Seventy-Fifth Year EoDrTr AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS I LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Money Collected for Viet Cong FILM FESTIVAL: Collection of Movies ere Opinions Are Free, 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MjCH. Troth Will Prevail NEws PHoNE: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. SATURDAY, 13 MARCH 1965 NIGHT EDITOR: LAURENCE KIRSHBAUM Marines for Viet Narn: Rose's for Mrs. Reel) AST SUNDAY a contingent of civil rights demonstrators embarked on a protest march from Selma, Ala., to Mont- gomery. They never made it. Before the protestors could get out of town, they were met by mounted state troopers. The police rode straight into the crowd. When the clubbing, whipping and gassing were over, 73 men, women and children demonstrators were injur- ed, 18 of them hospitalized. One was John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com- mittee, who sustained a possible broken skull. Before he was taken to the hospi- tal, he made a brief speech in which he said, "I don't see how President Johnson can send troops to Viet Nam but not to Selma." Monday morning 3500 Marines arrived in Saigon. But, evidently there were no troops to spare for Selma. THE SAME DAY Negro leaders announc- ed plans for a second Selma march to take place on Tuesday. The National As- sociation for the Advancement of Col- ored People pleaded for President John- son to send troops to Selma "to make sure there shall be no recurrence of Sun- day's bloody assaults." But the government sat firm. President Johnson said Tuesday he would only be deploying federal offi- cials to Selma to supply up-to-the-minute reports. Attorney General Nicholas Kat- zenbach concurred: "I would hope that it wouldn't be necessary to send troops to Selma." IT WAS NECESSARY. Tuesday evening Rev. James Reeb, who had flown in from Boston to take part in the demon- strations, walked out of the Walker's Cafe, was hit in the back of the head by a club and critically injured. Thursday, while Reeb was dying in a Birmingham hospital, Attorney General Katzenbach was asked if the government would send federal troops to Selma after Sunday's violence-"I have not recom- mended this course to the President and I believe that I am right in not doing so." Thursday evening Rev. Reeb died. The next morning the State Depart- ment announced that more troops will be sent to Viet Nam. THE TURN OF EVENTS in Selma in light of the stepped-up military oper- ations in Viet Nam suggests several frightening concepts about political pri- orities in the United States. Our concern for defeating Communism, preserving freedom and perpetuating the American ideal of equality evidently jus- tifies the concept of spending millions of dollars and hundreds of American lives in Southeast Asia. But our concern for preserving democ- racy and perpetuating the American ideal of equality evidently does not justify fed- eral protection for our own citizens in- tent on transforming the Constitution from a mockery into a reality. HERE IS SOMETHING sick about a nationthat can deploy thousands of soldiers to go off shooting Viet Cong elephants (the enemy, when they can be found) in the jungles, but can't spare a few hundred to avert the murder of a minister by a used car salesman in Ala- bama. The United States is maintaining a strange kind of internationalism-one that sees Communist aggression as the greatest threat to democracy and is blind to the necessity of upholding the demo- cratic principles that we hope to give to the world. NOW THAT REV. REEB has gone to an early grave, the nation has opened its eyes to a haunting reality: his death could have been averted if the govern- ment had provided federal protection in Alabama. But now it is too late. President John- son's yellow roses of sympathy were all the United States could do for Rev. Reeb's widow and four children. -ROGER RAPOPORT. To the Editor: T HE PUBLIC relations boys for the left-wing have done it again. By means of the usual emo- tional appeal to humanitarianism. they succeeded in collecting thirty dollars for the National Liberation Front moretcommonly known as the Viet Cong. This money was collected for the purpose of buying medical supplies-perhaps so that many Viet Cong soldiers can live to fight another day. It is perhaps of more than aca- demic interest to note that the Constitution of the United States defines treason as . .. "in adher- ing to their enemies. giving them aid and comfort . .." None dare call it treason? -Kenneth L. Yeasting, '67 Gary N. Barber, '67 Selma March To the Editor: THE FEDERAL court order ban- ning Tuesday's demonstration march in Selma was a safe one. However, it is noteworthy to real- ize that in an attempt to prevent further police atrocities and al- leviate tens'on. the ban has abused democracy and the Constitution. The restriction of free non- violent expression and association is totally incompatible with de- mocracy. All true American should and must indeed resent and ex- coriate this act. -Basil Lloyd Blair, '66 Flint Controversy To the Editor: "FLINT AND State Junior Col- leges," Leonard Pratt's edi- torial of March 11, does not re- veal the core of this controversy. Put aside the complications of personality, rivalry tradition and constitutional confusion-all of which are elements, to be sure. But then you uncover the central argument: the proposed expansion of the Flint College from an