBS) - TIDINGS OF GREAT
JOY - Special presentation of Christmas
music selections, vocal and orchestral, with
soprano Veronica Tyler and the CBS
Orchestra conducted by Alfredo Antonini.
11:15 p.m. (CBS) - Commencement of a
series of Christmas-oriented programs,
including a musical selection of Colonial
Christmas carols performed by the
Williamsburg (Va.) Singers, guitar and choral
selections by Los Elegantes and the Tucson
boys’ choir respectively, and a live candelight
service from the historic Bruton Parish
Church in Williamsburg, Va.
12:00 midnight (NBC) •• MIDNIGHT
MASS FROM ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL
- Live presentation of Midnight Mass from
New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
IN FATHER DAMIEN COUNTRY - Guide Richard Marks (left photo)
uses the base of a cross as a pedestal to look out toward Kalaupapa, the
leper colony on the island of Molokai made famous by the work of
Father Damien. The white cross marks the volcano which formed the
peninsula. In St. Francis Hospital (right photo) Sister Emmett Anne
talks with Mrs. Mary Opio and Marks.
FATHER DAMIEN’S LEPER COLONY:
A Forgotten Place of Peace
BY JO-ANN PRICE
KALAUPAPA, Hawaii (NC) - The
small Japanese woman was blind, her
fingers were stumps, her feet were in
bandages. But she smiled as she chatted
merrily, sitting on the edge of her bed.
Her name was Ethel Kamingo. She
had been here at Father Damien’s old
leper colony on the island of Molokai
for 40 of her 69 years - and in 1953 she
was married even though “I was an old
lady.”
“Florentino-my husband - likes
parties - and he’s a good cook.”
At this point Florentino, wearing a
rosary with beads as big as marbles, was
wheeled into the double room in the
blind ward of St. Francis hospital. He
laughed at the description of himself.
“That’s his bed over there,” Ethel
nodded across the room.
“We’re dying together.”
Outside the long, one-story wooden
hospital a dazzling sun burns down on
the six-and-a-half square-mile triangle on
this sparsely populated island. Great
waves smash against the shore, and
straight-up cliffs rise 2,200 feet behind
the peninsula.
When the young Belgian Father
Damien de Veuster arrived in May,
1873, at Kalawao, the barren northeast
part of the peninsula, was a place of
death amid life, a point of no return,
where the average leper was expected to
survive 14 months.
Today it is a place of life and peace.
Its population of 180 men and 35
women have accepted and moved
beyond the haunting terror of the
disease.
“We have a saying here,” said Richard
Marks, 43, an ex-electrician and a
patient, whose grandmother and uncle
are buried at Kalaupapa, “that as long as
you’re anxious, you’ll never get well.”
Marks and his wife, Gloria, run the
Damien Tours, one of two travel
services in the slumbering leper village
run by the Department of Health.
Nearly everyone in the town of
Kalaupapa is a patient. And nearly
everyone works for the state at wages
ranging from 10 cents to 90 cents an
hour.
Since no children live here, the
couple’s two children live with their
grandparents in Honolulu. Their father
sees them when he visits a leprosy
treatment center near Honolulu.
Marks was born on the island of Maui
and the first time he had leprosy - it
recurred and now he is being treated
again - he went to Louisiana where a
large leprosarium is located. The
experience made him angry about what
he sees as outmoded methods and
treatment of leprosy - a term he prefers
to Hanson’s disease - here in Hawaii.
But he would never go back to the
bustle of the mainland, or give up the
splendid beauty of life in the most
famous leper colony in the world.
Kalaupapa has a courthouse, a
seldom-used jail, four policemen, a
firehouse, a bar called Rea’s where
patients may purchase beer and wine
but not hard liquor, 200 or so TV sets,
more than 300 beef cattle, and scores of
old cars.
Patients live at home, for the most
part, provided they keep up the houses.
The 39-bed hospital, staffed by six
Franciscan nuns from Syracuse, N.Y.,
presently has some 16 patients, some
requiring almost full time care.
A moving spirit in Kalaupapa is the
present pastor of St. Francis Church, a
Belgian of the Sacred Heart order
named Father Philibert Vanfrachem, 73.
About one third of the community is
Catholic. There is also a United Church
of Christ and a small Mormon group.
“I’m the happiest priest in the world
- the fullness of man is not only
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY
BEAN (National General) (Dec. 20 release)
Yahoo! Paul Newman is the Law West of the
Pecos! Walter Brennan won an Academy
Award for his supporting performance as Roy
Bean, the “hanging judge” of Vinegaroon,
Texas, in William Wyler’s 1940 Gary Cooper
vehicle, THE WESTERNER. Times change
and now John Huston has given the robustly
shiftless judge center stage and his own
vehicle to star in. Paul Newman, Hollywood's
leading non-hero, essays to make Bean as
lovable a reprobate as had Brennan. The odds,
however, are considerably against him,
although he succeeds well enough to make the
movie a wild, funny experience for nearly
everyone.
