"We're For All Africans Named Lumumba"
AT THE CAMPUS:
Il Trovatore:
Bad Plot But T hey
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DAY, DECEMBER 8, 1960 NIGHT EDITOR: FAITH WEINSTEIN
HERE IS A rather perverse
(and loud) group of people
who insist upon classifying "IL,
Trovatore" among Verdi's come
dies, and they may have a point.
"Trovatore" has been called the
worst plot in opera, but all of
its defects are swept aside by one
of Verdi's most brilliant scores.
The story may be absurd, but
they sing. And how they sing!
Since its first appearance, in'
1853, (the anecdote has it that,
Verdi wrote the music in 29 days)
"Trovatore" has been the. favorite
vehicle for great voices.
THE MOVIE version at the'
Campus, however, disregarded
both the virtues of song and great
voices. Instead of Verdi we were
p'resented with a "You Are There"
travestry of grand opera. And
betwixt and between the narrated
portions, the soloists vied with
each other for mediocrity.
All events previous to the action
of the opera itself, which are re-
counted by Ferrando in his open-
ing aria, were instead narrated,
and the scene where Azucena,
standing in front of a roaring fire,
throws her own child in by mis-
take (verisimilitude is not one of
the virtues of "Trovatore") was
even more ludicrous than Verdi's
original,
* * *
WHEN THE dramatis personae
finally assumed their operatic
roles one almost wished they would
go back to pure narration. Leon-
ora's magificient "Tacea la notte
placida" in Act I was sung, and
at times screamed, direct 1 y
through her nasal passages. Man-
rico was consistent, although not-
nasal. Throughout he both yelled
at the audience, and was a quarter-
tone flat. Azucena, in a wig like
straw, gazed absently into bon-
fires, and desperately sought to
stay on pitch, but, sad to say,
failed. While the Count, who didn't
exude, much evil, followed in the
noble footsteps of the other leads.
His "Il balen del suo sorriso"
DAILY
OFFICIAL
BULLETIN
The Daily Offlciai Bulletin is an
official publication of The Univer-
sit, of Michigan for which The
Michigan Daily assumes no editorial
responsibility. Notices should be
sent in TYPEWRITTEN form to
Room. 3519 Administration Building,
before 2 p.m. two days preceding
publication.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8
General Notices
Graduate Screening Examinations in
French and German: All graduate stu-
dents desiring to fulfill their foreign
language requirement by passing the
(Continued on Page 8)
(moved from the convent garden
to his tent) was best left undone.
And finally, when you put these
people together, particularly in the
Act IV prison scenes~ it was
adequately demonstrated that two
wrongs don't make a right (note
or otherwise).
To be intellectually honest.about
the whole affair, the final scene,
with Leonora managing, despite
a healthy dose of poison, to inter-
ject "fuggi, fuggi" from the dun
geon floor, while Azucena (repre-
sented in the movie as sleeping, on
the dungeon floor) babbles about
her "hills" and "happy gypsies"
and Manrico complains about in-
constancy, all against a jutaposed
backdrop of two scenes (the dun-
geon and the hills), has to be seen
to believed.
-David Jordon
AT THE STATE:
'Nile'
Floods
TODAY AND TOMORROW:
Problem Number One
By WALTER LIPPMANN
THE INCOMING Kennedy ad-
ministration will inherit a do-
mestic recession, which could be-
come severe. and also an interna-
tional situation affecting gold and
the dollar. The problems which are
raised must be regarded without
panic but also with great serious-
ness.
The two problems, the one na-
tional and the other international,
are tied together. As a result there
is at stake the capacity of this
country to overcome therecession,
to satisfy adequately its military
and civilian needs, to continue the
policy of foreign aid, and to go on
exporting capital for business in-
vestment abroad.
If the Kennedy administration is
to carry out its commnitments, it
must disengage the two problems
sufficiently to recover our econom-
ic freedom at home and at the
same time to promote the stability
of the international exchanges in
an expanding world economy. It
would be no great exaggeration to
say that, except for some unex-
pected crisis of peace and war,
dealing with this complex of prob-
lems is of first priority in the new
Administration.
S * -
PERHAPS THE BEST way for
the layman to begin is to fix his
attention on the fact that foreign-
ers hold in our market nineteen
billions of short-term dollar bal-
ances which they can at any time
cash for gold or foreign currency.
This huge short-term internation-
al debt limits our freedom of ac-
tion-our freedom to finance our.
foreign policy and to deal with our
international probl.ems of recession
and accelerated economic growth.
To keep our foreign creditors
from cashing their balances and
drawing out gold, we have to keep
our interest rates higher than may
be wise in view of the recession.
Moreover, the short-term debt will
continue to hang over Is and
threaten us even though we suc-
ceed in expanding our exports of
goods and services, as we must
try to do, to a level where we have
a surplus to cover our foreign com-
mitments.
