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PAGE 6—January 24, 1974
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Film Classifications
A - Section I — Morally Unobjectionable for Gen ral Patronage
A - Section II — Morally Unobjectionable for Adi Its, Adolescents
A — Section 01 — Morally Unobjectionable for Adults
A - Section IV — Morally Unobjectionable for Ad Its, Reservations
B — Morally Objectionable in Part for All
C — Condemned
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WHERE THE LILIES BLOOM (United
Artists) means fine family movie viewing
from Robert Randnitz. Set in contemporary
times in Southern Appalachia, WHERE THE
LILIES BLOOM tells the story of four
children trying to stay together after the
death of their widowed father, Roy Luther
(Ranee Howard). The eldest, Devola (Jan
Smithers), is a pretty 16-year-old but is also as
impractical as a lovely song. Hence, the
lesponsibility for keeping the Luther family
out of the orphanage falls on Mary Call (Julie
Gholson), a mere 14 but as intelligent as she is
fiercely independent.
Mary Call rules over the brood with flinty
determination, alternately threatening and
then cajoling her 11-year-old brother, Romey,
and baby sister, Ima Dean, as well as fending
off a neighboring farmer, Kiser Pease (Harry
Dean Stanton), who is intent on romancing
Devola. What complicates matters is that a
few years before Roy Luther’s death, Pease
had taken over their property by paying the
back taxes. Although Pease'had let the family
stay on as sharecroppers of yyhat had formerly
been their own land, the Luther’s could not
forgive him. On his deathbed, the father had
made Mary Call promise that she would never
let Pease marry Devola. As the film
progresses, keeping true to this promise
becomes more and more a dilemma for Mary
Call, as she begins to realize that Kiser Pease is
not the villain she had presumed.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the
movie is the way the children provide for
themselves out of the profits of
“wildcrafting” -- that is, collecting and
preparing certain herbs and wild flowers
believed to have medicinal qualities. These
were used in the home remedies of the settlers
and in recent years have found a new
acceptance in modern medical practice. One
of the comic highlights of the film is the
steaming hot onion poultice used to cure
Kiser Pease of pneumonia -- an exotic but
apparently effective treatment.
The point of this and much of the rest of
the film is that in a simpler, less complicated
society, man lived off the land and was
dependent only on nature. For modern
industrial man, living in an artificial
environment dependent upon economic
forces beyond the individuals control, there is
a real sense of loss of the natural. This
understandable nostalgia for the imagined
virtues of agricultural life is usually idealized
into some kind of bucolic fantasy. WHERE
THE LILIES BLOOM avoids this pitfall by
refusing to glamorize the poverty in which the
Luther family lives.
Although they live in a crumbling frame
house lined on the inside with newspapers,
and their meals are mostly fruits and
vegetables, with occasionally some game,
cooked on a wood stove, they do not consider
themselves poor or deprived. They have
learned the art of making do with what they
have and they do rather well because of the
rich soil of the North Carolina mountain
country. Their one grievance is that they have
lost their family land through trickery, a sense
of pride which by the end of the film has
been transmuted into a new appreciation of
their father.
The film’s narrative about children learning
to care for themselves in the adult world is
nicely balanced with humor and genuine
sensitivity to the youngster’s situation.
Although the plot and its outcome is fairly
predictable, the movie itself is anything but
formula kid's fare. The film is based upon the
1969 Newberry Award honor book by Vera
and Bill Cleaver, which had come from their
own experiences. To shape the material for
the screen, producer Robert Radnitz engaged
Earl Hamner, Jr., who successfully adapted
his own novel, HOMECOMING, into the
popular television series, "The Waltons.”
What emerges on the screen is the
authenticity of real people in a real
environment.
Radnitz assembled a group attuned to each
other and the story they were telling. Urs
Furrer’s color photography of the locale is
beautiful but completely in keeping with the
needs of the story. Tambi Larsen’s art
direction made use of a wide selection of
existing buildings and locations giving the
film's background the look of a documentary.
William A. Graham has directed his mixed
cast of professionals and local inhabitants
with the single aim of achieving naturalness.
