Correspondence
Correspondence On the one hand Los Angeles, Ca. To the Editors: It is both surprising and dismaying to find a critic with the perceptim of Colin L. Westerbeck, spouting the standard Hollywood...
...Now critics are urged to become hatchetmen, for the sake of "purity" in the arts...
...p. 722, Margulies, Rothco...
...Microfilm from Voi...
...Once again I have come away from one of his reviews convinced that he is as fine a critic as anyone writing today, neither captious nor bombastic nor vindictive...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being publiahed...
...Except for The American Language Mencken seems to be remembered today only by those once youthful rebels whose hero he was in the late twenties and early thirties...
...DAN O'NEILL And on the other Portland, Maine To the Editors: I recently read Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr.'s review of the film Other People's Money [Nov...
...While he was often denounced on the pounds of anti-Catholicism and anti-religion in general, his tweaking the noses of all authority and his disdain for hypocrisy in any guise were audacious, astringent, familiar and frequently quoted...
...Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...MARJORIE MURPHY "" ] I I Commonweal is indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Periodical Index...
...Coppola shows us our country's collective "heart of darkness": that despite good intentions through cultural superiority we wreaked havoc on a country and our own selfimage...
...Directors may spend millions on spy spoofs or space pictures but for a man to devote himself to something important was considered by them an outrage...
...Mencken was author of the aphorism on Catholic church reaction to new ideas (first wrong, later not wrong but dangerous, and eventually, that was what the church really taught all the time) which Cuddy quotes from Gregory Baum...
...No one could have been more astonished than H.L...
...To the Editors: "The Rebel Function in Catholicism" by Edward Cuddy is a gem in the very good September 14th issue...
...Index of American Periodical Verse, Book Review Digest and Book Review Index...
...Mencken, were he still with us, at this aphorism not only being taken over fifty-odd years later by one of the continent's most distinguished theologians but attributed to that theologian himself...
...I Illustrations: Cover I and pages 706, 708, 709;, Francisco Izquierdo/F/da Nueva, Madrid p. 714, Jean Chariot, from Commonweal, 1938...
...Serials Data Prol~'am No.: ISSN 0010-3330...
...l, 1924, to current issues available through University Microfilm, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mi...
...His point about creative artists' respecting the ambiguities of life--brought out in the context of Angi Vera--struck home to me...
...JOHN GREGOLI Up the rebels Saxtons River, Vt...
...48106...
...To place us in the center of the biggest military blunder our country has ever made and help us to feel the pain and waste is a mark of the highest artistry...
...Westerbeck has like other shortsighted reviewers jumped on the elements (particularly Kurtz) that don't work and refused to acknowledge how well Coppola has transformed Conrad's jungle where the native bears the white man's burden to Vietnam where the black serviceman does the same...
...To the Editors: It is both surprising and dismaying to find a critic with the perceptim of Colin L. Westerbeck, spouting the standard Hollywood line about Francis Ford Coppola in his review of Apocalypse Now [Oct...
...Unfortunately, it is disdained by jaded critics, suffering from critical hardening of the arteries...
...This idea of the "megalomaniac" director has been used by producers for years to keep artists like Von Su'oheim, Griffiths and Welles in line...
...The saddest part is that Mr...
...In this deliberately ambiguous spectacle (as any film about Vietnam must be), he gives us the psychedelic reality behind the "TV war" we witnessed...
...Copyright (.~ 1979 Commonweal Publishing Co...
...From the beginning the press has ridiculed Coppola's desire to plunge himself thoroughly into the biggest trauma of our age...
...Justice bids adding that H.L...
...p. 718, Bas., Tachydramos, Greece: p. 721, Joke, De Nieuwe Gazek, Antwerp...
...Commonweal: 706...
...Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...Westerbeck, the box office wizard, even dubs the picture a financial disaster (though it's doing far better than other epics of recent years such as "Catch 22," "A Bridge Too Far" and "The Wiz...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 23
