Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 6—November 22, 1973
TV Movies
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25 — 8:30 p.m.
(ABC) -- WHERE IT’S AT (1969) -- A Las
Vegas gambling casino (played by the real
Caesar's Palace) is where the action is
supposed to be in this story of casino owner
A.C. Smith (David Janssen) who is bent on
teaching his son Andy (Robert Drivas) the
tricks of exploiting the tourist trade. The lad,
fresh from college, is at first disillusioned by
his father’s cynical methods of operation. But
Andy soon learns -- somewhat implausibly -
how to beat his father at his own game. Andy
gains a controlling interest in the casino which
he finally forfeits to his father because he
realizes that the Las Vegas scene is his
father’s whole life but will never be his. Please
note that DFB’s calssification is based on
specific scenes that will be cut for TV
consumption. (C)
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26 — 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) -- LOVING YOU (1957) -- Early Elvis
Presley vehicle casts ol’ swivel hips in a soupy
romantic plot whose object is (a) to get him
into and out of the tender arms of several
starlet types, and (b) to sell the albums
containing the 20 or so tunes he warbles
between embraces. Shoddy production values
are prefectly matched by inept acting, “sexy”
dialogue. (B)
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 — 9:30 p.m.
(CBS) -- CRY RAPE! - Made-for-tetevision
“docu-drama” focuses on the trauma of
criminal rape, with a special emphasis on the
often cruel effects on the victim of the
follow-up investigation of the crime. In a
sense, the victim must choose between letting
the investigation drop or allowing it to go on
through the humiliation of many very
personal questions by detectives, as well as a
thorough character analysis. The result is
frequently as painful, or even worse, for the
victim as was the actual crime itself. The film
is not for the squeamish, and it has the bite of
added realism via the use of documentary
techniques and a cast of TV “unknowns.”
Definitely for the mature, but possibly a
valuable program for its information and
compassion in placing one of the nation’s
least understood but most repugnant crimes
in a sober, often harsh perspective.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28 — 8:30
p.m. (NBC) -- LISA, BRIGHT AND DARK-
Television drama explores the terrifying,
mysterious world of a young student suffering
from schizophrenia, or a split personality. The
story concerns the effect of the girl’s
inexplicable bursts of unpredictable and
increasingly violent behavior -- on herself, her
parents, and concerned school friends. Kay
Lenz is the girl, Anne Baxter and John
Forsythe play her parents, at first willing to
“ignore” their daughter’s disturbing behavior,
but ultimately moved to act and help her. A
Hallmark Hall of Fame production.
8:30 p.m. (ABC) -- OUTRAGE - This TV
film is a melodrama which seems to prey on a
fear shared by many of middle-America’s
middle-agers: the mindless terrorizing of
citizens and communities by rampaging
teen-agers. As such it should be taken with a
grain of salt. Robert Culp plays a suburbanite
who decides to wage a one-man campaign
against his comfortable neighborhood’s idle
teen-age bullies (they are bored, you see). The
kids in turn, led by Thomas Leopold, escalate
their malicious mischief, and their harassment
turns to terror via telephone threats and
obscene calls, an attempt to run Culp down
with a hot-rod car, and the cruel killing of the
family pet. By this time, Culp is ready to take
the law into his own hands (the police, natch,
are ineffectual) -- and the resultant mayhem
should please any well-bred violence-monger.
For sober citizens, however, this sort of tripe
does nothing to put a growing problem into
perspective, but rather aggravates it by
exploiting its sensational aspects.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29 —9:00 p.m.