upper division to a four-year program is seen as a challenge to the concept that the 13th and 14th years of at least public education of all kinds should be provided by junior colleges. This concept envisions the universities providing the 15th and 16th years and the graduate and professional programs. This concept has a great many ramifications, some good points, some bad, some uncertainties, and some significant support as well as opposition. Unfortunately, the Flint College expansion plan has become a battleground for this controversy as well as several others. --Jack H. Hamilton Assistant to the Vice-President for University Relations Young Democrats To the Editor: MUCH OF the apathy generated toward student organizations seems to be caused by the fact that what they do in the ordinary course of events is not considered "newsworthy" and is thus not publicized in the newspapers. The Young Democratic Club, for ex- ample, is ending its most success- ful year on campus, yet no one knows what it has been doing. I wonder how many students know that the first project of Young Democrats this year was sending a busload of students into the 16th District in Detroit, to aid in the campaign of Rep. John Dingell against Rep. John Lesin- ski, who had voted againstthe 1964 Civil Rights bill The areas we covered on that day in Sep- tember won the election for Din- gell. I wonder how many students realize that, for the first time, there was campus-wide distribu- tion of campaign materials from Young Democrats. Much money was spent to inform the student body of the issues in this last Presidential campaign. *, * * I WONDER how many students knew of the over 500 people who signed up with Young Democrats and worked in the election cam- paign for ten weeks under their auspices. And how many knew that Young Democrats supplied almost 200 poll-workers on elec- ton day, so many in fact that we were able to cover the Second Congressional District completely and still send about 35 workers into the 17th District In Detroit to help re-elect Majority Leader Joseph Kowalsky. And how many know that fifteen Young Demo- crats received national awards for working over four hours a week during the campaign? Iwonder how many students were aware of the continuous de- bates conducted during the cam- paign between Young Democrats and Young Republicans. Very few students knew that Young Democrats contacted al- most 1000 Democratic students of voting age and either got them absentee ballots or saw that they were registered to vote in Ann Arbor. The slim margin of victory for Rep. Vivian can be partially attributed to this heightened stu- dent vote in November. AND EVEN at this moment, how many students know that 120 Young Democrats are working every week in all five wards of Ann Arbor to elect a Democratic City Council? Only the "insiders" realize that, for the first time, there is a Young Democrat ward director on the campaign staffs of all of the Democratic candidates, and that a Young Democrat is seated on the Executive Board of the Ann Arbor Democratic Party for the first time. It was largely our work in last spring's Council election which opened the pos- sibility of a Democratic majority on Council for the first time since the 1930's. All of this-political action, edu- cat'on and the social activities of the club-went by unpublicized. The Young Democratic Club is the most active and successful political club on campus. We have the highest paid membership of any student organization. We have a large percentage of graduate students and continue to be the most attractive organization for undergraduates. These activities are what we do in the ordinary course of the school year. We have no internal factions or sign-ripping incidents to publicize us and spread our name over the front page. When we do get pub- licized, it is for our endorsement of SGC candidates or for our par- tcipation in such protests as the theatre stay-in, which are also important functions of' tne club. But this is the price of success. SO OUR ANSWER to the stu- dent who asks, "What do Young Democrats do?" is always, "Where have you been?" -Michael Grondin, '66 Chairman, Young Democrats BOSSART HELPS: Merrill's Songs, Control Cripple His Performance _At ill Auditorium ROBERT MERRILL presented last night a program of pieces from early Italian to contemporary American songs. For a sophisticated listener from Ann Arbor, the program consisted almost entirely of hackneyed pieces from every singers' repertory. Eugene Bossart pre- sided at the piano, however, and was more the leader in this recital than the follower that most pianists are as accompanists. Robert Merrill-whose voice is in itself one of the most beautiful in the world today-has not learned the art of control. He sang almost the entire first half of the program with an unfocused tone. He also lacked the ability to sing a true piano or pianissimo, but rather crooned these passages in the style of a pop singer. His habit of sliding up to high tones was one I have not noticed before in his singing, so it may be that he is tired from this tour. Even during the second half of the program he never sang like the "leading baritone of the Metropolitan Opera Co.," the way he is billed. THE FIRST PART of the program was devoted to the Italian songs most people learn in their first year of voice lessons. Merrill's per- formances could not erase the fact that these were basically lyric pieces and