The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
and by a genuine passion for gemiltlichkeit, rather hoped the Kaiser would win his war. Well, the Kaiser, unlike Hitler, was at least a gentleman, so we can excuse the Mencken wish even though...
...The return to earth is also flagged without subtlety in all thrcc murder, return to hubby, corporate responsibilities...
...Unlike the character played by Bridges, however, Anspach's character obviously, from the very beginning, is one which will never be suitable for the realm of the free and the beautiful...
...You have already heard the joke...
...Her own internal fears and rages prevent any relaxation of the rigid discipline she must maintain at all times to keep herself from being overwhelmed by the flood around her...
...It is almost embarrassingly simple-minded (and frankly I suspect it was made for television...
...He is now said to be the odds-on favorite for the 1976 presidential nomination among congressional Republicans, who perhap:~ wish to exonerate themselves of the fabled "arrogance" of their party's current executive office-holder...
...GOP Succession Set Now that the GOP line of succession is once again firmly established, the question of impeachment or forced resignation has surfaced quickly among Republicans...
...His was not the story of a rich prince seeking to live like his subjects...
...Emil Jannings' pathetic schoolteacher chases the alluring but vicious Marlene Dietrich, a dancer named "Lola-Lola...
...WASHINGTON) House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R-Mich...
...She smokes pot and sneers instead of drinking martinis and sneering...
...not as pretentiousness, and a gorgeous buffoonery masks the serious thrust...
...Only in Get To Know Your Rabbit i~ there any consistent success in the leading character's attempts to break out...
...He might have looked forward to undergoing electro-shock and having his personality altered...
...It was the discipline and demands of his life which were killing him, not its indolence or remoteness from the life of the masses...
...Then she leaves him over a trivial incident and becomes involved for a lengthy period with Kris Kristofferson, playing himself as he always wanted to be, a freewheeling hippie minstrel...
...Bede's gatherings...
...to raise the right-wing doubts of Ford's credibility...
...Your Three Minutes Are Up is the most straightforward of the group...
...Her attempt at flight becomes a colossal disaster when Kristofferson leaves her and she returns to Segal...
...What conclusions can be drawn from all of this about the state of American life...
...All of them involve catastrophically poor acting and often direction that must be called cheap...
...The implications of that are too complex to understand all at once...
...Bank clerks and secretaries turned to lives of crime and passion...
...No Early Earlier in the year Congress had hoped 26 The Alternative February 1974...
...The parts of the film that show how he was lured into the corporate world again Pave some realism, so we might as well think that the '~Qoof" episode is just his daydream and that Smothers is still stuck at Century City...
...In a sense that gives the story a lifelike quality which would certainly not have been imparted by the acting or direction...
...The hatred of authority and fear of lack of order would eventually lead to a society which would respond to the conflicting wishes by ostensibly smashing the old symbols of authority and substituting a new, more exciting social order which would combine discipline with newness...
...The point to be made here is that by 1914 Mencken had achieved his style...
...And like Bridges, Anspach comes to grief...
...At the very least, the final scenes show that except by supernatural forces, one cannot escape the corporate, work-a-day world...
...was sworn in as the fortieth Vice President of the United States on December 6, after the Senate had confirmed Ford's nomination with only three dissenting votes, and the House with a vote of 387 to 35...
...Well, the Kaiser, unlike Hitler, was at least a gentleman, so we can excuse the Mencken wish even though we deplore it...
...What is the bottom line...
...The Alternative February 1974 25 Anspach was not trying to develop a new way of life...
...He was essentially a lower-middle class person desperately being pushed into something closer to middle class status...
...Tom Smothers plays a young "junior executive" about to be completely swamped by his corporate responsibilities...
...Are we in the last stages of our own Weimar Republic...
...They were stories of people who were trapped in meaningless, bering jobs and tried to escape...
...Mencken fought the booboisie (the word was his coinage), and, though the boobs are still with us and congregate daily around the boob tube, he succeeded in leavening the lump...
...And pressures once again began to mount fm Nixon to resign or be impeached...
...Again, although Susan Anspach lived in Beverly Hills, she was living in Westwood by the skin of her teeth, not in Belair...
...He wanted the car and the girls and the money...
...The movies are Blume In Love, Get To Know Your Rabbit and Your Three Minutes Are Up...
