Page 6-Sunday, November 13, 1977-The Michigan Daily
The Michigan Doily--Sunday, No%
FILM/christopher potter
Undermining overrated flicks
First of a two part series
HAVE LONG BEEN a nation of
list junkies. While essasys and other
less structured forms of human com-
munication often seem to. float about in
an indistinct, unsettlingly shimmering
mass, the mere concept of lists carries
with it the blessed weight of the
authoritative and the tangible. ("No
shades of gray, man-here's the list.")
There is something so concise, so or-
dered, so soothingly official about lists:
Baseball statisticians worship them,
government agencies would perish
without them, the Irving Wallace
family has gotten rich making a book
out of them, Obviously, they're an
essential commodity for a level-headed
society.
Well, shame and mortification-I'm a
list junkie, too. I'm also a movie junkie
who, like most of us, has periodically
wandered out of a theater wondering
what in the bleep all the critical fuss
was over the flick I'd just seen. So, for
the benefit of all unwary victims who at
some time or other felt cheated by a
film that didn't live up to its ratings, I
present my very personalized list of
some of the most overrated films of the
1970s to date. And, to squelch dark
rumors that I'm a total negativist, next
issue I will present a companion list
containing my most underrated films of
the same period (critics-do too have a
heart).
In order of increasing offensiveness:
1. Sunday, Bloody Sunday
(1971)-This British film elicited
almost unanimous reviewer raves
when released, but I found it a bloody
boring exercise that seems not to have
withstood the test of time. (How many
of you even remember it? It was scrip-
ted by New Yorker critic Penelope
Gilliatt, which may account for some of
the communal highbrow enthusiasm,
but I was unable to get even remotely
involved in this picture. Its linear plot
involves a three-way love triangle bet-
ween a writer (Glenda Jackson), a
homosexual doctor (Peter Finch) and a
young sculptor (Murray Head) who is
the object of affection of the other two.
'M CERTAINLY no enemy of charac-
ter studies in films-I wish to God there
were more of them. But to make them
work you need interesting characters,
and Sunday's three remote, vaguely
unpleasant protagonists are about as
dissociative as you can find. Finch tries
hard and almost succeeds in making
something compelling out of his part;
Jackson seems bored with the whole en-
terprise; Head performs-like a man-
nequin. John Schlesinger directs at a
plodding pace concurrent with the plot.
Ho, hum-anyone for Jaws?
2. Network (1976) - Television a
neutralizing, imitative desert? Who
would have ever guessed? Network
pounds the point home, but in strictly
ironic fashion: Paddy Chayefsky's
smirking, literarilly sophomoric script
could only be the product of a graduate
from the very medium he now so-
righteously denounces. There is nothing
much more irritating than a moral
satirist who himself lacks the
philosophical scope and the creative
tools to dissect those he smugly
savages-at least Gilligan's Island con-
tained no pretensions of eternal truths.
Chayefsky's tale of a news anchor-
man and subsequently an entire in-
dustry gone mad is half realism, half
surrealism, and total tedium. His two-
dimensional characters are played with
appropriate and unflagging dullness
(save Peter Finch, who must have
realized that camping up his role was
the only way to save it); the whole
misshapen mess is directed with
supreme lack of imagination by Sidney
Lumet (another TV alum). These boob
tube graduates may justly rail against
what television did to sap their own
creativity-unfortunately, the damage
done them appears to have been ter-
minal.
3. The Last American Hero (1972)-A
fascinating example of a film gone full
circle on the spectrum of critical
response-perhaps the classic case of a
metamorphosis from underreaction to
overreaction.
A MODEST little picture about the
true exploits of a young moon-
shiner-turned-stock-car driver, Hero is
certainly several cuts above the drive-
in circuit to which it was immediately
exiled after its release. Utterly ignored
at first, the film was belatedly dis-
covered by a small number of critics
who soon began to trumpet it as one of
the best domestic films of recent years,
as an accurate slice of "vintage Ameri-
cana."
Hero does exude a certain rustic
authenticity as it follows its
protagonist's progression from his
daddy's still to the glories of the track.
You get a lot of insight into both moon-
shining and stock racing, but the feeling
of "so what?" kept popping into my
mind throughout the film's slow unwin-
ding. It didn't help at all to have Jeff
Bridges play the hero-Bridges is a
wonderfully natural actor, but his
See FILM, Page 8
By Laurence Goldstein
Edward Field is one of a new breed of poets who draw
their inspiration from the black depths of the movie theatre
and weave their verse from flickering screen images. As an
actor himself with off-Broadway experience, Field is as much
a performer as he is an audience and poet. This Tuesday he
will read his poetry in the Pendleton Room of the Union
at 4 p. m.
OETS ARE MOVIEGOERS before they are
Ppoets. They sit for hundreds of hours in the
dark along with everyone else, drinking in
images and dialogue that become as com-
pelling to them as the city of words we call the
poetic tradition. Many of their poems tend to echo the
elliptical rythms of movie speech, and since the
Twenties, poets have achieved fresh conceptions of
form by assembling "shots" in a montage, as in Ar-
chibald MacLeish's "Cinema of a Man."
Research into a poet's background often uncovers a
seminal movie-poem. Vachel Lindsay's adolescent
poem of 1914 on Mae Marsh, goddess of the silent
screen, is the first poem we have on the movies from
an important American writer:
Side" and "The Life of
poker-faced attitude prest
interest of the legends
thoughts as an adult. TI
determinedly oral, as in
Woman" poem:
It sometimes happens
that the woman you me<
is of that strange Transy
with an affinity for cats.
