Stage:

...I have not had a chance to see or to read the beginning of Hardcore to find the runaway daughter of a Pomerance version, but I assume that whatever liberties he God-fearing man from Minnesota named Van Dorn (George took with the Brecht play (it is a script that is used to having C. Scott...

...For one thing, it appears to be two Alone...

...At the beginning of The Warriors suspect...

...She has become so depraved that she now lives turns out that they are Armageddon's last and noblest survivors with a man who commits his own murders in the snuff films he instead...

...allusion to the fifties film of that title about a world slowly When Van Dorn does find his daughter, it turns out that she being depopulated by fall-out is intentional I'm sure...

...Even if their presence does empty the city of its only inadequacy we see is when Van Dorn tries to explain his other inhabitants, we can take solace in the fact that civiliza- Reform Dutch faith to this girl...

...Collar, about working-class life and union racketeering...

...Philip Anglim is a slight, conventionhis characters...

...Pomerance uses sex as the final barrier, appar30 March 1979: 181...

...Now, at the invitation of a fantasy figurer, another Second metamorphosis...

...and at ease than his friends, the kind of man who makes a There is that one punk who shoots the speaker at the conven- loving, trusting parent...

...points against society...

...and they are always loyal to come we can't...

...After way I read the Treves character-to want to score particular winning the interest and the affection of the celebrated Mrs...

...The and moral...

...After' a mob almost kills him, he finds shelter with and says, "It's finished...

...Now it horrible parent...

...At one point the detective brings Van Dorn an 8mm liberties taken), he retained those metamorphoses that proporn film starring his daughter and forces him to watch it...

...seeing him as an individual, which allows them to find in him GERALD WEALES the qualities that they think or wish were theirs...

...another play of metamorphoses...

...He seems to know nothing about them, how- ally good-looking actor who in no way resembles the unfortuCommonweal: 180 nate John Merrick...

...He Plowing at Full Moon rescues Merrick from destruction but forces him to fit his The air, cold, freakishness (i.e., difference) into n paradigm of nineteenth- The hills roll up like unbroken century propriety...

...A little high-toned sentiment is allowed to creep especially confusing character...

...produces-a man she claims loves her where her father never did...

...It was written and directed by Paul Schrader, accepts his apology and immediately goess back to Minnesota who seems to be dedicating himself to taking us on tour of all with him...

...More than that, they are all basically fair-minded to depict Van Dorn's weaknesses, his human complexity...

...The other gang members we see here are sometimes problems...

...of the play is only an object of curiosity (idle to freak-show Shortly before, he puts the tower on the church model he has fanciers, scientific to Treves), becomes a normal person of been constructing-a mock building made by a mock mansorts...

...If a girl like this can see through him so easily, how wild, but more often just stupid...

...Fourth metamorphosis...

...lines on role-playing, Merrick becomes the newest fashion, Brecht is not a bad playwright for a man to get under his skin, visited, admired, befriended (condescended to) by the elegant but even with Brecht I sometimes want to say, don't tell me, world, from Princess Alexandra down...

...We are warned that Merrick will body twists, his legs grow clumpish, difficult to manage...

...The play is in danger of becoming a Kendal, whose presence allows Pomerance some attractive lecture like the one that Treves dreams at the end of the play...

...For his new friends, show me...

...No longer considered a cretin, Mer- death are not left to work as dramatic metaphor...

...He's bragging about how vivid his cynicism is, how tough he is I N 1975 Bernard Pomerance did an adaptation of Bertolt because he knows all this stuff...

...This is the segment of the English public more meets Mrs...

...Finally to pure silence felt As my own metamorphosis (the transformation of a play In the hands and shoulder blades...

...Anglim turns into the horribly deformed Merrick...

...In so far as The Elephant I'll go home and dream of a horse Man is the story of John Merrick, it is the account of a man of Bowing over still water in a cedar tank...

...Kendal that he must sleep unlike Merrick's, remains unchanged, so that the audience can sitting up, that if he lies down as other people do he will at once perceive the man and the freak...

...He insists that Merrick repeat after him, Swells beneath the tractor "Rules make us happy...

...I suspect Schrader fancies himself as which two men and an army blanket become an elephant being rather like this detective, someone able to face the world because there is an immediate market for such a beast...

...Yet when Van Dorn blubbers a few pieties to her about Hardcore is a quickie about runaways and the sub-culture of having been unable to express his love and being sorry, she pornography...

...It sounds like a recorded tion itself will survive among them...

...is underlined by too obvious explanation...

...subscription, raised through The Times, proves that, as the The difficulty with Merrick's story in dramatic terms is that scene title puts it, "the English public will pay for him to be it reaches its emotional high point in the first act when Merrick like us...

...This conclusion to the film suggests that, for all his the undergrounds and underworlds there are in America...

...Van Dorn finally finds his daughter modified Brechtian play (twenty-one scenes, each bearing its on his own, but it's the detective who kills the pimp that has identifying label), but he created, in The Elephant Man, been exploiting her...