The mark of his success is that the four
children are seemingly never conscious of the
camera and studiously avoid being “cute.” In
particular, Julie Gholson as Mary Call comes
across as a strong personality, making one
believe that she has the inner resources called
for in her role. (A-l)
MAGNUM FORCE (Warners) A magnum,
Clint Eastwood solemnly informs the
audience at the beginning of this sequel to
DIRTY HARRY, is the largest-bore handgun
available today. Predictably in the course of
the film Mr. Eastwood once again
demonstrates the merits of this remarkable
plaything as, in the role of detective Harry
Calahan, he travels around San Francisco
battling the forces of evil that elude justice
and our “faltering” legal system. The message
is the same as in DIRTY HARRY: to do his
job a cop is justified in taking the law into his
own hands and, if need be, endangering the
lives of the innocent. The twist here would be
insidious if it were not so transparent. The
villains are a group of rookie cops -•
themselves experts in brutality courtesy of
Vietnam -- who are systematically murdering
the city's mobsters. Novel as it may seem,
Harry makes a crucial (if somewhat opaque)
distinction between his kind of fascism and
that of the rookies, thereby, one assumes,
guaranteeing his good-guy status. The theme
of MAGNUM FORCE is no less offensive
because of Ted Post's slick action
photography and the generally competent
performances by a cast that features Hal
Holbrook as Harry's court-defending
lieutenant — who turns out, in what must be
the most cynical plot device of the year, is the
mastermind directing the rookies. For this,
and the film’s incidental “macho” sexual
references and pervasive violence, credit
presumably goes to the screenplay by John
Milius and Michael Cimino. Visually and
thematically MAGNUM FORCE is a
thoroughly irresponsible motion picture. (C)
TV Movies
SUNDAY, JANAURY 27 - 8:30 p.m.
(ABC) - THE BOSTON STRANGLER (1968)
- Rather seamy, occasionally distasteful and
generally unpleasant quasi-docur.ientary based
on the “fictionalized” book by Gerold Frank.
The subject is Albert DeSalvo, the
self-confessed “Strangler,” who terrorized
Boston for a number of months in the late
Sixties, mainly by strangling thirteen of its
female inhabitants. The film unfolds as a
gritty terror-mystery as the Strangler (Tony
Curtis) stalks victims one after another
(thankfully, they are shown in aftermath) and
the pclice, headed by detective George
Kennedy and Massachusetts Attorney General
Henry Fonda, concentrate on the
investigation. The film is taut and
realistic--and gruesome enough to make grown
men wince and women faint dead away. (B)
MONDAY, JANUARY 28 - 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) - RABBIT, RUN (1971) - It’s difficult
to imagine what will be left of this utter
failure of a film after the TV censors get
through with it. Originally made for theatrical
release, it never made it off the cutting room
floor. The film, which stars James Caan,
Carrie Snodgrass, and Jack Albertson as
small-town Pennsylvanians, was adapted from
a dark and brooding novel by John Updike
which probed the shadowed corners of the
mind of a young man (Caan) who simply
failed to grow up and face responsibility. In a
mad pursuit to find some shred of light in his
life, Caan chases illusions and women with
equal fervor. The result is a runied marriage
and shattered dreams. Tough, but told in
filmic terms in a way that cannot be shown
on TV. So, why are they bothering to show
anything at all? (B)
9:00 p.m. (ABC) - THE TRIAL OF
ETHEL AND JULIUS ROSENBERG - An
ABC Theater presentation, starring Brenda
Vaccaro and Hershel Bernardi. In the postwar
era, J. and E. Rosenberg were the only
convicted spies to be put to death. Their case
is therefore unique and compelling - whether
or not they are given a just TV treatment is
another matter, but let’s hope they fare better
than Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did in a
similar ABC Theater program earlier this
month.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 29 - 8:30 p.m.
(ABC) - THE GIRL WHO CAME
GIFT-WRAPPED -- Leering, infantile comedy
stars Karen Valentine in the title role, and
Richard Long iv the recipient. He’s also
publisher of a mcie-oriented magazine called
“For the Man Who Has Everything” - and
now we imagine he has. A time-waster.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30 - 8:30 p.m.
(ABC) - THE HELLSTORM CHRONICLE
(197’) -- Odd mixture of
fascinating/horrifying documentary footage
about the ubiquitous and voracious inset in all
its forms, from kindly moths and lady-bugs to
deadly fire and army ants. Unfortunately, the
philosophical thrust of the film is to use scare
tactics in making us feel on the brink of an
ecological disaster from which insects will
emerge the only dominant form of life. City
dwellers weary from fighting roaches may
experience a sense of deja-vu-but most of us
will see through the hokey-pokey "scientific
findings” of the film’s fictional narrator, “Nils
Helistrom, PhD.” (A-l)
9:00 p.m. (NBC) - RED SKY AT
MORNING (1971) -- . . .Sailors take warning,
or so the old sea-saw goes. Here, however, it
should be changed to viewers take warning --
unless, that is, they go for a mindless and
raunchy portrait of an adolescent boy coming
of age in wartime New Mexico during WWII.
