The Talkies / Rocky

...My own mail consciousness has been raised by two particular attempts m communicate with me via the Postal Service...

...Worse, the same images recur, the same stories, the same characters, in many instances the same lines and scenes...

...There is one particularly tortuous scene of Rocky in training, filmed silently, running through the park, exercising, sweating, practicing punches and racing through a railroad siding to the accompaniment of an un-synchronized rock masterpiece all interminable, all unbearable...

...In the decades since, the Court has instead become increasingly vigilant in its defense of noneconomic liberties or, as they are sometimes called, "human rights--presumably to distinguish them from those rights tainted by the inhuman institution of property...

...Most emphatically is this true in First Amendment adjudication, he argues, because restrictions on governmental activity in this area are, in the last analysis, quite far...

...The sheer cost of postage has stampeded people into circumventing the federal mails...

...J . Edward Day, who was U.S...

...needless injury if governmental power were still limited by traditional constitutional doctrines, but no one, it is argued, can really be hurt by forcing the government to keep hands off religion or "free expression...

...Nevertheless, he has done us a service by combining the essentials of these scattered pieces into a single integrated study, where his earlier lines of criticism against the Court gain added resonance and clarity in the larger setting...

...Walter Berns has been a thoughtful critic of the Court's work for more than two decades now, and central to all his criticism has been his insistence that the Court cannot, in the end, evade its burden of judgment...

...Since 1971, when the independent Postal Service was duly constituted, first-class rates have escalated from 6 cents to 13 cents per ounce...

...It is true that success is often assured by presentation of the familiar, but the boxing rut is going a bit too far...

...What is discouraging is that, while there is a limit to the dramatic uses of boxing, most of them have never been explored...

...If corners are to be cut it is probably best to be brazen about it, because in trying to look expensive the meager resources inevitably look cheap...

...For the most part, the book draws on arguments and scholarship already published in various articles by Prof...

...But after scattered reports around the country, the case has been neglected...

...Alas, Sylvester Stallone drew too close...

...Such independence of mind is admirable in principle, but compromise in this case might have been the wiser route...

...Judging from the credits, Stallone seems also to have written some of the songs, filled in as script girl, hired his brother-in-law to hold the lights, and built some of the sets with his own hammer and nails...

...The Narragansett Electric Company of Providence, Rhode Island, for example, initiated hand delivery of bills to about a quarter of its 250,000 subscribers...

...Rocky defeat in their craggy faces, loyal girl friends, cynical sports reporters...

...Its symbolism is painfully obvious: if you wish to speak knowingly of the "ultimate game," an enterprise that sees two men hitting one another for money surely fills the bill...

...The messengers are Narragansett employees who would have been laid off, but for this ingenuity...

...from being inconsequential...

...Berns' book is essentially an attack on the doctrinaire libertarianism that has characterized the First Amendment views of several members of the Court in the last thirty years (most notably Justices Black and Douglas and, in an earlier era, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes) and has often won over a majority of the justices in the resolution of particular cases...

...I think occasionally of the paintings of George Bellows, where through the smoky haze the faces of the spectators are often as grotesque as the contorted pulps of the boxers...

...The Harder They Fall (novel by Budd Schulberg, movie with Humphrey The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 25 Bogart) examined, in its superficial way, the other side of the ropes--the business enterprise, the dealing in flesh, the corruption-but opted as usual for the confused, victimized pug as the center of the action...

...Even the potential of such a weighty legal occurrence ought to qualify Mr...

...Another, along with a check, took six months from Ithaca, New York...

...He employs a vaudeville Brooklyn accent to represent a native of Philadelphia...

...I say, let us have no more cauliflower ears...

...Rocky is a clod, and it is a continual mystery how a good-looking, sharp-dressing, grammatical dame like that could bear to be in the same room with him...

...The real interest in Rocky lies off the set...

...BOOK REVIEW The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy WalterBerns / BasicBooks / $12.50 Jeremy Rabkin In the late 1930s, the Supreme Court largely abandoned its traditional defense of property rights and also gave up its long struggle to maintain a balance in the federal system by keeping Congress within the bounds of the interstate commerce clause...

...The Rocky-and-his-girl-friend subplot is beaten to death, and thrown in gratuitously at awkward moments, fatally interrupting what action there is...

...Berns' latest book, The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy, is sure to be labeled a polemic...

...Currently, the organization wolfs down a lump sum appropriation of $1.6 billion, and President Carter is expected to make good on a campaign pledge to make the Postmaster General's post a political appointment once again...

...I think I was guillotined during the French Revolution," he said...

...m l t I THE TALKIES by Philip Temian Why is boxing the habitual allegory of third-rate minds...

...Yet there is, after all, a certain underlying continuity between these broadly divergent approaches, a practical connection made most explicit in the populist rhetoric of a First Amendment "absolutist" like the late Justice Black...

...Star quality, after all, is an elusive and indefinable gift, and comes from the most unlikely sources...

...He is convinced, obviously, that he has wrought a cinematic tour de force, defying convention, with a bleary eye to the Academy Awards and future triumphs...

