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...There are other good roles in the movie...

...The revulsion against the anti-Enlightenment regime of Nazi Germany makes this obvious...

...They are all struggling to make good in a world they never made and over which they basically have no control...

...It is a wonderful atfmnation of the power of movies to show us something piercingly insightful about our world in a vehicle which is hypnotically fascinating from the very first moment...

...He truckles to a self-important petty Mafioso uncle who may reward him with a restaurant...

...They knew what liberty was and sorely felt its absence...

...She is a real person and she takes out her frustration on others, as real people do...

...Mike wants to be a loan shark...

...But Altman's characters are larger than life...

...Four young men run around and around in the maze of Little Italy's small streets on Manhattan's lower East Side...

...There are clearly many ways in which to criticize the Enlightenment view of society or the principle of ethical relativism...

...Further, Caute ignores the question of whether any people, no matter how debased or savage, enjoys having a few score millions of its population exterminated...

...You a fag, Marlowe...

...Second, the fellow travellers were often most noticeable in defense of the persecution of intellectuals or members of the bourgeoisie, as Caute documents...

...Teresa herself must summon all of her strength even to consider moving out of her parents' miserable apartment into an apartment uptown, by herself...

...But, as time goes by and much of the fog obscuring the life and meaning of Kerouac begins to lift, those who see the author of Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac McGraw-Hill $8.95 Kerouac by Ann Charters Straight Arrow $7.95 The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur as a bearded peacenik, extolling the virtues of mindlessness between drags on a reefer, are likely to be surprised...

...Chandler's usual smooth-talking, always-calm gangster is a grotesquely modish punk who smashes his girlfriend across her face with a Coke bottle to show Marlowe that he does that to people he loves, and he does not even like Marlowe...

...He lives by a cede which he never questions, and whose utter artificiality and irrelevance he does not even glimpse...

...By another, he was the most "far out" radical the American literary scene has ever known...

...So he goes to her hospital room, takes off his clothes, and apologizes to her while standing naked...

...But of all the characters living out a fantasy of collective neurosis, Johnny BOy is the most deranged and split...

...At one point Harvey Keitel, playing Georgie, a desperately conflicted smalltime hood, tries to drive his girl friend, Teresa, and another friend, the lunatic Johnny Boy, into Brooklyn...

...Scenes in the house of the rich are shot through gauze, to emphasize the ridiculously unreal nature of the life these people live...

...If Kerouac had a hero," the interviewer wrote, "it was William F. Buckley, Jr...

...The usually execrable, but here, wonderful Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe, a private detective from the 1940s who has suddenly awakened to find himself living in the l.~s Angeles of the 1970s with girls as neighbors who sunbathe nude, a cat who will only eat one brand of food, and killers and victims who are imitations of themselves...

...They speak of how exaggerated and caricatured our lives have become without speaking rancorously...

...The Raymond Chandler kind of detective story hovered for so long and so precariously on the brink of being absurd in itself that the slight push over the edge which Altman has given it does not work against it at all...

...When the police take him in, a cop says to him, "Marlowe, that sounds like a fag name...

...they say...

...Georgie, still thinking he is Francis of Assisi, apologizes to the maid...

...Caute does not seem to realize this, and hence, though he has written a thorough enough history, his book lacks the venom his subject demands...

...Caute makes reference to the by-now trite idea that a primitive people need authoritarian control in order to develop and progress and, in fact, do not mind being deprived of freedoms which they never enjoyed...

...He lends money to Johnny Boy, who not only does not pay it back, but taunts Mike for not being man enough to get it from him...

...It is a movie which brings alive the whole huron geography of an area and the people who live in it...

...The laconic Marlowe has become utterly passive...

...The rich couple being harassed by the gangster live in a mansion in Malibu which seems to go on forever...

...They cannot function at all outside it...

...All of these are fictions--but the truth about Kerouac, I fear, would startle his unconscious subverters more than the yarns they themselves cooked up...

...That is the terrible law imposed upon the characters who people Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, Mean Streets...

...These people were not backward or uneducated...

...Mike cannot let Johnny Boy get away with it without fatally damaging his standing as a tough guy, so he invokes a tragic ending for everyone...

...This would have expiated their bourgeois sins, since their prerogatives would then be serving the movement...

...The swirl of voices and sounds near him never stops, even while he is sleeping...

