THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
feeling like hell, which is hardly the formula for commercial success. Some of the reviews I've seen of D/spatches have an impassioned, exhortatory quality, as if the national honor somehow...
...She's not as raunchy as Diane in Goodbar, nor as idealistic as Vanessa Redgrave in lulia, nor as dedicated as Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point...
...I have two for a starter, two old faithfuls: What is it...
...are as right a way to look at poetry as at that contraption we bought on Sale t o . . . but we have forgotten why we bought it and what it is for, simply because we do not know, never did, what it is...
...I question an adjective like right for question...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...What good is it...
...Moments like these are what leave the "it" girl's men startled and helpless, and leave the rest of us pretty delighted as well...
...I go further...
...if you read the book, you'll understand why...
...THOMAS POWERS LIBERATED LADY 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Gosh, I saw a swell movie the other day, just swell...
...At one point in particular, she just flops across his desk all of a sudden, landing on her stomach with her head propped on her hands close to his face and her feet sticking up lolling in the air...
...Only questing questions...
...The residue of Mary in her is what keeps "it" from running wild...
...The dress really is something out of Mary's wardrobe, complete with one of those lace collars that looks like a doily...
...This assures the audience that inside the aggressiveness and desire for experience, there is still a little girl like Mary...
...I don't think it's going to work...
...But I like meandering under plane trees: that is, I like to question things, in spite of my questioning questioning...
...Because she contained a share of both the innocent young things that preceded her and the steamy voluptuaries who were to follow, she is a richer characterization than either...
...word, too...
...Is this the right question...
...In truth, pretty, perky, saucy, sexy Clara Bow is still Mary Pickfordmbut a Mary Pickford who is now allowing a bit of her "it" to show...
...This happens when the unwed mother whom Clara supports and provides a home for is threatened by welfare workers who want to take away her baby...
...All of us also know the Questioner he was...
...It's a movement full of sudden girlish exuberance of just the kind Mary always showed...
...Poetry is part of that Monday to Sunday questing stroll through life, part of the weekday/weekend world, a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy, a teeny part of the universe, though weightier (etymologically, teeny is smaller than tiny by weewhich com~s from weq, OE for weight), And What is it...
...But to question the Holy Grail...
...But then I question my not questioning...
...She's not really brazen So much as just brash...
...Her sexiness is exceeded only by her moxie-ness, which is what keeps us off our guard with her...
...is just as natural, and practical besides...
...Dispatches is one of that company...
...and the thoroughly modern message is clear that in this unsuppressed, unsubtle form, the libido is a rather wholesome and appealing character...
...His most recent book o/ poems is Bach and a Catbird (Roth...
...Thus the only real scandal in her life comes about as a curious case of guilt by association...
...Whatever answers I sometimes dream up, I question...
...It is an incident that allows her to sample the true fruits of sin and depravity without actually having to stain her own character in the process...
...But after we have been disarmed by this scene where she tries to cut the dress down, imagine our surprise when the finished re-make in which, she arrives at the night club turns out to be the proverbial little black dress, the one that every femme fatale of the thirties and forties was going to wear when she wanted to stop the show...
...It is a good thing they are around, rooted right in us, constant Adam and Eve, to keep us alive to the facts of our lives, to remind us we are creatures who want to know about the makeup of our Monday world, what makes it work, so that we can snooze a little longer, a little more snugly, on Sunday morning . . . or doze, Sunday afternoons...
...Herr set out to describe certain things about Vietnam which never got into the newspapers at the time...
...There are lots of movies about girls like that around these days...
...She gets her kicks all right, but she always manages to give a few as well...
...She doesn't realize that this is the reason he is being stand-offish, so she turns up the heat...
...Of course, what is a moral tragedy for another girl leads to a comedy of errors with Clara, and the whole confusion is happily cleared up in the end...
...She had "it...
...Both as a strategy for getting a man and a moral for a movie, such brazenness can succeed because Clara is not only forward, but straight-forward...
...Sometimes I simply accept, not questioning anything, poetry least of all...
...There are poets Commonweal: 791...
...Some of the reviews I've seen of D/spatches have an impassioned, exhortatory quality, as if the national honor somehow depended on the number of Americans who rush out to buy Herr's book...
...ll I know about poetry is questions...
...I question questioning...
...There is a certain ambiguity in her personality that's very attractive, a certain combination of innocence and sex, a certain _9 . . who can say...