THEREFORE, THE KENNEDY
administration will have to attack
the situation on two fronts-one
domestic and the other interna-
tional.
On the domestic front its ob-
jective is bound to be to make our
economy more effectively competi-
tive as against Western Europe and
Japan. This will require greater
investments in research and tech-
nology. It will also require a con-
certed effort to stop the so-called
cost-push inflation brought on by
big business and big labor. This
will probably mean establishing a
policy by which for a term of
years wages in the key industries,
like steel and automobiles, do not
rise faster than the general na-
tional average of productivity. On
the side of business this will be
coupled with the policy of reduc-
ing prices.
Experts in this field, notably
Prof. Robert Triffin of Yale Uni-
short-term debt into an interna-
tional reserve deposit. The idea
would be to establish for world
monetary transactions an ar-
rangement similar tq our Federal
Reserve System.
One way to do this, as Prof.
Triffin has proposed, would be to
authorize the International Mon-
etary Fund to accept reserve de-
posits from its member central
banks and to give these deposits a
guarantee that they could be cash-
ed in gold or its equivalent. Prof.
Triffin believes that it would be
possible to transfer from their
present owners to the Monetary
Fund about half of our short-
term debt abroad.
The proposal has already been
approved unanimously in England
by the Radcliffe Committee on
the Working of the Monetary
System.
ABSTRUSE AND COMPLEX as
is the whole subject, it is not far
fetched and unrelated to prac-
tical politics. We know frot, his
book, "The Strategy of Peace,"
that Sen. Kennedy was already
thinking along these lines in De-
cember 1959.
"...On the agenda," he said a
year ago, "is the reserves prob-
lem. The expansion in world trade
has proceeded at a pace which is
outstripping the free world's pro-
duction of gold, and the dollar
has been forced to bear a dis-
proportionate burden as a reserve
currency. It is time that we con-
sidered in common a method for
economizing international reserves
which would exploit the new
strength of the pound and the
continental currency."
(c) 1960 New York Herald Tribune, Inc.
"Legions of the Nile," the latest
of the Italian imports, made its
way to the State Theater last
night and if nothing else its a good
indication that the American
movie industry might not be as
bad off as everyone thinks.
This particular film is, for lack
of a better term, what's known
as an Italian Western.
The Ingredients: wide screen;
poor color film; toothsome husky
Italian males and thinly clad
dollies; the usual unnatural, dub-
bed sound track; a few classic
characters; some battles, cheap
scenery; blood by the bucketful,
and a lot of laughs. Splice well
and you have "Legions of the
Nile," a half dozen of its pre-
decessors and who knows how
many successors.
The story of this one is quite
simple.,
Scene: Egypt, the court of Cleo-
patra.
,Dramatis Personae:
Corridius: Commander of a legion
day, a dance hall girl by night.
Antony: Tired of the past, in love
with Cleo.
Corridias: Commander of a legion
of Rome, sent ahead to try to sway
Antony. Falls in love with the
night time Cleo. (The good guy.)
Marianne: loves Corridius.
Augustus Caesar: Rome.
Assorted villians.
Lots of others: mostly dead.
Need one say more?
This one's no better or no worse
than its predecessors, even though
the color is better than usual.
But cheer up fans, things are
going to get better. Next attrac-
tion: "Girl of the Night," based
on the true story Call Girl by Dr.
Harold Greenwald.
-Harold Applebaum
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:
Article Misrepresents Algerianar
To the Editor:
WOULD LIKE to answer a few.
points made by Mr. Ait-Laous-
sine in his article on Algeria pub--
lished by the Daily.
1. Mr. Ait-Laoussine mentions
a. French army of 800,000. This is
pure flattery. Andrew Hawley, in
his editorial, states the truth: the
French have never been able to
send more than 400 to 500,000
troops to Algeria.
2. Mr. Ait-Laoussine talks about
"an, expedition for colonial re-
conquest" launched in 1954. There
was nothing to "reconquer": Al-
geria was under French control
at that time, and still is for that
matter, at least from the French
army's point of view. Had the
French government seriously en-
gaged a war in 1954, at a time
when neither Tunisia nor Moroc-
co were independent, the situation
in Algeria might be today com-
pletely different. The "war of ex-
termination" Mr. Alt-Laoussine
mentions (this for the American
public; he knows better) has never
really taken place. Let us face it:
the French army never seriously
tried to imitate in Algeria what
the Russians have so successfully
done in Hungary!! By saying this
I merely want to point out that
the French policy in Algeria has
never been as mean and as syste-
matic as Mr. Ait-Laoussine seems
to suggest.