(CBS) -- CATHOLICS -- Dramatic TV film is
based on the so-so novella by Brian Moore,
which focused on the seemingly irreconcilable
differences between a community of
conservative Catholic priests and brothers on
a remote Irish island and the “new” dynamic
Vatican, circa 1990. At the center of the film
is a dispute between the community’s abbot
(Trevor Howard) and a young pirest (Martin
Sheen) representing the Holy Father in Rome
(who’s referred to throughout as “the Father
General”) over the community’s persistence
in saying the Mass in Latin — and without
guitars and colloquy, yet! The film is nicely
acted (with Cyril Cusack and Andrew Kier
among the cast), it’s interestingly
photographed in a rugged Irish location, and
its themes of old traditions versus new
directions is, to say the least, timely. All of
these strengths carry it through for roughly
three-quarters of its length, but things begin
to fall apart when the drama reaches for a
conclusion that, if not precisely satisfying all
parties in this film, will at least not offend
anyone out there in (Catholic) television land.
A Playhouse 90 production.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30 — 9:00 p.m.
(CBS) - IN COLD BLOOD (1967) - This
presentation of an extraordinary but highly
controversial film seems to show that some
movies just aren’t suited to TV showing,
thanks to the commercial breaks and
necessary cuts by properly
violence-and-sex-wary network censors. The
film is a courageous, compassionate
semi-documentary from Richard Brooks. His
exemplary film recreates with shattering
realism but a notable lack of sensationalism
the true story of the senseless 1959 multiple
slaying of the Clutter family of Holcomb,
Kansas and the apprehension and hanging of
their killers, Perry Smith (Robert Blake) and
Richard Kickock (Scott Wilson). From the
Truman Capote non-fiction novel, IN COLD
BLOOD explores the backgrounds and
motivations of the two criminals, scrutinizes
the practice of capital punishment.
Exceptional use of black and white
photography (by Conrad Halt), music (Quincy
Jones) and sound. (A-lll)
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30 AND
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1 — 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) - FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE
STORY - Two-part, four-hour TV adaptation
of the enduring horror classic by Mary
Shelley, starring Leonard Whiting as the
misguided Dr. Frankenstein, David McCallum
as his slightly warped colleague, and Michael
Sarrazin as their man-made man. This one has
monster mushiness, too, what with the
creature's being presented by the docs with a
“bride,” (“Oh, just something we stuck
together for you . . .”), in the lovely form of
Jayne Seymour. The story, like the monster,
is in bits and pieces - as Frankenstein muses
bitterly over the accidental death of his
brother, later becomes intrigued by a fellow
surgeon (McCallum) and his research into
assembling humans from charnel-house scraps,
their successful attempt to bring their
creature to life, their further joy at producing
a playmate for it, and their subsequent horror
and tragedy when the monster undergoes
radical changes of physique and psyche. Heh,
heh, heh. (Note, don’t confuse this
star-studded production with another
network’s year-ago attempt to do the story in
multiple parts - no pun intended - running
on consecutive late-night time slots, which
was a total disaster.) Fun for
strong-stomached adult horror buffs.
ill/////
OOQQOQOQQQOOQQQQQQQOOQQOQQ
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
O
OJ
Film Classifications
A - Section I - Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage
A — Section II — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Adolescents
A — Section DI — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults
A — Section IV — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Reservations
B — Morally Objectionable in Part for All
C — Condemned
noftooooooooooooooo
///////// | I | !\\\\\'
SUMMER WISHES, WINTER DREAMS
(Columbia) . . .Joanne Woodward is superb as
troubled wife.
In RACHEL RACHEL, Joanne Woodward
captured a woman approaching middle age
who loved but was not shown love; in her
newest film, SUMMER WISHES, WINTER
DREAMS, Ms. Woodward again captures the
character she portrays, this time a woman
well into her middle age who loves but cannot
show love. Both films, incidentally, share the
same scriptwriter Stewart Stern, which, not
surprisingly, means that they share much of
the same intensity of feeling that both
inhabits and inhibits their characters. WISHES
is by no means the offspring of the earlier
film; rather its pedigree is the assurance of
quality for the film goer who seeks something
more from a film than action or fast pace or
simple entertainment.
