The Talkies

...informative, if only collating the best of other books on FDR...

...Instead it is just a mockery of human tragedy, people pretending to be pretending to have human failings and weaknesses...

...That is the same team who conquered time and space in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...

...But the movie was terribly scary...

...They were dutifully chanting the slogans that had been assigned to them in the Ready Room--but I was really into it, and I could see that my zeal really impressed them...

...When he succeeds at being shocking and outrageous, his glee knows no bounds...

...When I got inside the theater and The Exorcist started, the dialogue did not get any better...

...Thompson's aren't-I-outrageous description of himself as a %veird-looking 35-year-old speed freak with half his hair burned off from overindulgence," betrays this masturbatory delight in self that, more than anything else, seems to be the true theme of Fear and Loathing...

...There is simply no way of telling what one can and cannot believe and as a result Thompsen's book can at best only amuse, however mildly, and never truly entertain...

...Most important, is it valid to suggest that Roosevelt was destined for greatness...

...But then comes the cutesie-pie clever 26 The Alternative June--September 1974 WHILE I WAS waiting in a long, cold line to get into The Exorcist, a girl who was with a group of people behind me detached herself from the group and went to sit on a stone stoop...

...The movie would have been just as good (bad) had the theater simply gone dark for a few minutes between each violent scene...

...We know that the girl is inhabited by a devil when she starts urinating on the floor and talking dirty...

...But for anyone who believes that movies should be about the development of human life and should elucidate anything about the human condition, or even that movies should be clever or witty, The Exorcist is a serious setbhck...

...Childishly disrespectful, boastfully ignorant of his subject ('tpolitical analysis never was my game anyway . . . . "), defiantly egregious, he has successfully applied to the so-called New Journalism all the tenets of the Trousered Ape school of modern fiction...

...Far more subtly destructive is The Sting...

...The two great parties are not simply enormous and cumbersome contraptions whose sole function is to wrench jobs from one another and to maintain jobs wrenched...

...Basically, the show has no more plot or development than would a visit to a freak show...

...The Exorcist is a movie which is so bad that one must stand back and watch the full scope of the retreat on which it has led modern moviemaking to fully understand its significance...

...The Exorcist is a good movie for those who want to be scared for a few minutes...

...The author's credentials are impressive indeed...

...And finally, on the possibility of a Kennedy-Lindsay floor fight: '~f nothing else, it would turn the Democratic National Convention in Miami this July into something like a week-long orgy of sex, violence and treachery in the Bronx Zoo...

...Will Davis' evidence for later years be as dependent on "he must have thought" analyses...

...Of a Wallace speech, he writes: '~rhe air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five minutes into his spiel, I had a sense that the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us...

...So Rogan has to go to the hospital for the insane, where nothing can be done either...

...and qualitatively as perceptive as most biographies...

...What more could one ask...

...Hey, I hope you freeze your tail off,"one of her friends said...

...Conceived as a "high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boris down to or how it fits into history," Fear and Loathing can be more accurately described as a solipsistic picture of what the On the Campa/gn Tra//'72 by Dr...

...They are utterly unmemorable and serve only as prelude to each new shock...

...However humorous these words may be (to some), they are not words to describe our colorless American politicoes nor t h , dingy if quasi-respectable world in which they move...

...His first book, Hell's Angels: A Savage and Terrible Saga (1967), was a first-hand account of riding with and getting "stomped" by motorcycle morons...

...All of this is about half as exciting as an examination in trigonometry...

...Or this: "Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine...

...In the meantime, a hired killer is stalking Robert Redford...

...Or is it a myth...

...they are, instead, heinous bloodsuckers and rabid beasts (Nixon, he writes, %peaks for the werewolf in us...

...She takes the tyke, whose name is Regan, to a series of doctors who suspect brain damage and put the child and the devil through a series of medical procedures which make anything the devil does look positively beatific by comparison...

...They somehow get together the money to put on a truly elaborate display for swindling the Big Mick...

...I was standing in the cockpit with a joint in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in the other . . . . " Unable to judge what is and what is not important, he continually turns back to himself, and so opts for the latter...

...After shouting at the NBC booth during the Republican convention: "You evil scumsucker...

...She is the daughter of a movie star who is temporarily living in Washington, D.C., in a mansion in Georgetown...