...In one marvelous scene, Clara even acts out the film's revamping of the earlier ideal of the sweetheart which Mary Pickford had embodied...
...In the film Clara is a sales girl at a giant department store who throws herself at the store's owner as if she were a little gold digger, and gets him...
...is not the only way of looking at verse, or universe...
...But this girl isn't like that Diane Keaton girl in Looking /or Mr...
...Not the only way, maybe, but a natural way...
...Not only do I question my answers, I question my questions...
...Is it the right adjective...
...which sank almost without a trace back in the '60s...
...Clara Bow, and the movie I recently caught up with that has her in it is called lt...
...You can quest the Holy Grail, for instance, without disturbing your neighbor...
...There have been other good books about Vietnam and not many people bought those either--Ward Just's To What End...
...It's strictly a child's sort of gesture, too, like flopping on one's bed in one's own room...
...She won't even let the store owner steal a kiss without getting slapped good and proper for it, and she has never had in her mind anything less than marrying the gentleman...
...We were sure she couldn't do it, with the result that when we see she can, we're so impressed we forget all about how naughty she is...
...What good is it...
...None of that, nor hemlock...
...What good is it...
...We all know about the unexamined life, its supposed value, and we all know where that phrase came from...
...Questing is better than questioning...
...The marvelous part of the scene is that Clara attacks this dress with a scissors and hacks off the collar so crudely, the effect is laughable when she tries the dress on...
...Things can work out this way because the truth is that for all her flirting, Clara has never allowed any man to trifle with her...
...It's a scene where Clara is remaking an old dress to wear on the first date she has ever had to go to a night club...
...It was about this very independent and strong-willed young girl and how she makes her way in a hazardous world...
...No question about it, I would not like hemlock...
...Goodbar...
...And so it goes...
...On the one hand, such a move is an allurement, a bold play, something almost suggestive and erotic...
...This it is which authenticates Clara's innocence...
...In the context in which it occurs and with the result it has of bringing her face within kissing distance of his, it is a wanton gesture...
...The lady I'm talking about is a Ms...
...I pretend I'm walking under plane trees now, (any similarity between Socrates and me is purely poetic license), letting you listen to the questioning going on in me, the questioning that is a quest--a questing . . . one hopes not too pedestrian...
...What we may have forgotten is how his questioning, under a plane tree, led to his unquestioning drinking of the hemlock...
...This twosome comprises the kind of intelligence which wants to take Big Ben (Westclox or Westminster) apart to see what makes it tick, or bong...
...This is the perfect gesture of a Mary with "it...
...This girl sets her sights on only one guy at a time, and doesn't let any of them take advantage of her, either, by murdering her or anything like that...
...But she's no slouch compared to those women, which is saying something when you consider that she's fifty years older than they are...
...Perry Young's Two o/ the Missing, Philip Caputo's A Rumor ol War, Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers...
...Oh, I know...
...We never understood it...
...It" is the Americanization of the Latin pronoun id, Freud's shorthand meaning the libido...
...Whether looking at a hexameter or a galaxy, an Alexandrine or a meteor, Adamant Iwantoknow and Evenerup Iveamindtoo are almost bound to ask the kind of question that fiddles with things, the metronomes and telescopes of the world...
...It" is that certain something, that-je-ne-sais-quoi, which Elinor Glyn, who appears in the movie, first described in an article for Cosmopolitan...
...I have a going thing with life...
...On the other hand, though, the impulsiveness in it is impish...
...Impulsive, quirky and absolutely bubbling over with energy, she truly is a bit of the libido let out to play...
...What is it...
...She differs from Mary not by being immoral, but only by being ambitious...
...It's very interesting to watch how carefully Clara preserves at least the sweet after-taste of her more demure and sheltered predecessor Mary...
...That might lead to fisticuffs...
...It is a quieter JOHN FANDEL, Commonweal's poetry editor, leaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...Clara saves the day somehow by claiming the baby is really hers, but then this deception gets back to the store owner, who has just begun to take a shine to Clara, as i f it were true...
...It's not so much the fact she could wear such a scandalous dress that has floored us now, but the fact she could make one...
...The presence of Mary in Clara is perhaps most 9 December 1977:790 keenly felt in the scene where Clara goes to see the store owner while he's still under the impression that she is a n unwed mother...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 25