The story relies on depth of character
rather than on complication of plot. At the
core is the personal crisis of an affluent New
York wife and mother for whom life has little
comfort and less meaning. Rita Walden’s own
mother (played by Sylvia Sidney) is one of
her few companions and is not so hot a one at
that — always complaining about the sales
help at Saks, equally upset by impersonal
waitresses in those comfy spots where Fifth
Avenue ladies meet for lunch and where they
give a wedge of lemon with tea rather than a
slice, “the way they do in England.” And
after a morning of this litany of grumpiness,
what does the mother do but die of a heart
attack in a Village art theater during the
middle of Bergman’s WILD
STRAWBERRIES. Far worse, Rita cannot
even cry. She must, and realizes she can,
re-examine her life - with husband (Martin
Balsam), daughter (Dori Brenner), and, most
important, with herself.
Rita Walden's relationships with her family
are like the tangents drawn on a circle in a
geometry class: they touch only a minute
point on the periphery of her existence and
go off at right angles from her heart. In the
case of her optometrist husband, whose name,
naturally, is Harry, there has grown a kind of
loving that is as polite and uninvolving as it is
secure and enduring. With the daughter,, who
is also Rita’s one fragile link to her estranged
homosexual son, the relationship is a testy
truce broken frequently by brushfire
confrontations. Rita plods through alone by
clinging to cherished illusions of the past,
many of which are brought out into the cold
on the bitter day of the mother’s funeral back
in the little farm community the family
abandoned so long ago.
private agony of a lonely, desperate woman
who has allowed life to slip past her because
of her refusal to deal with its realities. The
ending of the film, however, is cautiously
hopeful and points toward a new
understanding of self and a renewed need for
others.
SUMMER WISHES, WINTER DREAMS
is the sort of intense, finely detailed movie
that usually doesn’t pay off at the box office
because it lacks the necessary flash, but which
is to be honored and savored for the craft and
skill that caring men and women have poured
into it. The performances are flawless --
Joanne Woodward enhances her reputation as
one of our finest film actresses, Martin Balsam
creates great individuality in a basically
one-dimensional role, and Sylvia Sidney (after
17 years away from films) makes her presence
felt long after her image leaves the screen. The
direction is by Gilbert Cates, who directed I
NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER, once
again showing an understanding for the
subtleties of intimate relationships, their pain
and love. In other hands, this film might have
been no better than a dreary TV “dramatic
special;” but the case is otherwise, and
WISHES emerges as the sharply etched drama
of an American life. (A-lll)
LATE AUTUMN (New Yorker) Yasujiro
Ozu has only recently been recognized in
America as one of the great masters of the
cinema. His work was devoted to portraying
the bonds of family relationships, the
generational transitions of all life, and, most
beautifully, the tranquil view of change as a
timeless continuum. This particular variation
on these themes (originally made in 1960)
uses the same basic situation as Ozu’s final,
most moving film, AN AUTUMN
AFTERNOON, but seen this time
from the woman’s point of view. A young girl
rejects marriage because she does not wish to
leave her widowed mother alone. The family’s
friends, botching their clumsy attempts at
matchmaking, mistakenly convince the
daughter that her mother is planning on
marrying again. It is only after the daughter
has gotten betrothed that the mother reveals
her intention to remain alone, happy and
content with her life as it is. This is a good
introduction to Ozu’s more serious works
because he lightens the mood with more than
his usual amount of gentle humor. One of his
targets, very fashionable today, is the
insufferable male smugness that comes from
seeing women as being naturally dependent
upon man. A beautiful work, beautifully
made, LATE AUTUMN is one of the most
satisfying films you could possibly see this
year. (A-l)
A subsequent vacation trip to Europe,
promoted by Rita’s husband as a chance to
“get away from it all” but also very carefully
tied into an optometrists’ conference, for tax
purposes, brings Rita even closer to total
collapse. Her crippling problem is that she
carries her failures around like an old hand
bag. She cannot open up, cannot
communicate her pain to others, especially
her husband, whose constant understanding is
in itself a further reason for her not to face
the hard facts of a wasted or, at least,
unfulfilled life. By the time the film reaches
its conclusion, with a climax that very nearly
sweeps Rita away, we have witnessed the
RECENT FILM CLASSIFICATIONS
All American Boy, The (Warners) -- B
Breezy (Universal) - B
Don is Dead, The (Universal) - B
Happy New Year (Avco Embassy) - A-lll
Hex (Fox) - B
Italian Connection, The (AIP) -- C
Serpent, The (Avco Embassy) - A-lll
APOSTOLIC DELEGATE ON FARM - Apostolic Delegate in the concelebrant at a Mass in Des Moines marking the 50th anniversary of the
United States Archbishop Jean Jadot climbs aboard a corn combine on National Catholic Rural Life Conference. (NC Photo)
the Broderick farm near Des Moines, la. The Archbishop was the principal
BOOK REVIEWS
WELLINGTON: PILLAR OF
STATE, by Elizabeth Longford, Harper
and Row (New York, London), 1972,
$10.00. Reviewed by Father C. Stephen
Mann.
