Dear Editor
Dear Editor Simon This is a fun letter. When I saw Last Tango in Paris ("On Screen", NL, February 19) at the Lincoln Center Film Festival, I was amazed by the applause at the end of the...
...There are many reasons why I like The New Leader...
...The main difficulty with trying to parody King Richard I and his Court, as we all know, is not the lack of targets but the fact that our leaders are already doing the job so well themselves...
...The reason for this, I suspect, is the President's desire to be loved, coupled with his weak sense of humor: When Art Buchwald or Marvin Kilman makes some outrageous suggestion, all in good fun of course, Nixon misses the comical intent and, in a misguided attempt to please the columnists, promptly acts on it...
...By the same reasoning that leads Goodwin and Sturmthal (and the New York Times) to conclude from expressions of readiness to work that people will work, authorities should take at face value a convict's promise to be law-abiding...
...What was interesting, though, was how transparent his arguments turned out to be and the insipidness of the position he tried to defend...
...East Orange, NJ...
...to support the odd notion that "the desire to work is present among the entire population, including nonwhite welfare recipients...
...Nor will the arguments of Goodwin and Sturmthal help lower the welfare rate...
...Hartford, Conn...
...Labor market and welfare statistics indicate that, as one might expect, the tendency of the poor to take available jobs is reduced by welfare grants, and the more so the more the grants approach available wages...
...Having read the insane lucubrations by the "critics" that this film has inspired (in France, alas, as well as in the United States...
...When I saw Last Tango in Paris ("On Screen", NL, February 19) at the Lincoln Center Film Festival, I was amazed by the applause at the end of the projection...
...But I'm afraid it may backfire on him, and on the rest of us...
...Perhaps it was for the "teats" of Maria Schneider, who was (which were) present in (on) the balcony...
...We live in an age when historians make their names by contradicting whatever happens to be the established wisdom (they call it "revisionism"), so naturally one anticipated an eventual attempt to upgrade the feeble reputation of Dwight Eisenhower...
...From the answers given on a questionnaire...
...To suggest that a President was necessary is to suggest very little indeed...
...Such faith is touching, but it will scarcely help reduce the crime rate...
...He does it in private, to be sure, but given the chance would gladly grunt or growl his conviction from the rooftops...
...We certainly don't need Goodwin and Sturmthal to tell us that...
...At some unavailable wage nearly everybody is "willing" to take some job...
...I appreciate finding at least one critic-without quotation marks-willing to call Last Tango what it really is: "yet another pretentious, empty and dishonest film by that arrogant, derivative, monstrously slick filmmaker...
...Goodwin concluded that the poor "express as much willingness [to work as others...
...New York City Ernest van den Haag Eisenhower I enjoyed reading the summation of recent Ike-conography presented in the review by Joseph E. Mick ("Ike from a Distance," NL, February 19...
...Edward P. Millwark...
...New York City Leo Sauvage New York Correspondent, "Le Figaro" I appreciated your movie critic's typical "Simonizing" of Last Tango in Paris, but would he care to explain just how Marlon Brando "preconizes animal noises...
...Among them I give a top spot to the fact that you are the outlet for John Simon's refusal to be brainwashed by the fake nonconformism of esthetical "movie-revolutionaries" of all types, of all stripes and of all sexes...
...Clearly, Ike from a distance looks no more attractive than he did from close up...
...Pocatello, Idaho Eli M. Abolar University Librarian, Idaho State University John Simon replies: The character played by Brando proclaims the preferability of communication by animal noises, commends them above words...
...Parmet's book, therefore, was no surprise...
...That is why we get Carswell, Watergate, White House guards dressed like Erich von Stroheim, and a whole cast of characters who could only have been dreamt up by some satirist on an acid trip...
...Goodwin overlooked this and so does Sturmthal...
...Work Adolf Sturm thai ("Correspondents' Correspondence," NL, February 5) paraphrases Leonard Goodwin's Do the Poor Want to Work...
...Therefore...
...I expect to be informed any day now that a prominent architect has been hired by the Administration to design a shining new addition to the Executive Mansion, large enough to house a spacious, yet spartan Cool Room...
...No dictionary with which I am familiar matches "preconize" with any definition that makes sense out of this usage...
...Bernardo Ber-tolucci...
...February 19) was a gem of a piece...
...Yet statements of willingness are not evidence for future behavior...
...Barbara Plunkitt Cool Walter Goodman's "Keeping Cool" ("Fair Game," NL...
Vol. 56 • March 1973 • No. 6