...Several current movies are so similar in theme to those pre-apocalypse German movies that they deserve to provoke some thought, and they 'do...
...But that would have required careful acting and direction of his persona from the very beginning of the film and that was more than the film could muster...
...Energetic, Responsible, Able, Loyal, Decent, Reliable, Fair, Optimistic, Respected, and Dedicated"--was sworn in as Vice President amidst pomp and ceremony...
...The Blue Angel is only the most famous of a whole series of these movies...
...The German words and phrases--wille zur macht, saufschwester, katzenjammer---are sprinkled around like paprika...
...Consequently, during a Joint Session of Congress, Gerald R. Ford--Mr...
...Of course, not all liberal Democrats were so magnanimous, and the attempt by some left-wing ideologues to thwart Ford's nomination raised concern among at least one conservative Republican legislator that the inevitable result of this effort would be a policy of appeasement on the part of Ford, once confirmed Vice~ President...
...Perhaps, but you cannot prove it by the movies...
...Maybe he succeeded too well...
...In all three of these movies, as well as in too many other movies to count, the lover of the protagonist is a powerfully irritating and depressing force, at least at the outset...
...In each story the escape takes on the most superficial form--travel, change of clothing, fantasy-change of occupation...
...Television shows, like the Body Snatchers, are among us in the guise of movies...
...His transformation is so magical and unreal, though, that he might as well not have escaped...
...Haig had no explanation for what the "sinister force" might be, but this latest theory caused at least one GOP congressman to question aloud whether the White House position was merely a parody of Geraldine's---'~Phe devil made me do it...
...The streets turned murderous and cruel...
...The new words come like pellets along about page 358 of Mr...
...Her fate is worse even than Bridges in Your Three Minutes Are Up...
...Menckens of an era that gave us identifiable critics who contributed an exciting continuity to the reviews that are no more...
...He has become more greedy and dishonest than the potty crook who led the escape, and he finally becomes so intoxicated with the power of dishonest thinking that he murders a gasoline station operator who will not take his expired credit card...
...Blume In Love does muster an extraordinary acting performance from its star, Susan Anspach...
...Since White House staffers l.qird and Harlow have indicated that their departure is imminent (both men have shown a healthy eagerness to leave the White House, though neither wanted to leave before the Ford confirmation), a rocky road still lies ahead for Nixon...
...The enemy today is the intellectualoid )The Alternativds coinage), which means that some of the booboisie have been educated beyond their intelligence...
...And in the end he is reduced to playing a minor role in a cheap cabaret act, clucking like a rooster to drtmken and contemptuous audiences...
...That is the most serious historical lesson that can be drawn from these movies...
...We could stand some of those self-educated newspapermen of the teens and the twenties who became the Burton Rascoes, the Francis Hacketts, and the H.L...
...We last glimpse him sitting in his mortgaged Mustang convertible by the side of the road, weeping hysterically and obviously meant for a bad end...
...Ford Confirmed After what was billed as the most detailed probe ever undertaken of a public official, Gerald Ford remained untainted...
...His fiancee is constantly harping on what furniture and appliances they will get after they are married, and telling him to work harder, when he does not want to work at all...
...Bridges works in a huge office in a forest of desks...
...That lends a certain poignancy to the movie which is about equivalent in depth to that felt when watching Lassie go to the rescue...
...He gives up his job, his respect, his pitiful financial security...
...That was called National Socialism...
...But they have all attracted attention and cannot be dismissed as a complete coincidence...
...He goes on the lam from Los Angeles up Route 1 and makes it as far as Monterey before the whole thing comes unglued...
...Middle class people, just up from peasant status shed their sleazy coats of respectability and took to life on the streets...
...Towards the last days of the Weimar Republic a series of films emerged onto the screens of Germany...
...They bear the hideous birthmark of the television show:, no development of character, no direction, no acting--in a word, radio with pictures...
...The stories are simply the modern equivalent of fairy tales--movies which could and should be television shows...
...Rather, she was trying, like Bridges, to have all the good things, mainly material, of the old way, without any of the discipline (in her case, the discipline of having to seem like everyone else...
...The enticements of low-life turned out to be hollow and mocking...
...It is not blind coincidence that every one of the stories takes place in Angeles...
...The only unusual aspect of the film is that after repeated attempts have been made to ensnare him in the corporate life...
...The critical scene has passed back into the hands of the professors, some of them worthy...
