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21 The New Journal I March 9, 1969

Contents 3

George Richmond and ''micro-economics"

by Paul Goldberger

5

Sam Fuller: an interview

by Marty Rubin and Eric Sherman

11

Teaching Black studies

by Austin Clarke

In Comment: Sarah gets the axe, Schulz gives the same to Ribuffo, Ribuffo replies in kind, and the dramat turns out to be a few actors in search of a director.

Sarah When this observer sacked out at 5 A.M. on the first day of Sarah Lawrence's Coed Week, there were still a fair number of bull sessions in progress. One group stayed up aJl night discussing "consciousness," althought by discussion's end they must have been talking only from memory. However, to imply that all the girls were eager, or even willing, to get to know the recent arrivals would be inaccurate. A number of the male participants noted fierce indifference on the part of many of the permanent residents.

Classes must not be very central to the education process at Sarah Lawrence, for the girls did not seem to take them very seriously. Even in comparison with Yale seminars, for which the level of preparation is often not very impressive, the class discussions betrayed a remarkable lack of familiarity with the material at hand. But the classes are not a waste of time. Probably having long since reconciled themselves to the obvious fact that the students are not going to be able to sustain very learned discussions, the teachers go to rather imaginative lengths at least to keep their students entertained for the hour, if only to break the silence which would otherwise prevail. In one European history class the professor's short attempt at substantive discussion of the political and economic relationships of the various social classes during Louis XIV's reign was met with general looking out of windows and lighting up of cigarettes. The class spent most of the time airing their views as to whether Louis was "really happy" living at Versailles. A visitor from Harvard noted a certain lack of "analytical rigor" in the class's discussion, demonstrating a capacity for understatement for which his institution is not particularly known.

This apparent Jack of interest in class is not meant to suggest that Sarah Lawrence has anything in common with Briarcliff, beyond proximity. I was roundly assured by students and teachers alike that the real education goes on in the conferences.

Conferences, for those unfamiliar with the jargon, are described by the Sarah Lawrence catalogue as follows: "Conferences permit continual interchange between students and faculty and afford students the kind of personal guidance in their work that should enable them to move ahead to higher levels of understanding and fuJier use of their developing talents."

In other words, conferences are a system in which each student meets regularly with each of her professors to demonstrate her ignorance not only of the material assigned to the entire class but also of material in her field of particular interest.

In most cases the visiting males refrained from participating in class dis-

cussions, perhaps under the delusion, perpetrated at some leading Eastern universities, that one should be familiar with the materialt nder discussion before opening his mouth. However there were some reports of guys not only participating, but pressing their points rather vigorously.

These stories were generally related by the natives with an amused comment about Jitte boys attempting to assert their masculinity. In fact there are few things a guy can do that will be less appreciated by Sarah Lawrence girls than to attempt to suggest his masculine superiority. These women are generally not well disposed, at least intellectually, to any such doctrine.

While calling the visitors "coeds" was a widely repeated joke arounc.' the campus on Monday, I suggest that by the end of the week many of the guys were wondering, if they ever were to get one of these girls into bed, who would wind up on top.

However, once again the temptation to generalize must be curbed, when the subject is the Sarah Lawrence student body.

In the fight presently being waged against a higher tuition, for example, two of the leading figures (the author of the students' alternative to the hike and the chairman of the open meeting held last week) were men. And as only thirteen of the 592 students at Sarah Lawrence are male, this is rather suggestive. One cannot help pondering whether these girls are, in fact, no more truly "liberated" than the gir ls in the building occupied by the Colombia students last spring, who (according to a friend on the inside) ••did all the cooking and cleaning up, while the men went out to defend the fortress."

The other current campus issue, not unrelated to the tuition increase, is the "diversity" of the student body. The present tuition and room and board fee of $3,950, coupled with the limited scholarship funds available, do circumscribe the range of backgrounds from which the stu-· dents are drawn. In fact, most of the girls seem to come from upper-middle and upper class homes in the New York area, a limitation which is presently the subject of much debate. What is most interesting is that the freshman class, generally drawn from terribly respectable and probably sheltered homes, is collectively regarded as a wild group of people, even by Sarah Lawrence's permissive standards. lt is a well accepted adage around the campus that "whatever you are looking for can be found in the freshman dorms." The story of the freshmen who gave LSD to their cat and then dropped him from a fourthfloor window to see if he would land on his feet (he did not) was the wildest of the freshman stories, but not by as large a margin as might be expected. In many cases, though, the upper-class years find a return to a more sedate style of life. Perhaps these girls will come full circle and return to nearby Scarsdale to raise a family and spend their days as fruitlessly as their frustrated mothers, possibly substituting pot for alcohol, demonstrating that their Sarah Lawrence education did not fail to leave some impression.

Don Davis

So Who's a Schmo?

Leo Ribuffo tells us that graduate students are schmoos. Leo Rosten tells us that AI Capp's endearing little creature is actually a schmo and that "any schmo knows what a schmo really is." Are graduate students

really as bad as the pungent Yiddish epithet applied to them implies? Mr. Ribuffo doesn't really seem to know. For with all his railing against the insufferable dullness of Yale graduate students, he implies that most of these poor wretches could, if they awakened their sleeping imaginations, blossom into something productive like a dentist, a lawyer, a writer, a musician or a forest ranger. If graduate students really h ave within themselves the power to set the world ablaze but just can't seem to realize it, then, like,the repressed dames of Victorian fiction, they are more to be pitied then censured. If, on the other hand, they each wrongly think they could drill teeth with more verve than Major Peress, argue the Jaw more deftly than Perry Mason, write hotter stuff than Harold Robbins, play a meaner flute than King David and sniff out more fires than Smokey the Bear, then they are indeed "schmos."

