Page Two
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Friday, March 17, 1972
Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Friday, March 17, 1972
Straw Dogs
Michigan Theatre
Most people I've spoken with
seem to be generally disgusted
with Straw Dogs for reasons I
don't really understand. All the
complaints I've heard criticize
the film's violence, yet Straw
Dogs is not' needlessly graphic.
In fact, the film is much less
nauseating than I had expected
-little blood, no guts, and I
never once had to look away
from the screen. Furthermore,
the movie's concern with vio-
lence is secondary-its main ten-
sions are sexual. David Sumner
(Dustin Hoffmari) is an Ameri-
can mild-mannered mathemati-
cian who moves to Cornwall with
his physically oriented, alluring
wife Amy (Susan George). The
violence arises from the towns-
men's desire for Amy, their envy
of her husband, Amy's ambigu-
ous feelings towards David and
the villagers, and David's at-
tempts to satisfy his wife.
Admittedly; I too find Straw
Dogs revolting, not because it
depicts violence, but because it
approves of violence and views
it as an aspect of mature, ethical
men that should be encouraged.
Peckinpah's 'film's philosophy
is disgusting, not its rare gobs
of catsup.
-Richard Glatzer.
Such Good Friends
State Theatre
Such Good Friends, for much
of its 100 minute length, is Pet-
C lCQ~
QQ Q d
ronius Arbiter come to New
York. Like other recent films,
SGF satirizes the upper middle
class this time by depicting an
affluent artist and children's
book author (Lawrence Luckin-
bill), his. wife (Dyan Cannon),
and the friends and institutions
that surround them. But what
makes Preminger's movie super-
-ior to stuff like Diary of a Mad
Housewife is its unusual comic
tone-hard, black, and bizarre.
This tone occasionally falters,
more occasionally once Luckin-
bill enters a hospital to have a,
minor operation and Dyan begins
to realize how perverse her life
is, but the screenplay (written
by Elaine May under a pseu-
donym), is full of funny, maca-
bre bits, and the fine cast help
make this the best of the urban
life lampoons I've seen.
-Richard Glatzer
* * *
KMute
Campus Theatre
While Klute bills itself as a
hooker's love story, I found it
better as a murder flick. A man
disappears, his family and cor-
poration hire a friend, John
bars of Michel Legrand's title
Klute (Donald Sutherland), to
find his whereabouts. The last
person he is known to have seen
is a prostitute, cheesily named
Bree (Jane Fonda); they fall in
love, find a murderer, and in
the last scene are about to set
off for Tuscaurora, Pennsyl-
vania, where the whole thing
started.
This raises the obvious ques-
tions, how did a basically nice
girl like this get into the pro-
fession and why does she leave
her, big apple pimp for small-
town boy Klute, all of which
would make for an interesting
film. The trouble is that the
film tries to answer these ques-
tions with a couple of scenes
in her psychiatrist's office,
which tell us little. As a result
the film falls back on the mur-
der part of the plot which works
out well as the characterization
is there to create the tension.
-Peter N. Munsing
*, * *
Summer of '42
Campus Theatre
The all-pervasive mood of
Summer of '42 can be magically
summoned by humming a few
theme. Like the movie, it is
wistfully soft, lyrical, and ting-
ed with a measure of nostalgic
sadness. One can almost see
young Hermie running around
anxiously on the island, trying
to ignore his taunting friends,
getting a fleeting glimpse here
and there of the beautiful mai-
den, played by Jennifer O'Neill,
The only possible criticism
one could muster against this
movie would entail donning a
black hat and growling Bah!
Sentimentalism! Humbug! But
director Robert Mulligan avoids t
this pitfall by keeping his
tongue, for the most part, firm-
ly lodged in his cheek, concen-
trating on making several parts
of the film very funny in their
tense, innocent charm, as when
Hermie goes to the drug store to
buy contraceptives.
What Hermie encounters at the
age of 14 is rare. While his eag-
er buddies are still preoccupied
with feverishly delving into
books to find pictures of cou-
ples "doin' it," he has drifted
away to a distant plateau. In
that summer he does more than
just "get his end in"; he learns
something about the potential
for unifying sex and emotion
into a whole. And he learns it
in a way that sets him apart
forever from the old "Hermie,"
as well as from his friends.
