Man vs. Nature; Man vs. Maleness
Brudnoy, David
Movie Review: Man vs. Nature; Man vs. Maleness "It's clever, but is it art?" Kipling asked, as must all film critics almost each time we see a noteworthy film. Film is the people's art; the books...
...Images of images raised to a power beyond our recognition...
...Lewis stands to lose his leg...
...But shocking news has reached us from the Connecticut Audibon Society which is demanding the extermination of the monk parakeet...
...The Defense Department had announced earlier that the 1972 bomb tonnage had already topped last year's...
...Lewis is convinved that the escaped rapist has shot Drew, that he's somewhere above them waiting to shoot them all...
...It would not be fair to consider Shakespeare's or Marlowe's kings in the same vein, because we have no modern Shakespeare or Marlowe to test the comparison...
...Still the worst news, as expected, comes from Washington where the FCC rejected the claims of Ms...
...There's much of art in Deliverance - art according to both Dryden's and Wilde's definitions - and much cleverness too: Based on James Dickey's gut-stomping -- novel, written for the screen by him, and directed by John Boorman, Deliverance makes a canoe-trip into the wilderness undertaken by four Atlantans into a thrilling vision of man's struggle with Nature and himself...
...and Ed, upon whose terrified nightmares the film closes, bears the vivid scars of this straggle for survival and this uncertain deliverance from victimization by the river and other men...
...We, the People...
...Yet the losers in this game of delusions are always ourselves...
...Wendt's testimony by declaring that some of their countrymen eat as much as six pounds of dirt a day, "not just because they are hungry, but because they think it does them good...
...At the next major set of rapids...
...With Lewis and Drew still to arrive on shore the second day, Ed and Bobby are confronted by two men toting guns...
...In Kuala Lampur, Mr...
...Still, it is an interesting speculation to wonder why the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English public could avidly seek out or at least accept, the complexities in their Heads of State, while we children of the democratic enlightenment seek out the stereotype...
...Lewis takes aim and shoots one man in the heart...
...Indeed, if anything, our presidents are larger and more potent than Renaissance kings...
...Spaghetti is the Italian immigrant who died in 1911 and has been on display at the McDoughal Funeral Home in progressive Laurinburg for 61 years...
...The system's gonna fail...
...The losing candidate reels off into his special oblivion, perhaps to give it one more go, if he can come up with the right image...
...The trial of the Watergate Seven will begin on November 15, thirty-nine days before Christmas...
...He believes he has the will of the people, and in a way he has...
...On October 28 Oakland won the World Series, while in Kuala Lampur one hundred farmers lost a tug-of-war to an elephant...
...Ben-tendorf of the National Organization for Women sued when New York refused to grant her a license to marry her three-year-old pet chihuahua...
...And the hill-folk are brutal as well as wary...
...Who are these enormous people...
...The election is completed, and the people's choice once again takes his position in the elegant Georgian building we have set aside for him...
...courses are only too familiar, and unfortunately it's being reviewed again and again in the most elevated metaphorical (and metaphysical) manner...
...Lee had "failed to demonstrate that dog food poses a danger to human health...
...In Heat, the male image is the most trite of all: a young, hot, super-stud, played as in most recent Warhol-Morrissey films by Joe Dallesandro, an actor of much greater talent, as each succeeding movie shows, than his obvious appeal as a muscle-beauty-boy would lead one to expect...
...I regret only (and this is an infrequent regret among film critics) that Deliverance is not longer...
...The Women's Heroic Crusade continued as two Maryland women sued to vote under their maiden names...
...The other runs away, Bobby recovers what is left of his dignity, and the four adventurers argue over whether to hide the body or take their chances with the law...
...it is perhaps a tale too heavily larded with symbolism of the sort with which those of us who've undergone deep college lit...
...Hail, Caesar...
...Music, the photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, who did McCabe and Mrs...
...But in Kuala Lampur police have warned that women who wear backless dresses or blouses without brassieres will be arrested, and in Bangkok things are worse...
...In England the Education Ministry has warned that British school children may be breeding lice in their long hair, while back in modern Kuala Lampur the government has banned "hippies...
...Bertha Benten-dorf's cause is still in doubt...
...They are so grand, in fact, that they are beyond personality...
...Hail, Caesar...
...Joe is the former kid star now on the skids, to whom women are drawn like bees to honey...
...So much of film, today and for decades past, is quickly forgettable trash, "art" only in the sense, a mile wide and an inch deep, in which anything "acted, or filmed, or sculpted, drawn, painted, sung, played, warbled becomes "art...
...Drew resists, begs the others to do what's right...
...From then on, things get worse...
...shortly thereafter Moroccoan medical authorities corroborated Dr...
...The Senate approved the appointment of General Creighton Abrams as Army Chief of Staff, and the Senate Armed Services Committee closed its investiga tion into the private war of General Lavelle, ret...
