Wednesday, March 28, 1973
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Page Three
Wednesday, March 28, 1973 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Three
THURSDAY NIGHT
HOFFMAN
BIG MAN"
Panavision" Technicolor
Sl
Of
sexua idy
Modern Languages Aud. 3
(E. Washington at Thayer,
Ann Arbor)
7:15 & 9:30 P.M.
$1.25
New World Film Co-op
I
By BRUCE SHLAIN
The new Andy Warhol produc-
tion, Heat, playing at the Fifth
Forum, is incredibly similar in
atmosphere to Paul Morrissey's
first directorial effort, Trash.
This is primarily because Heat
has the same off-handed style of
improvisatory, half-mumbled act-
ing and the same quasi-documen-
tary style. And like all Warhol
films, it is full of stock Warhol
women. A "stock" Warhol wo-
man is a pseudo-freak-psychotic-
nympho-eroticist with a naughty
vocabulary who is either physi-
cally atrocious (as is usually the
case) or strikingly beautiful in
an exotic way that defies t h e
aesthetics of looks entirely. They
are invariably suicidal and/or
sexually aberrant, but they all
have one thing in common in the
Morrissey films: they want Joe's
body.
Yes, Heat also stars Joe Dal-
lesandro, this time as a non-
committal, former rock star
who's trying to make it in Holly-
wood as an actor. While waiting
to hear from his agent, he stays
at a motel inhabited by a stun-
ning menagerie of flipped-out
characters.
Two brothers stay there who
have a nightclub act in w h i c h
they sing, tell jokes, and then
have sex on stage. When asked if
he really digs their act, the ar-
ticulate brother (the other bro-
ther makes him seem articulate
by spending most of his time
masturbating around the pool
area in little girl's clothing)
"It is, for me, the most enjoyable Fellini in a dozen
years, the most surprising, the most exuberant, the
most beautiful, the most extravagantly theatrical.
The audience I saw it with kept interrupting the
film with applause. This isn't something you normal-
ly do at the movies, but it seems proper for 'Fellini's
Roma'."
-Roger Greenspun, New York Times
The Fall of the Roman Empire
1931-1972
- - - - -- - - -
"FELLINI'S ROMA'
A r United Atists
STARTS THURSDAY-1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30
ENDS WED. IAI LI
7:10-9:0 And y"WHrhol's "HEAT"
MIDNIGHT SHOW-FRIDAY AND SATURDAY ONLY
"WOMEN IN LOVE"
Use Daily Classifieds
shrugs and says, "It's a living'
Pam Ast, as Jessica, is staying
at the hotel, too. She is t h e
young lady with the whorish, col-
licky baby sing-song of an ob-
noxious voice. Several P s y c h
courses could presumably be
taught analyzing her stupidity;
she is probably the only act-
ress today who is used because
of her personality's fascinating,
utter lack of depth.
It is through her that Joe
meets her mother, Sally T o d d
(Sylvia Miles). Sally, played by
Miles with more than just a touch
of borgeois pop vulgarity, is the
crystallized image of the "fall"
of Hollywood, a fall as emotional
as financial, from the regal, al-
most aristocratic days of Von
Stroheim to the inanities of TV's
Hollywood Squares, of which
aging Sally is a panel member.
She inhabits a huge, palatial
home in Beverly Hills, symbol of
the old Hollywood, which s h e
owns as a residue from her four
unsuccessful. marriages.
Through her, Joe thinks he can
make his vital connection and
make his way into the money, al-
though he actually does not ap-
pear to care a great deal about
success. It is not as if he goes
about getting in bed with Sally
with any ambitious zeal or arous-
ed desire, it is almost pure cir-
cumstance.
He happens to be stranded at
her home one afternoon after
Jessica, who drove him there,
has to hurriedly leave because
her lesbian girlfriend had taken
9:30 56 Naturalists
10:00 2 Appointment with Destiny
4 Search
7 Owen Marshall
50 Perry Mason
56 Soul!
10:30 9 Irish Rovers
11:00 2 4 7 News
9 CBC News
50 One Step Beyond
11:20 9 News
11:30 2 Movie
"Cannon" (1971)
4 Johnny Carson
7 Night Life
50 Movie
"Satan Met a Lady" (1936)
12:00 9 Movie
"The Pharaoh's Woman"
(Italian 1968)
1 :00 4 7 News
1:30 2 Movie
"Suicide Commandos"
(Italian 1968)
3:00 2 TV High School
3:30 2 News
wcbn
89.5 fm
pills. So Joe goes about the se-
duction as if it were an accident,
just as Morrissey's style of direc-
tion proceeds by "accident" as
if he were eavesdropping.