. Bruce Shlain
Hospital
Fox Village
Cynicism is not worrying
about crime because you expect
it to happen. However once
you've been robbed there is al-
ways the chance that you will
survive with hospitalization -
the last resort. Hospital com-
pletes the cynical circle with a
hospital that kills its patients
in a bureaucratic quagmire, a
world where "It is axiomatic
that nursing home doctors are
wrong."
The film centers around a ser-
ies of murders and their event-
ual solution by the medical di-
rector of the hospital (George
C. Scott), alternating between
black comedy and good potboil-
er. However the events are all
plausible, and the plot moves
quickly enough so that it never
degenerates into a soap opera-
there are too many things going
wrong to have long stretches of
unadulterated angst. The tone
is cynical but not despairingly
so - life may be a shitsand-
wich, but if you keep on chew-
ing you'll eventually finish. At
least you won't starve.
Peter N. Munsing
Wide variety at Film Festival
The Stewardesses
Fifth Forum
A porno movie doesn't have to
be graphic to be stimulating, but
even so The Stewardesses wasn't
all that it could have been.
Though it's the only X rated 3-D
film I know of, it's 3-D usage
consisted of a number of feet
sticking out and some fairground
scenes; considering the sexual
protruberences and cavities of
human body a lot more could
have been done.
The non-plot concerns the vari-
ous loves of a group of steward-
esses on leave. There's lesbian-
ism, anal intercourse, rape and
masturbation, a large amount of
which is footage of ecstatic
faces with enlough gasping for a
nation of astonished housewives.
There's also social commentary
-a girl trips on acid (taken with
non-fat milk) and maturbates
with a bust, another gives a
Vietnam-bound soldier a piece
of her action, and there's some
pointless violence as befits a
drama of these troubled times.
The film winds up with a dy-
namite murder and suicide, due
to the sexism of an advertising
executive with a homosexual
past who sought a young girl's
acting ability between her legs.
In the best porn tradition the
dialogue is distilled banality and
the sets look as if they were
picked up at Meyer's Thrifty
Acres. All of which is to say it's
very funny soft core porn. Not
great porn, but then again bow
often do you get to see a 3-D
porno flick?
-Peter N. Munsing
End of August at
the Hotel Ozone
Cinema II
Friday and Saturday
A little known film by Jan
ARTIST GUILD presents
THE BEST IN BLUES!
HOWLIN'
WOLF
AND HIS BAND
TON IGHT
FRI., MARCH 17
8:30 P.M.
I.M. BUILDING
OAKLAND
UNIVERSITY
ROCHESTER, MICH.
Tickets: $2.50"
Available at Salvation Records,
University Cellar, and at the
door.
Information call 377-3030
Schmidt showing life after an
atomic war. A tribe of women
roam the earth, destroy the lust
vestiges of civilization and prove
we're all animals dawn deep.
Ozone is supposed to be a pes-
simistic, stark, depressing movie.
More than that I can't tell you.
-Richard Glatzer
* * *
The Conspiracy
The Conspiracy is showing
three reputedly classic films this
weekend. Man of Aran (1934)
and Nanook of the North (1921)
are Robert Flaherty documen-
taries about an Irish fishing vil-
lage and Eskimoes respectively
and are considered to be the
best of their genre. Rene Clair's
A Nous La Liberte (1931) is a
satirical attack on modern tech-
nology that predates Chaplin's
Modern Times and is occasional-
ly found on critics' all-time best
Sfolen Tickets,!.
Buy tickets from ' AC-
Daystar outlets only, or
from friends you know.
Call 763-4553 to check.
The following stole n
tickets for Ma rch 17
Alice Coltrane show will
not be honored:.
Sec. II, Row H, seats 11, 13,
12, 10, 8, 6; Row B, seats
1, 3, 5, 7. Sec. ill, Row D,
seats 6, 4, 2; Row L, seats
12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2. Sec. IV,
Row 1, seats 1, 3,'5, 7, 9,
11, 13, 12, 10, 8
Subscribe to
lists.