...He said as much himself ("I'm not a Beatnik, I'm a Catholic"), but beyond his stated convictions is substantial evidence...

...Rev "A Last-Ditch Stand" Recent publication of Jack Kerouac's long-awaited Visions of Cody, as well as Ann Charter's biography, have brought on a renewed interest in the whole Beat phenomenon, and as periodically happens, all the so-called hippies on campus are again rushing out to the bookstores to read, many of them for the first time, On The Road...

...His direction reinforces the feeling of claustrophobia which is written into the script and acted with brilliance...

...But they uniformly refused to accept Party discipline, and instead chose to wallow in their guilt...

...They could believe that it was necessary to crush certain classes to bring about a new order, but then logically they would have to insist on their own destruction, which they conspicuously did not do...

...Great American Series I really thing...

...Scorse.~e, who previously gave to the world {he hilariously simple-minded and pretentious Boxcar Bertha, has more than done his own penance...

...There was also a decided elitism in the fellow travellers who saw and admired Stalin the Planner, administering his country on a perfectly rational basis, without interference from the bourgeoisie or the working class...

...Georgie goes to church every week, to Confession, where the priest tells him to say ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers...

...Mean Streets is a story of an entire neurotic demimonde, exactly corresponding to the demimonde that most of us carry around with us in our heads...

...The plot is the same one Chandler used in every one of his stories, about doublecrosses and murders among rich people and mobsters...

...Based loosely on a Raymond Chandler story, the movie is an almost uniquely funny comedy--it starts out being funny and never stops being funny for one moment...

...The people in Marlowe's world are not the wrenchingly life-like tormented souls of Mean Streets...

...And what is most self-destructive of all, he mocks everyone who tries to help him, finally mocking himself into a violent death...

...The cede tears him apart, and he does not understand why...

...He makes an #r by Benjamin Stein "The Long Good.bye" effort to be like Saint Francis among the hired killers...

...Had they not wished to torment themselves, these men could have decisively adopted Communism...

...I would argue instead that a certain masochism is necessary to fellow travelling...

...What are you doing...

...The fellow travellers who acquiesced in their destruction could not believe it was a painless operation...

...But first, the legends...

...The pity of all of this is that at most these two movies will be seen by a few million people...

...As played by Amy Robinson, Teresa is a character of almost unparalleled humanity: As she and Charlie leave the hotel, she says to a black maid, "You can make up the room now...

...The Long Good-bye is a tale of a society which has inflated itself to a size proportionate only to satire...

...But he does not believe in it...

...Arriving almost at the same time is Roberr Altman's The Long Good-bye...

...It is an allegory of the life that almost everyone suffers through--blocked and hemmed in by artificial barriers and laws which keep us from seeing the larger world and opportunities around us...

...regret getting involved in this Donald Segretti, LL.B...

...24 The Alternative January 1974...

...It is a story of how a world which people choose to protect them eventually suffocates them, even though they may remain alive...

...It is by no means perfect--it has irrelevant background music, a laughably false bartender who quotes Blake, too many injokes about eating "Chinks" (Chinese food) ---but it is a masterpiece...

...But he cannot catch up to her and he is hit by a car while trying...

...In the centralized economic administration of the Soviet Union, and in the totalitarian efforts to remake society, the fellow travellers saw an attempt to bring this dream into being, and they could not fail to support it...

...When he spots someone he wants to talk to driving along Wilshire Boulevard, he runs after her car...

...As a result, he has come to represent for many a kind of Cold War flower child who predicted and blessed everything that was to happen to youth pep-cult as the years of jazz and street kicks slid into those of acid and activism...

...The real action is on television, where creatures from another planet write, direct, and star in shows which get at least ten million viewers just for being on...

...And so the Kerouac legacy continues to grow...

...It makes me sick," Jack wrote to John Coyne at National Review-who was then in the employ of Spiro Aguew---"It sounds like a complaint from Al Capone...

...But there was, of course, another element within these men which caused them to refrain from adopting Communist societies for themselves...

...When everyone else is acting calm and passing out the whiskey, Johnny BOy starts a fight...

...As he lies bleeding on the pavement, the woman zooms off showing her personalized license plate--"LUV YOU...

...By another--popularized by Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal, quite naturally--he was a drooling gay libber...

...The other characters are similarly trapped...