Dallesandro is not a great ac-
tor, but his screen personality is
carefully assumed. He cares very
little for what happens to him,
but the sense of a strong and
unreachable emotional reserve is
always there. In both Trash and
Heat he is an apathetic charact-
er who finally reveals his hos-
tility and "draws the line" be-
fore he becomes lobotomized.
In Trash he finally rebelled
against the social worker who in-
sisted on trading the govern-
ment's money for the Joan Craw-
ford shoes; in Heat, Joe's one
move of self-assertion is his
final word of obscenity for Sal-
ly, who wants to keep him in the
way Gloria Swanson entrapped
Bill Holden in Sunset Boulevard
and finally murdered him. Whet
Sally tries to shoot Joe in the
movie's climax, the gun is not
loaded. She throws it disgus'edly
into the pool, while Joe looks
off into the distance, apparent-
ly bored with the whole busi-
ness.
While Trash flirted frequently
with morbidity, Heat is more
of a comic film. Joe is not on
heroin or impotent, as he was in
Trash, and so to identify with
his complacence is not as trag-
ically suffocating. Joe has noth-
ing to lose, he is totally at ease
always, guiltless, biding h i s
time.
The slapstick sexuality that
surrounds his life, the psycholo-
gical slapstick of the Warhol
women - all revolve around Joe,
to the extent that his listless lack
of involvement stands out like a
beacon affirming sanity.
His deadpan manner is remin-
iscent of Buster Keaton, but while
Keaton's stoic expressions were
accompanied by flailing arms and
legs, Joe's body is as lackadais-
ical as his countenance. Dalle-
sandro combines a physical en-
nui with his deadpan without re-
sembling a zombie. Although so
much of his life is an immersion
in the physical, in indiscriminate
sex, he is at the same time
somewhat corpse-like. His unen-
thusiastic physical stances make
his "life of the body" a sad
contradiction.
Morrissey's exploitation of the
more intensely psychotic fringes
of the pop scene recalls the fe-
tid sensuality of Fellini's La
Dolce Vita in which Fellini aim-
ed to "put a thermometer to a
sick world," knowing full well
he was taking his calibrations in
the fever zone of freak sexual-
ity.
Morrissey escapes the inevit-
able monotony of revealing layer
upon layer of degeneracy by
focusing on Dallesandro, who is
used as the thermometer, as the
frame of reference, rather than
relying on the viewer's queasy
stomach and sense of moral out-
rage. And Joe is a thermometer
that often refuses to register, that
refuses to admit his immersion in
a world of distortion, a refusal
that maintains the precarious
and unique dramatic balance of
Heat.
I am extremely wary of ele-
vating Warhol or Morrissey to
the level of Erudite Social Com-
mentators, for they really com-
ment very little. Like their
Christ-figure Dallesandro, they
prefer to shrug their shoulders.
Their own sense of -alienation,
however, is colored by an essen-
tially comic vision that trans-
cends their artistic limits.
It is a comic vision without
punchlines, without release,
Beckettian even, yet with Beck-
ett's sense of doom replaced by a
rich panorama -of frantic activ-
ity, a sexual and psychological
circus without a ringmaster.
SprinA
Daily Photo by TOM GOTTLIEB
Balinese Theater
Dancers perform the Topeng, the masked dance theater of Bali,
last night in Rackham.
Lrsteen: Shades"
4
of. Dylan, Morrison
to,
tonight
6:00 2 4 7 News
9 Courtship of Eddie's Father
50 Flintstones
56 Operation Second Chance
6:30 2 CBS News
4 NBC News
7 ABC News
9 1I Dream of Jeannie
50 Gilligan's Island
56 Making Things Grow
7:00 2 Truth or Consequences
4 News
7 To Tell the Truth
9 Beverly Hillbillies
56 I Love Lucy
56 Zoom
7:30 1973 Tigers
4 A Festival of Family Classics
7 Wild Kingdom
9 News
50 Hogan's Heroes
56 Consumer Game
8:00 2 Dr. Seuss Cartoon
4 Adam-12
7 Paul Lynde
9 NHL Hockey
50 Dragnet
56 America '73
8:30 2 Selfish Giant
4 Madigan
7 Movie~
"RubyGentry" (1952)
50 Merv Griffin
9:00 2 Mitz . The First Time
56 Festival Films
Prize-winning student films
By HARRY HAMMITT
Bruce Springsteen's recent re-
lease with the intriguing title
Greeting From Asbury Park,
N. J. (Columbia KC 31903) is an
album that should not be passed
by lightly. Even though it must
be admitted that Springsteen is
at present an obscure performer,
this album should more than es-
tablish him as a major new tal-
ent.
As the first and major impres-
sion, Springsteen appears to be
a very talented home-grown ver-
sion of Van Morrison. He doesn't
sing as well as Morrison by any
means, although he does sound
a bit like him a lot of the time.