The Michigan
Daily
J
-Richard Glatzer
r
CAMP SHOMRIA
THE CAMP WITH THE UNIQUE JEWISH CON-
TENT BASED ON THE PIONEERING VALUES OF
THE KIBBUTZ IN ISRAEL
July 1st-August 13th
Ages 9-16
6 weeks-$3$0
3 weeks--$200
or $70 per week
For Further Information Call: 665-8576
i
- I ,,
BOX OFFICE OPEN 6:30
SHOW STARTS at 7:00
By PAUL TRAVIS
Arts Editor
The Ann Arbor Film Festival
is happening again in the Archi-
tecture Aud., with over 30 hours
of experimental, avant-garde
films made by people from all
over the country. -
Co-sponsored by the Cinema
Guild and the Dramatic Arts
Center of Ann Arbor, the fes-
tival has gathered judges from
inside and outside of the Uni-
versity, who will dole out about
$1,500 to the respective festival
winners and select about 12
hours of film to go on tour
across the country.
If last night's showings are
an accurate sampling, festival
goers can see a wide variety of
styles, topics and camera tech-
niques - all of which are very
enJoyable.
Last night's 7:00 showing had
nine films of varying lengths,
mostly under ten minutes, which
kept the audience's attention
through most of the showing.
The longest film, Dreamwood,
lasted 45 long minutes. Recount-
ing dream sequence after dream
sequence the film charts the
main character's wild search for
a beautiful woman through
woods and mountains. The wo-
man never appears as a solid
being, only as images nicely
super-imposed on trees and
rocks and in lakes. Dream after
tedious dream, he chases her
until he finally realizes that she
is in reality Mother Nature. So
he digs a small hole and screws
Mother Nature. The film might
have been nice if it had been
cut in half.
In contrast to Dreamwood was
the first film Construction Job,
a four minute film using Beatle
music and old film clips to gen-
erate a completely absurd at-
mosphere. Quick cuts from a
man setting a building on fire
to a group carrying lumber and
pushing wheelbarrows to no-
where, interspersed with other
The Michigan Daily, edited and man-
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Michigan. News phone: 764-0562. Second
Class postage paid at Ann Arbor, Mich-
igan. 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor,
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day through Sunday morning Univer-
sity year. Subscription rates: $10 by
carrier, $11 by mail.
Summer Session published Tuesday
through Saturday morning. Subscrip-
tion rates: $5 by carrier, $5 by mail.
t ion, rates: $5 by carrier, $6 by mail.
crazy antics provided a very
weird and very funny beginning
for the audience.
The second film of the even-
ing was a short special effects
feature called Meditations. Us-
ing vividly colored water and
swirling smoke that changes to
the resonance of a deep gong,
Meditation brilliantly explodes
across the screen with flourishes
of color, color, ever-changing
color.
And then came one of the
strangest films I have seen in
a while. There is a man drink-
ing lighter fluid, lighting a
match, and then spitting out the
fluid while holding the match
in front of his mouth. The ef-
fect - a blowtorch. As the star
of. Gemini Fire Extension did
this over and over again, a sliver
of another picture appeared on
the left side of the screen and
slowly grew larger. It was the
same man doing the same thing,
sometimes succeeding in making
a huge flame erupt from his
mouth, sometimes failing. The
point of it missed me but it
was fun to see if the man on
the right made a bigger flame
than the one on the left.
Then it was cartoon time
with Everyduck Versus The
Spectre Of Communism. Crude-
ly drawn, Everyduck fights the
forces of the Commies who have
already taken over the east
coast. Everyduck fights by pray-
ing hard and in the end he is
answered by a bolt from heaven
which knocks off the nasty
Commies. Duck then goes to his
reward in the sky - a ham-
burger shack. Absurd and some-
times funny.
The next film was called Ono
starring John Lennon, Yoko Ono.
and many nude bodies. Ono was
made by Daniel Seymore while
Lennon and Ono were audition-
ing bodies for Ono's movie Fly
at Seymore's flat. You get to
see John strumming a guitar,
Yoko strumming a guitar, Yoko
rapping, and lots of flys walk-
ing around on naked bodies. So
What.
Also shown last night was a
fine slick pseudo-promo for Sun
City Arizona called the Best of
Your Life. Shot on location, the
film has the resident of Sun
City tell you about how great it
is to live there. A fine funny
movie.
Belt was another change of
pace. Consisting of eggs moving
on a conveyor belt to the time
of a man laughing, Belt offered
some interesting footage from
different camera angles, with
different lighting, and with the
eggs moving at various speeds.
The laughter was infectious and
the audience was thus prepared
for the grand finale - the eggs
reach the end of the belt and
smash pn the floor. '
To wrap-up the 7:00 show was
a very funny film called Ser-
geant Swell of the Mounties.
