Wednesday, February 7, 1973
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Page Three
Wednesday, February 7, 1973 THE MICHIGAN DAILY
PaeThe
tonigIht
6:00 2 4 7 News
9 Courtship of Eddie's Father
50 Flintstones
56 Maggie and the Beautiful
Machine
6:30 2 CBS News
4 NBC News
7 ABC News
9 I Dream of Jeannie
50 Gilligan's Island
7:00 2 Truth or Consequences
4 News
7 To Tell the Truth
9 Beverly Hillbillies
50 I Love Lucy
56 Zoom
7:30 What's My Line?
4 Festival of Family Classics
7 Wild Kingdom
9 Irish Rovers.
50 Hogan's Heroes
56 Consumer Game
8:00 2 Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour
4 Adam-12
7 Paul Lynde
9 News
50 Dragnet
56 America '73
8:30 4 Banacek
7 Movie
"Divorce His/Divorce Hers"
Part 2
9 Wonder of it All
50 Merv Griffin
9:00 2 Medical Center
56 Eye to EyeJ
9:30 56 Ask the Lawyer
10:00 2 Cannon
4 Search
7 Owen Marshall
9 This is Noel Coward
50 Perry Mason
56 Soul!
11:00 2 4 7News
9. CBC News
50 One StepsBeyond
11:20 9 News
11:30 2 Movie
"The Desperados" (69)
4 Jo hnny Carson
7 Jack Paar Tonite
50 Movie
"The Telegraph Trail" (1933)
12:00 9 Movie
"Rage" (1966)
12:30 50 Movie
"Man from Monterey" (33)
1:00 4 7 News
1:20 2 Movie
"Big House, U.S.A." (55)
2:50 2 News
wcbn
By BRUCE SHLAIN
Two suburban Southerners are
being forced to sodomy at gun-
point along a river bank by two
vicious hillbillies. One of the vic-
times has already been violated.
Now the hillbillies turn towards
the other man, Ed (Jon Voight),
who is helplessly tied to a tree.
There is a close-up of Ed, he
is wide-eyed and panting, t h e
sweat is rolling freely down the
sides of his face. Now a close-up
of the attacker-to-be, of his
scraggly beard and horrific,
toothless smile. The camera
drops to his belt, he begins to
undo his trousers, and then the
camera suddenly zooms in be-
hind him to Lewis (Burt Rey-
nolds), who stands poised with
bow and arrow. The singing
thwock! of the arrow is heard,
one of the hillbillies has been hit
in the back and the other runs
off. All of this in approximately
three seconds.
And then the pace is slowed,
the camera lingers on the dying
man staggering about with an ar-
row clean through him, the sound
'Deliverance': P urely
visceral experience of fear
9:00
12:00
4:00
7:10
8:00
11:00
3:00
The Morning After Show
Progressive Rock
Folk.,
Buckminster Fuller
Rythmn and Blues
Progressive Rock
Signoff
"DEAL IN UNNATURAL
SHADES FROM THE PSYCHE...
A GOTHIC MYSTERY."
-Time Magazine
Color by DeLuxe i
-ALSO-
The stars of "Goodbye
Columbus" the comedy
"MADE FOR
EACH OTHER"
* THURSDAY *
Max von Sydow Liv Ullman
THE EMIGRANTS
CULT.URE CALEJHWA
CAPRA FESTIVAL-Cinema Guild presents Capra's Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town at 7, 9:05 in Arch. Aud.
FILMS-Psych 171 Film Series shows Terry's Comings and
Goings and Bullins' A Son, Come Home in the Frieze Are-
na at 4; AA Film Co-op plays Adige's Mad Dogs and En-
glishmen at 7, 9 in Aud. A, Angell.
MUSIC -The Music School presents Theo Alcantara con-
ducting the U Philharmonica and Thomas Hilbish, con-
ducting the U Chamber Choir in Hill at 8.
UPCOMING DRAMA TIP-UAC Michemers present Woody
Allen's play Play it Again, Sam Thurs. at 8 at Mendels-
sohn Theatre.
DRAMA-Honey plays at 8 at the Vest Pocket Theatre.
ART-An exhibition of works by 30 university art faculty
members is on display in the museum of art.
WCBN-Our campus FM station broadcasts the first of its
tapes of the Future Worlds lecture series at 7:10. The
first part of Buckminster Fuller's talk can be heard to-
night; the second half will be broadcast tomorrow at
7:10.
