Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) manifest that he does not do it for the sake of historical accuracy. Subsequent to the publication of Breach of Faith various government investigations have...
...Justice, in case you were wondering, triumphs...
...according to disclosures by the Senate Committee on November 5, international cable traffic was monitored by the National Security Agency from 1947 to May of 1975 without the knowledge of any President since Harry Truman...
...Subsequent to the publication of Breach of Faith various government investigations have revealed not only that the intelligence chiefs have been free of the duress of Huston but that they have been tolerably free of the influence of several Presidents...
...Roger Daltry of The Who, who shone in Russell's Tommy, looks wholly embarrassed in this wholly embarrassing mishmash...
...David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index • • ^ Black Christmas: Retitled from Silent Night, Evil Night, under which name it bombed, this gripping chiller plays with a brutal fellow going 'round killing young ladies and their sorority house mother...
...none was more hopeful than the crowning myth of the presidency—that the people, in their shared wisdom, would be able to choose the best man to lead them...
...It is just as clear that the Huston Plan is no more a causal antecedent to Watergate and the plumbers than Breach of Faith is a causal prelude to the Presidential candidacy of Linda Lovelace...
...Because White's blowzy analysis of Huston and his plan is pivotal to White's analysis of Watergate and the coverup, it is the most crucial of his misstatements—it is not his last...
...Important: allow six weeks for address change...
...Naturally, he must die, Mahogany must Return To Find Her Roots With Her Own People, and Billy Dee (who is a cross between Omar Sharif and Ron Dellums) wins his gal, thus proving that Afro-Americans have more fun, and white homosexual photographers commit suicide, and clothes make the woman, and the movie is breaking all box office records in New York and other centers of advanced culture...
...Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the 1975 winner of the Harold Robbins Award, Theodore H. White...
...Bloomington, Indiana The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 39...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 (Please attach address label here ) ^ Please renew my subscription for one year...
...Let's Do It Again: The inevitable sequel to last year's Uptown Saturday Night, which, like the original, is light and frothy, jivey good time, fluffy but sprightly...
...What matters is sheer noisiness, noisiness to lure from their tvs and radios those wretches who need stupendous jolts of excitement to make life worth living...
...Unlike the late Richard Weaver, he does not perceive modern civilization to be on a "fearful descent," nor is the impending "dissolution of the West" just around the corner...
...The Congress has astounded and delighted all observers by its first efforts to make the Congress responsible to the changing needs of a new generation of Americans...
...Enough stiff upper lips to revive the Empire, but also enough bargain-basement Freud to bring back mother love...
...Diamonds: Shelley Winters has all the best lines, playing an American Jewish widow tromping around Israel, but she is wholly incidental to the story, which has to do with a Britisher (Robert Shaw), his Negro accomplice (Richard Roundtree), and the Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv...
...Can you guess that the gentlemen have grand theft on their minds, that Shelley waddles in and out at soft moments, and that you've seen the robbery before, in Topkapi and about nine other flicks...
...Liszt was the first teenie-bopper idol, don't you see, and Wagner was a Nazi, or didn't you know...
...It is a glory: "Middle America had been without a great leader for generations, and in Richard Nixon it had elevated a man of talent and ability, a President so powerful as to change the world, so powerful that Richard Nixon alone had been able to destroy Richard Nixon...
...He fancies no apocalyptic visions...
...Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier once again in dutch with the hoods...
...Bravo...
...John Wayne back as the cantankerous Western lawman, joined by Kate Hepburn as a missionary lady out to avenge her daddy's death at the hand of the desperados...
...The performances, although splendid, cannot rescue the "plot," such as it is, from unremitting boredom...
...The clash of macho vs...
...At one point he erases from the record practically every Presidential Administration since the late Mr...
...Changing Your Address...
...BRUDNOY'S FILM INDEX (continued from page 36) Marxist, kindly but bureaucratic-minded cops, an old horse, falling leaves, falling snow, falling interest level...
...In fact, viewed with respect to historical accuracy, Breach of Faith can be read as a sustained insult to the Organization of American Historians...
...Scarlett—and no Butterfly McQueen for miles...
...Lies My Father Told Me: Cross Duddy Kravitz with Fiddler's Tevye, situate the story in Canada, find yourself the cutest little Jewish kid on the block, give him a wise but cratiky grandpa, a weepy momma, a bumpkin papa, a neighborhood whore with heart of unkosher sandwich spread, a gossipy yenta, the village (continued on page 39) 36 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 RUSSELL KIRK (continued from page 29) principles of order has done much to preserve America from the confusion and violent change that plagues most modern nations...
...Whereas radical authors and even some conservative writers might see the critical events of the sixties and seventies as a prelude to the breakup of American society, Kirk harbors no such notions...