(NC News Service)
It will be a great sadness if (as seems
more than likely) this excellent book is
read only by the professional history
student and/or Anglophile. There are
many good reasons why this work
should be read by anyone with any
pretensions to interest in current affairs.
For one thing, the Countess of
Longford has again put us all in her debt
by providing a superb example of how
biography ought to be written, and this
present work is a worthy successor to
“Wellington: The Years of the Sword.”
For yet another, at the present time
there is some fascinating insight to be
gained by reading of the manner in
which a man of unquestioned integrity
pursued his way as a public servant in an
age not noted for incorruption.
There is a good deal in the present
work which perhaps only the Britisher
will wholly appreciate, and certainly
much background is taken more or less
for granted. But every reader will be
rewarded by the spectacle of a man who
after Waterloo was in effect the arbiter
of European affairs assessing himself as
nothing more than a “servant” in affairs
of state. The Duke of Wellington’s
personal probity was a legend in his own
time, and has remained so to the
present. It was indeed fortunate for
Europe that he was in every sense a
“simple” and uncomplicated man - had
he been a man of towering ambition, I
suspect that the consequent damage
would have been well-nigh incalculable.
There are two matters of outstanding
interest in this book. First, for the
American reader in general, there is
the insight to be gained into the
profound distrust which the British
public has in large measure for the
professional politician. There was in
Wellington’s time, as there is now, a
deep-seated prejudice in Britain in favor
of the amateur, in favor of the man
financially independent enough of
bribes and favors to be his own man.
Resistance to reform of the franchise -
real enough on Wellington’s part to
begin with - rested not so much on
distrust of uneducated masses (though
that entered into it, to be sure), as on
fear of the rise of professional
“politicos” on the French model. While
Wellington certainly did not invent
pragmatism in British politics, he was
certainly a worthy exponent of its
essential strength as also occasionally of
its inherent conservatism. Nothing is
more marked (in contrast to the
American experience) in British political
life than the comparative absence of
lawyers in its process.
Secondly, for Roman Catholics in
this country, there will be considerable
interest in the history of Roman
Catholic political emancipation,
resulting in the Act of Parliament in
1829. Much of the controversy will of
course be bewildering to American
readers, and it is perhaps here that the
very distinguished book under review
takes a good deal for granted of
non-British readers. Wellington, in
common with most of his
contemporaries, was perfectly at ease
with the Roman Catholic landed gentry,
just as they themselves saw their lands
and their inherited culture (and even
their isolation) as part of a total
national scene. It was by no means an
insignificant part, and the inherited
culture had produced magnificent
ipinds. The real fear of Wellington, and
the real fear of most of his
contemporaries, was not the incursion
of Roman Catholics into public life, but
the fear of that unhappy donation of
Pope Hadrian IV (himself an
Englishman) to the English crown -
Ireland. Hindsight exacts no penalties -
and hence we may allow ourselves the
luxury of asking what might have
happened if Wellington had been
allowed one of his early ideas, and had
allowed Ireland to go its own way.
