Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
cated mode she adopts in these late novels exploits this mimetic accuracy in order to prod the reader to her ironic attitude towards the human failings captured in them. What Iris Murdoch knows...
...That's the whole point of this exquisite little scene with which the film ends...
...The Runner Stumbles was not shown at the Festival, but the films that were were sometimes too like it...
...And if it has this scene followed shortly by another in which the hero explains what the first scene meant, it's a bad movie...
...I wonder at times whether films don't get into the Festival on the basis of someone's having caught the first twenty minutes of them...
...Does he want to tell them his troubles...
...Hanna's comprehensiveness, documentation, and innovation create a searching analysis of contemporary American Catholicism...
...But since it is the last scene, we can enjoy even as we watch it that no one is going to explain it away afterwards...
...In Angi Vera, director Pal Gabor does better by Communism than Kramer does by Catholicism...
...Every month I am sent a magazine called Cinema ~ t 1 1 Frangais which gives a run-down on all the major films in production in France...
...Or does he see in them some image of himself...
...Worse, he doesn't trust human experience...
...Uncertain, he hesitates...
...Contributions are tax-deductible...
...The trouble with Kramer's film about a priest accused of murdering a nun with whom he was in love is that itonly takes lovers seriously...
...The hurry de Chalonge is in to eliminate all the possibilities except one is almost insulting...
...In this scene the hero, who is in the midst of a grave personal crisis, is waiting on a train platform...
...Does he want to help them with theirs...
...Food and medical aid is being distributed through our channels and in cooperation with UNICEF and the International Red Cross...
...As the film ends Vera twists around in her seat to peer out the rear window at the receding figure on the bike, who remains unaware of being observed...
...Vera taps on the side window and calls out as the car pulls past the cyclist, but she doesn't hear either...
...Rather than ideological fervor, it was having the temerity to complain about conditions where she worked that caused her to be chosen for the school...
...Showing an anthology film of Bugs Bunny-Road Runner cartoons, as the Festival did this year, seems to me this kind of behavior, and showing Other People's Money suggests that the Festival is trying to curry the favor of the industry in France the same way...
...02106 9 November 1979:627...
...Having a festival only makes sense if it offers us a rare opportunity to see movies--an opportunity t6 see exceptional movies, likeAngi Vera, that we would not otherwise get a chance to see at all...
...There are probably a dozen nondescript tales of intrigue like Other People's Money made there every year...
...Last time I was talking about Stanley Kramer's The Runner Stumbles, a film on which Angi Vera offers a damning commentary...
...But Anna is dozing and doesn't hear...
...COMMONWEAL 212-MU3-2042 "| 232 Madistm Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...An aft too rare combination of scholarly precision and readability . . . . We have, for the first time, a single volume which provides an indepth analysis of Gandhi's political strategy and its relevance for social struggle today . . . . It is a book that should be read by scholars, students, political activists and everyone who seeks the progress of humanity...
...What makes this scene so like the one in Other People's Money is not just the situation where one person watches another, but the atmosphere of the scene...
...But de Chalonge is afraid someone might take this whimsical treatment for a loose end, so he soon has Rainier explain it away like the incident on COMMONWEAL: A Christmas gift that thinks, talks, listens and entertains Friends whom you might have given Commonweal last Christmas would have enjoyed such features as: John Garvey on Celibacy Mary Jo Weaver on Singleness Jonathan Yardley, Martin Green & George W. Hunt on The State of American Fiction The Special Issue on John Paul II Richard J. Krickus on The Limits of the Superpowers Anna Maria Murdoch on Mythology and Motherhood Thomas J. Gumbleton and J. Bryan Hehir: Is SALT II...
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...Illus...
...She pecks him on the cheek to calm him...
...Sitting between the cyclist and the dozing Anna, neither of whom answers when she calls out to them, Vera is alone...
...Up to that point Other People's Money seems artsy enough for the Festival, and to have the right sort of liberal politics...
