The Talkies / Close Encounters and High Anxiety
Everitt, David
"The Talkies / Close Encounters and High Anxiety" food-stamp and food-distribution programs showed that unemployment is considerably higher for those recipients subject to the work registration requirement. The study indicated that the...
...The scene is funny enough as a separate piece, but what it is doing in this picture and why it is played with such Laurel-and-Hardy thoroughness is hard to fathom...
...With Douglas Trumball in charge of special effects, and a camera crew that includes Vilmos Zsigmond, William Fraker, Douglas Slocombe, and Laszlo Kovacs, it would be unreasonable to expect anything less...
...The purported dramatic high point, however, is hardly worth all the painstaking technical wonders...
...Watching Young Frankenstein made me wish I was seeing a Universal horror picture...
...Unemployment was seriously over-counted during the Depression...
...Thus, the federal government deals a double blow to employment: It increases real unemployment by various social-welfare programs, and then compounds the problem by reporting inflated unemployment statistics...
...Every obvious manifestation of this preoccupation is recorded with a sharp eye for the insignificant, expressing in many scenes what could have been captured in one or two...
...Although the Close Encounters notion of benign aliens is clearly admirable for its optimism and peace-lovingness, feisty aliens are more entertaining, and much less disappointing...
...The study indicated that the beneficiaries of the two programs were nearly identical with respect to participation in the number of independent welfare programs, overall income, and geographic and social characteristics...
...If he could be as surehanded in his conception of humans as he is in his handling of monsters and aliens, he would certainly be a prodigious talent...
...It contains much that I did not know...
...Now Brooks spoofs the master of suspense...
...We should not, however, expect the government readily to accept this challenge since the more than $16 billion worth of existing programs to "reduce" unemployment would be jeopardized...
...His life was a happy whirl of marches, rallies, demonstrations, teach-ins, press conferences, and TV spectaculars...
...But his subsequent pictures (Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie), the ones that seem to have secured most of his current following, have all been feeble exercises compared with his early work...
...and hallelujahs, and also gratifying sales, among the true believers in the Gospel of Uplift, confirms the impression of him that I formed at the time...
...In a good science-fiction movie, like Star Wars, the extraordinary special effects are seemingly effortless and are used as instruments in achieving a larger goal, that of telling an adventure story...
...Spielberg seems to have picked just about any glib entertainment that would kill time before the spectacular climax, regardless of whether it fit into any sensible dramatic scheme...
...Additional support for the thesis that unemployment figures are unrealistic is provided by the figures themselves...
...Brooks forces and contrives situations to fit pat punch lines and continually depends upon outrageous shock gags that are neither shocking nor outrageous...
...Like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Silent Movie, Brooks' latest film is a series of gags loosely linked together for the purpose of parodying a familiar movie genre...
...Thus, the handles of George Patton's famous revolvers were of pearl, not silver...
...Once to Every Man, which will undoubtedly generate a chorus of hosannas Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., Richard Ely Professor of Law at Yale University...
...Eugene V. Rostow was Under Secretary of State, not Assistant Secretary...
...Unemployment among the former was 31.2 percent...
...First, overall unemploymentrates are biased upward by as much as 40 percent.f Second, unemployment rates are differentially biased among various population groups...
...At the time I said, in a couple of magazine pieces that were rather less admiring than most of his press coverage, that he struck me as a generally goodhearted and engaging fellow, but one not much given to rigorous analysis or hard thinking about hard problems...
...At one point he even resorts to having someone blurt out "Bulls--t," presumably for irreverent comic effect...
...Yet what lies behind it is never really bothered with...
...Like the vast majority of autobiographers, he doesn't give himself any the worst of it—as he says, "there was no point in being too harsh on oneself'—but he is as honest as most and more so than many...
...As for the final encounter, the staging and rendering of the giant mother ship are unquestionably impressive, but I found myself noting this impressiveness with dispassion...
...In June 1977, 56.4 percent of the adult non-institutional population was employed in the civilian sector...
...Criticizing Abraham Lincoln because "he was more committed to political union than The American Spectator March 1978 29...
...Evidently, Steven Spielberg is a much better director than he is a screenwriter...
...Dreyfuss tries to re-create this mysterious shape while doodling, by modeling his shaving cream, by examining the contours of a ruffled pillowcase...
...Brooks' recording, "The Two Thousand Year Old Man," his monologue in the short film The Critic, and his first full-length film, The Producers, rank with any of the great comic achievements...
...See Michael Darby, "Three-and-a-Half Million U.S...
...His virtues, which are of the heart, and his weaknesses (I will not say "vices"), which are mainly of the head, can be shortly summarized...
...The most salient of the latter are vanity, intellectual laziness and its corollary—a lack of skepticism, self-righteousness (particularly in his later years), and a deficient sense of humor...
...Byron White was the Deputy Attorney General, not an Assistant Attorney General, under Robert Kennedy...
...But when the material is often amateurish and sometimes simply stupid, as in High Anxiety, the effect is all the more wearisome...
...Nevertheless, I missed him when he left Yale and the spotlight, and not entirely for the same reasons that the Sioux mourned the passing of the buffalo from the range...
...That this is a silly step too far is bad enough, but Spielberg compounds the problem by trying to turn the scene into a plea for pathos, with everyone at the dinner table bursting into tears...
...A half hour of this sublime space processional gave me the uncomfortable feeling I was spending the evening in church rather than watching a sci-fi movie...