I propose we find out just how much hidden brain and talent there is among graduate students in a way that would more than satisfy Mr. Ribuffo's plea for more frivolity and whimsy among the Ph.D. seekers. Could not graduate students agree to re-do something they have all been through many times since summer camp days, namely have an all-graduate-student revue? Here is the ideal vehicle for releasing all the pent-up energies that have smoldered for so long in the graduate's breast. I do not for one moment believe that much real talent will be discovered in such a venture, and I fear that a musical extravaganza staged by my peers may be about as whimsical as the leaden matzo balls my grandmother, the worst cook in Grodno Gobernya, used to inflict upon her family. This is beside the point, for a Yale grad revue will provide its perpetrators with something to tell their grandchildren which will be more true than tales of their disastrous love affairs and less damaging to their sense of decency than the real story of how they invented half of the sources listed in the bibliographies of their doctoral dissertations.

Obviously the vulgar talent needed to produce a satirical-romantical revue abounds in the Yale graduate school. In college the aspiring but incompetent playwright had to compete with students who could actually write plays, the ham with the real actor, the wise guy with people with real senses of humor, and the high school drum major with the musician.

Here in the grad school the pros would be excluded and the amateur talent could flourish uninhibited.

Ideas for the plot of the revue quickly come to mind. A colonial historian I know wants to exhume a work he did a few years back called "Plymouth Rock." Another friend who is torn between a love of the transcending power of the Baroque and a keenly felt need to be topical wants to write something on the current racial situation called "The Well-Tempered Cleaver."

I myself favor a saga about a former graduate student who becomes in turn a dentist, lawyer and novelist while living in a forest and destroying his mind by blowing the oboe. Mr. Ribuffo could certainly contribute some wheezy but serviceable jokes, for in his eleven paragraphs be was able to drop a gag (the one about the kvetchschrift) which does not yet suffer from rigor mortis.

Performers should be no harder to corral. Probably ninety percent of all grads were made to endure some sort of music lessons in their youth. Surely a band continued on page 14

Volume two, number eight March 9, 1969 Editors: Jeffrey Pollock Jonathan Lear Business Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Executive Editor: Herman Hong Art Director: Bruce Mcintosh Associate Editor: Lawrence Lasker Advertising Manager: K. Elia Georgiades Copy Editor: Paul Bennett Photography Editor: Robert Randolph Circulation Managers: John Adams Steve Thomas Contributing Editors: Paul Goldberger Susan Holahan William L. Kahrl Mopsy S. Kennedy Michael Lerner Leo Ribuffo Staff: Tom Abel, Anna Fleck, Nita Kalish, Michael Rose, Deborah Rubin, Scott Simpson, Joel Skidmore, Nancy Vickers, Warner Wada, Michael Waltuch THIRD CLASS NON-PROFIT PERMIT: Third Class Non-Profit postage PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published

by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., 3342 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520, and is printed at The Carl Purington Rollins Printing-Office of the Yale University Press in New Haven. Published bi-weekly during the academic year and distributed by qualified controlled circulation to the Yale Community.

For al lothers, subscriptions are $7.50 per year ($4.50) for students and newstand copies 50jt.

The New Journal© copyright 1969 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation.

Letters welcome. Unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped, selfaddressed envelope. Opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily those of The New Journal.

Credits: Phil Bath: pages 5, 10 John Friedman: pages 11, 12 Christa Lang: pages 5, 10 Bruce Mcintosh: Cover Robert Randolph: page 3 George Richmond: page 3 Allied Artists, Columbia Pictures, Lippert Productions, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros: pages 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

i

George Richmond, The "micro-economist"; or if you want a fifth-grader to learn, you might try paying him.

by Paul Goldberger

When George Richmond entered the fifthgrade classroom where be was to begin his teaching career, he was, by his own admission, naive. The school was P.S. 250 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn ; the students were Spanish-speaking inhabitants of a N ew York ghetto; and Richmond, like so many young Ivy League intellectuals self-consciously "doing their thing" in inner-city schools, was scared. "I found myself in the midst of a war not only between student and student," he recalls. "Each day cost me a year of my life." Richmond saved himself- and in the process saved a good many of his "unsavable" students as wellby creating perhaps the most radical rethinking of urban education methods in the last hundred years.

Richmond restructured his classroom along the lines of the ghetto values. Marks, he reasoned, were a middle-class concept; why not replace them with an incentive meaningful to Lower-class students? That incentive was money, and money-in the form of a paper scrip system- became the

reward for academic performance. Students were paid for high test marks, homework assignments and extra compositions, and once a month Richmond's wife supplied baked goods which backed the paper money system and were apportioned to each class member according to his accumulated wealth. The system, christened "micro-economics," worked so well that in P.S. 122, the second school Richmond tried it in, the reading level of his class of inner-city fifth gxaders rose from a minimum of eight months to four years as measured by standardized tests. Money, even play money, was real where grades never had been.

The system sounds simple, and basically it is; yet perhaps only a man like Richmond could have created it. Raised on New York's Lower East Side, also a slum area, Richmond's painting abilities earned him admission to the High School of Mus ic and Art; he made it to Yale in 1962 ("barely1 was what they called a risk student") after he asked the admissions officer who had just reviewed a portfolio of his drawings whether he would like to hear him recite a scene from Shakespeare. Before the startled interviewer could respond, Richmond was into his recitation. He ended up with a full scholarship. .