...11 BEACON ST...
...Vera has been the outstanding student at the school...
...from CHAPTER NINE 384 pp., $14.95 clothbound, $7.95 paperback ...also by Gene Sharp THE POLITICS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION Sharp's outspoken, incisively written analysis will disturb, even dismay, starry-eyed moralists and hard-headed critics alike...
...As the scene ends, he has drifted off down the platform, but still can't take his eyes off them...
...A film like this sticks a pin into the inflated melodramas we are used to seeing at commercial movie houses and even, too often, at the Festival...
...i I Send gift card to me [] for me [] Reneq# [] ! | t I MY NAME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | t ! 0 : e Address i Jl ~176176176176 . . . . ~ . . . . * ' ' ' ~ . . . . . ~ a | m | a City, State, Zip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . t I | e t I $ . . . . . . . . . . enclosed [] Bill me after Jan...
...The Festival's worst vice has always been its desire to attract big commercial films of the sort that don't really need a festival to be seen...
...It's 9 Vera says, naming a comrade from the school...
...She has been so torn between personal emotions and political commitments, so conflicted about her experiences at the school, that she faints at the commencement exercises...
...Oh, look...
...x9.5o Stanford University Press Catholics and American Politics Mary Hanna The impact of Catholics on American politics in the 1960s and 1970s is remarkable-as the names of the Kennedys, Eugene McCarthy, the Berrigan brothers, and others will attest...
...Richard D. Burnl, NAVAL WAR CoT.r.~.GE REVIEW 928 pp., $24.95 clothbound $13.85 3-volume paperback Write for brochure or Order from PORTER SARGENT PUBLISHERS, INC...
...Uncomfortable with the variousness and uncertainly in life, he wants to deprive us of them too...
...The other thing it has going for it is that despite its mediocrity--or, more likely, because of it--the film won some prizes in France similar to our Academy Awards...
...This is the kind of movie that Other People's Money is, the kind that can't stand to leave life a bit ambiguous, the way it really is...
...And this challenge most assuredly extends to military officers...
...The scene has a little magic to it...
...She gets up and confesses a love affair with her teacher, to the embarrassment of the officials who have just been extolling her virtues...
...An important addition to the literature of ethnicity, this study applies the methods of quantification, survey research, and interviewing to public policy and yields unexpected results...
...There he believed it was necessary to chart a nonviolent course which ordinary people could follow and by which they could maximize their power to control events...
...Screen I I I FESTIVAL FOIBLES GENEROSITY IN FILMS T HERE ARE THREE kinds of movies--good, bad, or indifferent--and one way to tell them apart is to look for the sort of scene that occurs about half way through Christian de Chalonge's Other People's Money...
...None of the conflicts the f'dm has revealed is resolved...
...1 . i | a I 9 ($2 per sub...
...Even'when she is the only one escaping abuse during a session of public criticism, Vera cannot accept her role as the people's heroine...
...10016 | i Please send Commonweal for one year at $20 for the first subscrip- | I : tions, $15 for each additional, to: | i * Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ! i Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | ' I | City, State, Zip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | a If a Send gift card to me [] for me [] Renewal [] ! ' I I NAme .~176176176176176176176176176176176176176 . . . . ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 | il Address...
...Nearby is an old couple...
...De Chalonge quickly gets down to the business of sorting out the plot's myriad details as a civilianpolicier, a mere story of intrigue...
...That she is leaving by car indicates she is going on to greater things...
...Other People's Money is like a business appointment with someone who is effusive and gracious and full of amenities when we enter his office, but after a few minutes wipes the smile from his face and says, "OK, what do you want...
...Preoccupied by this job of exposition, he has no more time to waste on style or character...
...He doesn't trust us with them...
...Anna is a staunch hardliner who at one point makes Vera aid her in denouncing a malcontent, but Vera is clearly, unhappy with her part in the act...
