)aturdoy, July 164 1971 THE MICHIGAN DAILY fitted other flying esect.- orners, It. St told gs con- length plane, tetched shy of attend- ed the above wind. pec- Detroit stown was round. Detroit reach lan- Lindy's dry in our shadow, much like Lindbergh used to call out for directions. She ignored us. "Just another noisy plane," she prob- ably thought. Jobst brought the plane in for a low pass at the spectators, saluting them by tilting the wings side to side as we came in. The controls were stiff. Henry Haigh, one of the nine men alter- nately piloting the craft, told reporters the replica was "Work to fly," but a very safe craft. The original, which Lindbergh helped the Ryan corporation to custom design, was intentionally difficult to handle so, when trying to keep the plane level across the ocean, he would not fall asleep at the_ controls. The first "Spirit" cost slightly less than $12,000 to build; the replica cost about $90,000, donated by many of the same spon- sors Lindbergh had. Modern two passenger planes cost less than the original "Spirit." HIS TRANS-ATLANTIC flight made an event in aviation history second to none. In 1953, 26 years afterward, Lindbergh wrote in The Spirit of St. Louis, "We have accom- plished our objectives, passed beyond them. 50th We actually live, today, in our dreams of yesterday; and living in those dreams, dream on." Now, his dreams of promoting aviation have surpassed one hundredfold in SO short years; his history making jaunts are ver- itably forgotten in the shadow of jumbo jets, moon shots and space shuttles. We touched down just rough enough to remind the inexperienced passenger we landed much too soon. Likq a little kid at a fair, I would have liked to ask for "one more time, just one more time." Lindbergh often took to his plane to get away from the days on the ground; it was a way to make the world bigger, and en- tirely his own. Today, we take the travel he pioneered' for granted, using jet transport as a means of making our worlds selfishly smaller. The "Spirit" stopped; I disconnected the headset, and unfastened the seat belt. Tak- ing the long step to the ground from the fiselhge, I saw the silver cross swinging slightly with the vibrations of the plane. Linda Willcox is the Daily's Editorial Director. Page Seven Sce enings by CHRISTOPHER POTTER "ATU RLAY MAGAZt NE THE CINEMATIC AGE OF IMITATION slogs drearily but solvently onward. Peter Bench- ley's The Deep is the latest and most economically elegant pro- duct of the ongoing formula repition, and is reportedly doing socko business across the coun- try (although perhaps not in Ann Arbor, where I stretched out last Monday amidst a one- fourth full, apparently non-en- raptured audience). It seems an unwritten law in the po-novel-to-pop-movie world that any writer who manages to churn out a genuine dual-media bonanza is not only expected but virtually obligated to subse- quently rearrange his meagre group of plot-shocks into an equally marketable sequel. And since Benchley fathered the book-to-film lollapalooza of them all, Jaws, one could easily en- vision hoardes of slobbering, manna-mad publishers and pro- ducers threatening him with lawsuits, blacklisting or tfie rack if he failed to come through with a comparable pot of gold spinoff. Well, Benchley has tried duti- fully and hard, regurgitating his literary bag of tricks into a novel and screenplay replete with cheap thrills, pseudo-ero- tics and determinedly one-di- mensional characters all aimed straightarrow at the viewers' senses with minimal disturbance to their brains. The Deep is geared to knee- jerk reactions, and the fact that it more often than not succeeds to that end fails to obscure the sad truth-that another Jaws it definitely ain't. THE DEEP'S storyline is at once multi-leveled and simplis- tic. While skindivini off the Bermuda coast, a young New York couple (Jacqueline "Biset and Nic/ Nolte) stumbles onto an engrossing dual find-a Span- ish dubloon and an ampule of morphine, the products of a pair of side-by-side shipwrecks more tha ntwo centuries re- moved from each other. Motivated by the lure of buried treasure, the two ally themselves with a noted diver- adventurer - recluse (R o b e r t Shaw) against the evil machina- tions of a Haitian gangster bent on recovering the ,thousands more ampules resting on the ocean floor. And that's the es- sential conflict, the remainder of the film-will the good guys find the hidden treasure while keeping the morphine away from the bad guys? Any addict of formula films will hardly need a hint at the answer. Despite the expected slick production values and some truly glorious underwater se- quences, The Deep's focus be- comes blurred both morally and stylistically when contrast- ed with Jaws. In the former, Benchley managed - however crudly and inadvertently - to touch a primal nerve in the col- lective human psyche: The shark as nightmare, as fear of the dark, as symbol of hys- teric menace lurking around every unknown corner. It would be an arduous assignment for anyone to top what amounted to an aquatic view of Satan, and The Deep's reliance sim- ply pales by comparison. JAWS ALSO t BENEFITED crucially from the genius of di- rector Steven Spielberg, who managed to tie Benchley's fragments together into some- thing resembling film art. The Deep's Peter Yates, a solid, workmanlike filmmaker, exhib- its no more sense of vision and scope than does Benchley's us- ually turgid prose. And while Jaws meticulously built and built in tension until its final apocalyptic explosion, The Deep never seems to generate any real nervousness at all - it goes off in too many directions, yields too many false alarms, too many shocks for shocks sake. Early on Ms. Bisset finds herself menaced by the mob- sters in scenes first involving a strip search, later on a bogus witchdoctor sequences, unusual- ly kinky for a PG film, but add- ing hardly anything to the plot. Still later a school sharks makes its obligatory appear- ance in a spectacularly shot but again plot-wise irrelevant interlude; but topping all these in non-rhythm is a fight to the death between Shaw's burly bodyguard and the gangster's chief goon, a duel memorable in its grisliness but so out of kil- ter with anything in the main storyline that the sequence looks like is could have beenn lifted from a completely dif- ferent film. THE DEEP also suffers from a moral obtuseness; whereas the protagonists of Jaws ven- tured into the perilous unknown clearly to rid the world of a menacing monster, the heroes of The Deep are motivated as much by avaricousness as are the villians they battle. And while Benchley tries to add a certain tremulous nobility to their actions (helping society by blowing up, the morphine), there is no hiding the fact that "our' intrepid trios in this ven- ture basically for the money, which makes it leagues more difficult to root for them. Ev- evry audience likes to believe it is above such low object wor- shiping. Given its crippling limita- tions, The Deep has its enjoy- able elements. Although Nick Nolte delivers a performance on the level o fa low-IQ beach gigolo, Jacqueline Bisset man- ages to bring a measure of ar- tistry to her emotionally unde- manding role, and is, as all the world knows, mesmerizing in a wet T-shirt. Robert Shaw is crustilly likeable in a slightly (fortunately) muted re-rash of his salty dog of Jaws, and the villians are leeringly villianous. In short, all the elements of formuls mindlessness are at- the viewer's disposal; and while these elements may combine to make one forget about overdue work and unpaid bills for a cou- ple of hours, The Deep's long- range benefits will probably stick with you less than .a five- minute dip in the Rec Building pool. tinger, 9, had just as much fun as the a disappointingly small crowd of less 1 was open to the public. Mark has just beinnings of American aviation. Bisset: Sleaze in 'The Deep'