Richmond's career here began uneventPaul Goldbe'rger, a freshman in Stiles, is a contributing editor of The New Journal

fully ; he was notable largely for his initial dislike of Yale. "I couldn't stand the Gothic architecture, the extreme hedonism of the place," he says. Then he met Mr. and Mrs. Richard Sewall, and the angry young artist from the slums began to feel at home.

Sewall, master of Ezra Stiles College, took a liking to Richmond and agreed to sponsor some of his artistic work for Yale.

At first the Sewails were somewhat shocked - Richmond had simply walked into the brand-new Stiles Master's House to introduce himself "because I liked the architecture." But once they became acquainted, Sewall ended up commissioning the 14' x 14' tapestry that now hangs in the Stiles dining hall, a smaller version for the Master's House and some forty murals for the rest of the college.

"He was the most cheerful and interesting freshman I'd seen in a long time," Sewall now recalls. "We asked him to stay for supper, and we lingered for two or three hours talking. 'I want to come to Ezra Stiles,' he said, 'because you've got a lot of blank walls.' " It was Richmond who originally suggested the dining-hall tapestry, which filled the Sewalls' basement for the entire winter it took to finish. Three seamstresses were needed to complete Richmond's abstract creation, pieced together with squares of colored cloth to give the effect of a mosaic.

The Sewalls' enthusiasm provided the start Richmond needed. He held a show of drawings in the Stiles buttery and sold several works, then continued to replace them until, as Sewall says, "We were literally covered by Richmond products."

Prompted by his sudden success, Richmond went to Italy to try his hand at the tapestry business. One of the products of his European phase now hangs in an apartment-house lobby in Kenmore Square, Boston.

After his graduation from Yale in 1966, Richmond set off to Antioch College for a session as a Peace Corps trainee. He met Jill Orear, a senior at Antioch, and left the Peace Corps after a month to marry her.

He then accepted a position at Antioch des igning the "Arts in Appalachia" program, then sat back to wait for his wife to finish college. That done, the couple set off for New York and a summer of the city's Intensive Teacher Training Program prior to taking on P.S. 250.

Meanwhile, Richmond had been awaiting action on an application for alternative service as a conscientious objector. A member of the Society of Friends, he suffered through an FBI investigation, a Justice Department hearing and two years of waiting before, as he puts it, "they finally judged me sincere."

Today Richmond is back in New Haven, serving as assistant to the director of the Transitional Year Program, a program for inner-city high school graduates designed to bridge the gap between high school and college. TYP makes use of Yale facilities, but its support comes from the Rockefeller Foundation. Richmond teaches humanities and serves as a dormitory counselor to the male students in the program, who live in the Elm Street building which also.houses his apartment-a cavernous, old, high-ceilinged suite of five rooms, reached by an ancient elevator painted fire-engine red by a bored fellow student.

The Richmonds' apartment is white and sparsely furnished; most of the space is taken up by Richmond's paintings, which fill the walls of every room and seem almost to overflow the apartment. His two

albums of drawings, the Book of Rath and the Book of Joys--macabre and delightful , seeming crosses between Ronald Searle's cartoons and art nouveau--compete with books for storage space in the study. During my visit an oil in progress sat on the living-room easel, dominating the room. Richmond sat in a rocker just across from the easel, eager to talk about TYP or micro-economics, but not about art: "I've now become an educator," he said, "and now people, including me, are concerned with things of the world today.

The art is other-worldly, it is about the imagination, and I prefer a private investigation of the imagination. So I paint just for myself now." He has also put an end to selling his work: "Now that I have a salary and a wife, I don't have to."

He said The New Journal was welcome to reprint a few drawings, and suddenly he was up from his chair, busying himself with the Book of Rath and the Book of Joys . "Take this," he said producing a frightening pen-and-ink piece of surrealism

- "no, maybe not, it's too sick." He smiled and gave it to me anyway, then carefully selected three more samples of his talent.

The care with which Richmond selected the sample drawings-he spent considerable time musing over the albums--is characteristic of him. He has worked tirelessly on the micro-economics program, and hopes to win the support of a graduate school for research into the area.

So far micro-economics has been tried in only two classrooms, the P.S. 250 and P.S. 122 fifth grades Richmond taught during 1967-68; yet in both situations, the program was successful almost from the start. Basically, as Richmond explains it, micro-economics represented simply a use of means familiar to the ghetto--financial inducement-in place of means like grades, products of a middle-class approach which Richmond sees as based on "incentives of feudal sophistication." The end, academic progress, stayed the same; only the inducement changed. Yet in the process, Richmond notes, academic progress suddenly became acceptable, and the criteria for prestige in his classroom changed: ''The original leadership based on force, strength and muscle alliances was replaced by an elite, determined by ability and wealth."

Once the system of monetary rewards for academic achievement was firmly entrenched. Richmond expanded the program to include a real-estate game. Stu-

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dents used their scrip to purchase blocks of imaginary real estate and make investments, like a vast game of Monopoly, which grew, Richmond says, "until one day a group of students came to me and asked why they couldn't establish a bank.

Soon after, a savings institution developed.

We created an entire credit system, and some students became professional bankers in the classroom." Richmond supplemented the math curriculum with simple lessons in accounting, corporate finance and economics to guide the citizens of his micro-economy. To guide the leader of the micro-economy, the help of New York University was invoked: Richmond became a registered student at the School of Business Administration.

