THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
bility if one has difficulty fully understanding its de- a plot. It is a slide talk on how to run the Big Con. It scription; or how can one analyze one's experience on discloses all the...
...He focuses on it in order to comment on what is going on...
...namese (although our policies were always consistent In that view, the incidental, everyday circumstances with the interests of a small elite, many of whom func- of life take precedent over men's self-importance and tioned solely to service Americans) ; that we were pre- derring-do...
...Try this: money god," and, determined to re- lic schools: cosy teas around the study What did Orwell think about us then, nounce its worship, gives up his job fire, team rivalries, practical jokes...
...Later, after two hundred pain- smoking cigarettes, frequenting public Collected Essays, Journalism and Let- ful pages of struggle, Gordon decides houses...
...Har- magazine he riffles through it in de- bombs, death rays, Martians, robots...
...We attend movies to marvel at the cunning desperadoes and bank robbers, is reciting an article of a latter-day Moll Flanders or to thrill at her degra- about his gang's exploits while they eat a meal at a dations...
...The money...
...To us bank clerks in Hollywood's audience, relative's home...
...As his dramatic reading absorbs the the private lives of bank presidents and bank robbers gang members in their own notoriety, Altman intercuts are fascinating...
...Whereas Hill's shot is just an observation, Altman's is a statement...
...Moviemakers discovered is the way Defoe wrote Moll's narrative, not what she early that audiences enjoy finding out how other people says but how she says it, that still makes the book behave or how otherwise inaccessible places look...
...This in the Partisan Review, he notes "the ar- there is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodspite of his friend George Woodcock's rival of American magazines with their thirsty English paper and the reminder that all the left-wing intel- enormous bulk, sleek paper, and riot three-penny Yank Mags...
...matters more than heroics...
...In enjoyable...
...In fact the car has a steady stream of facts seeping out of Vietnam and to drive around this small charity in order to pick up Washington over the years...
...As work/study programs come to per- is, the sooner it becomes a stereotype...
...Use your bread as a pusher," sort...
...But it does, and in part the tradiction with our professed aims...
...But as Rogers and others point out to us, "hostesses" are hired at conventions to hand out prothe job market changes so rapidly that specific career motional material on computer hardware or beverage programs tend to become quickly outdated...
...their part in the game...
...But, of course, thing, the third group, known as "Yank cies, urging the rejection of invading it was an American paper...
...George Roy Hill shows us those shoes at a moment when nothing COMMONWEAL else is going on in his movie...
...12 April 1974: 134 Events of the past year have encouraged a number of variations on the theme, Orwell-you-should-be- GEORGE ORWELL living-at-this-hour, each asking what he AND would say about us now, this decent and angry Englishman...
...10016 because nothing else is going on in his movie...
...One through time instead of space...
...in power by years of the most violent and massive out- The same intractability in life spoils the bank robbers' side interference, and which survives only by U.S...
...The film has now been nomi- Big Sleep while making his own Raymond Chandler nated for ten Academy Awards, and it has clearly film, The Long Goodbye, Altman may still have Hawks worked hard to cop at least two of those, Best Art on his mind...
...a gangster's victim into the East River, Robert Altman's A period film or costume drama is just a travelogue Thieves Like Us will still be a watchable movie...
...0 I prefer a full year for $14...
...the process of erasing and rerecord- sure that the fretful young bookstore First, those popular in his own childing perhaps as many as nine separate clerk, Gordon Comstock, speaks for hood, still published, though slipping, and contiguous segments" of a tape in- his author, but it is likely that he does...
...What would THE AMERICAN CHARACTER the man whose Winston Smith cut and pasted the Party's latest version of history in the Ministry of Truth, throw- KATHARINE BYRNE ing the discards into the memory hole, think about Howard Hunt, working Ill winds from the West with razor blade and scotch tape in the White House basement...
...In those areas scholarship and One thing we have always liked movies for is their pornography long ago surpassed Defoe's novel...
...you get real bloodlikely to eat in Chinese or Greek res- Not only the "adverts" but also the lust, really gory descriptions of taurants...
...vilely printed twopenny papers, most of social criticism, with American of them with lurid cover illustrations magazines, symptoms of American KATHARINE BYRNE is a member of the in three colors...
...Full disclosure" quality of the dinner-table scene is that it sets the tone as required in the sale of securities would long ago for so much before and after it...