...He strives to convince the reader of how much more daring, how much more hip, and how much more on top of things he can be, than the rest of those dismal rubes out there onthe hustings...

...At that point, The Sting shows us that what we took to be hunmns were just actors after all...

...This time Redford and Newman get together to play two confidence men during the Depression who set out to swindle a gangster out of a large sum of money...

...But The Sting gives the audience much more than that...

...And not just any old body...

...ending, with Newman and Redford in each other's arn~ and everyone in the audience astonished and delighted...

...But the movie is punctuated at regular intervals by individual horror events, such as the highly touted scene in which Rogan abuses herself with a crucifix...

...I t is net the human tragedy we had been led to believe...

...He was only further confirmed in vital principles, traits, tendencies already firmly e s t a b l i s h e d . . . " FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny is readable, if interminable...

...This kind of writing is bad enough here, I grant you, but translated into the lackluster world of modern electoral politics, it is more often ludicrous than, as Thompson would have it, trenchant...

...This false bravado is the key to Thompson's literary style as well...

...He jerked the crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires...

...She also does many other stunts, such as vomiting upon people far across the room and twisting her head all the way around in a circle...

...That way the contrast between the scary scenes and the vacant interludes would have been even more stark...

...There was shock and repugnance in his eyes--as if he had just recognized me as lineal descendent of Judas Iscariot...

...Of the Super Bowl, for example, Thompsen writes: 'Tney came together on a hot afternoon in Los Angeles, howling and clawing at each other like wild beasts in h e a t . . . They were twenty-two men who were somehow more than men . . . They were giants, idols, titans...

...As a result, we are continually told less about the campaign itself than about Thompson's ostensibly hilarious antics...

...Far out...

...Or, in a similar vein: '~Rosenbaurn stared at me...

...As a wonderful bow to the women's rights movement, the torpedo is a woman...

...Why the devil, who could presumably go anywhere, should go to Washington is never explained, which is just as well...

...Joyce Goldberg & The Sting Of course they find nothing and neither does a psychiatrist, whom Regan knocks across the room with a single punch...

...The Republicans are out to foist gangs of organi~ 1 murderers on the nation and the work...

...Finally someone has the presence of mind to suggest an exorcist from the Holy Mother Church, and then the contest begins...

...The troubles with Fear and Loathing are many...

...Hunter S. Thompson Straight Arrow $7.95 author's disordered mind was like at the t/me, and little more...

...Fear and Loathing A DURING THE DISMAL months of our last national hustings, Hunter S. Thompson dispatched to Rolling Stone magazine a series of columns which have since been put between the covers of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, a book of some 500 pages which, not surprisingly, has attracted the attention of some of our more culturally destitute literati...

...But the book leaves the reader with some uncertainties...

...The whole movie is just a backdrop for one horrible event about every seven minutes--a beating, some super-filthy language, vomiting, tons of blood...

...It had me convinced that it was the genuine article--a good movie...

...Was the Roosevelt of 1936 and 1945 (to be described in future volumes) the same as the Roosevelt of 1914, 1920, and 1928, only wiser, more serene, more sophisticated...

...Davis examines the reality of Roosevelt's illness as well as the legend of "spiritual transformation" to which some historians have attested...

...If only there were some way to exorcise garbage like The Exorcist from the filmic system and put it in circus sideshows, where it belongs, the movies'would be far better off...

...The devil enters the body and soul of a lovely, not-yet nubile twelve-year-old girl...

...While all of this has been going on, there is a parallel plot about I)amien Karras, S.J., a psychiatric priest, whose job it is to treat priests who think they have lost their "vocation" while he is rapidly losing his...

...And with its happy ending and invincible charactem, the movie loses its humanity and becomes a big confidence game of its own...

...It simply is only a series of gory tableaux...

...the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding sting-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close...

...The Democrats, whose otherwise healthful waters have been fouled with the likes of Humphrey, Jackson, and Muskie, are doomed to self-destruct...

...From this point of view, if polio was a 'blessing in disguise,' it was largely for reasons having nothing to do with interior change...