Swell fights sissy Indians and
Billy the Creep, and he gets
medicine for an old man while
galloping across the country-
side without a horse. Billy the
Creep, with three sets of guns
strapped to himself and a knife
in his mouth, along with the In-
dian chief, armed with lipstick
in his bandoler instead of bul-
lets, were just two of the crazy
types in this completely absurd
movie. Extremely funny and
thorougly enjoyable.
While I don't feel entirely
comfortable in judging the qua-
lity of these films, I feel no hesi-
tation in saying that they were
all enjoyable and entertaining.
Ifyou find yourself unable to
sit through six hours of films
a night during this week's fes-
tival, you should at least try to
catch one showing to check out
what's going on in films today.
The winners will be shown this
Sunday and if last night was a
representative sampling, the
judges will have a hard job.
XCZVZCXVZCXCXCZV!?
The most unpronounceable word
to an English speaking person is
the Polish word chrzaszcz. It al-
legedly rhymes with thrzasez and
it means a may bug.
Circle-K Club
presents
O RAY SMIT
Sun. - 7:30 p.m.
3rd floor S.A.B.
U o-y<:y<-oe-o-
r" "
THE FINAL DIMENSION IN SHOCK!
"T HE COR PSE GR INDE RS"
"UNDERTAKER & HIS PALS"
"THE EMBALME R"
Like spending a night in the grave, baby.
4
-,tA41OIkel A __________ff.
FRI.-SAT:-SUN.
ow
Of
ur_
SHELLY WINTERS RALPH RICHARDSON
"WHO SLEW AUNTIE ROO" (PG)
"MURDER IN THE RUE MORGUE"
Plus "HORROR HOUSE"
-Daily-Tom Gottlieb
Ann Arbor Civic Theater
presents
ANTIGONE
by JEAN ANOUILH
March 22-25-8:00 P.M.
March 26-7:00 P.M.
TRUEBLOOD AUDITORIUM
TICKETS AVAILABLE AT STANGER'S, ANN ARBOR
III
Sunrise
4
214 E. Washington
Candles
i
.. ..
III
Leather
I realize that if the less fortunate animals
of this community are to be helped, it's up
to people like me through our Humane So-
ciety of Huron Valley, 3100 Cherry Hill Rd.,
Ann Arbor, Mich. 48105.
Please enter my tax deductible support as follows:
Art Objects
Handcrafted by
Sunrise
Communal Farm
a
Membership $3.00
Life Member $100.00
Name
Family Membership $10.00
Contribution Other $
Address
I
I
nonprofit conspir ECy cooperative
coffeehouse theater
4
10th Annual Ann Arbor
FILM W.,,FESTIVAL
in the
Architecture Auditorium
FRI DAY-Shows at 7, 9, and 1 i
SATURDAY-Special afternoon show at 1
P.M. Evening shows at 7 & 9 only
SUNDAY-This is winners night. Shows will
be in BOTH the Architecture Auditorium
and Auditorium A.
Leon
Thomas,
"Without question is the
most interesting, exciting,
and innovative s i n g e r to
come on the scene in many
a year."
Pauline Rivelli,
JAZZ & POP
. . . he must be seen to
be believed." VARIETY
"He should not be missed."
RECORD WORLD
CLASSIC FILM WEEKEND
-TONIGHT-
Robert Flaherty documentary double-feature
Nanook
of the North
1921. ". . . it is primarily the sense of rela-
tion to the people that is so keen . . . this
beautiful film was the beginning of the docu-
mentary film, the creative process applied to
real material." - Busley Crowther, GREAT
FILMS.
Man
of Aran
4
,d
1934. "a truly exalted work . . . undoubtedly
the greatest film tribute to man's struggle
against hostile nature . . . achieves a truly
epic auality, a celebration of heroic tradi-
tions."--Pauline Koel, BANG BANG
Nanook 7:00
Man of Aran 8:00
Nanook 9:30
LEON THOMAS-Brilliant vocalist-percussionist performs one night
only in concert with ALICE COLTRANE and The Contemporary Jazz
Quintet
THIS FRIDAY NIGHT, March 17-8 p.m.-HILL AUD.
7:30 Saturday
March 18-19
Sunday 9:30
Rene Clair's -classic satire-
A Nous La Liberte
1931
I
I - -easily amona the ten best films ever made--
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