that the vocal line should not be broken up to emphasize any syllable. Few performers can make these war horses enjoyable after the tenth time; Merrill is not among them. Merrill sung the French songs which followed with some feeling for text, but his enunciation was poor. He did the operatic arias with little subtlety, but with great volume on the high notes. Several of the arias were transposed down, so the audience, which was small, was spared any of Merrill's pinched uppertones. Merrill sang the encores from "Porgy and Bess" flippantly, and interruptions from the audience stopped the show occasionally. Merrill certainly could have chosen songs of more merit than those he chose. Surely, Barber and Finney have many fine songs we rarely hear. BOSSART COULD not have been better on piano; let's hope that next time Merrill's voice and program are better. -Richard LeSueur Shows Citeia Potential At the Cinema Guild THE CURRENT Ann Arbor Film Festival, showing products of limited budgets and unbridled imaginations, contains works of quite a wide range of quality, as is to be expected. While cinema may not be the only art form still alive, great well-springs of potential remain untapped. Robert Spring's two films were perhaps the most consistent of Thursday's second round of films. "Quiet," a funeral-parlor-game, is a gross travesty on morticia with quasi-Sabbot overtones; the photography is well thought out yet often amateurish, while the accompanying electronic music score is effective in its own right. "Annabel Lee," a series of images on Poe's poem, includes a superb scene depicting the girl running along a rugged beach toward her bearers-to-be, who are silhouetted on a dune against a super- imposed progressing solar eclipse. The closing scene is reminiscent of an Orpheus descending, but to a sepulchre. *n * * * "WHEEEELS NO. 1" by Stan Vanderbeek was a delight. An animated series of cutouts with appropriate traffic noise, this subtly funny, neo-Dada rhapsody on wheels inverts current art trends by making automobiles from faces, shoes, fire hydrants, etc. Growling cars devour one another, pseudo-Edwardian relics spew transmission gears, and the audience has a ball. William Earle's "Popcorn" includes multiple stills, often droll, set to interesting sound, but is rather poor cinema. "The Amazing Colossal Man" by Yvonne Anderson animates papermache hominoids made by grade-school children, to a science- fiction plot. It is pleasant, but hardly a major contribution to cinema art. ABBOTT MEADER'S "The Elms" begins well-sparkling rapids and ice-and includes good to superb splashes of color, but is generally tiring and repetitive playing with the camera. Sexual imagery was by no means ignored. "Mother," by Dov Lederberg, revolved about a woman and child playing nude; of variable technical quality and spotty coherency, the film tried to convince that the female breast is of more than "prurient interest." Two other films may not have been as successful. While Carl Linder's "The Devil Is Dean" alternated between a erotchy dream and a grossly oral jape. "Opus Alchemicum (Part ID" by Dennis Morgan quickly became frankly copulative after weak attempts at a variety of symbolism. IN GENERAL the films appear to be on a significantly higher plane than those of last year. Fertunately for the audience (whose patience has often been tried in the past) but unfortunately for the reviewer (who can neither rave nor revile), these nine films represent no extremes-either of unqualified superiority or of crude trash. -Gerald Ahronheim UNSEEMLY SOUP: Not Mad, Mad, Mad, But Bad, Bad, Bad At the Michigan Theatre YOU CAN'T PLEASE all the people all of the time . ..even if you use all the people. This is the not too funny lesson that one learns from attending "It's a Mad, Mad . . . (ad nauseum) World." Using the concept of "the more comedians, the funnier the film," and Mike Todd's cameo roles as ingrediants, Stanley Kramer has pot-boiled together an unseemly soup. Attempting to emulate Mack Sennett and the silent film slapstick era of comedy, Kramer has concocted a wild fanciful plot around a hidden treasure and The Chase for it. Most of the important comedians in American are included, either in starring roles or walk-ons (like Jerry Lewis, one of the disappoint- ing "surprises"). The result is both upsetting and slightly infuriating exactly because one does laugh throughout the film. * * * * THE FAULTS of "Mad . . . " are the responsibility of Kramer. (It is ironic that his brilliant film. "Judgment at Neuremburg" should have appeared only a week ago on television. For in "Judgment" one sees Kramer at his best, in "Mad . . .," at his worst.) Kramer is a skilled director. He handles action and plot develop- n.ent with authority and precision, each scene building on the previous one. This competence is responsible for the slickness and technical accomplishment of "Mad . . ." But the fact remains that Kramer is not a comedian, and "Mad . . ." ably demonstrates this. It was a cardinal rule of vaudeville that you never followed one comedy act with another, you always broke them up by inserting the jugglers or the trained seals. KRAMER ATTEMPTS to ignore this rule, and as a result he fails. Even the role taken by Spencer Tracey is allowed to have comic overtones (which are abruptly and crudely thrown away toward the end) when it should have provided a unifying theme and a central stasis for the comic action. Neither