Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SAUVAGE Despite the left-handed credentials The New Leader inscribes for Leo Sauvage, I still find Chief Justice Earl Warren and his associates on the Commission to be men...
...And since Padnos is thrown by such obvious points, it would be overmuch to expect him to get from my review that I am quite aware that Fellini intends to mock the false glamor he evokes,, but that-such is his emotional and esthetic confusion in the presence of upper-class luxury, demi-mondain saturnalia, and quasi-intellectual glitter-he ends up praying where he came to scoff...
...Giulietta, he writes, describing the end of Giulietta of the Spirits, ("On Screen," NL, December 6), "has become a free woman...
...innuendo is made consequential or attractive by including it in a high-type article, like, with quotations from Victor Hugo in the original French...
...Michael D. Padnos John Simon replies: Although, as his letterhead indicates, Michael Padnos belongs to the legal profession, his brief for Juliet of the Spirits is refreshingly free from legalistic complexities and convolutions...
...Lastly, in answer to Padnos' slyly accusing question about just who it was that felt the pleasure in vulgarity that the film exhibits, I wish to assure him that, whatever whopping errors I may be guilty of, he cannot pin the charge of having made Juliet of the Spirits on me...
...Who cares...
...And he is so clever...
...And why can't she sink deeper into any of the escapist techniques she experiments with...
...I am no longer afraid of you...
...By assuming, in so cavalier a manner, that the Drew administration is lying, not only to the public but to its faculty and students, Grauman merely adds fuel to the fires of righteous indignation and vindictiveness which., as he himself points out, ace already burning brightly in the hearts of the local vigilantes...
...In any case, it was not my intention to use this incident in an indictment of a university administration's "lying" policies, (Hall's word, not mine)-though goodness knows this would be a worthy project for someone-but rather as a simple illustration of the pressures faced by Governor Hughes in his campaign...
...The dream quite clearly enacts the breaking away from both Mother and Mother Church, influences that, by implication, stunted G.'s development...
...To what purpose...
...And if she can, why doesn't Fellini show us how she does it-we'd like to know...
...I want to be convinced why G., as a character, rejects it...
...the extravagant sets and costumes were the object of Fellini's mockery, not, as Simon has misperceived, his admiration...
...In literally every sentence of his review, Simon says something I find bluntly misperceived or in "immediate and aggressive bad taste...
...The assassination of President Kennedy is strange and tragic and weird enough...
...thus the fact that Fellini, an ex-cartoonist, is drawn to comic books and their makers, or consorts with modish pop artists, is helpful in explaining the reveled-in grossnesses of the film...
...but it is bottom enough to require more than one convenient little dream to release her from all her psychic and physical trouble...
...My original sentence was: 'The one development which could hurt Hughes would be further 'aggravation' of the issue by academic radicals, like the professor from another New Jersey college who assumed Genovese's position, almost word for word, at a second teach-in on the Rutgers campus last week...
...His responses on being interrogated were completely in character with this sort of malicious screwball...
...This dropout, this hopeless jerk did buy a gun of the sort that killed President Kennedy...
...Madison, N. J. Richard P. H ali Lawrence Grauman Jr...
...Certainly not from Fellini, for at the moment of her crisis Giulietta says to her mother "Non ho pin paura di te...
...J. C. Rich SIMON ON FELLINI How delightful to read John Simon...
...It does seem a shame, however, to talk about something quite different, when these significant questions are posed so sharply by this fascinating and important film...
...Fortunately for film-goers, Fellini is not concerned with floating free of "earthly and spiritual authority" but with real world, downto-earth men and women, and the problems they face, the rainbows they chase and the solutions they may find...
...I do, however, join with Padnos in admiring Robert Brustein's fine review of Juliet, though I fail to comprehend why, for instance, Brustein's trope for the film, "a huge helping of Italian ice cream, covered with marshmallow topping, chocolate sprinkles, butterscotch sauce and great gooey spirals of aerated whipped cream" is an exemplary way of seeing and discussing cinema, whereas my image, "the incestuous marriage of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue" is bombast, cheap, vulgar, meaningless, and onanistic...