Soon, Richmond recalls, the game began almost automatically to produce the social revolution he had hoped for. "There was a young boy in the class who on the whole was shy and retiring," he says, "and be- 路 cause of the class structure motivated by muscle, he had played little, if any, part in the Class esteem. Yet he nearly always scored one hundred on his math tests, and under the pressure of the game began to do the same on his spelling tests. At a dollar a point, he began to amass quite a bit of cash and to loan it out at attractive interest rates. Soon, unbeknownst to himself and the class, he began to achieve enviable stature and importance in their lives. The social order went through a quiet revolution, and acumen combined with work became respectable. I managed to convince him to employ the ruffians in the class to collect everyone's debts, and we had the beginnings of a police system."

Richmond's students became increasingly aware of their adjusted statuses, and it was perhaps only a matter of time before one student asked whether there was a welfare system. Richmond-"because I had a wicked sense of ~umor"-said yes, and began taxing the rich in the game to supply scrip to the poor. Friction grew between the rich and the poor, but before a confrontation could occur, Richmond was transferred to an路other school.

He is hesitant to conclude that his transfer was the路result of the micro-economics game. "It could be," he says, "but I have no grounds to know for sure." Whatever the cause, he started micro-economics with his new class, also a group of fifth graders from a poor neighborhood. He added a reading program to the scrip reward system, and it was here that phenomemil rise in reading level, from a minimum of eight months to four years, took place.

The second success of micro-economics led Richmond to conceive of his current plan, which he hopes will win the approval of a graduate-school faculty. In collaboration with Bill Watman, now a staff member at the Office of Economic Opportunity, Richmond expanded the micro-economics concept to an entire school. "The school would be a small life-game," he says, "with the development of school-wide small businesses, stockmarket games and even horseracing games. There would be a legislative system , and social action programs in the real community funded by a foundation within the school."

Ultimately, Richmond sees the students in the urban school, which would be at the junior-high level, planning their own curriculum. "What they would study would be about the city," he says. "They would read about welfare, war, love, hate, slums, children-the curriculum would be in their own vernacular." Richmond's urban school would contain a complete

range of social services, with students dealing with criminal offenders-i.e., discipline problems-in their own way.

A school store would be open monthly to allow for the exchange of scrip for merchandise, all earned by academic performance. "This will allow the poor student to have some stake in the society," Richmond says. "And when he has that stake he will protect it. It's as real and as near to him as the middle-class system of grades is far from him. The school will be a state-a state in which the children prepare for life by playing roles, where they deal with the real problems of a state."

The urban school represents an entirely new concept of the relationship between student and teacher-one generated by aggregate demand. Price theory would become crucial to the classroom; once the school is operating fully on Richmond's concepts, students would not only receive money for educational achievements, they would pay money for the chance to educate themselves. The course offerings would become a marketplace, with students purchasing their way into class.

Faculty and administration would be in the position to control prices so as to make certain "preferred" courses attractive.

English, for example, would be priced cheaply, and students showing a tendency to restrict themselves to one subject area would be taxed by the administration for extra courses in that area.

Perhaps the most significant feature of George Richmond's urban school is the plan for backing the value of the scrip.

Students can, of course, cash their scrip into property at the store, or they can invest it in one of two ways. A system of stock and real-estate investing would allow students to build up scrip capital, which would be redeemed in real cash for a fraction of its scrip value at high school graduation. The final alternative-and the most exciting-is to invest academic achievement scrip in "educational bonds," which would mature at high school graduation into college scholarships. Thus, in every sense, the ghetto child of the urban school will truly 路have earned his own college education.

What are the drawbacks to the system?

Discussing his proposals in New Haven, Richmond sees few, if any. The profit incentive, he argues, is here to stay, and be finds little wrong with exploiting it to a good advantage. He responds to the critics who attack the application of real-life economic principles to the classroom by calling the school the ideal place for first grappling with the e.c onomy; for "there is no such thing as unfair competition in the classroom. There are no monopolies, no price fixing; no one inherits wealth, thereby starting life out in a more advantageous position than the next person, and there is no political pull or graft."

Richmond realizes the radical nature of his urban school and, despite its astonishing success on a classroom scale in New York, he bas no illusions about its unattractiveness to conservative school administrators. "But it is a non-utopian system," the ex-Yale, ex-Lower East Side artist-turned-educator emphasizes, "and is only meant as a transitional stage, not an end in itself. It's just one possible way out of the difficulty our schools are in now."

It is just one possible way out; but this way, unlike all the others, might just work, because as George Richmond says, "It doesn't come from the educators; it comes from the kids." ::;

5 I The New Journal I March 9, 1969

The checkered career of an ex-copyboy: an interview with Samuel Fuller

by Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin Eric Sherman, '68, made Charles LloydJourney Within as a Scholar of the House in film. His new film, Mario and the Magician, will be shown at Yale on April 4.

M artin Rubin is the current chairman of the Yale Film Society. His next project will be a book on the American director D ouglas Sirk.

The following interview is an excerpt dealing with only six of Fuller's eighteen films.

The complete interview, covering his career film by film, will be published this spring by Atheneum in the Authors' book Five American Film Makers. in addition to the section on Fuller, the book will contain interviews with Budd Boetticher, Peter Bokdanovich, Arthur Penn, and Abraham Polonsky.

o,

Samuel Fuller is perhaps the most aggressive of all film-makers. His films are concerned with the direct physical and visual communication of emotional impact. In a review of The Naked Kiss, critic Michael Delahaye of Cahiers du Cinema made an observation which could apply to all of Fuller's films: "Let him who is not a ghost dare to say he has felt nothing." .

Fuller's films often deal with pimps, swindlers, gangsters, prostitutes, petty crooks, stool pigeons, low-income detectives--people on the lower fringe of society. The borderline position of these characters makes them easily detachable from the mainstream of social concerns and allows them to act out Fuller's favorite drama: the conflict between personal, emotional interests and the impersonal, mechanical responses dictated by social and environmental superstructures.

