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PAGE 6—January 30,1975
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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 TV - Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, Reservations
B - Morally Objectionable in Part for All
C — Condemned
USCC DIVISION FOR FILM AND BROADCASTING
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ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
(Warners) . . .Harsh, gripping adult drama
about a tough-minded woman. The title
sequence and opening scene of ALICE
DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE suggest
that Martin Scorsese, the brilliant young
director of last year’s surprise success MEAN
STREETS, is about to pay homage to the
romantic dramas so popular in the Hollywood
films of the forties. The small square image,
the satiny backgrounds, the mood music, even
the rosy tints, all suggest a self-conscious
nostalgia for a lyricism that is long lost. Then,
unexpectedly, the film opens up, the image
expands, to reveal the sad suburban sprawl of
modern New Mexico. These two universes, of
Hollywood glitter and of modern realism,
become the pivots in Scorsese’s complex and
controversial picture of woman’s fate in
America. And while Scorsese never quite
manages to merge the mythic and the real in
the film, the stylism and the pedestrian, his
ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE is
thought-provoking without being shrill or
didactic, entertaining without being
superficial or simplistic.
Alice, superbly portrayed by Ellen Burstyn
in her best role since THE LAST PICTURE
SHOW, is a typical housewife at the beginning
of the film frustrated in her role as
homemaker and alienated from her brutish
husband, Donald, played by Billy Green Bush.
Alice has sacrificed her dream of a singing
career to serve as cook, babysitter, and bottle
washer for Donald, an archetypal male
chauvinist who constantly denigrates or
rejects her efforts to please him, and who
bullies their young son, a wisecracking but
lovable brat named Tommy, played by Alfred
Lutter. Donald, a salesman for Coca Cola, dies
in an accident, and Alice and Tommy are left
alone and penniless. The rest of the film is a
saga of their journey across the Southwest, as
Alice pursues her singing career. Neither a
great success nor a total failure, Alice first
finds herself a job as a singer in a piano bar,
where she is victimized by another machismo
man, Ben, played by Harvey Keitel. Alice
moves on and takes a job as a waitress in a
greasy spoon, where she is courted by a
rancher named David, played by Kris
Kristofferson. By the end of the film, Alice
and David have begun a somewhat uneasy
alliance.
Given the relative scarcity of films about
women produced in Hollywood today,
ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE is
a bold attempt to picture the role of a single
woman in contemporary American society.
Alice’s voyage, a journey which is both
physical and psychological, provides a
gripping vision of a landscape in which
women are cast into secondary and
subservient roles and offers an illuminating
insight into one woman’s dawning
consciousness of her own plight. Alice’s
marriage to Donald is a prison for her: all her
best efforts to make things better exacerbate
the situation. Her fancy dinners, new clothes,
and amorous advances all result in destructive
confrontations. Alice’s brief affair with Ben
evidences more of the same exploitation;
Ben’s .toothy smile and awkward advances
hide a deep misogyny.finally unmasked in his
sadistic assault on Alice. Even David’s
pleasant exterior and ingratiating manner,
appealing as they are, mask a desire to be in
charge, to have things his way. Alice has to
compromise to stay with David, and he, too,
must comprdmise to accomodate her. Thus,
the end of Alice’s odyssey contains many
ambiguous and ambivalent elements. It is far
from the happy ending of traditional
Hollywood opuses; there are no easy answers
in ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE
ANYMORE.
The realism of ALICE DOESN’T LIVE
HERE ANYMORE is undercut somewhat,
however, by rather studied acting, highly
polished dialogue, and flashy directing. While
the film could have been a gritty realistic
portrait of oppression, all the edges are
softened by a commitment to many of the
conventions of the popular film. The style
and professionalism of the film seem to work
at times against the theme of the film. Kris
Kristofferson, for example, is so carefully
framed throughout that he appears a pillar of
strength and a paragon of paternal virtues; the
result is that audiences will be rooting for
Alice to stay with him under any conditions,
hardly a liberating sentiment. Similarly, both
Alice and Tommy have sharp witty exchanges
that echo the stylish comedies of the thirties.