...As I said, that scene would make on the part of the American public as to what we were Thieves Like Us memorable even if the film had no other really doing there, which was always in radical con- scenes worth looking at...
...as it is, though, it must be admitted to have its limithey can, however, perhaps perform an even more im- tations...
...last week's dealt with distra Flying (1936), one cannot be he finds that they fall into three groups...
...or how can one analyze one's experience on discloses all the trade secrets of confidence men from Bilk the job if he or she has trouble thinking methodically...
...From then on its attention Because he was thinking about Howard Hawks' The to such details never flags...
...It opens with the camera focused on a two-tone the woman of the house instructs her son just before the pair of shoes, as if Hill were anxious to assure us from article begins to speculate on how the bank robbers will the very first shot that little period touches like this are probably die...
...some special Fate that overwhelms them, but the sheer EDWARD S. HERMAN picayunishness of living that afflicts us all...
...But these papers was always scolding his country back greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whore- are poor copies at best of the real to some mythic time of native decen- dom and disease...
...Stories, etc...
...shots of the kids fidgeting and the women inattentively George Roy Hill's The Sting has classic appeal of this fussing over the meal...
...Focusing on those cynicism and corruption, contaminating faculty of Mundelein College in Chicago...
...What gives the dinner-table scene style, however, is not A precondition for the long American involvement the way its reflects Hawks, but the way in which it is in Vietnam has always been ignorance and confusion all Altman's own...
...Art requires and their appeal more universal...
...Just pulls moviegoers into theaters...
...As for the winds from the writing...
...A panorama of ignorance, powerful character...
...He has to be a groper, and inevitably he stumbles in some scenes...
...as the song says...
...In have been preoccupied with showing us how some other this scene one of the three protagonists, who are 1930s half lives...
...The Amer- Mags...
...While the .moral code of the ideas from East and West, notions for- icans always go one better on any kind English boys' papers is a decent one, eign and inferior...
...Orwell does speak with crime and dishonesty never held berated young left-wing intellectuals for for himself a few years later...
...Nixon and his As an ambiguity in the film's title is meant to suggest, followers are not angry that their brutal satellite doesn't Altman's thieves really are like us...
...Picking up a English magazine, with stories about Brownell Orwell and Ian Angus...
...in the dozen years before his death in the advertising agency where "most boys who are "clean-living, keep in early in 1950...
...But unlike that pair of two-tone shoes coming 17 Issues for $3 down the street in The Sting, the little pick-up truck from which Coke is dispensed during the robbery in For New Subscribers Only Thieves Like Us is not just a quaint period detail...
...and bad boys include damning references to Amer- nothing in the world is sacred except whose badness consists of "betting, ican influence on English life...
...No one would read THE SCREEN Moll Flanders anymore just to get the straight poop on eighteenth-century England or be titillated by the confessions of a strumpet...
...It does not really have as Hawks cannot be bothered to show us most of the a plot so much as an exposition arranged to look like murders in his crime melodrama, Altman cannot be Commonweal: 133 Thieu's South Vietnam bothered to show us most of the bank robberies in his...
...that it was the enemy concern with daily routine interrupts the reading of the who relied primarily on force and terror...
...Oscars are all right for The Sting...
...He does so precisely 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...fact so much filmmaking has been devoted to this urge In the same manner, long after The Sting has been to be edified, the whole history of movies might be re- weighted down with Oscars and sunk into oblivion like garded as an extension of their first genre, the travelogue...
...4/12/74 COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...overlapping dialogue in the scene just described owes In other respects The Sting may be lacking, but it has much to Hawks, and in its general conception Thieves also obviously hit upon the sort of arcane subject that Like Us also seems not dissimilar to The Big Sleep...
...And that something is usually a personal 00000000000000 style that a director, or writer or painter, can impose on the subject he is dealing with...
...Something that interests us mainly because we portant function, perhaps the essential educational role, have never seen it before is, by definition, a novelty, by helping students to prepare for life, with its variety and novelties tend to wear off...
...court Brace Jovanovich, 1968...
...at least marginally home-grown...
...In the lectuals he knew were too poor to af- of brilliantly colored adverts urging you Yank Mags (Fight Stories, Action ford French cooking, and were more to spend your money on trash...
...Is sums up so aphorishave destroyed the sustaining myths that we were try- tically a view of human experience consistent throughout ing to help (or "save") the majority of South Viet- the film...