He has a bit of the dramatic bite
of Morrison, but he also has the
carelessness of Dylan and a
9:00'
12:001
4:001
7 :00
8:00
11:001
3:00
The Morning After
Progressive Rock
Folk
Talk Back
Jazz
Progressive Rock
Sign-off
M{
cable tv
channel 3
3:00 Pixanne
4:00 Today's 'Woman (The Prine of
Miss Jean Brodie", upcoming
Ann Arbor Civic Theatre Pro-
duction previewed)
4:30 Something Else
5:00 Stratosphere Playhouse
5:30 Local News/Town Crier
6:00 Consumer Forum (How To Bud-
get grocery shopping)
6:30 NCAA Super Sports
7:00 Community Dialogue
(City Council members dis-
last Monday's meeting)
CULT"Ujr",CALE1NA
FILM-Cinema Guild presents Le Roy's Little Caesar in Arch
Aud. at 7, 9:05 tonight. Ann Arbor Film Co-op presents
Bakshi's Fritz the Cat in Aud. A Angell at 7, 9 tonight.
Pysch 171 Film Series presents The Sixties and Africaner
in the UGLI Multipurpose Rm. at 4. Asian Studies Film:
The Year of the Pig in 1025 Angell at 7, 9:80 tonight.
Women's Studies Film Series presents The Salt of the
Earth in the UGLI Multi-purpose Rm. at 7 tonight.
SCHOOL OF MUSIC-U Concert Band, Sydney Hodkinson,
conductor in Hill Aud. at 8 tonight.
touch of the drawl of Leon Rus-
sell.
The album was cut in a small
studio in New York and the band
that Springsteen uses is complete-
ly made up of unknowns, with
the exception of Richard Davis
on string bass on one number;
coincidentally, Davis also played
on Morrison's first solo, Astral
Weeks. With this band in tow,
Springsteen produces an album
that is slightly shoddy in a musi-
cal sense, but this shoddiness
adds to the dramatic appeal of
the album and gives the music
an earthy quality that is often
missing in slickly produced al-
bums.
The band is basically small and
simple. Springsteen plays acous-
tic and electric guitar, harmoni-
ca, and bass on two numbers.
Vincent Lopez plays drums, Clar-
ence Clemmons plays sax and
does background vocals, Gary
Tallent plays bass, David San-
cions plays piano and organ, and
Harold Wheeler plays piano on
one tune. It is the prevalent
drumming of Lopez that keeps
the band together with a strong,
simple, and sometimes sloppy,
style.
There are several slow songs
on the album, both of which
f a 1 t e r, particularly "Mary
Oueen of Arkansas" w h e r e
Springsteen plays some disturb-
ingly choppy acoustic rhythm
which gives the song a lack of
solidity. Over this choppy rhythm
Springsteen sings hesitantly and
then plays some extremely sim-
ple harmonica which may even
be a cut below Dylan. Otherwise,
the songs remain at a constant
moderate tempo which seems to
mark a lot of folk-rock and its
derivatives.
As for the melodic content of
the songs, they all rely on a
relatively simple chord progres-
sion with an equally simple
bridge which is often used to con-
trast in terms of tempo of inten-
sity with the main body of the
song.
In general, his songs come out
of the same vein as Morrison's
"Caravan," "Glad Tidings,"
and, particularly, "Wild Night."
None of the songs have the tight
precision of "Wild Night," but
they do have the frenetic feeling
that Morrison puts across in that
song. Of particular note is
Springsteen's first song, "Blind-
ed by the Light," where Spring-
steen's quick rhythm guitarwork
gives the song a really dynamic
quality. Practically any of the
other songs on the album are
about equally good, especially
"For You" and "Spirit in the
Night."
Not only are the tunes good,
but Springsteen reveals that he
is a most capable lyricist. His
lyrics are close in spirit with
those of Morrison with a greater
variety of subject matter, but
they also approach, at times, the
quality of early Dylan. On "Lost
in the Flood" and "It's Hard to
Be a Saint in the City," Spring-
steen spills out image after im-
age in a studded paranoic vein.
Finally, on "Blinded by the
Light," Springsteen uses a series
of rhymed images that he tosses
off rapidly, rivaling Dylan's, use
of the same device in "Highway
61 Revisited."
This is a most impressive de-
but. Springsteen shows that not
only is he a good musician-per-
former, but an excellent lyricist.
With an album like this under
his belt, perhaps he will get a
chance to do some more record-
ing and get some of the attention
which he merits.
Have a flair for
artistic writing?
Ifyou are inteest-
poetry, and music,
drama. dance, film,
or writing feature
stories a b o u t the
arts: Contact Arts
Editor, c/o The
Michigan Daily.
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They used every passion in their incredible duel!
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