These fine lines draw laughs, but they
puncture all attempts at realism, and suggest a
knowledge and detachment not in keeping
with the oppression and entrapment of these
two individuals in a world that seems stacked
against them. Even Scorsese's facility as a
director, his easy manipulation of cinema’s
vast technical resources, undercuts much of
the film's realism. When Alice sings, Scorsese
can’t resist moving his camera gracefully in
wide arcs, softening his focus, and carefully
arranging his lighting to make her seem much
too beautiful, much too talented, to be a
minor singer in a dilapidated bar.
ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE
ANYMORE, despite its flaws, is an engaging
film which will generate a good deal of
discussion. The casual moviegoer may be
somewhat distressed by many of the tawdry
situations the film treats and by its rough
language, but ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE
ANYMORE does provide a welcome focus on
women in America without too much
sentimentality nor idealization. (A-IV)
BROTHER OF THE WIND (Sun
International Pictures) A kindly old mountain
dweller befriends four cuddly, frisky, lovable
wolf cubs and raises them amid the scenic
splendor of the Canadian Rockies. Short on
plot, but long on meadows, mountains, takes,
and sunsets, the quartet are introduced to
raccoons, porcupines, bears, deer, elk, a
weasel, and, alas, a snowmobile-riding,
shotgun-wielding Man! Younger children
might be frightened by a few scenes depicting
hunting and killing in the wild, but the sheer
beauty of the scenery and the intimate
glimpses of wildlife make this film a pleasant
experience for all. (A-l)
ABBY (AIP) The black version of “The
Exorcist” can appeal only to the least
discriminating minds among us. It has all the
defects and excesses of the original plus a few
obnoxious goodies of its own. God and Devil
clash this time through Protestant channels,
which suggests that Jesuits, and especially
Jesuit fatalities, are not all that necessary in
movieland exorcisms. (B)
TV Movies
USCC DIVISION FOR FILM AND BROADCASTING
1
SUNDAY, February 2 — 9:00 p.m. (ABC)
- CRAZY JOE (1974) - Grade-A gangster
trash stars Peter Boyle as the late Joe Gallo, a
maverick Brooklyn mobster who paid for his
sins with his life, thanks to the mob’s rough
system of instant justice. The film is laughable
in its pretentions (Gallo had 'em, too) to the
“noble savage” theme, and some of the
dialogue (“Which do you prefer, Sartre or
Camus?” quoth Joey at a cocktail party in
radical-chic circles) positively reeks. Fred
Williamson, in fact, gives the film its only life
as a black gangster who tries to help Joe give
his own faltering operation a new dose of
blood. But the rest is all worthless, especially
in its misguided morality. (B)
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3 — 9:00 p.m.
(NBC) - DOCTOR’S WIVES (1971) - This
one is pure, albeit adult, soap-operaticS as the
doctors at a large Far Western hospital dally
with the nurses while their wives find
diversion elsewhere. A colleague’s ill-timed
fatal heart attack provides the necessary
scandal and shame to motivate everyone back
into their proper and respective beds. Forget
it, especially if they leave in the gruesome
open-heart surgical sequence. Dyann Cannon,
Richard Crenna star. (B)
9:00 p.m. (ABC) - THE ONLY GAME IN
TOWN (1970) — Two lonely, average people
meet by chance, take up residence together,
and finally fall in love. Warren Beatty, while
perhaps a bit too young-looking for the part,
actually carries the show as a nervous, joking,
lovable, mixed-up adult-kid, a compulsive
gambler making ends meet by playing a piano
in a Las Vegas club. One night Elizabeth
Taylor, a hefty chorus girl, equally mixed-up
(a mistress kept dangling on a string for five
years by a married businessman), wanders in
and invites him home. They form a "no
strings attached” relationship while ever so
slowly coming to understand and accept each
other. The film offers some interesting
delineations of character and excursions into
motive and meaning, but never with any real
depth of drama or emotion. Veteran Director
Stevens has lost his bounce and comic flair;
the film is a bit uneven and overlong. And
yet, as an “old-fashioned” melodrama, it
holds interest, has color, is honest and
divertingly entertaining. (A-lll)
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4 — 8:00 p.m.