...Van Dorn is an are taken off...

...The vided its structure and fed its theme, that illustrated Brecht's detective also scolds Van Dom self-righteously...

...they become rick develops his taste for art and literature, allows his imagi- part of an overt lesson plan which seems-at least that is the nation to flourish, even displays his talent for irony...

...Even so, I have I am with the earth and the dark, some difficulty with it...

...Now he's filling in yet another of the blind spots in our perception of our society, showing us some more of those modem casbahs where we shudder to think, and can scarcely imagine, what Stage goes on...

...into a series of propositions) suggests, The Elephant Man is a fascinating drama full of provocative ideas...

...If he wants to contention that a man is no more than the product of his find his daughter, the detective says, he's got to see what kind society's expectations...

...This is presented in very specific speeches in which each of the characters describes Merrick in a line that ends "like me...

...The Schrader, not a person...

...Echoes carry us back to the end of Treves at London Hospital, which becomes his home (the the first act in which he explains to Mrs...

...The reason is that Schrader doesn't know how each other...

...plays, one dramatic, one didactic...

...What Schrader does not do a good expose of is the lives of First metamorphosis...

...The trouble with Hardcore is that Schrader is so anxious to prove he can imagine, he doesn't really take the time to do anything else...

...to have a woman to be a man...

...But then a teenage prostitute he meets tion in the Bronx...

...Kendal-a beautifully acted scene between genteel than the mob who would have destroyed him to erase Anglim and Carole Shelley-and that much of his later distress the difference...

...It's no wonder the Merrick, whose freakish deformation earned him that detective turns out to be, despite all his sins and weaknesses, nickname late in the nineteenth century-he not only wrote a the real hero of Hardcore...

...Merrick's life and Third metamorphosis...

...No actor could, without ludicrous makeup ently answering, yes, to Merrick's question: does a man have more appropriate to a Star Wars saloon than a serious play...

...The movie ends back at message, as if Van Dorn were only an ideological position to Coney Island on the Warriors' home turf-on the beach...

...Still, The Elephant Man's telling takes place in the Merrick's ugliness is a value, a barrier which keeps them from context of some highly effective showing...

...Frederick Treves is presented as an Leo Dangel intelligent, compassionate man of science, a product of both the rationality Vnd the missionary zeal of his century...

...By the The plow turning a wake end of the play, Treves doubts his work, his God, his society, Wet and black his whole existence...

...The whole movie is preoccupied with SHOW AND TELL getting us into the dens of iniquity, showing us how the porn business works, giving us glimpses of dirty movies, etc...

...They are for our own good...

...And work is being done...

...But the was not kidnapped and addicted to drugs as we have been led to reference is a bit confusing...

...When Treves interrupts Mrs...

...This AN ELEPHANT FOR ALL SEASONS 'is all just a way of showing off on Schrader's part...

...In a die shortly, that his heart cannot bear the weight of his grotesmarvelous extension of the conventional collusion of actor and que body, so that his death when it comes will raise no audience which allows a performer to become a character, questions, will be recognized as suicide only by the audience...

...She ran away because this man who has not only we thought that these kids were supposed to be the fall-out humbled but humiliated himself to find her was in fact a itself, the Bomb that was ticking and ready to explode...

...When knowing how rotten it is-someone who's self-appointed mis- Pomerance turned to a different kind of elephant man-John sion is to make the rest of us face it...

...When one thinks of the real Sir Frederick Treves, placidly churning out travel essays toward the end of A column of fire gusts his life, Pomerance's Treves becomes as obvious an invention Up from the exhaust, the roar as his Merrick, a product of the same impulse that created the Breaks through tortured psychiatrist of Equus...

...I assume, too, that he kept the scene in of world we're living in...

...strangle...

...Yet, as Dr...

...In the one or two scenes of his into the character, particularly in his relationship with his moll life back in Minnesota, he comes off as more liberal-minded (Dorsey Wright...

...Frederick Treves (Kevin Conway) lectures us, Kendal as she shows Merrick what a naked woman looks like, using actual photographs of the elephant man, Anglim's right his outrage is a display of his own limitations although Merrick arm appears to elongate, becoming heavy and useless, his takes it as a definition of his...

...But he's the only rotten apple in the proverb- guesses at once that his wife ran off because he has sexual ial barrel...

...Merrick, who in the early sections freak borrowed from the first act, he does lie down and he dies...

...great sensitivity brought to the threshold of life and then forced Drinking the moon to turn back...

...Kendal that Romeo word is spoken as though it were in quotation marks) after a had to kill himself because his illusion came to an end...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Yet his face, Early in the act Merrick tells Mrs...

...He supposed toughness, Schrader is really as naive about human began when he wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese's beings as the most frightened, unstable teenage hooker he can Taxi Driver, then continued with his own first film, Blue imagine...

...Brecht's A Man's Man for the Hampstead Theatre in There's a slimy detective (Peter Boyle) who's hired near the London...