...These findings suggest that before we embark on massive programs of general expansion or specific public jobs programs which are likely to increase inflation, a cleaning-up of existing unemployment indicators is in order...
...Otherwise, all that the technical wizardry succeeds in doing is drawing attention to itself...
...The spaceship descends majestically, people stand around and gape, there is a stately exchange between 28 The American Spectator March 1978 denizens of different worlds, the spaceship takes off as ceremoniously as it arrived, and all is well in the galaxies...
...Richard Dreyfuss plays the principal character, an electric company worker who encounters an alien spaceship somewhere David Everitt is a writer living in New York City...
...So it is unfortunate that so little of his comic talent has found its way to the screen...
...After several inspired but uneven movies, Woody Allen seems to have realized the importance of some sort of structure, as his wonderfully comic character study, Annie Hall, attests...
...In particular, the rate among blacks contains a much heavier distortion than that among whites...
...In contrast, unemployment among whites who participated in the food-stamp program was only two percent higher than among whites in the food-distribution program...
...Simply put, it is boring to watch a spaceship hovering and blinking above an observation platform when it could be doing something interesting like decimating the platform and terrorizing the countryside...
...thus, the anything-for-a-laugh rationale behind the humor of High Anxiety is ultimately self-defeating...
...The increase in unemployment has also been linked to the amount and duration of unemployment compensation and to the minimum wage...
...Dreyfuss' supposedly tragic preoccupation progresses to outright buffoonery When he heaves his garden, dirt and all, through his kitchen window for the ultimate modeling material...
...It also omits some things that I knew (such as his 1970 observation that the New Haven trial of some Black Panthers for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a suspected informer was "legally right but morally wrong," which led me to wonder whether he meant that the kidnapping, torture, and murder were legally wrong but morally right), but on the whole it strikes me as a reasonably frank and accurate portrait of William Sloane Coffin, Jr., a subject to which the author has evidently devoted a great deal of attention...
...the replacement depot to which he was sent in World War II was at Lichfield, not "Litchfield...
...But that was ten years ago and now that sort of language is about as startling as "Stick 'em up...
...To my thinking, zap-gun and laser fights are just about the only good reason for going through all the trouble of simulating space-age mechanisms, just as, as Dwight MacDonald once said, the only good reason for making an ancient Roman spectacular is the opportunity for one or two orgy scenes...
...Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, An Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941," Journal of Political Economy, February 1976...
...The problem with Mel Brooks' new everything-goes comedies is that everything is expected...
...and the lengthy prelude to the monumental "close encounter" is a combination of tedium and silliness...
...However, reported unemployment was considerably higher among blacks who received food stamps, and were thus subject to work registration, than it was among their counterparts in the food-distribution program who were not subject to the work requirements...
...The problem of sustaining comedy for ninety minutes or more without the benefit of a strong plot or character has rarely, if ever, been solved...
...He becomes obsessed with this experience, in particular with the mental image of a cone-like shape —ultimately revealed to be an image of "Devil's Tower," Wyoming, the site of the final close encounter...
...While those factors have increased real unemployment, the increase we are reporting here is simply fictional...
...Since 1973, when work registration took effect, that employment rate has been the highest since World War II, except for 1968 when employment was 56.5 percent...
...His carelessness about a number of minor facts is symptomatic of his approach to serious issues of fact...
...When he gets around to making a pinnacle out of a plate of mashed potatoes at the dinner table, Dreyfuss' usual energy and charm are powerless to carry the scene off...
...BOOK REVIEW Once to Every Man: A Memoir William Sloane Coffin, Jr...
...near Muncie, Indiana...
...THE TALKIES by David Everitt Close Encounters and High Anxiety The technical brilliance of Close En- counters of the Third Kind is beyond dispute...
...I was not personally acquainted with Coffin and knew almost nothing of his private life...
...The target this time around is the Hitchcock thriller...
...Atheneum / $12.95 Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...Hitchcock is funnier...
...It is worth noting that the current artificial increase in unemployment has a historical precedent...
...The Producers was, and still is, genuinely outrageous, precisely because the antics of Bialystock and Blume always remained within the realm of possibility...
...among the latter it was only 22.3 'percent...
...Two early sequences in Close Encounters are along more traditional science fiction lines and they put Spielberg's uncommon melodramatic skills to good use...
...In the decade that began in the early sixties, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale University, almost daily adorned and enlivened the front pages and the tube...
...Brooks' newest film, High Anxiety, is no exception...
...His last film, Jaws, was a thoroughly expert thriller, no doubt due in some degree to the fact that Spielberg did not write it...
...Since The Producers, Mel Brooks has followed the reverse pattern: He seems to have forgotten what he originally did so well...
...Our analysis has revealed two important conclusions...
...Silent Movie made me wish I was watching Buster Keaton...
...Each scene is practically a skit unto itself, and without such distractions as developed personalities and overall logic, the punch lines quickly become mechanical and predictable...
...good case could be made for Mel Brooks being the funniest man in the country...
...When Steve McQueen said it to Robert Vaughn in Bullitt, I can remember there was quite a stir...
...Even if all the gags were ingenious, over a long stretch the effect would still probably be tiresome...
...The former include physical courage, energy, humanity, frankness, and friendliness...
...The unemployment rate that year was 3.5 percent, or less than half of the reported rate we are expected to believe nine years later—when employment is just as high...
...After all, he who bakes the cake may eat it too...
Vol. 11 • March 1978 • No. 5