- - - - - - - - - -
of crickets is heard, and then he
collapses, blood obscenely pour-
ing from his open mouth, again
in close-up.
This murderously-paced action
sequence signals the real be-
ginning of Deliverance, although
it occurs some forty minutes in-
to the film. It is the point where
the innocent-seeming journey of
four men on a weekend canoe
trip explodes into The Ordeal.
The dead hillbilly lies grotes-
quely among the city folk, and
they are noticeably terrified by
the body's presence, a reminder
of what they have just been
through. Only Lewis, the n o s t
athletic and courageous of the
four, dares approach the body.
The rest, Drew, Ed, and Bobby,
cower in the background as if
they were the confounded apes in
2001 and the dead body was the
'secretive and all-powerful mono-
lith.
Seeing as it is customary cine-
matic etiquette for the camera
to politely leave a dead body af-
ter the obligatory last gasp, this
scene, with its morbid, unflinch-
ing insistence upon accentuating
the hillbilly's bloodied counten-
ance, is part of director John
Boorman's consistent emphasis
on the physical aspects of death.
At every opportunity, Boor-
man concentrates on the situa-
tions which call for repeated phy-
sical contacts with the dead. The
hillbilly killed by Lewis must
be carried upstream and buried
to avoid a trial; the other assail-
ant is eventually slain by Ed,
and he too must be laboriously
dragged about tied up with rocks,
and plunged into the river; and
when it appears that Ed, Bobby,
and Lewis are about to make it
out of the river peacefully, they
are startled by the sight of
Drew's mangled body up against
a rock, confirming his assumed
death the previous day.
The graphic and macabre gor-
iness (some sequences could con-
ceivably repulse Lt. Calley) ris-
es above the level of the Porno-
graphy of Blood, for the empha-,
sis is at all times on the char-
acters' reactions to it.
To be sure, having the aud-
ience recoil at something espec-
ialy ghastly establishes a very
special type of identification with
the actor - he is then acting out
our own sense of horror.
This questionable but extreme-
ly effective device was utilized
in Catch 22 when Alan Arkin, as
Yossarian, stripped the clothes
from the wounded young Snow-
den only to have his insides sud-
denly pour out. Then there is a
quick cut to the contorted face
of Arkin, who is then given a
great deal of leeway, for no aud-
ience could recover quickly
enough to say that Yossarian's
frenzied, hand-biting response
was overexaggerated, or melo-
dramatic, or epileptic. I would
suspect that, without the rush of
intestines, the subsequent clos-
er scrutiny of Arkin might cancel
out the scene's effectiveness.
This type of identification is
especially crucial to Deliverance,
because the movie simply does
not make it on James Dickey's
intellectlal level, nor did Boor-
man tailor it to anything more
than the purely visceral exper-
iences of fear. Leaving the pro-
f"ndities to smolder in the nov-
el, he has concentrated on In-
volvement, and with success.
There is little else but the
categorical assault of direct and
immediate exuerience, which car-
ries with it the bare, simplistic
clout of naked tragedy. Totally
absent is the cool, stylized, de-
tachment that frequently makes
foreign films seem so cultured
next to their American counter-
parts. Boorman's "vulgarized"
approach is curiously apropos for
his subject matter, since the ac-
tion, occurring as it does in :he
wilderness, is already stripped
of its cultural context, and Boor-
man takes the reduction one step
further by stripping away m'ch
of the artistic context as well.
There is a severe paucity of
contemplative moments - t h e
primary thespian requirement in
the film is to know how to pant
and feign nervous exhaustion.
Jon Voight does noticeably better
than his three cohorts, but even
Voight is at times so exaggerat-
ed in his despair that one had to
wonder, does the smell of death
make him asthmatic, or is he
really having a crisis? B u r t
Reynolds also has a failing,
namely his difficulty in convinc-
ing himself he is not Marlon
Brando - but his leg gets hurt
before he ruins the film with the
macho stance.
Deliverance is, of course, not
the first film to deal with the
unleashing of hidden fears and
powers in an alien and dangerous
situation. Movies like Peckin-
pah's Straw Dogs and Cluzot's
Wages of Fear are of the same
type.