His police-blotter lineup of characters a lso gives Fuller's stories the flavor of back-page features in newspapers like the Daily News or the Daily Graphic, for which Fuller was once a reporter. For example, one can easily envision The Naked Kiss in tabloid terms: "EXCALL GIRL KILLS MILLIONAIRE FIANCE!" We recognize the potential depersonalization of these stories into the protective cliches which newspaper headlines symbolize (i.e., "150 KILLED IN PLANE CRASH"). However, Fuller's forceful, violent presentation of the material erases the comfortable distance we like to establish between ourselves and the medium.

In his recent films, The Crimson Kimono, Underworld, USA, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, Fuller has shown a complete command of the means necessary to shake the most complacent audience out of its habitual apathy.

The director's commitment to an emotional and personal value system has led many critics to oversimplify, to characterize his talent as "primitive." Some of Fuller's most devoted admirers like to picture their hero as some sort of lovable ape-man swinging his camera a round on a rope. This conception would be more viable if Fuller eschewed all concerns other than those personal ones he prefers. However, Fuller's world-view encompasses with equal depth all aspects of the conflict he presents. The outer, social frameworks which threaten his characters' emotional integrity are indicated with admirable force in nearly all of his films. The city in Pickup on South Street, established in ominous reflections on street windows and the huge bridge looming outside Richard Widmark's shack, eventually becomes in Underworld, USA the gigantic superstructure of National Projects, which infects and perverts practically every level of American society-from sports and charity to fammal devotion and big business.

Fuller's films depict a society in the final rigor mortis of institutionalization. He calls for a complete revitalization of that society on a primal emotional level, even in the most violent manner. Fuller's visual equivalent of the personil impulse is the close-up, which he uses more frequently and more forcefully than any other film-maker. The visual rhythm throughout Fuller's films is from long-shot to close-up and then back to long-shot. Similarly, the structure of his stories goes from a long, establishing view of an outer framework to closer, personal dramas (often in direct conflict with the larger perspective) and finally back to the original position, now re-evaluated and refashioned in completely personal terms.

The final long-shots of the corridor in Shock Corridor and the route to the bus station in The Naked Kiss are repeated from contexts earlier in the film, but their meaning is completely changed in light of the volcanic emotional struggles which have intervened.

With the exceptions of Baron of Arizona, Hell and High Water, Merrill's Marauders and Shark, Fuller has exercised virtually complete control over every aspect of his films.

His personality has revealed itself consistently and progressively in all eighteen of his motion pictures. The following interview was conducted at his home in Los Angeles in November, 1968.

The Steel Helmet Sergeant Zack's (Gene Evans) entire platoon is massacred by the North Koreans. He survives by a freak accident involving his helmet. He is aided by a Korean orphan whom he calls Short Round. They join a platoon commanded by a rule-book lieutenant (Steve Brodie) whom Zack despises. The platoon sets up an observation post in a Buddhist temple, and they apprehend a Communist who is lurking inside. When Short Round is killed by a sniper, Zack, in a rage, kills the prisoner. In a massive attack on the temple, the lieutenant is killed while showing exceptional bravery.

Zack bestows his charmed helmet on the lieutenant's grave and leaves with the other three survivors.

the only thing I'm really interested in, because it's the only mystery. That's why I' ll always dramatize it. I don't think there's anything more dramatic in motion pictures than death, even though w.e assume we're cold-blooded a nd can take it for granted. I don't know of any other subject. At all.

The relation between Sgt. Zack and the little boy is similar to the one between Price and Drew in The Baron of Arizona.

Zack doesn't realize the boy's attachment to him until after the boy is killed.

Ah yes! I see what you mean. Any damn emotional cementing between them grows on them. Yes, you're right.

What Zack epitomized there was the symbol of a non com: no emotion whatsoever. None! Because if you have emotions, you' re not in war. There's no time for emotion. It becomes a job. You wake up. You work a little. Maybe you go on ·a patrol or a little skirmish line. Your fight is very brief. You rest. You crap.

You eat. Then you go out and shoot again. You go to sleep. Then you get up . .. .

If you do this for three years, it's just a job. It's a tremendous machine inside you. The only emotion you have is, ''When do I get out of here, and when does somebody replace me?" That's the only emotion you ever experience in war. You become very aware of sounds. You become very aware of sight. And you become very aware of trust in man. Very aware. If I know you two fellows are on my right, that•s fine.

If I' m worried about you, I'm in trouble.

So I thought it might be a very effective scene if Zack blows his top, not because of the enemy or shooting or all that, but because of a kid. You should never blow your top over a person who's on your side. The kid was on his side. You did catch something there; it was a growing love affair. It was a love story.

When Zack blew his top, he shot down an unarmed P.O .W. To me, that was not a shocker. It was to the press .

Tremendous shocker. A lot of editorials.

I have all the newspapers. Big full-page interviews asking, ''Would You Shoot This Man?" You see, I think it's a little on the stupid side, when you're in war, to hold your fire just because a man puts his hands up. Five minutes before that, he's shooting at you. He runs out of ammunition; he can put his hands up.

I mean, certainly there's no law. If there's a law in war, then we' re really completely nuts. Now, we're only ninety-nine percent nuts. But if there's a law .. . how can there be a law in an illegal act?

So I cannot get concerned about shooting a prisoner. It means nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. I think the idea of shooting a man is more important. I don't care whether he's a friend or an enemy. But the idea that we have laws and Geneva Conventions and rules and regulations is a cover-up for a lot of stupid things.