(ABC) -- DEATH BE NOT PROUD - Made
for TV. This is a special movie presentation
that provides fine family viewing, although
parents should be aware of the heavy
emotional tug the subject may provide for
wee ones. The story concerns a young boy
whose death is something his parents can bear
only because their son’s brief life was so full
and joyous. The teleplay comes from the
popular John Gunther book, and it is based
on the true story of his son’s death. The film
is beautifully made and acted, and its positive
themes about living and dying can prompt
some thoughtful parent-child discussion as a
follow up-it’s up to you.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6 — 9:00 p.m.
(CBS) - DIRTY DINGUS MAGEE (1970) ~
... is frail Frank Sinatra, hurling himself
halfheartedly into a Western spoof ill-suited
to his tough-guy talents. Anne Jackson is both
town mayor and madam whose bordello
business thrives on a cavalry clientele. George
Kennedy is the sheriff she installs and
instructs to incite an Indian uprising to keep
the cavalry around. Lois Nettleton is the
schoolmistress whose extracurricular
invitations rival Miss Jackson’s, and Michele
Carey is the Indian maiden who ambushes
Dingus for "bim-bam” in the bushes. Jack
Elam is the outlaw ambushed by the
townsfolk who mistake him for Dingus. Burt
Kennedy is the director who allows all these
uncivilized roustabouts to have a field day
altering allegiances in a mad cacophony of
discordant sequences. Shoddy in its lack of
veritable sets and scenery, juvenile in its
attempt to ridicule the “Code of the Old
West,” and tiresome in its constant leering,
DINGUS ambles along as a hastily packaged
vehicle for the action market. Boisterous and
bawdy in a very dumb fashion, it is hardly the
fun movie for a family. (A-lll)
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7 — 9:00 p.m.
(CBS) - DILLINGER (1973) - This is
certainly one of the most carefully detailed
evocations of the violent era of lawlessness
that swept middle America during the Great
Depression. Unfortunately, the film is one of
the most relentlessly violent and bloody
movies of the already blood-drenched year.
Director John Milius (who also wrote the
screen play) may have been trying to criticize
America’s deadly fascination with guns and
folk heroes such as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy
Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson who lived and
died by them, but he seems to have
succumbed to the same morbidity he
questions. Nonetheless, for the
strong-stomached, there is a pair of fine
performances lurking in the gunsmoke:
Warren Oates has just the right balance of
swagger and transparent sensitivity to make
him a believable folk hero; and Ben Johnson
as Melvin Purvis, the ruthless F.B.I. agent who
was obsessed with tracking down (and usually
killing) the “Most Wanted” outlaws, is an icy
picture of the image-conscious “law ‘n’ order”
mentality of the times. The film is harsh and
brutal, beautifully photographed and
authentic in period detail - but certainly not
for all. (A-lll)
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8—9:00 p.m.
(ABC) -- FRENZY (1972) - Old Master
Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful suspense thriller
focuses on a madman strangler preying on
women in contemporary London. A kind of
Jack the Ripper gone formal, the killer
dispatches his victims by means of a
characteristic necktie, with accompanying
perverse violence.. An innocent man whose
careless way of living nonetheless implicates
him is the point-of-view character, tautly
played by Peter Finch. The question
Hitchcock poses and builds his high suspense
on is whether the wrong man will be punished
for the crime-and we do not find out until
the very last moment. The film has all the
horror and fascinating shock value of
PSYCHO, but in keeping with the
“permissive” times, Hitchcock lamentably
adorns his movie with very explicit violence.
Thus FRENZY is a good film of its genre,
recalling the best of Hitchcock's work, but it
is for the mature and non-squeamish filmgoer.
(A-IV)
9:00 p.m. (NBC) - COOL HAND LUKE
(1967) -- Paul Newman plays Luke, inmate
of a brutal, ramshackle southern prison farm
whose prisoners spend endless hot days
whacking weeds at the sides of the state
highways. The wardens are cold and hard,
more so than any prisoner, sentences are
severe, and incidental punisgpnents degrading.