...Not only is this bombast cheap and meaningless, but it reveals once again Simon's total lack of comprehension of the film...
...While he has accurately recalled that the Drew trustees averred they dropped Meilen one week before his teach-in performance at Rutgers, his observation that "these reasons are less than persuasive" is equally accurate...
...But what is all this talk of "cavalier manners" and fuel-on-the-fires...
...DEAR EDITOR SAUVAGE Despite the left-handed credentials The New Leader inscribes for Leo Sauvage, I still find Chief Justice Earl Warren and his associates on the Commission to be men of integrity, competence and credibility...
...I find the film a masterpiece because it is a beautiful work of art which accords quite perfectly with my understanding of psychological reality...
...but none of this has been adequately dramatized, and, I repeat, solutions of deep-seated problems cannot be had so cheaply as one big shock and one eye-opening dream...
...Does it really take celestial vision to answer these questions...
...I find Simon's writing to be "of the onanistic schoolboy, or Playboy variety" (e.g., "In New York, Fellini called on the publisher of Captain Marvel comic books...
...What rot...
...His social worker interpretation of the "moral" is that Giulietta "frees herself from her mother's authority and thus from both earthly and spiritual authority...
...To turn from substance to form, this letter "cannot begin to do justice to the disjointedness, irrelevancies, pretentions and gaudiness" of the review...
...One of the nice things about writing for this journal is the apparent respect of its editors for their contributors...
...Padnos' second paragraph is falsely set up: He omits the part of my statement about G.'s untying her child-self from the martyr's gridiron...
...Or does Simon think that leering (and irrelevant...
...an indolent mind finding refuge and solace in a dream world in which he found himself a learned and superior and mighty personage...
...With his musical sound and his terrible pen, he can tear anyone limb from limb...
...I assume that Hall would find this statement of the case unobjectionable...
...Nor do I expect Padnos to be able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant biographical data...
...May I suggest to Saxwage-and to you-that life is much too involved to be explained by the plot meanderings of B-movie brainstorms...
...Washington, D.C...
...While these reasons are less than persuasive in the eyes of many observers, both in and out of the University, it seems to me that Grauman owes both the Drew administration and his readers the courtesy of at least a perfunctory refutation of them before he goes on to draw the opposite conclusion...
...The most recent example is Simon's total failure to understand Fellini...
...Her husband's temporary departure is not yet the "absolute bottom" by a long shot...
...Do we then have to invest it with hallucination in order to make it explicable to a rational mind...
...Giulietta becomes free, he tells us, because her husband's leaving on a trip with another woman allows her no alternative other than coming to grips with her problems...
...How" is through the mechanism of which the snake pit is the classic example: She hits absolute bottom when her husband leaves her, and the shock snaps her to her senses, and she sees herself clearly for the first time in her life...
...In Cabiria, because the heroine is such a simpleton, this kinetic cure is almost believable...
...And when I wondered about the "purpose" of her liberation, I meant, of course, that the film leaves totally unclear what resources this mousy, dull, plain, middle-aged woman has for putting her liberty to use, even if she could achieve it...
...Legitimate academic reasons for this decision have been set forth at some length in a faculty committee report...
...Simon, of course, missed the whole point...
...One may question the effectiveness - or, more to the point, the sincerity-with which Fellini has expressed himself...
...But Giulietta to my mind is a greater film, for it is not only visually far more exciting, but it also deals with internal conflict, whereas Cabiria dealt with the easier question of surviving a blow from the outside world...
...Simon might benefit from this example of how to see and discuss the modern cinema...
...ACADEMIC RADICALS I have finally read Lawrence Grauman Jr.'s article The Issue In New Jersey (NL, October 25) and at this late date I would like to protest his flat statement that the contract of Drew's James Meilen will not be renewed directly as a result of Mellen's statements at the Rutgers teach-in...