The callow kid is Richard (THE WALTONS)
Thomas, whose acting range is limited herein
to three big gulps-and-gollies a minute. In
between, he's trying to make friends with a
Chicano punk (Dezi Arnaz, Jr.) who wants to
beat him up, or putting the make on a plump
school mate (Katherine Burns) who does
some precocious groping of her own. And in
between that, the boy’s Naval-officer father
(Richard Crenna) is killed at sea and his
boozy mother (Claire Bloom) needs help
fending off amorous “uncles.” To round
things out, this will probably be TV’s all-time
winner for blipped profanities-those
teenagers, you see, are trying out a set of
brand new cuss words. (A-1II)
THURSDAY, JANUARY 31 -- 9:00 p.m.
(CBS) - THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS
JANE PITTMAN - Cicely Tyson, whose best
previous role was that of the mother in
Sounder, gives a tour de force performance
here as Jane Pittman, a former slave whose
life spanned the birth of the civil rights
movement. The two-hour drama special is
based on the novel by Ernest J. Gaines. At
110 years of age, the fictional Miss Pittman
recounts the changes she has seen in American
life as well as her own personal trials and
triumphs. Motion picture director John Korty
has caught the sense of history in the
developing attitudes between black and white
leading up to the confrontations of the early
sixties. But in the main, the drama is a
personal one a/nd a rare opportunity for seeing
the world through another's eyes. The
historical scope of the production make it one
of exceptional value.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1 - 8:00 p.m.
(ABC) - THE BABOONS OF GOMBE - Not
a feature film, this is an absorbing filmed
documentary based on the studies in animal
behavior conducted by Dr. Jane Goodall in
Africa’s vast Serengetti. Like its predecessor,
BABOONS focuses on the intricate social
system that governs a particular colony of
beasts -- in her previous TV film, Dr. Goodall
studied a wild dog pack. The film, which has
been meticulously photographed by Dr.
Goodall and her husband, shows the rigid
pecking order among the baboons, their
“domestic” activities, and their constant fight
for survival (don't mess with them!) in their
forbidding habitat. Fascinating and
informative for the whole family.
9:30 p.m. (CBS) - ZIG ZAG (1970) -
Insurance man George Kennedy discovers he
has a malignant brain tumor. He sets himself
up to be convicted of an unsolved crime and
arranges that his wife will receive the reward
offered by the insurance company. There is
an amazing amount of complication involved
while he lays the phoney clues leading to his
arrest and arranges for the money. Eli Wallach
as the lawyer and Anne Jackson as Kennedy’s
wife are both lost in the jumble of events, and
the incredibly contrived ending detracts from
what merits the plot may have had. Kennedy,
however, puts in a fine performance as
always. (A-l I)
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2 - 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) - SILENT RUNNING (1972) - Drama
about ecological disaster, circa the
not-too-distant future, centers on a shipload
of scientists (Bruce Dern is the commander
and, apparently, the most demented) floating
ark-like through space with a precious cargo
of plants and living things that can no longer
survive on earth. The themes of man’s
relationship to his environment, especially
regarding its despoilment, are thoughtful. The
drama, however, is sometimes pretty punk.
(All)
JULIE GHOLSON (rt.) becomes the head of the household to a of WHERE THE LILIES BLOOM, a United Artists Release.
tight-knit family of brothers and sisters in the Robert Radnitz production
BOOK REVIEWS
THE BEST IN CHILDREN’S
BOOKS: The University of Chicago
Guide to Children’s Literature,
1966-1972, edited by Zena Sutherland,
University of Chicago Press (Chicago)
1973. Reviewed by Donna Ford.
(NC News Service)
Friends from West Germany who
now live in the United States recently
asked me to recommend some books for
their children. Having been a librarian in
a children’s department of a public
library, I was able to supply them with
some book lists. Another aid I would
suggest to parents would be a book as
“The Best in Children’s Books.” This
kind of book is a resource that is
available to all parents who want to
provide their children with a worthwhile
reading program.
Covering books published from 1966
to 1972, this guide will help parents
know what current books might be
most suitable for their children.
