The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" are Jeffrey Hart's "Secession of the Intellectuals," James Burnham's "Notes on Authority, Morality, Power," and Irving Kristol's "A Foolish American Ism--Utopianism": three of the most...
...and all hang around together and look like a cross between Jeb Magruder and Andy Warhol...
...Who, then, should read this anthology...
...It is the first black exploitation film made for television with a white hero, released at theatres...
...It is totally predictable from start to finish...
...And then The Conservative Alternative, and much else, would become merely monument~v---imposing but lifeless--to a world that might have been...
...All of these are the flaws of movies made for television...
...Once they decide on the answer (sometimes correctly, sometimes not), they almost invariably vote accordingly...
...Ralph Waldo Emerson (an unlikely person to quote here) once remarked that a scholar is "man thinking...
...Finally, Brudnoy has gathered a generally distinguished set of articles which examine specific contemporary public issues from an intelligent right-wing perspective...
...No further explanation of the rationale for the crime is given...
...Some of the swimming people are bare-breasted...
...All these articles are included in Brudnoy's book...
...That should be its true market: uncommitted, indifferent, and even critical students whose understanding of conservatism is often inadequate or minimal...
...Watergate...
...Those who contend that conservatives are indifferent to the environment should scrutinize Frank and John Mey.er's demonstration of the ways in which the free market mechanism can be used to curb pollution...
...From here on out, as they saw it, most new domestic programs would deal not with the mass of working Americans, but with groups like welfare mothers and unemployed slum dwellers (many of them conveniently color-ceded...
...From the fantastically popular black exploitation films, the makers of Magnum Force have taken a character which, by itself, blows the whole picture out of the water...
...Some group of people have been roaming San Francisco and Marin killing gangsters without benefit of trial...
...Truth About Attica By An Inmate...
...Personally, I suspect that Lubell's simplistic, almost naive brand of cynicism fails to do justice to a myriad of far more objectionable factors than self-interest~hatred, fear, envy, rage, stupidity, and, most dangerous of all, misguided altruism, to name only a few...
...Conservatives, to be sure, for whom the book will be a convenient collection of significant essays...
...The motive for all of these murders cannot be gangsterism...
...are Jeffrey Hart's "Secession of the Intellectuals," James Burnham's "Notes on Authority, Morality, Power," and Irving Kristol's "A Foolish American Ism--Utopianism": three of the most incisive studies of our malaise written anywhere in this decade...
...It was he, after all, who long ago entitled his study of altruism in American politics, What's in It for Me...
...All of these superficially irreconcilable elements have been blended together in the sequel to Dirty Harry now packing them in from coast to coast...
...In an unexplained way, Dirty Harry Calahan has rejoined that same force...
...Recently Herman Kahn and other social scientists have been saying that the lowermiddle classes are in revolt over the ease of life and sexual libertinage of the uppermiddle classes...
...I forbear...
...For the sin of enjoying what should be forbidden, for bringing into the open what should be clandestine, the death penalty has been revived...
...The next victim is a more understandable target...
...The Conservative Alternative is another welcome proof of the intellectual ~sophistication of the Right...
...A group of rookie policemen, all veterans of the Special Forces in Nam has joined the San Francisco Police Department...
...Eventually, 'Dirty Harry kills the killers, and their leader, the satanically clever Hal Holbrook, who pretends to loathe killing while secretly glorying in it and recruiting the killers...
...rather, they persuasively argue the legitimacy of the conservative case...
...According to Lubell, greedy self-interest lies at the heart of most people's voting motivation...
...It is always a pleasure to find essays and books that forcefully restate conservative conv~ctions and beckon us, in Robert Frost's words, "to the truths we keep coming back and back to...
...As everyone knows, Clint Eastwood, the famous character actor, plays Harry Calahan, a fantastically tough cop, in both movies...
...energy problems, and the economic hitches attending the latter could drive many of the members of the new coalition back into the arms of a charismatic demagogue with a liberal program artfully embellished with a few Wallace-style trimmings...
...Then, in 1972, with the economy still healthy enough so that the mass of gainfully employed Americans felt financially secure, they resoundingly rejected old liberalism and new populism together, in the rather sorry form of George McGovern...
...Facial expressions are always fixed in a smile or a frown...
...Stealthily, a member of the "magnum force" creeps up to the bushes by the pool...
...Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them proved that most of the nation was fed up with traditional Democratic liberalism in 1968...
...No further description of the group is given...
...But Harry Calahan does not mind if they look gay: 'TIell, I wouldn't care if the whole force was queer if they could shoot like those boys," he quips to his patrol car partner, a black...
...Those who still believe that media bias is a right-wing Hobgoblin should consuit Edith Efron's pungent investigation of television news coverage...
...He glories in the titl~ of opinion analyst and, ever since his remarkably accurate forecast of voting trends in the 1952 presidential election, he has spent most of his time taking America's pulse...
...He first throws a bomb into the pool, then machine guns the people around the pool...
...Where will it go from here...
...The really important question is: does Brudnoy's anthology adequately encompass contemporary conservative perspectives...
...Nor can it be an eye for an eye...
...With prosperity (and the more gradual passing of the old Depression trauma that stayed with many voters long after the Depression itself was past) many members of this coalition of dependency began to perceive that big government had given them just about everything they needed from it...
...Coupled with emotional irritants like rioting, ever-higher taxes, and forced busing, and added to the numerous failures of the New Frontier and the Great Society at home and abroad, this caused a major realignment...
...Those who think of conservatives as either quaint romantic reactionaries or ignorant ranters should read such perceptive, fact-laden articles as James Q. Wilson's study of the federal regulatory agencies, George Will's "The Conservative Critique of the Welfare State," or Anthony Harrigan's somber "America's Deteriorating Defense Posture...
...Actually, reading America's mind would probably be a better way of describing it...
...Somehow all of the excitement of the first film has vanished from the second...
...He is a black pimp who has just ripped off a rebellious member of his company by forcing Dr~no down her throat...
...It is what Sam Lubell hears and notes during his interviews---the gripes, hopes, fears, and resentments of individual citizens (and their evolution over the past two decades) that makes his book unique...
...Women are treated with contempt as sex hungry subhumans...
...Harris, Gallup, and the race of onedimensional statisticians they have by Samuel Lubell Norton $5.95 spawned could learn a lot from Sam Lubell, but it is the politicians rather than the pollsters who have the most to gain from studying his raw findings...
...On the other hand, if the economy does not plunge, and the Republican Party doesn't panic or commit suicide, my guess is that, come 1976, we will see a moderately conservative Republican elected to the White House at the same time that beth major parties continue to lose prestige with the voters and large segments of the electorate continue to cast about for new faces, new labels, and more permanent political home...
...And there are more...
...Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...But far more importantly, Brudnoy's work should be read in college and high school courses in politics and related fields...
...I~t it pass, for Isubell considers himself neither a moralist nor a reporter...
...If only a "gaggle" of the already converted examine this book (and others like it), Brudnoy's anxiety about "tokenism" will prove wellfounded...
...After all, one thing is always true of coalitions: They are never permanent...
...Roundheads and Cavaliers, choose your weapons...
...There is no doubt whatever that Harry Calahan will emerge relatively unscathed and victorious...
...Camera angles and framing are reminiscent of television advertisements for tires...
...One sees very little of him on television, even when, as occasionally happens, a network commissions him to do a poll...
...Not all_of the victims are gangsters...
...Blue-collar workers, college students, minority group members, or pensioners-that is the one question they all want answered...
...Not all of the victims are themselves killers...
...To add a delightful touch for the leather fetishists and sado-masochists in the crowd, the nude bey and girl cling together, childlike, and plead for mercy as the remorseless killer blasts them apart...
...Some of the people are swimming...
...The people around the swimming pool and the pathetically pleading bey and girl on the waterbed are obviously being rubbed out for the sin of their fleshly appetites and their satisfaction...
...The slender web of story which supports various shots of Clint Eastwoed does have a fascinating social content, although it seems incongruous in a film which is obviously bogging the viewer not to think about it at all...
...The men are handsome, the women beautiful...
...What he has found during some of his recent brain probes makes for interesting reading...
...In Magnum Force, the epitome of hardhattism, the policeman is striking back with a vengeance...
...The Future While It Happened S AM LUBELL IS A SMALL, frog-like man with thick glasses and a croaking voice...
...Perhaps, with articulate leadership like that represented here, conservatism will successfully transform itself from an isolated Remnant into the confident voice of a political majority...
...But after that, the killers shoot a mobster who has been hiding out in an apartment along with his nude boy and girl companions...