...His third, the book before us, chronicles thirteen months of 'Ynadness" on the scent of the candidates, during which our hero gives his press card to a "gin-soaked crazy" who tugs at Muskie's legs during speeches from '~V~ictory Special," interviews McGovern as the two stand, preoccupied, at urinals, and reveals Muskie's "addiction" to Ibogaine, an exotic Brazilian drug...

...That is the problem...

...That FDR may have used his handicap to advantage might indicate perspicacity, but Davis considers Roosevelt's personality almost totally formed prior t~) the crippling illness: ~he himself remained essentially the same as before...

...Fne percentage increase of seriousness, integrity, tenacity, understanding of self and others . . . was little, if any greater than that which occurred during his time of troubles in early 1920 and the subsequent campaign for the Vice Presidency...

...His second, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972), recalls dope-induced capers at a police convention on narcotics and dangerous drugs...

...Hey, I hope you get a hemorrhoid," one of her male friends said...

...Such story as there is concerns the devil's taking up residence in a human body...

...I say not surprisingly because Thompson's book is a natural to fetch the likes of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., J. Anthony Lucas, Nicholas yon Hoffman, Seymour Krim, Saturday Rev/ew, and the Nation-all of whom have heaped uncalled-for praise upon its undeserving head...

...The movie is just a carnival of scary scenes, It is strung together without any sensible connective tissue whatever...

...A one-time candidate for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the 'Treak Power" ticket who has become an inspiration to New Left journalists already disenchanted with the staidness of Tom Wolfe, he embodies all the virtues to which the above-mentioned aspire...

...Recognizing his power to charm colleagues, opposition, and constituents, Roosevelt plotted the road to the White House as early as 1920--detours, setbacks, failures notwithstanding...

...and Paul Newman (Wow...

...A typical spaghetti western is like Othello in terms of plot by comparison with The Exorcist...

...At those moments the movie takes on an air of tragedy and starts to tell us something about the limits of friendship and the motive power of fear...

...As a result, when Thompson casts The Alternative June-September 1974 27...

...To Thompson, they are not mere buffoons, silly and fourth-rate fellows eager to stake out spots at the public trough...

...Besides being repetitious and silly, the author's frequent phantasms--such as the lbogaine episode--destroy whatever faith the reader may once have had in Thompson...

...Rejecting the idea that Roosevelt underwent a spiritual rebirth and purification through suffering a ~aersonal Gethsemane," that he came to believe Providence had intervened and saved him from death as a sign of his "chosen" work in the world, Davis measures the change in FDR brought about by physical disability...

...Fear and Loathings main fault stems from its author's serious intellectual deficiencies: plagued by a juvenile self-consciousness, Thompson over and over calls to mind the image of a little boy making a pint-sized muscle or boasting, see-whatI-got-away-with: '~It was dark when we took of[ from Long Beach...

...they are instruments of the Devil...

...The friendship between Redford and Newman grows extremely intense, and it is authentically upsetting when it begins to look as if one is going to sell out the other...

...The gangster whom Redford and Newman want to con, a blustering Irishman lovingly called "The Big Mick," has killed a friend of Redford...

...You limp-wristed Nazi moron...

...What first appears to be striking and graphic prose, full of much verve and bubble, at second glance looks very much like the exaggerated and melodramatic prosifying that high school instructors of journalism tell their budding sportswriters not to compose...

...The film is richly and lushly atmospheric...

...It is at just that point that The Sting plays its swindle on the audience...

...While it does not matter who starred in The Exorcist, it is vitally important to know that for The Sting George Roy Hill directed Robert Redford (Robert Redford...

...It turned out to be a theatrical movie made for television...

...Paul Newman...

...he describes what followed: '~ went deep into the foulest back-waters of my vocabulary for that trip, working myself into a flat-out hate-frenzy for five or six minutes and was drawing smiles of approval from some demonstrators...

...Money is so precious to the Irishman that the con men figure it would hurt him more to take his money than his life...

...Well, what's a mother to do...

...Just seeing Newman and Redford in their wide-brimmed hats and waspwaisted suits is enough to guarantee a very substantial box office...

...On top of which, Thompson is unashamedly partisan (Nixon, he writes, 'Yepresents the dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise"), and he writes very badly...

...All of the scenes between the horror are pure filler...

...It has wonderful supporting characters, excellent sets, and a plot which is both its doing and its undoing...

...That he achieved it is, of course, undeniable...