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PAGE 6 — January 18,1973
LIFE IN MUSIC
By The Da means
DON’T LET ME BE LONELY TONIGHT
By James Taylor
Do me wrong do me right
Tell me lies but hold me tight
And save your goodbyes for the momg light
But don’t let me be lonely tonight.
Say goodbye and say hello
Sho nuff good to see you but it’s time to go
Don’t say yes but please don’t say no
I don’t want to be lonely tonight
Go away then damn ya
Go on and do as you please
You ain’t gonna see me gettin’ down on my knees
I’m undecided and your heart’s been divided
You been turning my world upside down
Do me wrong and do me right, right now, Babe
Go on and tell me lies but hold me tight
Save your goodbyes for the morning light, morning light
But don’t let me be lonely tonight
I don’t want to be lonely tonight
No, no I don’t want to be lonely tonight.
(c 1972 Country Road Music/Blackwood Music, Inc., BMI)
James Taylor’s sound is distinctive. It is difficult to miss the bitter-sweet voice
and message. Both his voice and his message have a down-to-earth character that
make you believe in the honesty of the man who is singing.
It is also difficult to miss the sensitive but seemingly pained person who lies
behind e music. Taylor songs echo a felt experience of frustration which make
you know he has felt what he sings.
“Bitter-sweet: describes James Taylor’s message about as well as anything. He
offers neither despair but hope but an unresolved tension. You feel Taylor’s
search for love’s sweetness in songs like “Fire and Rain” and “Don’t Let Me Be
Lonely Tonight,” But you also feel that he isn’t finding what he’s looking for
and the bitterness with which he pulls back fearing to trust again.
The tension comes through clearly in his new song, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Tonight.” “I’m undecided and your heart’s been divided.. .Tell me lies but hold
me tight.. .Go away then damn ya.” He can’t do with her and he can’t do
without her so he airs his frustration - “don’t say ‘yes’ but please don’t say ‘no’
James Taylor’s music highlights the bitter-sweet elements of our world. There
is that which is difficult to accept, the shallowness, apathy and insecurity of
people. They use us, make us suffer and then reject us. But there is the much
more noble side of people, that which makes them continue to share, to risk
themselves, and to work for an ideal.
Father Anthony Padocano, writes in his book “Free To Be Faithful” about
the mixed value of life. There is the lonely and alienating element - “Every man
is conceived in a strange land .. .distant from his home, as far from his destiny as
he shall ever be . . .We are surprised when we are dealt with honestly.” But there
is a freeing element to life for “rebirth is possible . ..through men who trust.” It
is really the people who invest themselves in a trusting way that make life
believeable and worth living.
James Taylor struggles in his music with those moments of trusting and not
trusting. There is no answer, of course. Both the bitter and the sweet are there.
But you come away from a song like “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” saying to
yourself that it is no small thing to trust.
We all know that there will be many more disappointing moments in our lives;
there will be people who will be empty and unfaithful. But we never give up, for
there is that voice within each of us which sings “I don’t want to be
lonely.. .tonight.”
(All correspondence should be directed to: St. Joseph Church, P.O. Box 5188, 216
Patton Ave., Shreveport, Louisiana 71105)
c 1973 NCNews Service)
TV Movies
THE MAKING OF A PRIEST - Cameras close in on the action as
Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Welsh of Philadelphia bestows the ministry of
lector on a candidate for the priesthood during a 20-part television special
FOR PRIESTS IN UNITED STATES
called The Making of a Priest. The program, which began Jan. 16, traces
the life of a priest from the time before he makes his decision through his
reflections on priestly life.
NFPC Wants More Equality of Income
CHICAGO (NC) - The National
Federation of Priests’ Councils released
results of a study on the income of U.S.
diocesan priests that concludes “there is
a great deal of income inequality”
among them.
In its monthly newspaper
Priests-USA, the NFPC said the survey
was the first national income study on
diocesan priests. The study covered 149
of the 155 U.S. dioceses.