To me, the thrill of war-.nd there is a tremendous thrill--is death. That's

I seldom heard a dying man make a speech. The general things you hear, when a man is hit next to you, are, "Oh no. Oh hell. Oh hell no. Ohhhh noooo.

Please. Please. Not me."

That's exactly what the "mute" soldier in Steel Helmet says when he's killed.

Oh right! That's what he says. That's what you say, and you go. That's exactly what happens. None of this: " Now, I want to tell you one thing, Joshua . ..

Two miles down there, you go to your left, you find Nora ... She's got a horse waiting ... Tell her the sheriff said, ' lchabod Crane was right.' " It's selfish. All exits are selfish--and personal. And that's the way it should be.

Pickup on South Street On a crowded subway, Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) picks the purse of Candy (Jean Peters). Among his booty, although he does not know it at the time, is a piece of top-secret microfilm that was being passed by Candy's consort, a communist agent (Richard Kiley). When Candy discovers the whereabouts of the film through Moe Williams (Thelma Ritter), a police informer, she attempts to seduce McCoy and recover the film.

After several failures, she falls in love with him. The desperate agent exterminates Moe and savagely beats Candy. McCoy, now goaded into action, apprehends the agent in a particularly brutal fight in a subway. McCoy and Candy, temporarily reformed, are reunited.

The open ing of the picture is played completely without d ialogue, when Widmark picks the girl's pocketbook containing the secret information. This gives the action a great deal of ambiguity. It's only much later in the picture that you find out what actually transpired. So, instead of starting out on a "Commies versus the Good Guys" note, you're primarily concerned with personal issues from the start.

You're right about the ambiguity. The ending is like that,·too. Some people thought, ' 'Well, I guess he'll go off with the girl and be happy." I gave her a line at the end to show that they'll never change. The cop nys, " No matter wlult happens, l'lrfind this son-of-a-bitch in a week or two with his hand in somebody's pocket." She says, ''You wanna bet?" The way she wid that showed tlult

61 The New Jo urnal I M arch 9, 1969

I wanted the audience to feel he even· tually will go back to picking pockets, and she'll go back to doing whate ver the hell she wu doing.

This is what I got a kick out of in the p icture: the idea of having a pickpocke t, a police informer and a h• lf-assed hooker u the three main characters.

The p icture was made in about eighteen or twe nty days at Fox. A big picture for me. The whole thing was shot in downtown L.A., and I used a lot of tricks to make It look like New York.

This seemed to be the most "close-up" of your films. You even kept dolying in from a close-up to a more extreme close-up.

Forty Guns Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) and his brother Wes (Gene Barry) ride into town and throw Brockie Drummond (John Ericson), a local troublemaker, into jail. Brockie's sister Jessica (Barbara Stanwyck) comes with her forty hired gunmen and frees Brockie. After Brockie kills Wes on his wedding day, Griff confronts him. Using his sister's body as a shield, Brockie threatens Griff. Griff, ignoring his personal feelings toward Jessica, shoots both of them.

Was the subway a set?

It was a se t. I told the ut director I w a nted t hose st airs, because I like d the idea of Widma rk pulling Kiley down by the ankles, and the heavy's chin hits e ve ry ste p. Dat-dat-dat-dat-dat: it's musical.

Oh yes. You notice d that? I like to do that sometimes. My first film, I Shot Jesse James, was also shot with a lot of close-ups.

Why?

Because I' m not interested in the bank or the people in the ba nk. I' m interested in a te ller who is going to be shot and the man who is going to shoot him. The same thing in Pickup. Come to think of it, there are very few e xtras in the film , very few people around .. . .

Although you establish the city very forcefully in the film, you seem to be more interested in individuals than in the structures, political or otherwise, that surrou nd the characters.

Oh, sure . More than that, too. I specifically hit hard on d escribing Kiley not as a communist but •s an agent. The re's a big difference. Tremendous difference.

An agent is a paid employee. If tomor· row •nother country will give him more money, he will do it for them. It's got nothing to do with p•rty affiliation.

Nothing political•bout it at all. But when I talked to people, even on the set, all they thought wu, "Well, he's a Commie." I didn't want just that. That's too obvious.

A Commie doesn't mean to me what he does to a lot of other people. I mean, there are communists all over the world.

I even know communists who hate other communists. Frankly, I don't understand what they' re talking about.

It' s all meaningless. Politics bore me, but the politici•ns do not bore me, because they're chuuters.

That's why I played down the politi· cal situation in Pickup. I was not interested in the structure. I could have had a hell of • big scene with fifty or sixty extras. They' re all gathered together, and the head man says: ''This is terrible.

What about the Party?" You never hear the word " Party'' in my film .

You are never even told that the FBI man in Pickup is from the FBI. He's just from the government. I didn't w•nt to pinpoint it. At th•t time, Fuchs, the British espionage agent, had been arrested for selling information to Russia. The government man in the film says to Widmark, "You know about Fuchs. You know what he did.'' Wid mark says, "I don't know what you're t•lking about.

I don't care.'' That's the mood I wanted to get in the picture.

wanted one of those riveting machines and fire and lights and life. Alive l Noisy! Because it's going to be ve ry quiet soon-for her.

There was another technique in the film which I especially liked: the way you moved the camera. For exam ple, at one point Widmark has to get out of his shack:, and be swings across the water on a rope.

Rather than simply following the action, the camera moved back before he swung.

There was the same type of thing in the long-take where Jean Peters is getting beat up by Kiley. The camera would go to where the action was going, before the action actually went there.