You take her to a restau
on an ordinary date, bei
by the glitter in her slittj
and afterwards of cours
and she turns into a blac
and bites you to death.
I WAS SUPPOSED to play in the
weekly duplicate game with Alan,
but when I reached the club, just
minutes before game time, he was
nowhere in sight.
"Excuse me sir," said the club
manager, "but are you Mr. Par-
sigian?"
"Yes," I answered, still scanning
the room for partner.
"A gentleman named Alan called
and said something came up and he
wouldn't beable to play this evening,"
the manager said.
I was a bit perturbed, but I suppose
these things can't be helped. Since I
had already driven to the club;and it
wastoo late to find a new partner, I
debided-:to kibitz. Steve and Frank
lodked'like a good pair to watch, so I
pulled up a chair behind Steve.
As evening wore on, it seemed
almost inevitable that Steve and
Frank would win. They were having a
tremendous game due to the stellar
play of the club's undisputed cham-
pion--Steve.
He made 6 no trump on a hexagon
squeeze, psyched his opponents out of
a cold slam, and defeated a 6 heart
contract by underleading his
doubleton king of spades. When we sat
down at the last table, Steve and
Frank were confident of victory.
There was a rumor going around that
Jim-probably the worst, and cer-
tainly the luckiest player. in this
hemisphere-was also having a good
game, but Steve dismissed the rumors
as "ludicrous."
"If we take averages on these last
two hands we'll be set," he said to
Frank as he picked up his cards.
The first hand was uneventful-the
opponents bid and made 4 spades, just
BRIDGE'
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ken parsigian
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as they had at every other table. But
then this hand cropped up:
North(Frank)
SAJ982
HKJ64
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CQJ
West East
S10654 SK72
H10872 HAQ
DJ DKQ9875
CK985 C43
South(Steve)
SQ
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CA 10762
FRANK OPENED the bidding 1
spade, and East, whose name is
too insignificant to recall, overcalled
2 diamonds. Steve had too many poin-
ts to pass, but he didn't fancy a 3 club
call on that ragged suit, so he
doubled-the negative variety,
showing a smattering of points and
no fit for partner's suit. West, another
nondescript player, passed, and
Frank called 2 hearts. East persisted
with 3 diamonds, and Steve doubled
again-this time for penalties. Three
passes ensued, and Steve led the
spade queen.
Frank won the ace and returned the
spade 2 (a suit preference signal
asking for partner to return the lowest
ranking suit not counting the suit led
(Spades) and trumps; had he wanted
a heart lead he would have returned
the jack spade). Steve ruffed low,
and paused to think. -He~knew his par-
tner wanted a club lead, so he could
get in.to lead another spade for Steve
to trump, but since dummy had the
? M1j
$'
A generation later John Berryman published a poem,
which he later suppressed, called "Homage to Film"
(1940). It opens: P
She is madonna in an art
As wild and young as her sweet eyes:
A frail dew flower from this hot lamp
That is today's divine surprise
This night Ihave seen afilm
That might have startled Henry James
From his massive calm
Of discipline, or sent Donne
Into passion ...
IELD, IT MUST
want to use the
wants to replay the
nation. He rueful
adult life is worthy of the
fantasy material. Randall
"The Lost World," uses t
symbolic reference to his
Field were to write the pc
us what happens in the mo
the same childhood. R.H.W
of his volume The Day I
Barbara Steele, measures
to a star of gothic flicks he
Field actually takes us thi
stein's birth, search for a r
Variety Photoplays is so
further volume of reverie
titled A Full Heart, which
month by Horizon Press.
are immensely witty and
Is this the kind of materi
writing about? Field has
telling points about his pr
New York Review of Book
favorite poet. The movies
the theatres (before shopp
extravagance) certainly
dsay said they were-the
civilization. John Holland
poem of his volume, Movie
The unnamed film certainly sent Berryman into
passion; one feels in the poem the excited fervor of a
man haunted by the aroused spirits of his
imagination. "The poet is at the movies," Adrienne
Rich remarks in one of her poems, and she must have
spent as much time inside theatres as Lindsay or
Berryman to write lengthy works like "Shooting
Script" and "Pierrot. Le Fou"-twisting imagery in
direct imitation of modern filmmakers like Godard.
Many poets have found film to be the new
mythology, a' repository of figurative and symbolic
references serving the same function that classical
myths have in the past. Those who agree that Joan
Crawford is as poetic a subject as Venus should be in-
trigued by the work of Edward Field, author of the
best known book of poems devoted to American film.
Field's Variety Photoplays, published in 1967,
regales the reader with artful retellings of the great
movie legends: "Curse of the Cat Woman," "She,"
"The Bride of Frankenstein," ' White . Jungle
Queen," and the success stories of "Lower East
Laurence Goldstein, an associate professor in
the University's English dept., has published
poems about Bette Davis and Bella Darvi in addi-
tion to a book on Augustan and Romantic litera-
ture
I remember: the RKOC
ARDENandALDEN
SQUARE's bright
Honor them all. Remer
splendor blazed
In sparkling necklaces
Distances and deserts.
4.
' z.
Edward Field grew ur
theatres, memorizing the
countless matinees. Those
stories should perhaps be
a ritual that began man,
when the Cro-Magnon in
the caves of Lascaux an
paintings and retrace thei