“The purpose of the study,
undertaken the past July, was to assess
income differences and to compare
incomes with the regional cost of
living,” the NFPC report stated.
According to the study, the national
salary average for a 45-year-old diocesan
priest for 1972 was $7,586. This the
NFPC report said, compares favorably
with the 1969 average salary of a senior
accountant ($7,150) and “rather
favorably” with the 1972 cost of living
for a middle-income family of four
($10,971).
The figures include benefits such as
car allowances and an approximate cash
equivalent for fringe benefits such as
room and board, according to an NFPC
official.
The study was conducted for the
NFPC by James H. Stewart, a Catholic
who teaches sociology at the Lutheran
College at St. Olaf, Northfield, Minn.
figures and data of the report must be
compared to the standard of living in a
particular region or diocese.
The priest told NC News that the
data of the report was secondary to the
purpose of the report. “Some
discrepancies are likely to be found in
the study,” he said. “But the mere fact
that such a report was begun is
important to all Catholic priests.”
Father Bargen noted that bishops at
the 1971 World Synod of Bishops in
Rome emphasized the need to examine
the salary structure of the clergy.
From what the bishops said in Rome,
Father Bargen said, “it is important for
the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops and the NFPC to work
cooperatively in looking at the
divergence of income of priests in the
United States.”
This is significant, said Father Bargen,
in plans to have a more liberal exchange
of priestly personnel among dioceses. It
is also significant when financing new
forms of ministry outside of parish
work, he said.
Finally, said Father Bargen, income
reports are important to the priests who
have an obligation to live a life of
frugality and poverty. “As we
investigate our own life-style we must
have the data available to consider what
is expected of us. I see the significance
of a balance between an equitable salary
and the call to live as a poor man,”
Father Bargen said.
Stewart, the researcher, said: “When
we look at individual dioceses, we find
the general trend that (priests in) the
northeastern dioceses have the greatest
annual income, while (those in) the
southern and southwestern dioceses
have the least. ..
“The main trend evidenced (in this
survey) is that priests in the northeast
are relatively better off than priests in
the West,” Stewart said.
He said that a large number of
dioceses do not “adequately provide for
either transportation allowance or
pension benefits, as manifested from the
premium contributed by the dioceses.”
Film Classifications
A
A
A
A
B
Section I — Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage
Section D — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Adolescents
Section HI — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults
Section IV — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Reservations
Morally Objectionable in Part for All
C — Condemned
THE HEARTBREAK KID (Fox) . . .Bright
bitter-sweet adult comedy from Elaine May.
— Elaine May’s second effort at directing has
yielded one of the most interesting adult
comedies to come along since THE
GRADUATE. The story, about an immature
Jewish bridegroom who is stung by a WASP
on his Miami Beach honeymoon, is a
marvelous but uneven combination of
strengths -- principally those of Miss May’s
deft direction, Neil Simon’s
uncharacteristically serious screenplay, and
the nifty acting of Charles Grodin as the
groom, Jeannie Berlin (Miss May’s daughter)
as his ill-fated bride, Cybill Shepherd as the
SCHIKSA goddess who smites him, and Eddie
Albert as the granite slab who does not want
to become his new father-in-law. Beneath it
all, however, lies the bedrock of the Bruce Jay
Friedman story, “A Change of Plan,” which
provides both the narrative skeleton of the
film and its basic humorous attitudes. The
result is a sharp satire, but one that bites
carefully, and then gnaws thoughtfully so that
we can digest it all.
The film begins almost wordlessly, offering
intimate yet very economical glimpses of
sporting-goods salesman Lenny Cantrow
(Grodin) as he makes the singles bar scene in
New York, picks up Lila Kolondny (Miss
Berlin) and, after a whirlwind but chaste
courtship, marries her in a rented hotel suite
with rented pianist before a packed gallery of
relatives on folding chairs, over which sweep
the strains of “Close to You" and the
Coca-Cola jingle. It all fits.