...papers whose appeal is to boys be- the English school child or working Commonweal: 135...
...These papers featended, we were earlier told, to pro- Gordon has a grievance against "the ture continuous serials about boys' pubvide a record of history...
...At every turn such circumstances unwitserving free choice and self-determination and opposing tingly upset the best-laid plans just as the woman's aggression by somebody else...
...and that our article...
...Commonweal, April 20, 1973 This is not to say that Altman's film is perfect or even his best work...
...His insights and of the men were the hard-boiled, Amer- hard training, wash behind their ears, crotchets, in prose like a windowpane, icanized, go-getting type to whom never hit below the belt...
...That is Name what a style is for, to make statements, and only a director who has something to say ever feels the need Address to develop a style...
...The reason he is unable to show us the bank robberies is that he is more interested Each of these myths was exploded by a succession in watching someone hand out free Coca-Cola from a of individual analysts, by the Pentagon Papers, and by truck in front of the get-away car...
...Paul developing one's interpersonal skills is not to deny what Newman and Robert Redford have been hired to demonsome regard as the program's essential mission: job strate this science on the same theory that curvaceous placement...
...something more durable than information-something inimitable, something that will still seem unique and original after the mere information has become old-hat GROPERS & SLICKSTERS or obsolete...
...They are the sort of momentary recognition that a film like that deserves...
...It is not the Law or act like a democracy...
...Good function by aiding students in getting their first job...
...For Altman, as for Breugel, trivial action finally goal was a democratic order in South Vietnam...
...sus- fun when they re-enact a robbery in their relative's tenance and increasingly brutal repression, is established front parlor, and the children get too bored to keep up as the great triumph 'of American selflessness...
...It scription...
...Further- services or whatever is being sold...
...The imposition of a its load of hostages, and then it drives off without ever minority faction of our choice, temporarily sustained being noticed by the assembled crowd...
...But Altman focuses on the Coke truck at a time when Please send the next 17 issues to: everything else is going on...
...In his essay "Boys' Weeklies," the all-in, jump on his testicles West, carrying American ideas, atti- Orwell looks in at the offerings of a style of fighting written in a jargon tudes, customs, Orwell hated the ex- typical news agent's shop, with its that has been perfected by people cesses and errors he defined as Amer- "poky little window with sweet-bottles who brood endlessly on violence...
...Work/study programs, then, perform an important "That's en - ter - tain - ment...
...Yes sir, The Sting is more, the statistics show that many who do learn parti- one smooth operation, and director Hill is as slick as cular skills frequently end up in quite different work...
...The better a prototype of experiences...
...That's too easy, and already overshadowed by In an early novel, Keep the Aspi- tween the ages of twelve and eighteen, other headlines...
...ican, derived from American advertis- and packets of Players, and its dark ing, American popular literature, interior smelling of liquorice allsorts Thus what begins as a pleasant exerAmerican movies, the American wor- and festooned from floor to ceiling with cise in nostalgia develops into a piece ship of money and power...
...To impose his own idiosyncrasies on a Send for a Trial Subscription film, Altman has to take risks with his directing...
...and Mr...
...This obduracy in human nature ruins a bold escape from a prison farm when the gang We have created in South Vietnam a monster that member being sprung thoughtlessly bad-mouths his makes the Diemist fascism of 1961 look benevolent and rescuer's girlfriend and is put out of the car at gunpoint...
...What such enterform this broader role, their value should become greater tainment is not, not by itself anyway, is art...
...Certainly the way Altman choreographs Direction and Best Costume Design...
...Like the early history of scene alone would be worth the price of admission even the novel, the early stages in the history of the movies if nothing else in the film deserved a second glance...
...spair, sickened once more by the sight and heroes who are G-men, air aces, George Orwell loved England as a of "page after page, advert after ad- master spies: always some single allmother loves a wayward child, and he vert...
...what the film is all about...
...in the late thirties...
...to Wire, from the time the first Chump gets the Boodle To emphasize the work/study formula's potential in until the Grifters put the Sting on the last Mark...
...In one up for admiration, "taking their cooking from France and of the wartime letters he wrote for their politics from Russia...
...Altman's work can wait for something City, State, Zip more permanent since it will be around a long time...
...Next is a newer breed of ters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia to return to that world...
...the slickest con man who ever lived...
...Again and again he of beastliness...
...it ability to provide information...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 6
