Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Tuesday, March 26, 1968 Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Tuesday, March 26, 1968 'ELVIRA MADIGAN' ... ...ANOTHER VIEW By DEBORAH LINDERMAN Since it is not stylistically radical, Elvira Madigan is not an "important" film, but it is a surprisingly good one, and it has an interesting dimension which has gone mostly unremarked. Apparently, its captivating features are extraordinary visual beauty and its love-life choice. But the film has "taken a risk" because for one thing, its beauty could be repellently cloying, and for another, the legend of lovers who choose each other to the exclusion of the world Is stock enough to be repellently corny. The question is then, what rescues the film from incessant tedium, and keeps its lyricism from being stupefying? Compared to Swedish existential dramas of the sort made by Bergmann or Mai Zeitterling, where there is a hyper-fertile pro- liferation of torments and "philosophy," this film seems traditional and unadventurous. But, it is saved from its own hazards by its own kind of modest existential dimension. This dimension makes the film contemporary in the mood and feeling it evokes, even though all the pastoral beauty of shimmering meadows and golden glades seem to plunge us into the idealized green world of a classic Romance. The "legend" of the film is of a gorgeous pair of young lovers, a soldier and a tightrope ballerina, who leave their bourgeois and bohemian lives for the total consummation of themselves that they find in each other. They live, social renegades, on love and the earth's bounty. As their store of wine, fruit, cheese, and money runs out, the options of separating and returning to the world is impossible and so they kill themselves. But this "old tale" - the pathos of happy lovers that end up dead, of a love that dissipates itself - is not what the film is "about." It is rather an exploration of a state of being. The lovely pastoral idyll is, at the surface level, a corollary for that state. At another level the idyll is undermined by the dark center of that state which is destructive and already full of death. Thus the "suicide" has a forceful inevitability - it is not the sudden despairing act of lovers who have no exit, but the love going to the natural end of its own tether. Nor is the love perfect, and impossible only because it is an escape from "reality." It is impossible because it is too complete, like the voluptuous countryside. The appearance of Sixten Sparre's friend, despite his insinuations about Sixten "letting down his country," is not, I think, a crude intrusion from the bourgeois world, but ironically a way of "telling" the quality of this love. There are other ways of telling it, too. One of the first shots of the film shows Elvira holding a mirror for Sixten while he shaves. She deliberately reflects the sunlight into his eyes: the idea of the blinding mirror image suggests a love full of the need for total fusion, and an intensity that must spend itself in de- struction. Some more obvious visual "signals" use destructive in- struments: the pair makes love as Sixten holds the razor in his hand; a bottle of wine spills out onto jheir picnic cloth over a knife, a peasant woman butchers fish on a newspaper headlining the pair's disappearance. But besides these "pre-cursive" devices, the thing also has a strong feel of destructiveness. For example, at its most lush and , poignant juncture (Elvira eating berries straight from the branch), just as one suddenly rebels at the bursting opulence of all this, there follows a scene of Elvira scrounging for mushrooms, then vomiting them up. And the sickliness that has been ironically undermining the idyll all along emerges bluntly at the surface. The absolute global dimensions of the love are spoken by Sixten who says that, for lovers who live in the grass, that blade of grass which blinds you to the world can also be all the world. The premise of the love is that there is never any question of compromising, and its emotional and bodily violence overlap: Elvira asks how the gun kills, saying "I thought we knew all there was to know about the body." Her remark casts back on Sixten's making, in another context, a catalogue of the layers the bayon- ette must penetrate to reach the intestines (epidermis, dermis, fat, fascia, subcutaneous tissues, muscle, intestine). However, the lovers are not, star-crossed, though they are doomed. Choice, not fate, controls them. And here again the exis- tential dimension is always undercutting, and making us resist, a deliberately established "myth" of the full flush of summer. Elvira says about the tightrope, when you fall you fall; Sixten says about his desertion, a person can choose more than once; when asked by Sixten's comrade if she is happy, Elvira says there are times when one must not ask what, things cost. The love is all or nothing. Yet these "charged" lines and images are distributed in an almost random way beneath the fecund surface of the pastoral, and work with "unnoticeable" (one may be accused of "finding too much in it") counter-statements against this rich but con- ventional myth of the love too pure for the world. The theme music _ is Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto, rendingly, lingeringly nostalgic, but a thorough uneasiness pervades the whole film. It is no accident that the time is 1889 - the end of that century finds an affinity with now in more than just camp - and that the clothes which Sixten Sparre and Elvira Madigan wear are "coming back." i theatre 'Greasepaint': Just Buy the Album By RICHARD KELLER SIMON The Roar of the Greasepaint -The Smell of the Crowd is about three times as long as it should be. Nearly everything except the music could be cut, to the play's great advantage. It begins like a musical ver- sion of Waiting for Godot, and ends like The Jackie Gleason Show. If it could make up its mind which it wanted to be, it would make more sense. As it is, Lucky and Pozzo become, Jackie and Art Carney, and what started out to be about the revolution turns out to be about the boy scouts. The story line, by making a claim to significance (through heavy handed symbolism), opens itself up to this type of criticism. It alternates between a funny-sad clown show, and a stupid-inane collection of bad gags. You go away feeling that somehow you were sup- posed to feel sad, when you were not, or that you were supposed to be moved, when you were not. But you do feel bored. It really makes much more sense to buy the Broadway cast al- bum. Not only is the music really excellent, but the lyrics are clever. On the record you can hear the lyrics; from the Hill Aud. stage (even in the center of the main floor) you cannot. The audience left hum- ming the music - for that, along with the dirty gags, is all that came through. Although almost all of the blame rests on the writers, the actors deserve their share. Ed- ward Earle (as Cocky) was the one exception. His vaudeville range may be limited (a little Eddie Cantor, a little Jimmie Durante and a little Charlie Ch ap1in), but within that range, he was delightful. His line delivery was perfect; his expressions were brilliant. David C. Jones (as Sir) was wretched. He can't act and he can't sing. The role was quitei clearly created for Cyril Rit- chard (who played it on Broad- way), and it very badly needed him. So much was the part de- signed for Ritchard that Act Two contains a parody of lines evening in a British Music Hall. Quite by accident, it made the same point as John Osborne's play about music halls, The Entertainer. Osborne's play combines musical numbers, broadly smut- ty jokes, and a story about a music hall comedian. It makes a point about the- decay of this once interesting medium. The Roar of the Greasepaint follows this pattern. The musical num- bers were obviously vaudevillian in manner (and one, "Where Would You Be Without Me" in Act I, was exciting and beauti- ful). The gags were the kind that Grandpa used to like, but Grandma didn't ("As soon as you stop dating our mission- aries, you can start eating our daughters.") And the story fol- lowed the career of two men, at the sametime music hall types and symbols. But there the similarity ends. Where Osborne's play makes a point about lousy music halls, The Roar of the Greasepaint rather illustrates the point. Fleming, Co Schedule Op (Continued from Page 1) would be no further inputs be- sides the Regents." Robertson felt such a condition may be "awkward." He explained that one of the functions of UC would be to advise the president. "It would be somewhat awkward for the president to chair a com- mittee which is to advise shin." Spurr and Claude argued there; would be a greater "prestige" to UC if the president chaired it. Claude explaincd, "The argu- ment for putting tn-e finger on the president was that this was a matter of highly central import- ance." He claimed the position would be "symbolic" of TiC's duties. But no members refused direct- ly Fleming's suggestion the word- ing of the report be changed to "the president or his representa- tive" to chair UC Fleming said, 'I probably would not do it." en Hearing Fleming f>rther questioned the report's provision that all UC legislation be ratified by Student Government Council and Faculty Assembly before t becomes valid law. Fleming suggested. "this leaves a potential void" if one group vetos a proposed piece of legisla- tion. Gretchen Groth. grad, said "ac- ceptance by groiuos who would be involved by it (&he legislation) is more important than the time it takes to ratify" or the possibility of a legislative void. Robertson agreed, claiming that the major confrontations over rules within the University in the past have arisen because there has been no viable form of ratifi- cation. Fleming explained if UC did not legislate, the power would revert back to the Regents. Fleming said the committee had produced a report that "was in general, good". I 4 Pointless Urchins i1 (t ug Order Your Subscription Today 764-0558 3020 Washtenaw Phone 434-1782 Between Ann Arbor & Ypsilanti JAMES . HENRY 1STWARTFONDA I 14 i I Io TONIGHT Directed by Orson Welles, 1941 A I ". _: .at: .:: m IL 'L14 ORSON WELLES JOSEPH COTTON Is Loven...Turned Kill COLOR FROM CRC 1 :20-3:20-5:20-7:25-9:25 Last 2 Days Thur.-"The President's Analyst" "The swift and brutal biography of a power-mad newspaper tycoon, a man of twisted greatness who buys or bullies his way into everything but friends' love and his nation's respect."-LIFE s TATE I 7:00 & 9:05 75c I I TONIGHT AT 7-9 P.M. 1 DIAL 8-6416 "Perhaps the most beautiful movie in history."-Brendan Gill, The New Yorker. "Exquisite is only the first word that surges in my mind as on appropriate description of this exceptional film. Its color is absolutely gorgeous. The use of music and, equally eloquent, of silences and sounds is beyond verbal description. The performances are perfect-that is the only word."--- B o sl e ny Crowther, New, York Times. "May well be the most beautiful film ever made." - Newsweek.: THIS WEEK THURSDAY, March 28- SCARLET EMPRESS dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1934 Starring MARLENE DIETRICH FRIDAY, March 29- SHANGHAI EXPRESS dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1932 Starring MARLENE DIETRICH 4 0 I t I I If$ I