...Hence, he argues, there was no blatant hypocrisy in the fellow travellers' position...

...The viewers are at home and the shows are at the theaters...

...Running through the statements of Gide, Steffens, and other American intellectuals quoted in this book, there is a feeling of guilt at possessing so much wealth and so many privileges, and a satisfaction (particularly in Steffens) in the thought of men like themselves being done away with as a class...

...But they are bursting with vitality and interest even at their slowest pace...

...By one popular notion, Kerouac was trying through the great "rucksack revolution" to shake the fabric of the American political system to the ground...

...His world is Little Italy and its laws, the hypocritical moral cede of eighteenth-century Sicily, are unbreakable...

...When Esquire's John McLintlock sought him out in his Florida refuge shortly before his death, Jack ushered the magazine writer into a room strewn with Falstaff bottles and stacks of National Review magazines...

...She, unlike Charlie, knows that she has to get out to live, and she hates herself and the world around her for making her feel guilty about wanting to leave but also forcing her to do it...

...You a fagT' Marlowe is just a by-stander while the world goes on around him...

...His stature as a counterculture guru is well established and that, as Kerouac himself lamented, seems to be his fate: to be co-opted by a generation of "leftists" that never really understood him, and with whom he felt little kinship...

...His only action, until the very last frames, comes as quips and wisecracks...

...He throws bombs into mailboxes just for the hell of it...

...He alone leaves the neighborhood for forays into Greenwich Village to pick up girls...

...He has some essential sense of humor and humility, but the cede will not allow it...

...He is, throughout the movie, a human bomb, ready to explode at any moment from the force of his unresolved conflicts...

...First, it should be clear that fellow travellers were not the only or most important disciples of the Enlightenment: its ideas are inextricably implanted in modern western society...

...The gate attendant for the lush Malibu compound does an imitation of a different movie star with each passer-by, first Jimmy Stewart, then Cary Grant, then Walter Brennan...

...It is the first absurdist detective story, an innovation which, it suddenly appears, was long overdue...

...Kerouac was, politically and~I argue this fully knowledgeable of the man's obvious excesses-temperamentally, a conservative...

...He climbs to the roof of his building and shoots a pistol at random targets...

...Stephen Rosen The Talkies qr "Mean Streets" and You can get up, but you cannot get out...

...He tries to ward off the obvious doom of his deranged friend, Johnny Boy, played mAgnificently by Robert De Niro...

...And a terrible tragedy overcomes them in that borough...

...But Marlowe's world is an amusing place...

...By another he was a junkie...

...When the n~id replies, "I only gut two hands," Teresa snaps, ~Then use them...

...You do your penance on the streets," he says...

...We don't know Brooklyn...

...Thus while the presence of an Enlightenment ethos shows why fellow travellers of the Left existed while "fellow travellers" of the Right did not, it does not explain why a small group of men went much further than the rest of society in extolling Soviet Russia...

...He buys what he thinks is a load of stolen German telephoto lenses which turn out to be Japanese lens adapters, virtually valueless...

...I wish only to show that these two concepts do not explain, as Caute states, the phenomenon of fellow travelling...

...He will not act out the part everyone else chooses of the up and coming junior Cape...

...Perhaps someday something can be arranged...

...The best Marlowe can do is say, "Yeah...

...But it is much more than The Alternative January 1974 23 that...

...At the time, he had received a plea from a left-wing organization that he not pay his taxes because they were going to finance the Vietnam war...

...He, who has supposedly been acting bizarrely since he was hit with a nightstick, cannot even begin to control the rage he feels at being entrapped in a world of rigid and unrealistic laws of behavior...

...He cannot disobey them even when they make him act cruelly towards his lover, Teresa, calling her dirty names because she sleeps with him, at the same time desperately needing her and hating himself for keeping her in a closet, meeting her for rendezvous at cheap hotels...

...Events overtake him and he cannot do anything to change their mocking his powerlessness...

...Marlowe has learned what Chandler's fans knew all along--his world is a richly amusing place and he might as well sit back and watch it in a philosophical mood, since it is wholly out of his control...

...When he decides he has wronged his girlfriend, he wants to give her "a totally open, totally natural apology...

...And he is always doing his penance...

...Modern western states, on the other hand, have achieved liberal democratic rights which are not to be surrendered in the interest of the GNP or social justice...