The stage is set for sardonic comment on the
futility, inhumanity and injustice of such a
penal system. Some will see Luke merely as
one of its pathetic victims, but through
symbolism and religious references, others
will see him as a Christlike figure whose spirit
rises above adversity and death itself. He can
also be interpreted as a man who achieves the
immortality of a myth because of his courage
in the face of the absurdities of the film’s
godless universe. Portions of the film are
overdone; proper restraint would have
diminished its powerful drama not a bit.
(A-IV)
JEWISH TRIBUTE TO CATHOLIC - A monument to America’s first
Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, is a major tourist attraction in
Israel. A visitor photographs the hilltop monument several miles from
Jerusalem. The memorial contains an eternal flame and pillars for each of
the 50 states, along with a bust of Kennedy. Christian-Jewish cooperation
is encouraged in a newly issued Vatican document. (NC Photo by Gerald
M. Costello)
BOOK REVIEWS
A CONCISE HISTORY OF SPAIN,
by Henry Kamen. Charles Scribner’s
Sons, New York. 191 pp. $9.95.
REVIEWED BY BARRETT MCGURN
(NC News Service)
Dr. Kamen is the author of an
earlier work on the Spanish Inquisition.
Formerly a member of the teaching
staff of the University of Edinburgh, he
presents here a capsule view of Spain’s
history from prehistoric times to the
present. Not the least of the work’s
attractions are 172 illustrations, many
in color, depicting many of Iberia’s
main art works.
To Dr. Kamen, Spain is a nation of:‘
important positive qualities but also of
many that are deplorable, the bulk of
each of them reaching roots far back
into the centuries. Culture flourished
under Rome. St. Paul’s message enjoyed
a quick, favorable hearing. The
subsequent Visigothic invasion
overturned much of the culture and set
a fierce anti-Semitism aflame. The
latter, Dr. Kamen says, has remained a
factor in Spanish life ever since,
sometimes muted, sometimes expressed
in harshest form as it was during the
centuries of the Inquisition and at the
time of the 1492 expulsion of the
Hebrews.
The Moslem centuries of a thousand
years ago brought cultural renaissance
and eventually, in distorted form,
reintroduced Aristotle to Medieval
Europe. Following that came the
Christian Reconquest. Religious faith
and martial valor were marks of the
Castilians who overcame the Moslem
occupiers, just as they were
characteristics in succeeding centuries of
the Spanish in the New World. On the
one hand there were the illiterate
Pizarro and the cruel Cortes destroying
the finest native civilizations of the
Americas, and on the other the Jesuit
St. Peter Claver and the Dominican Las
Casas laboring among black slaves and
the Indians:
The century following Columbus’
discovery saw Spain at its imperial peak
with Sicily, Naples, Albania and parts of
North Africa under Spanish rule, and
Catalan the official language of Athens.
From that point Dr. Kamen sees a
decline. Wars upon wars brought
repeated bankruptcies of the state
starting in the late 1500s. The
Re conquest put vast tracts of land in
the hands of a relatively few families,
some of which still retain those
possessions. A gap widened between
rich and poor. Rebellious ideas were
spread by the French Revolution. As
the middle years of the 19th century
approached both the Church and the
old nobles were large land holders. Then,
in 1834-1835 the first immense
eruption of anti-clericalism occurred.
Urban mobs sacked convents and killed
clergy. Two years later the state seized
all Church land, suppressed all religious
orders and, in Madrid alone, levelled 44
churches and monasteries.
The expropriation of the Church not
only failed to solve the problem of the
landless but, says Dr. Kamen,
exacerbated it, for a new class of
bourgeois property holders was added
to that of the nobility. If anything the
squeeze against the agricultural poor
became worse. By mid-century a new
philosophy began winning converts,
anarchism. Barcelona’s “tragic week” of
1909 was a consequence: a Catalan
general strike became an orgy of
violence. Nuns were raped, graves were
opened, 50 churches and convents were
burned. Police moved in and, the author
reports, shot hundreds.
That brings the writer to events of
living memory. In 1930, he says, many
city and rural workers were no better
off economically than they had been in
1830. A newly installed republican
government as an early order of business
moved against the Church, thus, in Dr.
Kamen’s view, making a fatal error.
