ARTS
Friday, September 28, 1984
The Michigan Daily
Page 5
4
Secret honor
returns for
world premiere
Joe
S
to stay
open during
October
Ann Arbor music fans take heart -
at least for a few more weeks. A
recording at Joe's Star Lounge
yesterday announced the club will be
open for at least part of October. No
scheduling information, however, is
available at this time. Joe's was
scheduled to close this weekend then
reopen in a month at a new location.
Stay tuned for further details.
Robert Altman returns. Two years
after his acclaimed interpretation of
Stravinsky's The Rakes Progess at The
Power Center, Altman's second
collaboration with the university has its
Ann Arbor premiere. The film is Secret
Honor, an adaptation of Arnold M.
Stone's- and Donald Freed's 'one-man
stage play about Richard Nixon.
Long regarded as one of America's
most unique filmmakers, Altman and
the university have for the last two
years enjoyed a mutually benefitting
partnership. As in the production of,,
The Rakes Progress, in which students
worked both on-stage and backstage
under Altman's guise, and with Altman
given a free reign, the film was
executed in much the same manner.
Last January Altman brought the
play to the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater
for a weekend run, and subsequently
shot it as a film in several rooms of
Martha Cook Hall that were redressed
as Nixon's set. Actor Philip Baker Hall
reprised his role of Nixon that he had
played on stage under Altman's direction.
With the help of Professor Frank
Beaver and the Communications Dept.,
thirty university graduate students
were recruited to serve in various
capacities as grips, gaffers, and
camera assistants. After shooting
wrapped, Altman returned to New York
with the film, for post-production.
Altman was drawn to the project, a
study of the inner conflicts that drew
Richard Nixon to his tragic downfall,
by the intense conflicts of his story. As
Altman himself stated at the time of
production, "Secrets are rarely
honorable, and honor is rarely a secret,
but in the context of the Presidency of
the United States, these words may find
themselves as bedfellows."
Two screenings of Secret Honor were
given last night at the Michigan
Theatre, with two more tonight.
Showtimes are 7:00 and 9:00 p.m.
-Marlene Roth
THE NROTC COLLEGE PROGRAM.
$2,000 EXPENSE MONEY AND
A NAVY OFFICER COMMISSION.
The two-year NROTC College Program offers you two years of expense
money that's worth up to $2,000, plus the challenge of becoming a
Navy Officer with early responsibilities and decision-making authority.
During your last two years in college the Navy pays for uniforms,
NROTC textbooks and an allowance of $100 a month for up to 20 months.
Upon graduation and completion of requirements, you become a
Navy Officer. with important decision-making responsibilities.
Call your Navy representative for more information on this
challenging program.
CONTACT LT. JOHN COSTELLO, NORTH HALL
764-1498
NAVY OFFICERS GET RESPONSIBILITY FAST.
Philip Baker Hall portrays Richard Nixon in 'Secret Honor,' Robert Altman's latest film which premiered last night at
the Michigan Theatre.
4 4r
I
Noon' brags and bores
I V.1. 1
LONDON (AP) - A long-lost semi-
autobiographical novel by D.H.
Lawrence has emerged from its time
warp to a mixed reception from the
critics, but the publisher says it is
selling well.
The hostile reviews call Mr. Noon
niediocre, overwritten and boring. But
othiers have hailed its appearance, not
only for its literary value but for the
li'ght it casts on the great author's life
and sexual attitudes, portrayed in such
classics as Sons and Lovers and
Lady Chatterly's Lover.
Novelist Anthony Burgess called the
work "something very like a major
novel and one of immense
autobiographical interest," while the
weekly Listener welcomed it for filling
in a major gap in Lawrence's develop-
ient as a man and a writer.
:Mr. Noon was completed in 1921
bpt never got published. Although tame
by today's permissive standards, it is
believed that it was too sexually ex-
plicit for its time.
'In 1972, the manuscript was acquired
by the Humanities Research Center at
the University of Texas in Austin, and it
was published last week by Cambridge
University Press.
The first part, 93 of the 292 pages of
Mr. Noon, is a novella that was
published in 1934 and describes the
sexual adventures of a young man
growing up in provincial England. The
second part, only now published,
chronicles 'the experiences of the
Lawrence-like Gilbert Noon in Europe,
focusing on his elopement with the wife
of an English professor.
Noon's elopement is believed to be a
thinly disguised account of Lawrence's
true-life romance with Frieda von
Richthofen-Weekley, whom he lured
away from her English husband in 1912
and married. They remained together
until his death in 1930.
News of the novel's imminent
publication was greeted en-
Stanley H. Kaplan
The Smart
MOVE!
,e
thusiastically by Lawrence scholars
hoping to learn more about the man
whose sensitive explorations, of love
and sex made him one of the most ac-
claimed and controversial writers of
this century.
"And what have we? We have a long,
disjointed, mediocre roman a clef,"
wrote Christopher Stace in the Daily
Telegraph. "There is nothing here
Lawrence has not done better
elsewhere. The heavily
autobiographical content means, of
course, that thesis-writers will seize on
Mr. Noon with delight, but as a work
of art it fails."
James Fenton of The Times found
Noon's implied boasts of v sexual
prowess tiresome and wrote that by the
climax of the book, "it has been going
round in circles for some time." He
cited passages of writing which he
thought were "blatherings."
Several critics were put off by
Lawrence's direct asides to the reader,
as in, "Ah, dear reader, you don't need
me to tell you how to sip love with a
spoon." Francis King in the Sunday
Telegraph called the device "jocose
buttonholing of the reader in a manner
that makes one want to jerk free in em-
barrassment."
But Burgess, writing in the weekly
Observer, found Lawrence's "descrip-
tive powers at their finest," his ap-
proach "never without humor or irony"
and "he seems to be wiser about women
in this book than in any other, except.
perhaps, Sea and Sarinia."
The Listener said the book "fills one
of the most intriguing gaps in modern
literature" between Sons and Lovers
of 1913 and Women in Love published
in 1920. Sons and Lovers and with
its hero leaving his English mining
town. Mr. Noon wrote the
Listener's Michael Poole, "is the
'sequel' we never had."
Hilary Dodd, a publicist at Cam-
bridgerUniversity Press, said the num-
ber of hardback copies Mr. Noon
now in print was "approaching five
figures." Shesaid the first press run
had been sold out and a new run had
been ordered.
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---.
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