In that scene with Pe te rs, I told the camer•man, "Give me a leeway. M•ke it loose enough, but fluid at all times.

Don't hang around too long.'' I w•nted th•t fluidity, because the came r• can help the eye with action. If your camer• is moving, and your action is movingboy, you have •ctionl lf your action is moving, •nd your camera is st•tionary, it is not that effective. It's •lso better not to just follow the action. Again, it's your eye. I want to go beyond the eye. So you have two se ts of eyes: the camera is moving, and your own eye is moving.

Just before the scene of Thelma Ritter's death, there's a shot of her seUing her neckties in a construction area at night. I got a hellish, underworld feeling from that shot. Were you trying for this?

Oh no. What I wanted there was con· struction. I wanted something that is being born right before somebody is dead. I w•nted something alive. I

I w as originally going to c• ll it Woman with a Whip. I don't like the title Forty Guns: it's meaningless to me. Origin•lly, Marilyn Monroe wante d to play the lead role. She liked the idea of this girl surrounded by all these me n. I thought s he was too young for what I wanted .

I wante d a mothe r-sister flavor there.

The stuntmen refuse d to do t he sce ne whe re the Stanwyck chuacter is dragge d by a horse. They thought it was too dangerous. So Stanwyck said she'd do it, and she did it. We did it the first time, and I said: " I didn't like it. It was too far aw ay from the came ra truck.

We're not getting what I want." So we tried it again, and I didn't like it. She made no complaint. We tried it a third time, a nd it was just the way I wanted it. She was quite bruised, quite bruised .

Oh yes. That was for the mood. I just wanted something beautiful, because the idea of technical, mechanical beauty (I usually don't like anything mechanical) was the only contrut I could get to the action, the violence. I tried to time each one of those dissolves so that it was almost like music, a beautiful piece of music, and all hell broke loose right after or right before that. l couldn't have gotten any other contrast, unless I used along talking scene, and I didn't want that.

Contrut makes emotion-that's what makes music, that's what makes paint· ing. Rembrandt, with his color, will use beautiful, subdued black-black-blue or blue-blue-black--Jesus, you can't tell what color it Js...-.-.nd then there's that hot gold or red with that one light.

That' s beautiful contrast. I just love that kind of stuff. I tried to get It in those long dissolves.

T here is a pervasive sense of death in the p icture, connected with sexual acts specifi-

cally. The most striking example of this is the wedding scene, where the groom is shot and falls dead on his bride.

You're right. I thought I would get a little touch of that in. I liked the idea of the hone ymoon bed being the grave.

The only time he really got to touch her, he w as dead.

I thought I would even contrast that scene a little bit, as far as se x was concerned , with the sce ne where the gunsmith's daughter measures Ge ne Barry for a weapon. I thought I'd have a little fun with sex, because the connotations were all there. I had a shot whe re he looks at the girl through a loose gun barrel; and as she walks, he pans with her, just like a camera. When I wu in Paris, Godard told me he used that shot in Breathless, e xcept that instead of a rifle, Belmondo rolls up a newspaper and follows Seberg walking. Godard said he took that from my film .

I could not use my original ending. I was aske d to change it, and I changed it. The ending I originally shot was a · powe rful ending. I had Sullivan facing the killer, the young brother of Stan· wyck. I had him grab Stanwyck and hold her in front of him. He knew he had Sullivan in a spot. I had him defy Sullivan. And Sullivan kills Stanwyck.

Then he kills the boy and walks away.

That was the e nd of the pidure.

I had to put in that line where Sullivan says that he aimed the bullet so that it wouldn't kill Stanwyck. She's alive in the end, and the y're happy. I didn't like that ending. A lot of people liked it, be cause they like to see the boy and the girl g e t together. I don't think that's important. I think it's much more dramatic the other way, because Sullivan has to blow his top. That's why he hasn't used a gun in ten years. But the moment he squeezes that trigger, he's a diffe rent man. He's an executioner, and he kills anything in front of him.

Underworld, USA

When he was a child, Tolly Devlin (Cliff Robertson), now a petty safecracker, saw four shadows on a wall beat and kill his father. He has devoted his life to tracking down the murderers. In a prison hospital, one of them divulges the other names as he dies. They are Gunther (Gerald Milton}, Gela (Paul Dubov) and Smith (Allen Greuner), top men in a huge crime syndicate known as Underworld, USA. which is run under the business front of National Projects by Earl "Boss" Connors (Robert Emhardt). Devlin infiltrates the organization and uses the law to dispose of all three men. Having accomplished his purpose, he seeks to withdraw and marry Cuddles (Dolores Dorn), a prostitute whom he is using

,

71 The New Journal ! March 9, 1969

as a witness against Smith. However, by this time, he is too deeply entangled in Underworld, USA, and he must kill Connors to free himself. In the struggle be himself is shot, and be dies in the same alley where his father was murdered.

It seemed that crime was defined in the film as lack of emotion. U nderworld, USA, was lack of emotion.

Yes. And also a facade of good citizenship. Remember that Boss Connors said: "We'll always win. All we have to do is pay a little taxes, go to church, send a couple of kids through school, set up a few charities on the side. We'll win.

We always have. We always will."

Whe n I shot the bookkeeping and the adding machines and all that, I tried to show the man's hand in the foreground hitting the keys very fast. That, to me, was Underworld, USA, what he was doing: tic-tic-tic-tic bing-bing tic-tic-tictic. ... It never stopped.

A theme of cleanliness runs through the entire film. It starts with Cliff Robertson sterilizing instruments in a prison hospital and ends when , as he's dying, be stumbles over a trashcan which says "Keep Your City Cle.an." Why did you use this?