The films by Peckinpah and
Cluzot, however, are films of
linear motion, they move steadily
towards .some impending catas-
trophe or release, some epiphan-
ous, all-encompassing climax,
which will conceivably provide
some answer to a pressing, dis-
turbing question. Will Dustin
Hoffman as the timid mathemati-
cian in Straw Dogs stand up to
the drunken village ruffians who
are trying to break into his
home? Will the truckdrivers in
Wages of Fear stand up to the
pressure of driving trucks load-
ed with nitroglycerin?
There is notequivalent question
to ask in relation to Deliverance,
and hence no answer. Every ten-
tative or desperate act taken by
the characters to extricate them-
selves from their Ordeal proves
ultimately fruitless, there is noth-
ing realy tangible that they are
fighting against.
Even when Ed eliminates the
second hillbilly (who was perch-
ed on a cliff with his shotgun
waiting for their chance to go
by) with an arrow, his triumph
is double-edged; for in the pro-
cess he falls on one of his own
arrows and wounds himself, so
that he is left with the gnawing
pain in his side.
There is always another dan-
gerous stretch of rapids around
the bend, and even when they
have left the water, there is still
the suspicious probing of the po-
lice to contend with. As Bobby
remarks, "There's no end to it.".
The "escape" must obviously
come from within - from this
comes the impact of Dickey's
novel. The characters must some-
how harness the energy released
from the upheaval they have un-
dergone. In the novel, Ed, the
narrator, says that "the river
and everything I remembered
about it became a possession to
me, a personal, private posses-
sion as nothing else in my life
ever had."
The film does not deal w i t h
escape routes. The only intima-
tion of Ed's personal transend-
ance of the Ordeal comes when
he scales the cliff at night to
ambush the hillbilly. Pleased and
a bit surprised to have climbed
up there, he stands tall and
looks down at the river, which
pulses through the gorge with a
blue-orange iridescence.
But Boorman does not dwell on
the scene, nor does he milk its
beautiful serenity by trying to
make the events cohere neatly
into Ed's personal salvation. The
film's final image is that of Ed's
nightmare, of a hand slowly
emerging out of the water in that
same, blue-iridescent atmosphere.
The canoe trip is over, but
something indefinable, amor-
phous, and frightening looms in
the background. Only the hand is
shown, just a tip of the night-
mare's iceberg.
Boorman seems to be leaning
heavily on the premise that a
horifying concept is all the less
horrifying once it is a concept,
that to be left with nothing but
a nervous inkling in the pit of
the stomach is the most honest
way to communicate such an ex-
perience as the men endured in
Deliverance. Indeed, he has re-
jected any formula, any frame-
work - it is not just another of
those "cases" of nature's indif-
ference or of the hidden prim-
itivism in all men.
If it sounds inane to applaud
the intellect of a director for hav-
ing the foresight to remove the
intellect from his adaptation,
then a I can manage to refrain
from doing so. Boorman may in-
deed be leaving most of the
work, most of the perspective, to
the viewer's personal discretion,
but it does not strike me as a
crime when the characters them-
selves are glimpsed in that same
uneasy purgatory in between the
loss of previous values and' the
grasping of new ones. This is,
after all, the nightmare of De-
liverance, to be suspended from
the edge of climax, holding on
with the fingertips and flailing
the air with the feet.
the air with the feet.
Bertolucci talks'
about Liast Tango'
MICHIMERS present
Woody Allen's play
Play It Again, Sam
8 P.M.-THURS.-FRI.-SAT.
FEB. 8-10
MENDELSSOHN THEATRE
TICKETS $2 & $2.50 in the
Fishbowl and at Mendelssohn Box Office
I
TONIGHT
By United Press International
Director Bernardo Bertolucci,
eye of the storm of controversy
over Last Tango in Paris, con-
cedes that his new film'has "a
certain fascination."
His shocker, which stars Mar-
lon Brando, caused Bertolucci to
be tried-and acquitted-of ob-
scenity in his native Italy. The
film has been lambasted for
male chauvinism by -women's lib
in the United States and hailed'
by critics on both sides of the
Atlantic as a triumph of art over
what used to be considered por-
nography. Bertolucci can tango
all the way to the bank.
"When they show Tango at film
festivals 20 years from now, the
iudiences will think I made it
for a nun's school, even, in
Italy," predicted the compactly
built, handsome director whose
five previous films included sev-
eral flops and The Conformist,
which earned him international
critical praise.
