The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
has attempted to create new demand for tickets through a hard-seU advertising campaign. Off-track betting in New York, also backed by heavy advertising come-on, did not decrease illegal...
...This is pretty much what happens anyway in two new thrillers about hijacking that have been released...
...Rahner gives every satisfaction in this respect...
...The sociotechnology in which we live is expressly designed to comprehend every audacity and contain every attempt to work outside its appointed channels...
...In a curious way even the uncontrollable chain of events set in motion in each film remains a captive of the system supposedly being disrupted...
...Collapse of several stout parties...
...Anglo-Saxon professors--at least the ones I know--have to survive the irony of their colleagues, and consequently find it much more difficult to take themselves too seriously...
...His colleagues in Munich solve this problem by laughing heartily whenever they think that a joke has been made...
...Anyone wishing to devise an examination in Rahnerian theology could do worse than propose comparable themes and invite the candidate to suggest how Rahner would have treated them: thus we might arrive at the theology of birdwatching or coffee-drinking...
...The German university tradition places the Herr Professor on a very lofty pinnacle...
...HIJACKERS AND HIJINX 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The hijacker and the terrorist are perhaps our only contemporaries who can create the sort of excitement that gunslingers used to create on the frontier...
...The first is concerned with the wonder of everyday things...
...The other theory verified in this way is that the path of theology is through complexity towards simplicity, towards "the unutterably simple mystery" which enCommonweal: 111...
...they inquired anxiously...
...Yet even here, where we come as close as we ever can to the conditions of an old-fashioned showdown, modern society still seems to insulate its heroes from its villains...
...Quite frequently Rahner has in fact made a joke in the self-deprecating manner that is his, halfway between speech and a slurred murmur...
...They see that neither our wallets nor our honor may be vulnerable anymore, but our reliance on the system that protects them is...
...Eminenz, I said, thank you very much: but that is just what you gave me for my sixtieth birthday...
...When he was leaving Munich for Mtinster in the spring of 1967, he returned from a farewell visit to Cardinal Doepfner who had been so kind, said Rahner, as to give him a going away present...
...A portrait----of himself signed," said Rahher...
...The former is the sort of place in which one expects to encounter elegant, powerful people making command decisions...
...He must, in other words, be effective...
...Like everything else that flies in the world of business, gambling is a growth industry, and it profits not by filling an unstimulated public demand but by creating new customers...
...was the very natural question...
...Rahner has another ploy for dealing with these solemn expectations: he pretends to be a very ordinary chap, constantly surprised by the ordinariness of very ordinary things...
...Not only is he the accredited representative of Geist, that unique combination of spirit, mind, intellect, soul and imagination, but he embodies it and is its spokesman...
...But first a preliminary remark about German professors...
...The professor's reward is adulation, and here Rahner differs from the others in that he suffers from the respect and reverence which are heaped upon him...
...K ARL RAHNER recently notched up three score years and ten and gave a celebration interview to Herder Korrespondenz in which he was invited to review his life's work...
...He has a number of ploys for dealing with the situation...
...The subway system acts like a King Midas in reverse...
...Naturally there is a PETER HEBBLETHWAITE i$ former editor of the Jesuit publication, The Month...
...Even though that is rather like being invited to write one's own obituary, he set about the interview with good grace...
...I'm afraid he doesn't really make it as a Western hero either, any more than Fallon does...
...In this way Rahner also lives out two of his cherished theories...
...There is a quality of impishness and mischievousness which comes out in the interview when he claims to be a "dilettante" in theology, and declares that after studying it for forty years, he feels more stupid than when he started...
...In this context what makes the hijacker and the terrorist exceptional is that, seeing the system would foil other crimes, they attack the system itself...
...As a result even crime has to be "organized" to get anywhere nowadays...
...And in each film the burden of coping with the calamity falls to one man...
...In Richard Lester's Juggernaut someone has placed a series of time bombs aboard an ocean liner and then, once the ship is irretrievably at sea, demanded an enormous ransom in exchange for instructions on disarming the bombs...
...In the very process of being held up for ransom, the system still determines the course of action and channels the energies unleashed against it...
...Off-track betting in New York, also backed by heavy advertising come-on, did not decrease illegal gambling...
...Ha, ha, ha," they chortle...
...It also becomes, for each director, an opportunity eagerly seized...