Spain split in two, much of the army,
clergy and monarchy on the one side,
most of the laborers and many of the
Catholics of the Basque country and of
Catalonia on the other. Some 5,000
clergy were slain “in cold blood.” By
war’s end 500,000 Spaniards had died.
Peace, says Dr. Kamen, brought no
reconciliation: one side had overcome
the other, many issues were unresolved.
Despite industrial gains the problem of
rich and poor is no nearer solution, he
says, than it has been for so many
embittered decades. The Church’s
situation at least is different. The
expropriations of one and one-half
centuries have left their enduring mark
and there is no longer any simplistic
identification of the Church with the
wealthy. Dr. Kamen adds, however, that
Church attendance among the Barcelona
poor is as little as three percent.
The story is an often painful and
tragic one. Dr. Kamen’s sympathy for
the Spanish poor shines through on all
pages. The work makes for disturbing
reading but it offers a quick, lucid
insight into one scholar’s judgment of
the past and future Spanish role, into
elements of Spanish greatness, and to
some of the reasons for the ursurges and
declines of Madrid’s history.
(V V’ LIFE IN
BY THE DAMEANS
Big Yellow Taxi
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what
you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people a dollar-and-a-half just to see ’em.
Don’t it always . . .
Hey, farmer, farmer, put away that DDT. Now,
Give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees.
Don’t it always ....
Late last night I heard the screen door slam.
A big yellow taxi come and pushed around my house,
pushed around my land.
Don’t it always ...
Late last night I heard the screen door slam again.
A big yellow taxi took away my old man again.
Don’t it always . . .
By Joni Mitchell
(C) Siquomb Publishing Co.
Joni Mitchell teams up with the L.A. Express in “Miles of Aisles,” a live
album of the best of Joni Mitchell. The record is not merely a selection of cuts
lifted from previous albums but a collection of new arrangements of live
performances which make her best sound even better.
Joni has always been artful in her word weaving and melody singing. Her
music has proved durable through the early folk sounds up to the present and
Time magazine recently accorded to her the title of Rock ’n Roll’s leading lady.
MUSIC
l
“Big Yellow Taxi,” is her current single from the album, and like several of
Joni’s tunes, it confuses me. At first the song sounds like a lesson in
environmental appreciation. The message is timely-don’t destroy the beauty of
nature in the name of progress.
When you look closer, however, you notice that there’s no hint as to what we
should be doing about the problem, but simply the repeated refrain that things
just happen that way. Far from concern and care, the attitude is almost fatalistic
-- “don’t it always seem to go.”
The problem is compounded after her observations on parking lots, trees,
DDT, and birds and bees, when she adds her “old man” to the list. She may be
hurt at his leaving, but then again, that’s the way things go.
It is interesting to note that in the original recording of the song in the album,
“Ladies of the Canyon,” she laughs and clowns a little after the last verse almost
as if she didn’t know how to handle her hurt. In the present rendition she adds
that the big yellow taxi took away my old man again, as if to say either he’ll
come back or someone else will come along.
For all the beauty and creativity of Joni Mitchell’s music, it seems to lack any
statement of vision. She sings of searching but her goals elude the listener and
her references are a mixture of now and yesterday. Her references to the past are
significant, from the line in “Woodstock,” “We’ve got to get ourselves back to
the garden,” to the philosophy of the “Circle Game”-- “And the seasons they go
‘round and ‘round, and the painted ponies go up and down. We’re captive on the
carousel of time. We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came,
and go ‘round and ‘round and ‘round in the circle game.”
Vision is the quality which breaks the circle of futility and enables a person to
dream of a better and happy future in accordance with particular goals he has
chosen in life. For the Christian, vision means sharing the dream of Jesus, a
dream of universal peace and brotherhood in the kingdom, a dream rooted in the
past but pointed to the future for its fulfillment. The Christian knows that he
must work to help bring about this kingdom. He knows that happiness and
fulfillment are not idle dreams but a promise made by someone who tries to
keep the dream alive in all of us every day.
All correspondence should be directed to: The Dameans, P. O. Box 2108: Baton Rouge,
La. 90821.)