The only thing missing, of course, is that
Lenny has never gotten to know his bride and
begins to learn fast in a succession of
overnight states on the drive to Miami. In
New Jersey she sings all day off key; in
Virginia she munches candy bars in post-coital
bliss; in Georgia she hammers out an image of
themselves after forty or fifty years” of being
married. By the time they hit Miami Beach
Lenny is more than ripe for a change of plans.
The opportunity strikes like lightning when
he encounters the blonde vision of Kelly
Corcoran on the beach (Lila is back upstairs
teasing her hair to death). Fate again
conspires the next day when Lila is done to a
crisp by the Miami sun and has to spend the
next few days abed, leaving a frantic Lenny
free to plant after his new treasure, “the girl
of his dreams.”
This middle part of the film, where Lenny
realizes his dismal mistake but fails to see that
his new pursuits will lead to even a greater
disaster is simultaneously the sharpest and the
flattest part of the film story. Although Miss
May’s direction is always in control, the
situations and dialogue Simon cooks up
constantly verge toward his more familiar
clever-exchange style and threaten to
demolish the pathetic human story
underneath the surface. A sequence set in a
seafood restaurant in which Lenny haltingly
breaks the news to Lila (on her first
ambulatory night since the sun poisoning), is
too long and, worse, is entirely out of
character with the rest of the movie. With
Lenny hysterical and Lila in a state of
collapse -- she thought he was going to tell her
that he merely had some sort of incurable
disease, not that he wanted a divorce •• the
scene is simply incredible, whereas most of
the rest is only an exaggerated blow-up of the
truth.
From Miami and a quickie divorce, Lenny
follows the coy Miss Shepherd to wintry
Minnesota where the only thing colder than
the environment is the girl’s father (Albert), a
wealthy businessman who guards Kelly even
more jealously than he does his stock
portfolio. It is here that we are confirmed in
what we only suspected in Miami -- that Kelly
is a tfease, possibly a promiscuous tease. But
once again, Lenny fails to see. And after all,
love IS blind, and the boy must have his
SCHIKSA. And have her he does, following a
courtship that is precisely the opposite of his
pursuit of Lila. With Lila marriage was easy
while seduction was impossible; with Kelly it
is the other way around, although a somber
Protestant ceremony provides the movie’s
final irony. In the end, Lenny is once again
adrift in a marriage for which he is unsuited -
a moral statement that bears definite marks of
contrivance or the part of the May-Simon
combine.
The result for adult audience is a curious
experience into a swirling stream of life in
which young people, without knowing what
they are getting into, much less why,
nonetheless plunge on blindly and obsessively.
Despite the weak conclusion - insiders say the
film makers experimented with several
endings - the film bristles with telling barbs
about contemporary life, some of which are
merely entertaining, but many of which are
truly enlightening and occasionally
frightening. (A-lll)
JEREMIAH JOHNSON (Warner Bros.) is
the tale, done in ballad style, of a legendary
mountain man who left civilized society in
the mid-1800’s to live a solitary life in the
Rocky Mountain wilderness. Robert Redford
stars in a curiously uneven film by Sydney
Pollack -- full of lyrical beauty in the scenery,
some fascinating glimpses of the mountain
man’s rugged existence trapping or simply
surviving in a harsh environment, a number of
encounters with the various Indian tribes
(Johnson is regarded as “big medicine”
because of one of his feats, and becomes the
temporarily unwilling bridegroom of a
beautiful Flathead princess), exciting action
shots after Johnson breaks a Crow tribal
taboo and is sought out by lone braves for
mortal combat. But nothing adds up to an
integral whole, and the net result is like
making a stimulating journey through
beautiful country only to find that there is
nothing at the end of the trails. (A-ll)
CESAR AND ROSALIE (Cinema 5)
French director Claude Sautet turns in a
softly sweet and romantic study of love's
classic tug-of-war, actually a three-cornered
affair between a young woman and the two
men (one her age the other much older) in her
life. Sautet’s exquisite sense of cinematic
composition and pacing, plus the fine acting
of Yves Montand, Romy Schneider, and Sami
Frey make CESAR AND ROSALIE worth an
adult's while. (A-IV)
DIRTY LITTLE BILLY (Columbia)
purports to be the true story of how William
Bonney, Billy the Kid, began his life of crime
in the smalt farm town of Coffeyville, Kansas.