...Juggernaut's man on the job is Fallon (Richard Harris), a flamboyant Royal Navy bomb expert airlifted to the desperate liner to try to defuse the bombs...
...The contact between these men locked in mortal combat is in each case so tenuous that the one actual, physical exchange which must occur, the handing over of the payment, becomes a nearly insurmountable problem...
...The problem for both of them is that, as cowboy philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it, things are in the saddle and ride mankind...
...He can derive great pleasure from studying the instructions on the label of a sauce bottle or examining the workings of a cigarette lighter...
...In Pelham One Two Three, it's Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau), an unassuming T.A...
...The real issue in the New Jersey election and in the growth of legalized gambling generally is whether it is politic for a society to trade on people's most trivial impulses----whether it is good, that is, to make people into fools...
...For the hijackers in both films, the whole paradoxical point is not to come in contact with your adversary...
...Consequently he does not need to be interesting, still less entertaining, and indeed he is expected to be obscure, since the pursuit of Geist is arduous...
...Fallon is, for all his maverick wildness, essentially an executive...
...They are constantly expected to utter Great Thoughts...
...cop who happens to be on duty in the central dispatchers' room when the hijackers call in to announce what they have done and make their demands...
...The confrontations that Fallon and Garber have with their respective nemeses are strictly a battle of nerves carried out over a two-way radio...
...Everyone who comes in touch with it from the mayor to the hijackers turns into a nitwit...
...Yet reading between the lines one could catch a rare glimpse of Rahner the man...
...The latter is a setting more suitable to a gamut running from grubby, surly indifference to good-natured incompetence...
...With the system itself immobilized and held captive, some individual must once again come forward, as in days of yore, to stand up against the desperado...
...And to get the feel of a strange city, he always prefers to visit department stores with their glitter rather than churches...
...In the slim volume he published under that title, he discusses a number of ordinary activities--like walking about, sitting down, or going to bed--in which he detects hidden traces of omnipresent grace...
...What was it...
...Each film makes the mere accumulating, counting and delivering of the money into a complicated sub-plot, as if Lester and Sargent were both dying for the lone chance this provides to cut to a chase...
...But like most of the things Rahner has done, it provided no simple answers and was massive...
...The hijacker and terrorist therefore take over our means of transportation and lines of communication as purposefully as the gunslinger took over isolated frontier towns...
...and to highlight it might be to provide a key to his thinking...
...Because it now is possible to bet legally on horses, thousands of people who never in the world would have thought of betting on football or basketball or baseball are now betting with the bookies...
...Garber, on the other 1 November 1974:110 hand, is really just a bumbler despite his unflappable way of taking charge...
...Every other possibility has been so bureaucratized and systemsanalyzed that all the excitement, the crisis atmosphere which high drama requires, has gone out of it...
...German professors are exposed to no such discipline...
...condition which qualifies this last remark: he feels more stupid "in view of the vast amount of material which has to be mastered before one can begin to speak of a problem etc...
...And what did you say...
...Another of Rahner's deflating strategies, off the rostrum, is humor, but sometimes it rebounds upon him because of the difficulty of recognizing exactly when one is the presence of humor...
...In Joseph Sargent's The Taking o] Pelham One Two Three, four men who hijack a subway train demand an equally enormous sum for the passengers' safe release...
...He fits into the power structure represented by the directors of the cruise line, government officials and ship's captain (Omar Sharif) with whom Fallon drinks Scotch to settle his nerves...
...A Police Department white paper concluded that offtrack betting led to a 62 percent increase in illegal betting...
...In the end Fallon has to sort out all that knowledge which systems people call "input"--technical expertise about bombs, psychological assessment of the bomber, etc.mand come to an absolute decision about which wire to cut...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...And so'each film ultimately takes its cue from its surroundings, even in the creation of its hero...
...The only telling difference between these films, in fact, is the difference of atmosphere---of raise en scdne.--one would expect between a luxury liner and a subway car...
...Since one might be tempted to believe that only a wellprogrammed computer could equal Rahner's prodigious output, it is comforting to know that he has a human side...
...In the end of his film, Garber doesn't catch the hijackers so much as just stand around and watch while they trip themselves up...
...A climate has been created to gamble," said Paul Delise, chief of the Organized Crime Control Bureau in the Public Morals Division...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 5
