Dear Editor
Dear Editor The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. Mixed Review I was delighted with John Simon's "The Silent Minority"...
...for it is written-in the script by Burgess et Alitalia...
...Moses the Lawgiver presented a timeless story, adapted in part by Burgess, one of the English-speaking world's major authors, and starring Burt Lancaster, one of America's finest actors...
...His critiques have been the principal reason for my subscribing the past few years, despite my annoyance with your biased-and sometimes scurrilous-articles about the Republican party and its affiliates...
...Andrew R. Cameron Altman I have been mystified by all of the praise Robert Altman's film Nashville has been getting from the press, and 1 must say that Calvin Fentress' column, "Altman's Bicentennial Happening" (NL, August 4), did little to enlighten me...
...I wasn't eager to hear the additional dialogue cooked up by Burgess and two Italians" (note here how the meaning is changed by saying "and two Italians" rather than "and the two Italians...
...Philadelphia Edith H. Myers Moses I was genuinely dismayed to read Marvin Kitman's sarcastic put-down of the six-part CBS special Moses the Lawgiver (''Mediocre Miracles," NL, September 15...
...Kate Jones New York City Whether Robert Lekachman is right or wrong in his prescriptions for New York City's ills ("Banks and Beggars in New York City," NL, September 1), and I. for one, am not really equipped to reach a conclusion on this, he has certainly laid out the contours of the grim situation more clearly and persuasively than any other writer I have read on the subject-including the legion of reporters and commentators the New York Times has working on the story...
...Let me add one other thing...
...1 cannot agree...
...Nashville is simply one decadent filmmaker's despairing view of the U.S...
...Vernon, N.Y...
...To begin with, the piece seemed distinctly anti-Italian...
...Toledo, Ohio Edith R. Stillweli...
...Mixed Review I was delighted with John Simon's "The Silent Minority" (NL, September 1...
...I am not suggesting a TV critic should be a Bible-belt preacher, salivating whenever the Holy Scriptures are mentioned on the air, merely that a writer of Kitman's intelligence should recognize CBS' sincere attempt to provide its audience with something more than the frivolous pap the networks normally offer...
...Every time Kitman referred to the film's writers, he did so in a way that slighted or disparaged the two people of Italian extraction who had contributed to the script...
...But Simon and Pearl K. Bell make me continue to be a reader...
...with no more relation to the real America than Hollywood has ever displayed...
...Amarillo, Tex...
...and "the dialogue Burgess and his paisans added is jarringly contemporaneous...
...I wish your writers sympathetic to civil liberties could make it safe for me to walk to the corner at night to mail a letter...
...The city's struggle for solvency does seem to boil down, as Lekachman intimates, to a battle between the banks and the unions, with the politicians caught in the middle...
...Fentress writes that Altman "sure does slick it to us...
...And every time ] come upon New Leader pieces overly favorable to labor unions, I contribute more money to Right-to-Work organizations...
...More important, perhaps, Kitman takes the serious Biblical subject of Moses and the Ten Commandments much too lightly...
...Thus: "The new version was written by Anthony Burgess and two Italians whose work I am less familiar with...
...Surely, such a production deserved better than it got in the pages of The New Leader...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 19