By any standards at all, Wellington
was a very great man indeed. It is part
of the strength of this very fine
biography that we are allowed to see
something of the very human warmth of
a man who was fascinated by children,
totally uncondescending to the more
lowly placed, and wholly implacable
towards any suspicion of corruption.
(Father C. Stephen Mann, a native of
England, is dean of the Ecumenical
Institute at St. Mary’s Seminary in
Baltimore and co-author of the “St.
Matthew” volume of The Anchor
Bible.)
LIFE IN MUSIC
BY THE DAMEANS
Stealin’
Take me across the water
’cause I need some place to hide.
I done the rancher’s daughter
and I sure did hurt his pride.
• i,
Well there’s a hundred miles of desert lies
between his hide and mine.
I don’t need no food and no water, Lord,
‘cause I’m running’ out of time.
Fightin’, killin’, wine and women
gonna put me to my grave.
Runnin’, hiding’, losin’, cryin’,
nothin’ left to save but my LIFE.
Chorus:
Stood on a ridge and shunned religion
Thinkin’ the world was mine.
I made my break and a big mistake
Stealin’ when I should have been buy in’.
Fightin’, killin’, wine and those women
gonna put me to an early grave.
Runnin’, hidin’, losin’, crying’,
Nothing left to save but my LIFE,
LIFE, LIFE, LIFE, LIFE, LIFE, LIFE,
LIFE, LIFE.
Stood on a ridge and shunned religion
Thinkin’ the world was mine.
I made my break and a big mistake
Stealin’ when I should have been buyin’.
Stealin’ when I should have been buyin’.
Stealin’ when I should have been buyin’.
-By Hensley (WB Music Corp. -ASCAP)
(c) 1973 Warner Bros. Records, Inc.)
“Stealin”’ by Uriah Heep sounds like the story of a man running away,
running scared and running out of time as he tries to save his hide. When you
listen a little closer, however, you can hear a guy with pretty keen insight asking
himself some heavy questions about life.
He’s worried about life and how he’s been living (listen to the way he yells
“LIFE” nine times in a row). He made mistakes in the past - he lists a few things
which were heading him to an early grave. He realizes that the way he used to
handle problems - “runnin’ and hidin’” - didn’t really solve anything because he
usually wound up “losin’ and crying’.”
It’s only when he slowed down enough to face himself honestly that he began
to see the reasons for the shape he was in. The chorus of the song is a neat bit of
poetry which contains the testimony and wisdom of this honest man’s struggle
to understand life.
One of the most effective images I can picture to show independence is a
person standing on a ridge shouting to the sky above and the earth below. There
seems to be real power in a scene like that - where I’m my own man and nobody
else’s. Nothing can touch me - I’m free and I’m boss.
The only problem with seeking this sort of independence as a goal in life is
that instead of finding himself with the great feeling of being alone and
self-sufficient, man often winds up with the great fear of being alone and lonely.
Real life seems to be found in a healthy balance between independence and the
need for others.
Any stealing, in general, is nothing more than an assertion of total
independence - I don’t care about you - everything exists for me.
The person who approaches life with a stealing attitude of total independence
is not good at love because he doesn’t know what it means to need - he is too
accustomed to getting what he wants by taking for himself. He is not good at
friendships because he manipulates them for what he can get out of them right
now.
Love and friendships take time and patience. They are investments in life’s
special moments as well as its unglamorous ones and they always include
concern for others as part of this investment.
The person who tries to go it alone, taking from life just what he wants,
“stealin”’ when he should have been “buyin’,” becomes the victim of the
greatest rip-off ever known - the theft of his own chance to really live, love and
be loved.