Screen:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
the Ainu victim cub, thence into his translation, and thence into an essentially theatrical situation: two men holding each ultimately into his interpretation of the Ainu ritual as a holy ...
...Second, for Robert Phillips pride, and his aim is the destruction of the advice on how to write your own Divine Plan...
...Sally Fitzgerald, one of O'Con- anyway...
...Of her second and best novel, luminous letter-writer...
...He is more sinned against than sinning, and when he is finally shot at the end, he refuses to defend himself M i ILTON KATSELAS, who directed When You Comin' and gets our sympathy despite everything he has done...
...anymore...
...The counterpart role in The Report to the Commissioner, the plot seemed to resolve itself Petrified Forest-Humphrey Bogart's "Duke" Mantee-is 13 April /979: 215 the one that stole the show, and certainly Teddy is the only succeed...
...His name is wrote many, many letters "explaining" Lucifer, he's a fallen angel, his sin is herself to correspondents...
...And finally, for sheer when not writing fiction or letters, was to led man...
...in ways no empirical technique can chart, there waits not just The principals in Red Ryder act their little hearts out, too...
...also spent next to no time listening to and the Misfit's more profoundly-felt in(She was not, for instance, a convert, but music until late in her life: "All classical volvement with Christ's action which set a lifelong Catholic...
...Part of the problem with the ending is just that played by Michael Moriarity in Report to the Commissioner group therapy is by nature open-ended...
...As soon as production was comcharacterizations and acting would need a lot of sly help to pleted, she married him...
...In The Petrified Forest it was revealed in the end that The churches are emptier now than they have been, and I everyone was really just a little more honorable and purposeful myself am not often in the sparse congregations...
...In the role of the berserk hippy, Teddy, Gortner evangelizes as Triumph...
...fiction-Flannery O'Connor was inci- a television until 1961, when some One of her favorites of her stories, "A sive in such matters...
...What she did do, "The figure for the new Jesus-a shrivelfriends...
...He was But I don't think Katselas ever really had the faith in the cheating, which suggests that he never was able to believe in dramatic power of this property that Gortner did...
...The more abusive and threatening Teddy becomes, the more familiar and soothing the situation seems to be...
...She didn't own O'Connor's words...
...In his capacity as producer of the film he could give himself, the stage was well...
...Like the Mark Medoff play on which Red Ryder is Christians in attendance are to bind themselves to one another based, The Petrified Forest is set in the Southwest at a and to their totem animal, their human totem, their dead and roadside diner where a gunman holds a chance assortment of risen Christ, the priest holds the consecrated bread aloft and locals and travelers at bay...
...Whenever Teddy starts to get obstreperous, for incharacter here that's allowed to come even close to the two- stance, we hear the sound of a rattlesnake on the sound track...
...But what she has included is poses...
...There's no suspense in Red Ryder...
...He addressed her letters as if "to a This moment of grace excites the devil to a treasure-trove...
...The Christian ceremony involves comparison to that other adaptation of a stage play which it eating bread and drinking wine, of course, not eating roast recalls so vividly-too vividly...
...but unlike God, if he is indeed (Stephanie Faracy), and a local no-good called "Red" Ryder perpetrator and victim of the whole, we are not perpetrators (Peter Firth) are all held hostage in a diner by a flipped-out and victims in equal measure...
...motion, Katselas was really straining to move us...
...The film suggests that Katselas thought the performance...
...I suspect that when Gortner bought the rights to Medoff s turning to movies he has specialized in adaptations from thea- play, he saw that he could bring his own background to bear on ter, including Butterflies Are Free, which he had directed on it...
...source...
...She Grandmother and her superficial beliefs and some of which has been misleading...
...But with an effect like this use of slow film...
...Like when the Grandmother recognizes from the large body of extant corre- She resented being lumped into any the Misfit as one of her own children and spondence...
...sided complexities of that role...
...The difference is that forty or fifty years ago' who takes away the sins of the world...
...It's the moment had included more of the funny ones to Southern decaying magnolia...
...Third, for insight Dominican Sisters gave her one in Good Man Is Hard to Find," she deinto Flannery O'Connor's life, about gratitude for getting their book, A scribes as "a duel of sorts between the which relatively little has been known, Memoir of Mary Ann, to a publisher...
...Fourth, for long dis- music sounds alike to me," she says in the world off balance for him...
...She remained a subscriber about "the rejecting of life at the years...
...She saw all of her stories as nor's best friends (I cannot bring myself Flannery O'Connor wrote fiction for being about the action of grace on a to call this delightfully old-fashioned about twenty years, and much of that character who is unwilling to support it: lady Ms...
...A Stroke of Good Fortune" is funny, human documents I have read in treatment...
...It is one of the most moving, and alas, her early books received rough purity...
...The "artificial nigger" of the pleasure-Flannery O'Connor possessed read voraciously, exploring everything story of that name was meant to convey a wicked sense of humor and a heavenly from St...
...It cannot seem just simply to hippy dope smuggler (Marjoe Gortner) and his girlfriend acquiesce unless there be hope that beyond the acquiescence, (Candy Clark...
...O'Connor) has chosen well time she was defending what she wrote...