Directed by Stan Dragoti, a TV commercial
maker for the advertising agency of Wells,
Rich and Greene which produced the film,
BILLY is at pains to show the squalor,
lawlessness and venality of life in an 1850’s
mid-American community too small to have
even its own law officer. Regrettably, Dragoti
succeeds too well: his town is so drab, its
buildings so ramshackled and the mud of its
main street so deep and all pervasive, that the
accumulated filth gradually submerges his
film in an impenetrable sea of muck. Shiftless,
lazy Billy (Michael J. Pollard), comes West
with his mother and stepfather, is thrown out
of the family farm hovel and takes up with
Goldie, the murderous, half-mad owner of the
local saloon (Richard Evans) and Berle (Lee
Purcell), his girl friend who whores to keep
bread on the table. When Coffeyville finally
grows to legal status and runs Goldie out of
town, Billy tags along and officially begins his
career of killing when he shoots two
hoodlums who set upon the runaways. The
point of Dragoti’s film seems to be that poor
dumb Billy was a victim of the times and
circumstances, an idea that is neither very
new nor very stimulating and, at any rate, is
simply asserted in DIRTY LITTLE BILLY
which begans and ends nowhere. As another
demythologizing of the Old West, Billy tries
to make up for its hollow center with a lot of
gritty, peripheral sex and violence, to no
effect. (A-IV)
ROBINSON CRUSOE AND THE TIGER
(Avco Embassy) Daniel Defoe’s classic tale of
shipwreck and of one man’s survival on a
South Sea island becomes somewhat less than
gripping in this amateurish Spanish
production directed by Rene Cardona, Jr. As
Crusoe Hugo Stiglitz double-takes his way
through the various episodes of the novel,
being chased by everything from sharks and
panthers to bats and tigers until, having
rescued young Friday from a pack of
cannibals, he walks off into the sunset - no
less relieved, it would seem, than the
audience. At best a difficult story to bring to
the screen, this CRUSOE, with its stagey
camerawork and passionless narrator who
drones on forever about the lonliness Stiglitz
is totally incapable of dramatizing, it’s likely
to put even the kiddies asleep. (A-l)
HIT MAN (MGM) These days it seems that
when pro athletes are not jumping leagues,
they are launching careers in the movies.
Bernie Casey, who used to catch passes for
the Los Angeles Rams, occupies the title slot
here in what amounts to a black-exploitation
remake - virtually scene for scene, of 1971's
British gangster flick GET CARTER. In HIT
MAN the scene is East L.A., where visiting
hood Casey stalks the killer of his brother, a
lesser punk who ran amok under murky
circumstances. His quest takes him into some
of the seamier sites in the city, and into the
arms of some of the ghetto’s most unliberated
but libidinous ladies. There are more plot
twists than characters, and the dizzying
spectacle of raw sex and supergraphic violence
would horrify the Marquis de Sade. The
excesses are all the more lamentable because
the overall production values, along with
George Armitage’s sharp direction are well
above average. It is a pity to squander creative
resources, and a crime to debase human
values. (C)
RECENT FILM CLASSIFICATIONS
Robinson Crusoe And The Tiger (Avco
Embassy) A-l
Dirty Little Billy (Columbia) A-IV
The Getaway (National General) A-IV
High Plains Drifter (Universal) B
SUNDAY, JANUARY 21 - 9:00
(ABC) - HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962;
Part 1) Marathon, uneven (owing to three
distinctive directorial styles), historically
inaccurate celebration of the push West in the
mid-1800's. It is not difficult to accept the
likes of Lee J. Cobb, John Wayne, Henry
Fonda, Gregory Peck, and James. Stewart as
stalwart men who braved the long trails,
rugged terrain and weather conditions, and
who fought off hordes of hostile Indians. But
it is a mite hard, in this day and age to accept
the Indians simply as murderous savages —
after all, it was their land to begin with, and it
was promises made to them that were being
violated. (Part II will be aired Monday,
January 22) (A-l)
MONDAY, JANUARY 22 - 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) -- I LOVE MY WIFE (1970) - People
who only suspect Elliott Gould of being a
phenomenon rather than an actor will be
utterly confirmed by his hysterical
non-performance in this shabby, sputtering
drama about a man’s failure to love. The
vehicle, doubtless sanitized for TV
consumption, reeks of sensationalism as it
details our hero’s simultaneous rise in the
medical profession and fall as husband. In the
theatrical version there was an emphasis on
the doc’s frantic sex life, so watch out. (B)
9:00 p.m. (ABC) -- HOW THE WEST WAS
WON (Part II) -- See description for Sunday,
January 21.)