the brilliant moments provided by Jonathan Winters, the only consistently creative comedian in the movie, nor the scattered "good laughs" that do occur, can make "Mad . . ." anything but an aborted attempt at comedy. and a singularily disappointing movie. -Hugh Holland DOCUMENTARY: 'Mary's Day' Is-Finest Of Seven Film Entries At the Architecture Auditorium It was mainly a documentary about nuns celebrating a feast day at an all-girls' college in California. Yet, strangely, "Mary's Day" by Baylis Glascock was better than all the fantasies and visual experi- ments and the best of the lot at last night's showing of seven films entered in the Third Ann Arbor Film Festival. "Mary's Day" was entertaining, skillful, and in its own earnest way; extremely wild. Nuns carried signs ("I Like God") and decorated their school with giant cardboard catsup bottles, all in promotion of a remarkably "Pop" philosophy of religion. The film was as colorful as California. The photography was good, although not the best of the evening. It was sense and content, not skill that made the film better than the avant-garde "Everybody Hit Their Brother Once" by Gerald R. Slick and "Papilotte" by Benjamin Hayeen, which were the two other contest entries that stood out. "Everybody" was a fantasy of a girl in a bikini (with LOVE lip- sticked on her stomach) who danced around an allegorical mountain. The film had spectacle, humor, good directing, and acting, but tended to be unsubtle and was at times tiring. "PAPILOTTE" WAS a farce of high finance, with incongruity and dry humor. Hayeen has an eye for settings, presenting his hero in a graveyard, the stock exchange, and at the U.S. Treasury, with enough cinematic finesse to underline the strange humor of his-deadpan protagonist in these situations. !"c~r.r..A'nrrrnli fth r+Cn n 7 le ra nn-P a flm 'af:Ai I * {' t t" e rv t ph t Out To ,Get' GROUP HE CRY of "everyone's out to get us" emanated so frequently from GROUP headquarters during the recent Student Government Council campaign that one couldn't help but wonder whether the organization was composed completely of paranoids. However, on reviewing the facts of the situation, it becomes readilyaapparent that there was a basis for the charge. It was substantiated by a last-minute un- successful attempt to block the seating of three of the five victorious GROUP can- didates at this week's SGC meeting. Ranging from accusations of theft to charges of flagrant violations of elec- tion rules, the attempts failed to muster enough evidence to demonstrate that GROUP had meant to do anything but follow the letter of the law. THERE WAS ONLY one case in which the GROUP motives could be seriously questioned. This involved the GROUP ad- vertisement which implied, yet didn't ac- tually state, that all GROUP candidates were endorsed by certain organizations, when in fact some organizations had endorsed only one or two members of the slate. GROUP was first charged with the theft of a signboard belonging to the Young Republicans. They were acquitted when it was determined that the frame- work, which GROUP took on instructions from the basement of the SAB, had no markings to indicate any ownership whatsoever. 1 THE CHARGE of illegal distribution of campaign material through Alpha Phi Omega, GROUP answered that as an organization recognized by SGC it had the right to have posters distributed and it had dealt with the proper authori- ties to secure posting of the material. This, in fact, was the case. All recognized organizations on cam- pus have the right to have notices posted by APO. The APO president ruled that the nosters did not constitute election ma- apparently designed to provide IQC house presidents with some sense of authority -GROUP's explanation again resulted in the charges being dumped. GROUP SPOKESMEN asserted that the distribution was begun only after a reading of the compilation of IQC rules given all candidates by SGC's elections director. They explained that the distri- bution was immediately halted when the IQC regulations were made known. If, indeed, anyone is to be blamed, it is the SGC elections director, who neglected to include in his compilation the IQC rules GROUP had unknowingly violated. At any rate, the charge was blown en- tirely out of proportion by the seeming- ly publicity-hungry IQC presidents. The absurdity of the rulings allegedly violated almost resulted in the charge being laughed out of the Credentials and Rules Committee. AS TO THE LAST MINUTE attempt to block the seating of victorious GROUP candidates, influenced perhaps by Tom Smithson's blistering denunciation of the idea, Council refused even to consider a motion to that effect. The attempt failed, no more successful than any of the other multitudinous tries to scuttle the GROUP slate. In all these cases, what GROUP had indeed violated was not the SGC election code but the spirit in which it was inter- preted by the Credentials and Rules Committee. As explained by committee chairman Sherry Miller, the purpose of the code is to insure every candidate an equal chance in the election. Perhaps, however, the rules defined in this sense are themselves wrong. Stifling initiative has never been a desirable re- sult, and stifling initiative is exactly the result of the rulings in the code. IN FORMING an organization to en- hance their chances of being elected, the GROUP candidates showed a great s t y r 1 / if.Al k1 t tI 1 4 .+h I L ;A' I