The film is a rip-roaring tall tale in the
modern manner - i.e., loud, vulgar, and
serio-comic. The violent material is played for
laughs, variety coming mainly from a mixture
of comic styles. Huston, in fact, has gone to
great lengths to satirize other Western here
(including a theme song similar to the
“Raindrops Keep Failin’ On My Head" that
boosted BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE
SUNDANCE KID). The problem with all this
is that the laughs don’t add up to anything
too coherent, and Newman’s efforts are
thereby somewhat trivialized. By the time
Stacy Keach comes roaring into town as a
crazed albino gunman, for example, one
knows that the only thing holding the film
together are the splices in the print.
It is an amusing near-failure, poking
hit-or-miss fun at everything that moved in
the Old West, and yet without a steady center
of gravity or point of view. Some viewers will
be put off by its coarse language and laissez
faire attitude toward sex but this is mainly a
matter of sensibilities. What is more
questionable is the film’s ending which has
Bean as an old man returning to the town he
ruled in order to save it from burning crooked
oil interests. He does so by blowing up the
walls and burning down the town and so goes
to his reward in a blaze of glory. The film
could do without this final glorification of the
resort to violence as a means of purification.
Oh yes, Lily Langtry is played by Ava
Gardner in a cameo appearance, and director
Huston himself does a nifty bit as a grizzled
mountain man who “co-habited with a b’ar --
until she runs off with another grizzly!”
(A-l II)
LIMBO (Universal) . . .POW-wives
melodrama on the side of the angels. Back
before the days of Women’s Lib, Mark
Robson’s new movie would most likely have
been referred to by reviewers as a “woman’s
film.” Sensitivities may change but Robson’s
realities remain the same: the director of THE
INN OF THE SIXTH HAPPINESS and
PEYTON PLACE, not to mention VON
RYAN’S EXPRESS and HAPPY BIRTHDAY,
WANDA JUNE, has now turned his hand to
the immediately contemporary issue of the
tribulations of POW wives and has come up,
undoubtedly, with the soapiest “meller” of
the year. Of its own long-suffering ild LIMBO
is a masterful piece of work, calculated, one
assumes, as much to turn off the critics of the
genre as it is to delight, painfully, movie goers
who are never happier than when shedding a
tear in front of their TV screens or local
movie screen.
Robson directs LIMBO with a careful eye
for all the teary potential of the Joan
Silver-Linda Gottlieb novel. Its contrived plot
focuses upon three wives on a Florida Air
Force Base attempting to survive the absence
of their husbands missing or imprisoned in
Vietnam. Kathleen Nolan is a 35-year-old
mother of four who refuses to succumb to
temptation in the form of the local gym
teacher, Stuart Margolin; Katherine Justice
plays a well-to-do woman who even when
confronted with the facts, chooses a fantasy
life rather than face up to her husband's
death; and Kate Jackson is a newlywed who,
when told of her husband's status as an MIA,
rather quickly opts for the companionship of
physical,” Father Philibert said, “it’s the
soul that counts. What does this place
say? It says - accept God’s will in your
life. Here you don’t have complaints,
suicides, drug problems or loneliness.
There’s loneliness in new York or San
Francisco. Not here.”
Sisters at the hospital - successors of
the famed Mother Marianne Kopp, who
a sincere neighborhood gas station attendant
(Russell Wiggins). As the ironies -- as well as
the symmetry -- of melodrama would have it,
Ms. Nolan's husband dies in prison and Ms.
Jackson’s is released in what a news
commentator terms “one of the happier
stories to come out of Vietnam.”
It is one of Robson’s peculiar talents that
he so often manages to verge on the edge of
mawkishness without teetering over. While
LIMBO runs the gamut from gooey first
communion services to tacky renditions of
such pop songs as “You Belong To Me” and
“Strangers in the Night,” much of the film,
for all its neat contrivances, rings true. The
political overtones are for the most part
played down for the sake of the human
dimensions, except for one genuinely moving
scene in which three of the wives meet in
Paris with the North Vietnamese peace
delegation and watch a film of a U.S.
bombing mission which took the lives of
countless Vietnamese women and children:
suddenly the American wives are forced to see
their own problems in the light of a far larger
complexity.
Ocassionally LIMBO goes quite beyond the
limitations of its sources and its genre. The
performance of Kathleen Nolan deserves
particular mention as a sensitive recreation of
the terrible doubts and crises that confront all
women who must live through this type of
ordeal. Such an achievement in itself makes
excuses for the form unnecessary. (A-l11)
THE VALACHI PAPERS (Columbia)
Low-grade “factual” film based on the life
and confessorial times of the third-rate
mobster Joe Valachi, the man who a few
years ago told all to Federal investigators,
seems much more a piece of fiction than THE
GODFATHER, whose coatails it is trying to
ride at the box-office. Inscrutable Charles
Bronson (as Valachi) is the only competent
figure in an otherwise miscast and/or
misdirected cast of Mafia impersonators.
Some of the old “l’m-a tel la you, Joe, you
shut-a you face!” dialogue has a certain
unwitting charm, but the action,
concentrating on Valachi’s step-by-step
progression up the ladder to hood status and
his associations (mostly as driver) with
big-name crime figures, dwells too constantly
on violent outbursts. This is rough stuff,
amounting to near-exploitation. (A—IV)
JORY (Avco Embassy) adds yet another
cultured pearl to the already crowded string
of pubescent Westerns’ that have been
brought to the surface over the last year or so.