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24 - 8:30 p.m.
(ABC) -- GO ASK ALICE -- Made-for-TV flick
focuses on a young girl’s nightmare life as a
result of her drug addiction. The film is
allegedly based on the actual diary kept by a
young drug addict.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 25 - 9:00 p.m.
(CBS) ~ THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL (1965)
-- A big, big Hollywood Western spoof with
more than enough potholes in it to break
anyone’s axle. The basic story pits Burt
Lancaster and his thirsty U.S. Cavalry post in
frontier Denver against (a) a perilous whiskey
shortage and (b) pretty and spunky Lee
Remick as a femminist Temperance crusader.
Naturally, the two fall in love -- and the
soldiers eventually whet their whistles. The
TV version should be interesting in that it will
unreel in two hours, INCLUDING
commercials and station breaks. Whereas the
version presented in theatres was nearly three
hours long. Who knows what’s left? (A-ll)
FRIDAY, JANUARY 26 - 9:00 p.m(CBS)
- THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN
(1964) -- Hey, look this one over. Bright,
boisterous movie musical based on the riotous
/life of a real-life frontier character who made
her fortune in the silver mines of Colorado,
married crazily, was scorned by Denver
society, went abroad and made a big hit in
European cultural circles, and returned home
in triumph •• having survived a sea disaster
that gave her her wonderful nickname. Debbie
Reynolds is exuberant in the title role,
unsinkable, indeed! (A-ll)
SATURDAY, JANUARY 27 - 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) -- PLAY DIRTY (1969) - WW II
drama with Michael Caine, Nigel Green, and
Harry Andrews at the top of a fine British
cast. The solid if familiar plot has Caine cast
as leader of a rag-tag “Dirty Dozen” British
soldiers who are sent behind Rommel’s lines
to infiltrate the German Afrika Korps and
create havoc via sabotage. Andrews and Green
figure as the smug British officers who send
their men into certain death situations while
themselves remaining safe behind their own
lines. Rough battle action places the film in
an adult category. (A-lll)
The Gallup, N.M., diocese’s average
of $4,529 was the lowest among the 72
dioceses that fell below the national
average. The Grand Rapids, Mich.,
diocese’s $9,978 was the highest among
the 77 falling above it, Stewart
reported.
Stewart said there is a great disparity,
not only from province to province, but
also from diocese to diocese within a
given province regarding the income of
priests.
Father Francis F. Brown, NFPC
public relations director, told NC News
that income disparities can even be
found from parish to parish within a
diocese. He said there are also
discrepancies in income among priests
who teach in schools and seminaries
within a diocese.
“What we hope,” said Father Brown,
“is that local priests’ councils take up
this matter on the diocesan level in
order to eliminate some of the
inequities.”
Father Donald Bargen of St. Paul,
Minn., NFPC secretary of research and
development, emphasized that the
SCENES FROM NICARAGUA- Refugees line
up for food at a distribution center in Managua,
Nicaragua. In the background is the Intercontinental
Hotel which millionaire recluse Howard Hughes
vacated when an earthquake devastated the city. (NC
PHOTO)