...In some of the most gripping moments of movie lore, he struggled by night with a lunatic killer and finally killed him in an authentically exciting finish...
...He has become a legendary tough figure without any depth whatsoever...
...The Alternative March 1974 23...
...The next victims however really hit the social revolution jackpot...
...Magnum Force has them all, and for long periods of watching Magnum Force, the viewer will find himself wondering when the Alka-Seltzer commercials are coming on...
...The first victims are a gangster and his two bodyguards...
...By concentrating On carefully selected community samplings, and by interviewing in depth instead of relying on brief questionnaires with confining, prefabricated answers, Lubell manages to soak up not only the immediate, direct political trends, but also the fine strains of economic interest, regional background, prejudice, and perspective that cause a given person or group to vote a particular way in an individual election...
...But also killed is the gangster's lawyer, which might puzzle some...
...Lubell's premise that, again and again, self-interest is decisive hardly qualifies as a novel idea, but it is good to see a longneglected contributor to these pages, Dr...
...All well and good...
...In the first film, Dirty Harry, Eastwood was so disgusted by the pansified way the Supreme Court compelled policemen to behave that he quit the force...
...In individual cases where they still felt a need, such as medicare, they continued to support further government involvement, but these became the exceptions...
...Those who read this book may not become conservative, but they will surely learn that a responsible conservative alternative exists...
...There is a constant struggle going on over whether movies will take their dominant inspiration from good theatre or bad television...
...It involves no character development whatsoever, except for the spurious Jekyll-Hyde personality changes when a meek person is revealed to be a psychopathic killer...
...He has moved from the tormented by Benjamin Stein the lVaterbed persona of Dirty Harry to the robot-like figure of Shaft or Superfly or Slaughter...
...Brudnoy has given us not just a sample of Conservative Thought but several fine illustrations of conservatives thinking, of applied conservatism, of practical analysis...
...And these articles do not routinely recite the standard complaints...
...Nevertheless, he has a truer reporter's instinct than any of the sleek, bland, dinner-hour pundits who monopolize the screen--even if he does tend to oversimplify things at times...
...George Nash The Talkies Slaughter on AGNUM FORCE HAS broken new ground n the degeneration of the filmic process...
...All four of the rookies are deadly shots with the .357 magnum pistol (get it, "Magnum Force...
...But let us not congratulate ourselves too soon...
...So here is the equation: well-to-do plus sexually active equals threats to society...
...The answer must be yes...
...In evaluating an anthology one is always tempted to quarrel with a few of the editor's judgments...
...I italicize "raw" because once Lubell starts injecting his own prejudices as an old-line liberal, their value begins to drop sharply and you must edit as you read...
...George Washington Plunkett, vindicated...
...The theory is simply that the hardhats are enraged that the uppermiddle classes are getting away with something that the hardhats feel is forbidden or at least shameful...
...There is no acting...
...it is difficult to think of a major conservative viewpoint or concern that is not expressed in these pages...
...With Magnum Foree, score a big one for Captain Video, and for Herman Kahn...
...After this rich diet of social futurism though, the movie serves up only the thinnest of soups...
...All have been frolicking on a huge round waterbed when the killer, dressed in leather from toe to neck, wearing visors, kicks in the door and blows them 22 The Alternative March 1974 through the window to the ground twenty floors below...
...They have formed themselves into a Bay Area equivalent of the Brazilian "Death Squads...
...Those who think in abstractions about prison reform should read Frederick Wiggins' gripping account, '~l~e...
...We viewers know that the killers are policemen, and with the title and the crazed look of the young rookies, well, it does not take long to come up with the shocking truth...
...But before Dirty Harry has done his job, the killers leave behind a frightening trail of mayhem...
...And lest all the swingers draw any comfort from Dirty Harry Calahan's killing all the leather covered executioners, remember their leader's words . . . "Heh, heh . . . There's plenty more where they came from...
...But self-interest, while not the only, is certainly the most powerful of these factors...
...A group of young men and women are loitering by a backyard pool in Marin...
...At one point the leader of the killers explains that the victims are people who "are threats to society...
...Unless our message is conveyed outward, particularly to the young, the vaunted "silent majority" may ultimately melt away...
...In the Roosevelt coalition, bern as itwas of the Great Depression, this meant that blacks, blue collars, left-wing intellectuals, and many hard-hit white collars all looked to government to bail them out of a sticky financial fix...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