...But some movies approach art, in Dryden's sense of art as nature's handmaid, and others at least satisfy Wilde's pithy aside: "Art never expresses anything but itself...
...ROSENBLATT (continued from page 4) caricature intentionally, and therefore authentic...
...They use the elements of satire, and effect the end of satire as well, which is a diminishing of the importance of the subject at hand...
...Singa Lamb accused a farmer's cow of stealing his motor bike, and though Mr...
...Another item out of Andy Warhol's factory, again (as with Flesh and Trash) written, photographed, and directed by Paul Morrissey, Heat is as unconcerned with Nature as is Deliverance with fading Hollywood stars...
...Lyons believes that Northern Ireland's street rioting is good for citizens who are otherwise suicide prone...
...Kissinger sent hopes soaring at the end of the month with claims that peace was just around the corner - the fighting continued...
...And the homosexual rape is the utter degradation, for men who seem themselves as the dominant sex, those who (symbolically) rape their wives and girl friends, but are not to be done to as they do with...
...Led by Lewis (Burt Reynolds), who believes "machines are gonna fail...
...And then - survival," Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (Ned Beatty), and Drew (Ronny Cox) set out for a battle with Georgia's dangerous Chattooga River...
...The Canadian Broadcasting Company stepped beyond bilingualism by issuing its first new release in Eskimo...
...He does so, wounding himself with his own bow in the process...
...In Texas acupuncture was banned by the Texas Board of Chiropractic Examiners, and in Belfast Purdysburn Hospital's Dr...
...Joe Dalle-sandro, lesser, certainly, than Voight, but a maturing actor deserving praise...
...One week after Norway voted against entering the Common Market, Denmark opted for entrance despite the realpolitik of Mr...
...The four city men bury the corpse and set out again in their two canoes...
...They tie Ed to a tree and point a gun at him while one sodomizes fat, squealing Bobby...
...Also from that same prospering metropolis comes word that Malaysian authorities will not allow conjugal relations in jails...
...Lewis convinces Ed and Bobby that the law in those parts of the country will deal harshly with anyone who has killed one of their own...
...The one-horned rhinoceros is making a comeback, on the Indian subcontinent and reports from New Delhi indicate that the great Indian Bustard will soon be getting govern ment aid...
...Both films deal with the mockery that happenstance and other people make of man's image of himself as tough, resilient, and in charge of his fate...
...In Deliverance, John Boorman gives us a film I'm quite sure will remain for many years a paradigm of the filmic art...
...the books read each year, except by students pressured to do so, and the plays gone to and contemplated, don't add up to much in numbers, compared to the movies seen, discussed and argued...
...The river is nasty, rapids are everywhere...
...on with the story...
...Hail, and farewell...
...at the end of the month the Canadian voters turned thumbs down on Prime Minister Trudeau's party by giving the Tories a one vote majority...
...It is we who look at the men paraded on stilts and ropes before us every four years, each supposedly speaking directly to us, to our mortgages, our health plans, our desires for equal rights, for education, for peace, our poverty and old age, our draft status, our safety,-and feel no kinship...
...Enough bubbling...
...We do not recognize them, and they, in recompense, do not recognize us, because in the process of exaggeration, we too have been turned into caricatures...
...in Heat, Paul Morrissey points to a coming career, his own, of considerable note...
...Olaf Piertson...
...What are they that seek our votes and allegiance...
...To lower his rent, he consents to service the grotesque, porcine landlady of his seedy motel-apartment house...
...The 5446-59 hoofer now restricts her performances to the stage...
...An-An, the amorous Russian panda, passed away in a Moscow zoo, and Spaghetti will be buried in Laurinburg, North Carolina...
...Just as the other man is about to force Ed to fellate him, Lewis and Drew return...
...Lewis needs challenges to confirm his will and strength...
...Drew topples out of the canoe, the others are catapulted out of their's, Lewis breaks his leg, and the three survivors wash up on a rock...
...the bounty and terror of the river, and above all, the acting of everyone concerned, particularly Jon Voight, combine to make a film deserving the description, art...
...Their initial contacts with the inbred, hostile, suspicious, moronic, back-country folks, aside from Drew's discovery of a mentally and physically defective mute boy with whom he plays a banjo-guitar duet of surpassing beauty, lead the timid followers to urge Lewis to turn back...
...Eventually the four men make it to a town, there lie about their doings, seek medical care for Lewis and Ed, are mightily distrusted by the sheriff (played by author Dickey), and go home...
...and Sylvia Myles, who should have and could have made Sophie come alive in Portnoy's Complaint had she been given the role, and who will, in time, if offered more parts as meaty as hers in Heat, be recognized as perhaps the most stunning product of Warhol's haphazard process of discovery...