If it is less violent than THE COWBOYS, THE
CULPEPPER CATTLE CO., and BAD
COMPANY, JORY is also less interesting and
diverting. THE COWBOYS, after all, had
aninsidious message about violence that made
it controversial and therefore worthy of note,
and the other films were studies in precious
notions about the loss of innocence and were
quaint in their slavish efforts to recreat the
amber-tinted atmosphere of the Old West.
This leaves JORY pretty much out of the
running, because its tale about a young boy
coming to renounce violence by first bathing
in blood is familiar to the point of being trite,
and also because its obviously limited budget
precluded any real opportunity to explore
new cinematic territory or even do a fresh job
going over the old. The title role casts Robby
Benson as the 15-year-old who witnesses his
father’s killing and avenges it, repeats the
pattern for a friend, and gets involved in a
range war before riding off into the sunset. As
the gawky youngster, Benson is given to long
gulps and embarrassed grins, especially when
confronted by gunslingers or by tittle girls
with big ideas. Some of the older folks
include John Marley as a reformed
blood-luster and pop singer B.J. Thomas as a
fatally cocky cowpoke. Jorge Fons directed.
(A-ll)
ELVIS ON TOUR (MGM) While Elvis’
newest film (his 33rd) is hardly, as the
production notes assert, a “close-up look at
arrived in 1888 with her Franciscan
nuns from Syracuse - may be civil
servants technically but are all part of
the Kalaupapa community.
“I decided there was more to work
than an eight-hour day,” remarked
Sister Emmett Anne, 25, here two
years, “so I volunteered. It’s not what
you do, but what you are that counts
around here.”
the man behind the legend”, devotees will
find enough of the legend here at least to pass
an entertaining 92 minutes. A split-screen
documentary of a 15-day nationwide tour
Elvis made recently, the film intercuts his
performances with all sorts of Presley
memorabilia: tapes from the later Ed Sullivan
Show appearances, family photographs, clips
from his early films, newsreel coverage of the
famous Army haircut, and the inevitable
“staged” small talk between the shows
themselves which at best can be described as
latter-day mellow Presley. The real charm of
the present film, however, is those countless
shots of adoring, screaming fans - now no
longer teeny-boppers but, well, quite mature
young ladies in their early 30’s. Now that,
baby, is true loyalty! (A—1)
BELATED FLOWERS (Artkino) Abram
Room (best known for his 1927 Soviet satire,
BED AND SOFA) has taken a very early,
uncharacteristically romantic story by
Chekhov and made a simple but moving tale
of doomed lovers. A low-born doctor,
concerned only with making money from his
talents, cures a lovely princess of pneumonia.
Naturally she falls secretly in love with him.
Years later, moneyless and consumptive, she
declares her love for him and he, aware of her
incurable condition and moved by her
courage, understands what he has missed in
life. Together they go to the south of France
and when she dies he returns comforted only
by his memories. Out of this unremarkable
LOVE STORY fantasy, Room has fashioned a
stylish set piece in which every artifice is used
to establish and maintain a lyric mood of
idealized romance. This kind of thing is not
for hardbitten realists, but for those inclined
to savor the darkly romantic vision of
doomed love, FLOWERS is as chaste and
modest a version of ethereal emotion as one
could wish. (A-l11)
RAGE (Warner Brothers) After camping
out with his boy one night, an Arizona sheep
farmer (George C. Scott) wakes to the horror
of finding his son and flock dying in
convulsions. Unknown to him, his ranch has
been sprayed with nerve gas as the result of a
mechanical failure during a secret Army test
nearby. The military decides to hide the facts
in order to avoid panic in the community
(and in the larger nation) and to continue
their testing undisturbed. When Scott, who
himself has only a few days to live, finally
penetrates the conspiracy surrounding him in
a hospital isolation ward (he hasn’t even been
told that his son is dead), he becomes
unhinged and sets out to destroy those he
considers responsible. This story of a decent
man crushed by a technocracy unconcerned
with the individual is told in purely
melodramatic terms with two-dimensional
figures and story contrivances. Yet it is close
enough to reality (the disaster at Dugway,
Utah, happened only three years ago) to
trouble any viewer's complacency. The
pyrotechnics at the end may be spectacular
but are beside the point and, worse, they
somewhat undercut the meaning of what
precedes these scenes of destruction. Scott in
his debut as a director handles the action well
enough but is unequal to the task of making
an audience empathize with his oversimplified
characters and situation. (A—ill)
RECENT FILM CLASSIFICATIONS
Elvis On Tour (MGM) -- A-l
The Twelve Chairs (Artkino) -- A-ll
Belated Flowers (Artkino) — A-l 11
The Effect of Gamma Rays (Fox) - A-lll
Four Nights of a Dreamer (New Yorker) -
A-lll
Avanti! (United Artists) -- B
The Last House on the Left (Hallmark) -C
The Swingin’ Pussycats (Hemisphere) - C
Film Classifications
A — Section I — Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage
A — Section D — 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