...Just who dominated whom at those meetings between Huston and the panjandrums of the intelligence community is subject to Holmesian speculation, but it is clear by now that Huston, White's "menace to the republic," did not...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Even the teenie-boppers have shown the good sense to stay away...
...Breach of Faith is historical revisionism at its most preposterous...
...As White sees them, James Madison and his associates were indistinguishable from an assemblage of Rexford G. l ugwells...
...Lisztomania: After this, Ken Russell has nowhere—and I mean nowhere—to go but up...
...Enclosed is my check for $8.00...
...For once in this age of ripoffs of the old horror flicks, a winner...
...And time and space make three...
...he had broken with the faith that had glued Americans to each other in the beginning to make a republic...
...He has written a book whose gasconade and bombast could waken the dead...
...The Alternative Circulation Department P.O...
...His knowledge of the Founding Fathers is memorable...
...Please attach address label from the back cover of your Alternative is the space below...
...McKinley's by declaring, "Richard Nixon and his men were, for the first time in American politics since 1860, carrying on an ideological war...
...2) "Of all the political myths out of which the republic was born...
...Always attach address label when writing to us about your subscription...
...Such balderdash is characteristic...
...Although the American order has been shaken as of late, there is still much cause, Kirk concludes, to believe that it will remain essentially intact for the foreseeable future...
...It is the worst book of the year —a masterpiece of the disc jockey's art...
...The Nixon disaster has ushered in the new 94th Congress—overwhelmingly Democratic, refreshingly vigorous, more determined than any Congress since 1866 to curb Presidential authority...
...There are moments of much worth, and great stretches of wilderness...
...Le Chat: Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret make as much as possible of Georges Simenon's depressing tale of the married couple communicating by note, she having killed his cat, he having decided to punish her thereafter with eternal silence...
...Thanks to White's amazing gusto for the art of the Methodist ranter, he has succeeded in his quest...
...Conduct Unbecoming: Veddy British, veddy stiff, veddy bloody dull: Ind-jah late in the last century, and an "incident" in the regiment precipitates a kangaroo court trial of the accused and rather diffident officer...
...On September 24 former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton testified that his agency had illegally intercepted all mail to and from the Soviet Union from 1952 until 1973...
...According to figures made public by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 25, the Federal Bureau of Investigation committed at least 238 surreptitious entries from 1942 to 1968...
...Mahogany: At last, a soap opera for blacks, encompassing every iota of treacle imaginable...
...Nothing much matters, but the spirit's willing and the flesh is understandably weak for this sort of spoof...
...Yet whereas some revisionists twist the record because of their ideology or because their wives laugh at them for lingering at the bottom of the academic ladder, White revises the record because to him the record does not matter...
...Rooster Cogburn (...and the Lady): True Grit, Part II...
...Tracy, played by Diana Ross, who can sing but doesn't here, transmogrifies into Mahogany, the fashion model star of the hour, under the inspired tutelage of Anthony Perkins, who has perfected the high fag twitch...
...Billy Dee Williams is the Negro stud our Mahogany really loves, but Perkins represents glamor and opportunity...
...please print) Name Address City State Zip Date of change ^ • ^ • ^ ^ • • ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ • • • • • • • • • ^ ^ ^ • ^ ^ ^ • ^ • ^ ^ ^ ^ • ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ • ^ • • • • ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ • ^ ^ ^ • • • • ^ ^ • • ^ ^ ^ ^ • • • ^ ^ ^ • • • • • • • • ^ ^ ^ ^ • ^ • • • • • • • • ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ • ^ • ^ ^ ^ • ^ • ^ There is opportunity in America...
...According to the author: (1) "What he [RMN] did not understand was the past—or the reasons why Americans so long ago had originally put so much potential power in the office he held...
...Something about fixing boxing matches...
...Print your new address and mail this form to The Alternative...
...Lots of chills, eerie performances by Keir Dullea as an easily rattled pianist, Olivia Hussey as his girl friend, and enough terror to make Hitchcock's Psycho seem like Bambi...
...3) "...the presidency the supreme office, would make noble any man who held its responsibility...
...Ah, yes, what a magnificent Congress, and what a magnificent book...
...Gospel, with a story of no redeeming social value but with nice if predictably stereotyped performances from the leads...
...Michael York carries on nobly as the defending attorney, James Faulkner has very dreamy eyes as the accused, and Susannah York flashes her teeth quite a bit as the aggrieved Mrs...
...At another point he speaks of America's ethnic diversity in such exaggerated terms as to leave the impression that the United States is at one with the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...It's spooky as all get out...
...The penetration of groups adjudged subversive is old hat...
Vol. 9 • January 1976 • No. 4