...without entering directly into the center of politic a / l i f e and conflict...
...If it doesn't, it's indifferent...
...What she doesn't know her novels point to indirectly: the rich human possibilities of our world seen in the light of the good that shines in the most pessimistic of her novels...
...Vera (Veronika Papp), who has just completed the 1948 session at a special training school to which only the most promising young Communists are sent, is leaving by car with her friend and mentor Anna (Erzi Pastor...
...It defies the laws of gravity, tossing three or four possibilities into the air and just leaving them there...
...the no-nonsense political realists who think that they can dismiss this manual for nonviolent action as more of the same old daydreaming utopian politics are in for a rude shock...an instant "classic" on its subject...
...They don't notice the hero, but he notices them and approaches anxiously as if he's going to speak to them...
...Checks should be sent to AFSC/OXFAM--America Cambodia Relief, 15 Rutherford Place, New York, N.Y...
...At times it has shown such American schlock that the only reason imaginable was its eagerness to show itself loyal to Hollywood--to impress the studio bosses the way flunkies do, by being ready to endure any indignity in the hope it will bring you preferential treatment...
...I remember," he muses later, "I was fked on the day of the blackout...
...This study describes all aspects of Santa Clara's colorful past--from abortive attempts to finance the college by making wine to the x96o's controversy over the admission of women~providing a fascinating case study of Catholic higher education over the past century...
...Introduction by CORETTA SCOTT KTNG GANDHI AS A POLITICAL STRATEGIST wlth Essays on Ethlcs and Polltlc= by Gene Sharp Gandhi felt it impossible to be nonviolent...
...It does what comes easily to movies--boy meets girl--but gives no equivalent reality to religion...
...If a movie has a scene like this, it's good...
...The man has something in his eye, and his wife is trying to get it out...
...And almost every year the Festival seems to include an example of this second-rate genre--last year's was Michel Deville's Dossier 51--among the two dozen films that are supposed to represent the whole world's achievement in movies...
...Left alone,;'the scene is pleasing because it is indefinite...
...As the car drives across the wintry landscape, it Commonweal: 626passes a woman puffing along on a bicycle...
...Worth Supporting ? John Jay Hughes on The Leadership We Need Robert Phillips on Flannery O'Connor Such articles plus the many others, editorials, personal columns and reviews provide an abundance of good reading all year long in this widely quoted biweekly...
...for postage outside U.S...
...15.00 w the train platform...
...Shots of Rainier sitting in a bright, modern waiting room are intercut with a dim scene where the bank's board fires him by candlelight, as if in a fraternity ritual...
...As she passes the comrade on the bicycle now, what can she be thinking...
...By the end of Other People' s Money, the only mystery left is why this film deserved to be shown at the New York Film Festival...
...10003...
...A HUNGARIAN FILM called Angi Vera, which was also shown at the Festival, ends with a scene very like that on the railroad platform in Other People's Money...
...But what has made her outstanding, ironically, is her reluctance...
...What Iris Murdoch knows she transmutes into comic art so that we should not exaggerate our own importance either for good or evil...
...Such stylization is just a little something to get the film started, to break the ice...
...II I AN APPEAL-- OXFAM-- America and the American Friends Service Committee are mounting a combined million-dollar drive to save the starving Cambodians...
...Other People's Money often lacks generosity in this way...
...Canada) | 1119/79 ' *| iS i all I i l l 4i i 411 i l i I I i I t i l i alm I 11g i mlt i l i l I I I i l i I i I I I I i I i i i I I I ~ m 9 November 1979:625The University of Santa Clara A History, 185x-x977 Founded in x 85 x as a Jesuit college, the University of Santa Clara became California's first institution of higher learning...
...Why is the hero drawn to these people...
...A mild thriller about a bank executive named Rainier (JeanLouis Trintignant) who is being made the fall guy in a financial scandal, the film begins with some surreal touches...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 20