The Michigan Daily, edited and man-
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area); $6.50 local mail (in Mich. or
Ohio); $7.50 non-local mail (other
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Mirthful! Magical' Musical!
WAL.T . .'
DISNEY5 - t
AI.L-CARTOON *
FO rURE :
Dailyot 1, 3, 5, 7, & 9 p.m.
231 south state
Theatre Phone 642-6264
"There are two types of film,"
he said in an interview alternat-
ing between English and Italian.
"In one, reality is in front of the
camera. In the other, the film
speaks in metaphorical terms
and the reality is in the camera.
I used the camera in the latter
way in Tango.
Bertolucci considers 'inema
the only real esperanto, closer
to music than theater or narra-
tive. Waxing poetic about the
tool of his trade, he likened the
camera to a womb-a simile
that recalls the roundish, womb-
like room in which Brando and
his co-star, Maria Schneider,
explore the outer limits of sex.
Bertolucci said he was mes-
merized the moment he took a
movie camera in hand in his
late teens. He knew immediately
that films were his future-and
his punishment.
"When I am not making a
film, I am miserable and when
I finish one I always think it
will be my last," he said.
Bertolucci wrote Tango. for
Jean - Louis Trintingnant a n d
Dominque Sanda, co-stars of The
Conformist but they were not
available. He conceived the idea
of changing the male lead from
a Frenchman to an American
"sort of 'An American in Paris'
20 years later" so that Brando
could play it.
"I didn't approach him be-
cause of his success in The God-
father because they were still
editing it and even Marlon had
no idea whether it would be a
success," Bertolucci recalled.
Once Brando signed for the
role of Paul, an emotional bank-
rupt who seeks salvation in bru-
tal sex, the Betrolucci system
went into action - long discus-
sions with the actors to help
them get inside their roles, then
right into screening without the
usual rehearsals.
"I will film scenes many
times to get what I want but I
never rehearse," Betrolucci said
almost vehemently. "I feel it's
useless. It is more important
what actors are in the actual
moment of screening than what
has been said or written before..-
'It is important for me to
know what is happening in ac-
tors. If Marlon came to the set
with only a couple hours of
sleep, I had to take advantage
of his paller and sleepiness. I
think this gives a certain fascina-
tion to Tango."
A sense of time and lighting
also ari vital to the Betrolucci
style. He believes every film has
its own particular tide, not the
same as a clock or a calendar,
but the time of the emotions. H-
describes the lighting of Tango
as attaining a very refined at-
mosphere not unlike that in
paintings of the late Renais-
sance.
"But time dominates and it
gives me vertigo," he added.
"My next film will start in 1900
and move through the century,
until now, until tomorrow, into
the space age. But it will not be
the surface of the moon. It will
be the cornfields.
"I will take the camera into
the earth, as if I were filming
an unknown planet of an un-
known galaxy, with the feeling
that some city people have when
they first come to the country.
I'm writing the script now but
the land will oblige me to im-
provise with its unforeseeable
wind, change of light, with its
silence so pregnant with vibra-
tions.
As for the charge that Tango
is pornographic, Bertolucci has
a succinct answer: "There is no
such thing as pornography, only
good films and bad films. These
acts are so natural that to have
omitted them would be more
morbid because it would encour-
age the audience's fantasizing."
STUDENT DISCOUNT $1.00 OFF
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Dennis Hopper's
THE LAST MOVIE
starring DENNIS HOPPER and PETER FONDA
SYLVIA MILES JULIE ADAMS SAMUEL FULLER
AND FEATURING
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON
"a frenzied, brilliant, love-hate attack on contemporary movies,
including his own, and our assumptions about them."
"BEST FILM"-Venice International Film Festival
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liill
I
I
"Charles Brinson as Joe Valachi
is honest, affecting and strangely poignant."
-Playboy
TheValachiPapers
INTERESTED
IN STUDY/TRAVEL EUROPE 73
TONIGHT
A Showing of the Film IMAGES
AND AFTERWARD
The Opportunity To Meet and Talk With-
* 1973 Faculty Program Advisors
" Students from Last Summer's Program
STARTS THURSDAY
Thursday is Bargain Day!-We will now have mati-
nees every Thursday-All seats will be 75c before
6:00 p.m.
PU w \u
".*X--T-V.,
I
" Pt'arrnns Fvnp~ripnpi n ea ;, ii'dvandA Tr~nvol
I a hrnnd1I