...But the worthies tend to be specialists, called upon by our book supplement editors once and twice a year to set forth esoteric matter...
...Some was serious, and some was intended to be serious...
...Amateur Messiahs strive to convert osseocaputs, and a common beating becomes a rowelling...
...But the Teuton learning is deployed as humor...
...Thus it fell to Louisiana's one and only John Rarick (D-La...
...Her movement was not to a completely different or even radically different way of life, but rather to the best parts of her old way of life (the car, the house, the clothes) ~gether with the best parts of her new life (being able to feel contemptuous towards her former friends...
...She soon marries liberal Beverly Hills lawyer George Segal...
...On the same day the White House revealed that its Operation Candor was to reach even greater speculative heights with what one Administration spokesman called the "devil's theory...
...The real lesson of the movies is their artificiality and lack of touch with real life...
...Bridges, like most of us, is perfectly capable of wanting out, but not of getting out...
...His flare-up and doom could have been arranged so that they would have seemed to be inevitable results of his character...
...And the stilted, lifeless stories tell us which...
...She, on the other hand, will clearly have to complete her life, prolonged unnaturally by health foods and yoga, as herself...
...Many of Ford's ideological opponents, including freshman Democratic Congressman Gerry Studds (who has the distinction of representing the only one of Massachnssetts' twelve congressional districts carried by Nixon in 1972), were willing to concede that under the Twenty-fifth Amendment of the Constitution it was not their responsibility to judge a vice-presidential candidate by his philosophy...
...Anspach begins the movie as a liberal social worker marching for Cesar Chavez...
...Siegfried Kracauer said that these films represented a thorough schizophrenia in German life...
...He is engaged to a voluptuous but desperately conformist girl who leaves him when he quits his job to learn to be a tap-dancing magician...
...Hunkerous tumbles after brummagem, saints and succubi contend for the heathen, and snoutery is abroad in the land...
...Those of us who have longed to break out have generally not been escaping from Palm Beach, but more likely from nine-tofive and installment credit...
...She acts condescending and arrogant in anklelength rather then knee-length dresses...
...Unfortunately, for the historian in us, the lessons of these films are more appropriate for soap opera than for high dramatic tragedy...
...It does have some clever moments, but it is basically a television show (in fact, it is basically The Smothers Brothers Show) on a larger screen...
...Smothers escapes into being an itinerant magician by saying "poor' on the 23rd floor of Century City, ~ Angeles, U.S.A...
...This is basically a one-joke movie...
...All of those are real forces, but breezes compared to the hurricanes of selfgenerated feelings of entrapment which real life spawn...
...They dropped out...
...She is such a thoroughly repulsive attempted drop-out that she gives the viewer real pain in watching her, akin to the pain we feel in the presence of real people...
...Anspach continues to work to support him...
...His fiancee finds him in bed with prostitutes...
...Rarick questioned Ford's association with the Bilderberg group, which as we all know is "a secret international association of the rich and super rich...
...She drives a pickup truck and a convertible...
...Always and inevitably, their attempts to escape turned to tragedy...
...Also in each, the "oppression" which compels the flight is superficial and cheap--a job, a boring husband, too much responsibility...
...The Devil Made Me De It On the day of Ford's swearing in, Alexander Haig, Jr., who handed in his resignation as full general to assume the White House position as Chief of Staff, testified in Federal Court on December 6 that he and the President's lawyers had been concerned that "some sinister force" was responsible for the eighteen-minute erasure of the June 20, 1972 Watergate tape...
...It is a tastelessly told tale of the attempted escape of a young clerk (Jeff Bridges) from his job, his shrewish fiancee, and the life of consumer credit...
...But her life changes...
...The Congressional Record of December 6 was replete with praise (and occasional criticism) of Ford...
...He did not want the work...
...Her attempts to be a gentle, hippie-esque type are like trying to turn a German shepherd intc a mouse, or vice versa...
...But Jimmy the Greek is not yet giving odds and there aren't many in Washington willing to take a gamble at this point...
...By placing the locale in fantasyland, they have placed it either everywhere or nowhere...
...He was no longer ~just a newspaperman...
...The I_~uisiana congressman attempted to discern the implications of Ford's friendship "with these international kingmakers," but he was unable to muster much congressional support for his position...
Vol. 7 • February 1974 • No. 5
