This Beats Working for a Living
Finer, Steven
"This Beats Working for a Living"
...What institution carries more honor, respect, dignity, and authority than that of the college professor...
...Imts of Oscar nominations will go to this one, and Pacino is sure to win (or come close) to the best acting award of the year...
...By the by, MacDonald's are still the yolk-food in tb.ese United States...
...A superior scare-em-upper, not for the squeamish or for those who would revive the blasphemy laws...
...9 The Seven-ups: More cop time: four brutal policemen, the now requisite chase scene (he hum, hum, hum...
...and that, ~mder normal by Professor X Arlington House $5.95 circumstances, they don't give a whit about keeping up with the latest developments in their scholarly fields of endeavor...
...Stewart, and C. Day Lewis, all of them competent, respectable scholars as well as successful writers of mysteries...
...Alas, the facts square with the film: New York cranked out the Knapp Commission, it went merrily on its way, and then...
...The most certain way to become suspect within the academic community is to write a book that sells other than to the captive market of students...
...This one opens the heart, but don't think about it too hard...
...9 Magnum Force: Dirty Harry Calahan (Clint Eastwood) is back, routing out fascistic rookie cops whose trip is eliminating criminals beyond the reach of the law...
...9 Don't Look Now: Psychics, visions, ghosts...
...Let the public buy and read your work and you are accused of that most heinous of crimes--being a popularizer...
...9 Serpico: Based on Peter Maas' true story of the honest cop---there's a happy thought--who blew the whistle on cop corruption in New York...
...This Beats Working for a Living T~ WmTTNC...
...9 The Day of the Dolphin: George C. Scott and Flipper redivivus...
...Steven Finer 28 The Alternative April 1974...
...9 Cinderella Liberty: James Caan as a sailor with heart of gold, ready to undertake the regeneration trip with a "champagne-cocktail-sipping cock-teasing barroom chippie," whose only baggage is a twelve-year-old mulatto son and another kid on the way...
...Al Pacino is splendid, the film is rough around the edges, hopelessly idealistic in the liberal direction and depressingly cynical...
...Needs a transfusion of humanity...
...A superlative parody of twenty-first century life...
...The prof gets all the best lines in this asinine tale of hard times at Harvard Law...
...that they rarely have had to work for a living outside the academic community and consequently would starve if they found them:qelves without a job...
...Such a list could go on and on and on...
...It's rubbish...
...Of Professor Joyce Carol Oates and her well received novels...
...that the work load lhey carry from teaching courses and attending to committees is usually insufficient to consume much of their time, the result of which phenomenon is that one can often find professors holding part-time jobs off c,-mlpus or devoting most of their week ~<> preening dogs or other such felicities...
...9 The Exorcist: De debbil made her do it...
...9 Walking Tall: The most amazing comeback in recent film history, this bomb in 1973 has found its audience at last: take the law in your own hands and clean up evil, sheriff Pusser (Joe Don Baker...
...9 TheLast Detail: Jack Nicholson as a seaman taking a petty thief off to an eightyear prison sentence, giving the bey one last good time...
...Of Professors Carolyn Heilbrun, J.I.M...
...Get the picture...
...Harry is not quite convincing as Mr...
...He holds these truths to be evident: that most professors do not work for their pay...
...Professor X, his pseudonym being used lest <)the~vise he place his job in jeopardy, art=rues that the job of being a professional college teacher is not all that it seems to be...
...An inspired idea: mate Jonathan Livingston Seagull and this dolphin and you come up with George McGovern...
...9 The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe: Easy French farce, chuckles rather than guffaws, a souffl6, for fans of the droll...
...The only major film in years attracting hordes who know they'll be sick afterwards...
...The logic is flawless...
...Note the following statements, carefully extracted so as not to be taken out of context: "there is probably no area of more abysmal ignorance among college professor~c--and that is a mouthful of a statement--than the laws against plagiarism . . . . It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the college scene to learn that the biggest problem a professor has in dominating his class is the students who sleep through his lectures . . . . because most professors cannot write graceful, readable, literary prose, God help the poor scholar who does...
...9 The Sting: Newman and Redford easy on the take, lovable con men, outwitting the baddies, looking smashing in 1930s duds...
...Rubbish because Professor X presents no firmer foundation for his argument than his own experience and what he has heard second hand from his colleagues...
...Humorless and endless and not for the lepidopterist in the family...
...9 Papillon: Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen in for the long haul in French Guiana prison...
...A puff for prison reform, at the very least, and guess which man named D*LT*N TR*MB* is involved behind the scenes...
...part of the Zeitgeist on screen, now that blaxploitation flickers have petered out and Kung-phooey films have ai-EEEed their way into everyone's spleen...
...Then--nothing much...
...Brudnoy's Film Index _9 Busting: Vice-squad cops Elliot Gould and Robert Blake doing society's most important work: busting whores, raiding gay bars, intercepting dope peddlers, frustrated by the crime lord's muscle and cop connivance, I rooted for the criminals...
...9 Sleeper: Woody Allen to the head of the class...
...A French connection worth making...
...AND publication of this book were inevitable, for, in the realm of nonfiction these days, book buyers appear to cherish most the debunking of myths...
...9 The Paper Chase: It won't go away...
...that they are eminently boring...
...We have been treated to books which attack such honored American institutions as motherhood, political campaigns, Las Vegas, the Mafia, the Buckleys, and pesticidal panaceas...
...Rubbish because most every sentence in the book which purports to make a wholesale attack on the career of a college professor is a generalization with no substantial support...
...All of it...
...The cops are still on the take, and not just in Spraypaint Village...
...Harvard is reliably reported to have survived...
...Sailors' dreams never die...
...that they cannot teach...
...9 Day for Night: Truffaut's song to the cinema, an intricate, yet easy ramble through the ironies of movie-making within the well-made flick...
...Scrupulous Law, wooden as ever, but the flick does give us Hal Holbrook as a nasty, for once...
...And, on the basis of his sophonloric generalizations, his own graceless prose, his cowardice masked behind anonymity, and his bungling of what still remains a useful subject for a book, you'd do well to avoid This Beats Worhing for a Living...
...Daughter of The Exorcist...
...Compelling, like a cobra's wink...
...Flawless, Professer X? Well then, what of Professor William H. Gass, Professor of Philosophy and his much respected, popular works of fiction...
...The film-goer can too, by staying home...
...If his employer ever finds him out, Professor X will be fired not for his expos~ but for general reasons of incompetency...
Vol. 7 • April 1974 • No. 7