Knowledge of recent books is especially
important because to children (and
adults, too) the bright and shiny “new”
books on the library shelf are the most
appealing.
The main section of “The Best in
Children’s Books” contains book
reviews and is arranged according to
author. Each entry contains the book’s
title, publisher, price, and a brief
description of the book’s contents or
story line as well as the age range or
grade level for which the book is
appropriate.
These main entries are followed by a
number of indices which guide the
reader to specific kinds of books. For
example, the Developmental Values
Index arranges books according to
topics such as Family Relations,
Friendship Value, Honesty, and
Interreligious Understanding, thus
relating certain topics to a child’s
maturation process. There is also a
subject index including both fiction and
non-fiction books on everything from
Appalachia to Lasers to Zulus.
Additional indices include a curricular
use index (relating the book selections
to school subjects), a reading novel
index and a type of literature index
(mystery, biography, tall tales, etc.)
It is very easy for children to acquire
bad reading habits, constantly choosing
only one kind of book, or the book that
looks easiest to read, or the book with
the most eye-catching cover. It is
important for children to sample
different kinds of books, and the years
in which certain books are appropraite
for children pass quickly. Also, books
must compete with a myriad of other
activities in which children are involved.
So in the end, it’s up to parents to use
such tools as “The Best in Children’s
Books” to guide their children in
making productive and constructive use
of their reading time.
(Donna Ford is librarian for the
National Catholic News Service.)
LIFE IN MUSIC
BY THE DAMEANS
Time in a Bottle
If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day ‘til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you.
If I could make days last forever,
If words could make wishes come true
I’d save everyday like a treasure and then
Again I would spend them with you.
But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do once you find them;
I’ve looked around enough to know
You’re the one I want to go through time with.
If I had a box just for wishes
And dreams that had never come true,
The box would be empty except for the memory
of how they were answered by you.
(c 1972, ABC Records, Inc.)
The words of this song are particularly significant when we take into
consideration the artist. Jim Croce, as many are aware, died several months ago
in a plane crash, so when he sings “you never have enough time to do the things
you want to do,” the words especially ring true.
The music to “Time in a Bottle” is written with a dreamy lilt and gives the
effect of a music box with time ticking away. Each of us has dreams to be
fulfilled and promises to be completed and we are aware that time is gradually
slipping past. We have all wondered at one time or another whether we will have
enough time “to do the things we want to do.” As it is, when we have a good
experience, either when love is deeply share, or when a dream or a promise is
fulfilled, we want to capture that moment, to put “time in a bottle” and not let
it escape. We even comment on how wonderful it would be if life were like that
all the time. These are the minutes we would like to save ‘“til eternity passes
away.” These are the hours that we wish would “last forever.”
In “Time in a Bottle,” the state of total contentment and happiness involves
another person. She becomes the purpose and goal of his life, the one who has
answered his wishes and dreams, the one he would want to “go through time
with.” In this, time is used as the image of eternity. Whatever we find important
to us now is usually what we would want our eternity to be. There is the
realization that how one uses his time determines how he will spend his eternity.
This really challenges us to check within ourselves and question what is valuable
in our lives.
“Time” in this song does not seem to be used in a quantitative sense, the
“how much” aspect of time measured in seconds, minutes, hours; rather the
song seems to stress the qualitative sense of time, emphasizing “in what manner”
we spend our time. Thus we can spend four hours with one person and never feel
as though we have communicated, and spend a “moment” with another person
with whom we have shared something of ourselves and know that we have
touched eternity. William Blake once stated: To see the world in a grain of
sand/And a heaven in a wildflower/Is to hold infinity in the palm of your
hand/And eternity in an hour. The amount of time is not so important as the
completeness of the encounter.
In the refrain of “Time in a Bottle,” the writer laments that “there never
seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them.”
This is certainly true when we look at time in a quantitative, functional way. To
“do” things requires a certain amount of hours and days. For a person to “be,”
however, only takes a moment.
The refrain of the song continues that “you’re the one I want to go through
time with.” He makes his commitment in his life for this person and because of
that love, he will know and experience moments of “eternity.” This must be
that touch of “heaven” that we can experience in this life and which, hopefully,
will find its completeness in the next life when we join Him who is the source of
all Love, and time is eternity.
(All correspondence should he directed to: The Dameans. St. Joseph Church, 216 Patton
Are., P.O. Box 51X8, Shreveport, 1.A 71105)