...Indeed, his smirk before TV cameras a moment before his own fatal wounding was that of a smart aleck proud of the notoriety he enjoyed and the confusion among his antagonists...
...Sauvage seems to be under the impression that Lee Harvey Oswald was motivated by the logic of reasonable men...
...What relevance, except for the ogling paparazzi...
...I could go on...
...heaven knows why, or how, or to what purpose...
...in 8V2 and Juliet, it is the most flagrant deus ex machina...
...The film is at some pains to demonstrate that the spiritualism is the effect, not the cause, of marital neglect...
...Many New Leader readers may have seen Robert Brustein's highly critical but fair and intelligent review of Giulietta in the New York Review of Books (December 23, 1965...
...It is Padnos who "thumpingly" misses the point when he thinks it is G.'s spiritualism that "costs her her husband...
...Her achievement is that in facing the departure of her husband she casts off rather than increases her stock of phobias and illusions about the nature of reality...
...To prevent herself from dying, or going insane, or whatever happens to the people who never face reality...
...Or one might say that the film is too slow, too flamboyant or too ugly, or that Fellini is more entranced with beauty than with psychological reality...
...Why" has Giulietta become free...
...Where does Simon get this idea...
...But all the testimony of his life shows that his was a petty mind, distracted by a childhood at the hands of a rather gross and dreadful female parent...
...Fellini's story is about a foolish woman whose dallying in the unreal world of the 'spirits" costs her her husband, and the loss so stuns her that she comes back to the world of the living...
...When he says that G. here rejects "her fears," he is vague to the point of vapidity...
...So what...
...Because the final blow of her husband's actual departure left her no alternative-except the suicide which she was contemplating but which Fellini specifically rejects as a solution-to coming to grips with her problems...
...And as for "genuinely felt relish and glamour" with which Fellini is alleged to deck out spiritualism and sensuality, I only ask, genuinely felt by whom, Mr...
...He was armed with a revolver when he was caught in a movie house...
...Putnam Valley, N.Y...
...Not to mention vulgarity...
...Certainly Sauvage's own findings-doubts, surmises, naggings, smirks of disdain-break down by those tests which normal reason and logic demand of facts and reasonable deductions...
...I don't know what other evidence, what other research Sauvage would find credible if he cannot believe the Warren Commission's...
...Grauman chooses to ignore completely the statement by the University that a decision not to renew Mellen's contract had been taken through proper procedure prior to the teach-in...
...He bought it under an assumed name and with a Post Office box address-he was sly enough for that...
...What if Fellini, the author, rejects suicide...
...Simon calls the costuming and sets "the incestuous marriage of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar...
...All of the above can be argued...
...Some people seem to feel this is important...
...But Fellini falls for such simplistic solutions: a few prancing revelers at the end of Cabiria, a hallucinatory dance at the end of 8V2, and the protagonist is reconciled to his life...
...I might point out that Cabiria, which Simon did like, was also concerned with a rather lost woman (Miss Masina once again) looking for meaning in life in various unlikely places, and finding after a crise d'amour, that she could survive life's hardest blow...
...But how does such a devastating and witty fellow manage to miss the point so thumpingly...
...Hall might have better criticized my omission of the distinction between Genovese's remarks and Mellen's, i.e., that Meilen admitted betraying his animus in his classes, while Genovese apparently left his students technically unviolated...
...indeed, it is simple to the point of touching na??vet...
...replies: I see Richard P. Hall's point, but I fail to understand his strenuous rhetoric, in the first place, I should mention that the sentence that so disturbs him is coincidentally the only one altered from my original copy by the NL editors...
...It is her fears, not her mother's authority which she rejects...
...Unless it is simply that Padnos prefers ice cream to incest...
...What is there in her character, as presented, to give us even a hint that she can cure herself...
...From what sniggering movie magazine has Simon learned that "Giulietta is (Fellini's) embellished telling of his wife's own story...
...Simon...
Vol. 49 • January 1966 • No. 1