3. For example he speaks of the
French as if they had "organized
a plan for mass illiteracy." If it
were true, this plan would be a
remarkable failure: Mr. Ait-Lanus-
sine himself, educated in French
Universities would testify for that,
as Ferhat Abbas and most of the
leaders of the GPRA. It is true
that Arabic was only taught as
a foreign language, on the same
level as English, and that the
percentage of scholarization was
different in case of French chil-
dren and Algerian children. Still
passions have been so aroused on
both sides, that it is often impos-
sible to use only one's reason in
talking about the subject. Let us
try however.
The war in Algeria is the re-
sult of the IVth republic weak-
nesses. Had the liberal "Status of
Algeria" voted by the French Par-
liament in 1948 been applied, Al-
geria would have evolved peace-,
fully toward independence like
ALL the former Freftch colonies
of Black Africa. But, the pres-"
sures of the colons was such that
Paris never tried to impose this
liberal solution; and it is the
stubbornness of those colons and
the cruelty of some of their ac-
tion which have driven the Alger-
ian people to despair and war.
On the other hand, there is to-
day, after six years of war, only
one obstacle between the GPRA
and independence: it is the fear
of 1,000,000 Europeans living in
Algeria. This obstacle, the OPRA
itself built it systematically by
its irresponsible (if understand-
able) use of terrorism against the
civilian population, Moslem as
well as European. Neither side is
pure: this wary is a civil war and
nobody is never quite innocent in
a civil war.
IT IS CLEAR that the end of
the war is in sight. De Gaulle has
finally pronounced the words "Al-
gerian Republic," and he is de-
termined to use all his power, still
considerable, and his skill to reach
that goal. He has tremendous ob-
stacles to overcome (in France)
but he will succeed. For Ferhat Ab-
bas, in obtaining Peking's prom-
ise of military assistance has man-
aged to "unite" Moscow, Wash-
ington and Paris: nobody in those
three capitals really wants to see
Chinese volunteers in Africa, and
it is imperative for those three
governments that a truce and a
political settlement be reached as
auickly as possible. It is also the
Ait-Laoussine's sentence: "We
have to prepare ourselves for the
construction of an independent
Algeria" shows that, he too thinks
the future is more important than
the present.
What he wants, what I want,
what the French people want (as
will clearly show the referendum
planned by de Gaulle) is justice
for Algeria; that means a free
choice of her own destiny. It is
already necessary to forget the
past and to build with Algeria,
Tuinisia and Morocco a durable
friendship based on our common
cultural, economical and political
interests.
-Jean Carduner
Asst. Prof. of French
Caricature .. .
To the Editor:
IT WAS WITH regret that I'
found that the article on page
5 of Wednesday's Daily, dealing
with the lecture of Professor D.
C. Watt,, gave a totally mislead-
ing impression from its headline,
namely: "British Caricature An-
glo-U.S. Relations," to its final
paragraph, in which Prof. Watt
is made to say that still, today,
as a result of Suez, "a lack of rap-
port and confidence exists be-
tween the two countries." If such,
a lack exists-and, if so, I for one
am not anxious to encourage it-
I fear it is because of this form
of misrepresentation, brought
about by the sensationalizing of a'
scholarly talk intended essential-
ly for a perceptive, specialist audi-
ence. It was bad enough for such
an audience to have to put up
with the intrusive efforts of a
Daily photographer to secure a
blurred image which can only be
described as unrecognizable.
NOR IS THIS the only ground
for criticism of yesterday's issue.
We might pass, perhaps, the ubi-
quitous, hoary horror of 'British-
December may be seen in their
fireplaces alternately squatting on
and saluting the Yule Log they
have 'brought inside' from out-
side? Or for that matter that an-
cient British plays are still being
performed as they have been 'for
the past hundred years?'
Enough of this, Sir; we come to
Michigan to enhance international
relations not to bury them, but
with its impressive customary
standards of truth and accuracy'
we expect better things from the
Daily than this.
-Peter Calvert, Grad
Perhaps...
To the Editor:
PERHAPS, if Mr. Roberts had
allowed himself the luxury of
attending both performances of
the Messiah, the review he dashed
off for the Sunday issue would
have been radically different in
attitude. Perhaps ..
In any case, the inadequacies,
real or imagined, which Mr. Rob-
erts was sa eager to point out in
the Saturday performance were
wholly absent from the Sunday
performance. I would like to con-
gratulate all of the persons
whose efforts culminated in a fine
and moving performance of the
Messiah.
* . *
I WOULD, at this point, expand
my comments to include the rest
of that motley collection of re-
viewers (the word critic, by defi-
nition, does not apply) which
presently compose a segment of
the Daily staff. I would like to
comment, but it has already taken
me two days to rewrite this let-
ter in such a manner that the con-
tents-are composed neither of ap-
plicable, butmunprintable, obsceni-
ties nor subject matter for libel.
Daily editors and psuedo-critics
take heed. An effective review can
contain elements of criticism and