...COUN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...For instance, many of her characnovels and stories of Flannery Selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald ters were intended as the Devil perO'Connor- important twentieth century sonified: "My Devil has a name, a hisfictional works about which the writer Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15, 617 pp tory, and a definite plan...
...In fact, the role of the white cop slow motion...
...But as for about life than we had thought...
...She was also, it suffering for us all...
...It has to be forced to a was a combination of the personalities of Teddy and Red in this dramatic conclusion...
...What a word...
...It's in Back, Red Ryder?, worked for a long time in theater the nature of a shrink's work that we should love/hate, before making movies...
...Whatever dramatic potenus"-reaches every concert-goer as the climax of the classical tial it may have had in the past, for us this kind of situation is concert Masses...
...If only someone could be nasty enough to us to strip away our false selves and reveal us as we really are, we Screen believe, it would do us a world of good...
...LITTLE RED RYDERHOOD Since Teddy is implicitly the savior of all the others, as well WHEN YOU COMM BACK, H. BOGART...
...Even her of grace for her anyway-a silly old Richard Stern, which have appeared in first editor did not understand her pur- woman-but it leads him to shoot her...
...quarterlies...
...Throughout the And this is what the Christian is invited to hope for at the whole process, however, Red Ryder is suffering by implicit totemistic ritual of the Mass...
...And even when he tried an action movie, as actor, the freedom to perform...
...Another story, "A That is a lot of freight for one book, but might be added, a constant reader of Temple of the Holy Ghost," is said to these 596 pages of correspondence carry Commonweal (in the pages of which, revolve about the question, "What is it...
...Although the emphases and liaisons says, are somewhat different, Medoff s play has essentially the This is the Lamb of God same assortment...
...My only quibble is I wish she school-the gothic, the grotesque, the reaches out to touch him...
...this situation had a potential as melodrama that just isn't there Happy are those who are called to his supper...
...In Red Ryder the opposite is Batchelor, so for many others, the Supper of the Lamb is revealed...
...Red Ryder hapless wretch declare himself victim on all their behalf...
...Whatever Katselas and the rest remarkable thing about Katselas's direction is the way it relies of us may feel about this movie, though, Gortner can console on little cinematic tricks of a sort usually intended to shore up a himself that at least one person must have been inspired by his weak performance...
...Candy Clark...
...So, in its own way, the Christian ritual is totemistic after all...
...We have the mentality of that guy in the sacrifice is still there, and so is the bounding, defiant, unrea- cartoon commercial who's offered an Hawaiian "Punch," sonable, indomitable hope for justice...
...the Ravenna dome, quintupled, exploded, bursting in glory...
...the Ainu victim cub, thence into his translation, and thence into an essentially theatrical situation: two men holding each ultimately into his interpretation of the Ainu ritual as a holy other at gunpoint in an elevator and unable to do anything else communion...
...Justin Martyr to Salinger, Karl "the redemptive quality of the Negro's capacity for turning a phrase...
...This is no modest contentment with never before...
...It was no doubt to help him There's some hokey hand-held camera work, too, and at the with the realization of that role that Gortner brought in an end Katselas does the moment when Red shotguns Teddy in actor's director like Katselas...
...Everyone turns out to be either a moral, physical or served in strange chambers...
...justice but triumph...
...The only this material in the first place...
...Agnus Dei" with the incantat- emotional coward, or all three, which is what's wrong with the o y "Miserere nobis"-"Lamb of God, have mercy on whole situation...
...The ends in a comparable situation, A concert violinist (Lee Grant) act must somehow lead on to a common victory...
...Barth to John Barth...
...It's so predictable...
...We may all be and her husband, a motel owner (Pat Hingle), a waitress both perpetrators and victims...
...Books: ON BEING FLANNERY O'CONNOR There are at least five reasons to read LETTERS OF FLA1IWERY O'COAROR: with illuminating explications of her this book...
...But at the moment of communion, when the sheepish Forest...
...gets socked in the jaw, and says with a smile, "Thanks, I needed that...
...legendary cowboy who is his namesake...
...as their attacker, the movie inevitably has an ambivalent attitude toward him...
...I'm referring to The Petrified lamb...
...The primitive power of the ancient blood just group therapy...
...For men are not bound together by having some except talk, grimace and squirm under the tension...
...Since ness...
...First is for insight into the THE HABIT OF BEING texts...
...O'Connor was a vo- slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl" (in frenzy...
...He studied theater with actor- despise/admire him like this, and perhaps it's in the nature of oriented teachers like Lee Strasberg and Joshua Logan, and an evangelist's as well since both are in the soul-saving busihas taught an acting class himself for many years...
...The cussions of theology which are as lucid as one letter, "and all the rest of it sounds mummy in Wise Blood she describes as unexpected in casual letters between like The Beatles...
...He takes on each person at the diner in turn, one's lot that we are talking about, nor some mean and calcu- using his own bitterness as a goad to make them reveal to the lated success...
...This is the music of Handel and the splendor of whole assembly what awful sinners, what hypocrites, they are...
...He even devises a little miracle play where Red has to be the This.is what the Lamb really means...
...Her letters abound The Violent Bear It Away, she reveals, Commonweal: 216...
Vol. 106 • April 1979 • No. 7