...In Ann Arbor, that professor suspended for showing antiwar slides in his organic chemistry class is back on the job as is Miss Susan Foust, the 309 pound topless dancer from Portland, Oregon, who met with tragedy when she tried to perform on a table top...
...They are the products of our wildest dreams...
...In a statement interlarded with sophistries, the FCC claimed Ms...
...And both films present performances worthy of more than passing praise: Jon Voight, who may be what many of us thought Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson would become, the finest younger male actor of the decade...
...Piertson set himself afire in protest of the recent loss of his job and the possible entrance of his country into the European scheme...
...Frits Wendt believes the Earth can produce enough food to feed fifty times its present population...
...In many ways we are the more diminished, because we have created the context of our own ridicule...
...Heat is not merely another X-rated sexploitation waste, but a truly funny and truly sad commentary both on sex-starved women and, more importantly, on the male gender as sex objects- a reversal of the usual movie roles and a brightly successful one at that...
...The women's claims were upheld by the Maryland Court of Appeals, but Ms...
...Joe thinks he'll do anything for his "art," his dream of stardom once again on TV or anew in the flickers...
...Pragmatism wins...
...But like Deliverance, Heat investigates man's self-image, not, as in the first film, vis a vis nature, but in relation to maleness itself...
...But of 1972 films, only Cabaret thus far touches Deliverance for excellence...
...That is the way it goes in America .- in the words of Hinky Dink Kena, "Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances...
...Hail, and farewell.eople, and in a way he has...
...Suliemen, the oldest Arab in captivity, died at his home on the Gaza Strip at the age of 104, Leo J. Carrol went on to glory at the age of 85, and at the end of the month Ezra Pound fell ill...
...Lewis the bold becomes, when wounded, Lewis the whimpering child, as do most males when they are sick or wounded, and without hope...
...To no avail...
...It is not enough, or accurate, to point to the general disintegration of the dramatic hero, and say that the nobility and grandeur of kings would look foolish on our presidents, for it is not nobility our presidents, theatrical and otherwise, lack, but character...
...Fran Lee of an anti-dog group, "Children Before Dogs," refusing to allow her equal time to protest the "pro-dog" views of NBC...
...In Deliverance...
...Drew and the two rapists are dead, left to be covered over by a lake when Progress alters the river and brings "civilization" to the back-country...
...To find contacts in show biz, he lets himself become the kept-boy of Sally Todd (fantastically acted by Sylvia Myles), a fleshy, sun-parched, bleached, spreading, over-the-hillfilm "personality" who possesses only a gargantuan Hollywood house and a neurotic, pseudo-lesbian daughter...
...This situation obliges Ed, the quiet, gentle man who can't bring himself to shoot a doe, to scale the peak and hunt down the mountain man...
...Bobby wants only to forget...
...Art geniunely imitates nature...
...Presidential campaigns are full-fledged satires...
...It is in spots amateurish, and "dirty," yes, but not gratuitously so...
...In the presidential satires, the importance of the candidates is diminished from our perspective, and our importance is diminished from theirs...
...Critics have a habit of referring to presidential campaigns as circuses or side shows, but the reference is inadequate...
...The connection between Deliverance and the second film for discussion here, Heat, is not, surely, that of equality of execution...
...David Brudnoy CONTINUING CRISIS (continued from page 2) •The New Conservatism threatens the progressive democracy of New Guinea where Assemblyman Onamauta Beibe declared in the august Papua House of Assembly that "I have not eaten human flesh for a long time, and I am quite satisfied...
...I've no idea whether Paul Morrissey sees himself as an American moralist a la Eric Rohmer (of the Six Moral Tales), but especially in Trash and now in Heat, he is carving out an important niche for himself as flayer of the American sex dream...
...But its essence is an exciting tale excitingly told, a creation of art...
...Inevitably much of Dickey's fine book goes by the way...
...The scene of Ed's ascent to the mountain top and his confrontation with the man he must kill represents movie-making at its finest...
...In fact, the character Joe is nothing but his bod and his tool, not a man but a male thing...
...Deliverance stands by itself, expressing a towering vision and showcasing uniformly excellent performances...
...Miller...
...On the scientific front, the Boston Globe reports that Dr...
...Party workers return to their places behind the scenes, television returns to its regular programming, and we mount our seats at the breakfast tables, ready to mutter into the headlines...
...it also confirms Voight's tremendous talents, as his battles both with nature and with his own sense of values take on concrete dimensions...
...The winner, engulfed in this year's right image, now towers above us like Caesar, who, said Cassius, bestrode the narrow world like a colossus...
...At the behest of Congressmen Biaggi of New York and Broyhill of North Carolina and the State Attorney General of North Carolina, the local citizens agreed Spaghetti would receive a Christian burial...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 3