...First Amendment case law, almost entirely the work of twentieth-century Courts, plainly reflects the new emphasis: almost in proportion as it has come to defer to legislative judgment in the economic sphere, the Court has interpreted the prohibitions on governmental activity implied in the First Amendment more expansively and enforced them more intransigently...

...Fade out...

...He loses, but not until going the distance, a notable achievement, and proving to everyone, but most important to himself, that he really is somebody, that not only he coulda been a contender, but in fact was...

...We want to have available to us the alternative of using private carriers," he unashamedly told an interviewer in October...

...And yet there are developments to cheer the hearts of those who long to see the federal monopoly over the mails felled...

...Furthermore, it is completely unbelievable...

...Sylvester Stallone wrote the story and was determined to play the lead...

...A script begins to take shape just by listing the ingredients, and Hollywood (or, in the case of Rocky, Philadelphia) has been like a moth hovering around a flame...

...I recently burned my hand fixing a carburetor and felt like one of the Oxford martyrs...

...I love you...

...he recently told a magazine interviewer that he believes in reincarnation...

...As for Sylvester Stallone, it is tempting to crib Dorothy Parker's remark about Katherine Hepburn, namely that he runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. Stallone has one facial expression, dulleyed with his mouth open, and seems convinced that an aura of silent strength is best conveyed by appearing to be under the influence of depressants...

...The tribulations of the long-suffering Mel Solomon are exceptional, but not entirely unique...

...Boxing as an institution is populated by lively stereotypes--gangsters, street-wise hangers-on, philosophical trainers with the scars of Philip Terzian is on the staff of the New Republic...

...This pattern has been widely applauded, though it finds no clear support in the text of the Consititution...

...As it is easier to leave the "reasonableness" of economic regulatory schemes to the presumed wisdom of the legislatures (or the safeguarding of federalism to the presumed prudence of Congress), so it is easier to bar all state intrusion on free speech--or state aids to religion--than to judge in each case the actual constitutional propriety of the challenged measure...

...Postmaster General in the early 1960s, has filed a suit on behalf of the Association of Third Class Mail Users challenging the constitutionalit,/ of the Postal Service's monopoly of third-class mail...

...I know what he means...

...This sort of experience has won countless converts to the Eleventh Commandment of doing business in New York, "The check is in the mail," without which the town might collapse...

...Most boxers are poor boys suddenly thrust into the limelight, surrounded by leeches and torn by conflicting emotions and allegiances...

...The camera work is awkward...

...In so doing he ran afoul of the studio moguls, if such there be today, and was obliged to produce the film himself on a modest, indeed impoverished, budget...

...And, at least in tone...

...Well, all that may come to pass, and given the sense of the times, probably will...

...Solomon's case for occasional attention from the networks and the great national newspapers...

...When I see a movie about a person being guillotined, I have the strangest feeling I know what it was like...

...But it is a polemic informed by careful study of the writings and practices of the Founding Fathers, as well as by long reflection on the problems of liberal democracy...

...Berns over the past ten years...

...It has occupied them from Budd Schulberg through Norman Mailer, and of course has been a staple of the movies from James Cagney to Marion Brando to the current practitioner of the art, Sylvester Stallone, a flashy newcomer from whom I hope not to hear much in the future...

...Scenes are protracted, for example, and usually needlessly...

...It appears that the Solomon case could indeed set a precedent extending liability for federal employees in executing or neglecting their duties...

...Stallone is as good a candidate as any, and seems destined to succeed anyway...

...Berns is highly critical of the Court's readiness in these" cases to champion liberty in almost absolute terms, without giving sufficient attention to the problem that, in practice, these liberties are contigent on the survival of liberal democracy...

...Rocky is a good example of how delicate is the task of producing a play on a bare stage...

...Dialogue drags, and incidental encounters are mercilessly stretched into soliloquies with lingering shots of facial expressions...

...If the succession of events seems familiar, and the moral reminiscent, that is because it is, but it has not been seen in the theatres for some years, and a new generation of moviegoers needs to be reminded that in this most evanescent art form there are a few bedrock verities...

...Rocky is an aimless South Philadelphia mug, the "Italian Stallion," who through a series of tortured coincidences find himself in the ring with a Muhammad All-type, fighting for the heavyweight title...

...This is capped by a freeze-framed ringside hug from his girl friend: "I love you, Rocky...

...The plot is scarcely worth recounting, inasmuch as the movie has been made several times before, and any veteran of a boxing saga will know from the opening minute what will transpire...

...It is painful to watch, and soon the examples are distractingly apparent and abundant...

...One letter took a year to reach me in New York, having been mailed in Washington...

...Which goes to prove that given time, even a former Postmaster General can become as wise as Solomon...

...And new twists there could be...

...There should be an embargo on Rocky-like productions until a new twist has been concocted...

...Or at least, it cannot do so without danger to the country...

...Both approaches, in a sense, relieve the Court of the burden of judgment...

...it is that...

...And for that contrived pathos that so frequently passes for film drama, fistic images have proved usually irresistible...

...Those who defend it often observe that government has no comparable justification to interfere with free expression as it does with the free market: workers," farmers, stockholders, consumers--all of us would be exposed to Jeremy Rabkin is a graduate student in American government at Harvard...

...He points to the 26 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977...