Again, I wanted contrast. In addition to the sterilization of utensils, I told Robertson to put the bandages on the man very gently, very precisely, like a surgeon. I wanted to get that effect: he's so clean about those bandages even when he's double-crossing the man he's putting them on.

I also tried to get a contrast wherever I could between the cleanliness of the head of National Projects and the discussion he's carrying on about narcotics and prostitution and murder. I picked the swimming pool location for that reason. I wanted that hollow, clean atmosphere you get around a swimming pool. It's too bad we can't have a smell in motion pictures be cause there's an antiseptic smell around a pool, like in a gym. I thought that the cleanest thing in the world is a pool.

So I had this crime organization hold their meetings there, rather than in the pompous office or the pool hall or the dingy little room where gangsters usually hang out. I wanted to get that contrast to what they're talking about: it's so vile and low.

Why did you depict National Projects, the front for Underworld, USA, as such a typical business organization, with adding machines and bankers and everything?

It's all done mechanically. lt's almost like robots, like computer systems. As a matter of fact, I don't doubt that crime today is governed by computers. If I were to make that picture today, I'd show nothing but twenty machines. No people, just all the machines. I wanted to get that flavor of mechanization in the picture.

The coldness of the organization is particularly well reflected in the Richard Rust character, the paid killer. H e commits his murders totally without commitment, almost casually.

Now there's an honest character! That is a man who is not a psychotic; there's nothing insane about him. He just has a job: He certainly isn't interested in killing that little kid. There's no vengeance in it! There's no emotion in the man at all. That's what finally terrorizes Robertson-the way Rust says: " We have to wipe out this girl. If you do a good job, it'll get you in with the boss."

The only emotion he has is that it will get him in with the boss. To knock off a g irl means nothing to him.

I didn't want Rust to do anything that deviated from the character of a professional killer, except one thing. I told him, " When you're getting ready to kill somebody, put on your dark glasses; then we' ll never know whether or not you want to see anything, or whether or not you're feeling anything." You see, I wanted to keep away from emotion. I didn't want a character like in the old gangster pictures: he likes his mother, he supports his brother, he has a little dog, he feeds goldfish. I didn't want that.

Newspapers are present in a lot of your films. I particularly liked their use in this one. It seemed to me that there was a deliberate contrast in the film between witnessing the terrifying corruption of Underworld, USA, as in the murder of the little girl, and then seeing these things on the printed page, completely depersonalized.

Usually, newspapers are overdone in movies. But I don't mind showing something and then showing a contrast of it in the press. I feel the same way about flashbacks. Unless the flashback has

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new Graduate School blazer seal nothing to do with the actual situation, I don't like it. Le t me give you an example of what I mean. The character says, "When I was a little girl, my mother used to give me a piece of candy." As she's saying that, you flash· back: the mother's beating the hell out of her. I don't mind that kind of flash· back. But if you actually show the mother giving her candy, I can't take that. That's the way I feel about using a newspaper.

That's the whole story. In Merrill's Marauders, the theme that I thought would be very, very strong is not just of a man saying, "You do what I do"which is epitomized by his saying, "You put one foot forward; you take another step," and so on. That's only 50 percent. I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to show that when he says, "You do what I do," that means, "When I die, you die." That's the main thing I wanted to bring out. That's the Big Baby.

Robertson is the only one in the film who acts on personal grounds. He wasn't motivated by a newspaper story; he actually witnessed his father's murder.

I used the same thing in Pickup on South Street. This is human nature: In Pickup, Widmark didn't care about any· thing. Didn't care! But when he found out that someone took a beating for him, that someone was physically hurt in connection with him; then he immediately said, " OK, that's it," and he went right after t he enemy.

The same with Robertson. He didn't give a damn. But since he's committed himself, on his level, to a partner and since now he's assigned to kill this part· ner, then he has to go after Connors.

Because if Rust doesn't kill her, some· one else wilt · It's a theme I like in a picture. I never like a man to do something heroic for any chauvinistic or false premise other than emotional, personal necessity. If a newspaper says, "Great Hero Saves 12,000 From Being Bombed In A Sta· dium," w.e know he didn't save twelve thousand people. He saved one. That's what I'm trying to bring out.

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Merrill's Marauders Gener al Frank Merrill (Jeff Chandler) agrees to lead h is troops to make a final stand'at Myitkyiana. After several ambushes, plagues of typhoid fever and weeks without supplies, the troops refuse to go on to their final destination, the airfield. Merrill, on the verge of a heart attack, walks through his ragged troops and te 11s them, "As long as you can take another step, you can fight." He then fa11s over dead. Inspired, his soldiers begin to rise and move on. _ , , .... .... .-...-t.. ... l

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The theme of the fighter is carried over into your next picture, Merrill's Marauders. It's summed up when Merrill says, "As .long as you can take another step, you can fight."

Was the battle among the concrete blocks improvised?

Quite a lot of the picture was impro· vised, since we shot the whole thing on location in the Philippines. There used to be several tanks-1 think they were fuel tanks--supported on these big triangular stones. During the war, the tanks were blown up. The stones re· mained. When I saw those stones, I immediately got the idea for the battle scene. They reminded me of the dra· gons' teeth of the Siegfried Line in Germany. We fought like that in the dragons' teeth. That's chaos again.

The producers took out a couple of things I wanted in that scene. I wanted to get an effect of people shooting blindly, of America.n s shooting other Americans. Because it's panic! The whole thing is panic. But I had to draw the line. After all, I was told, it's a war picture. You're going to be showing it to mothers and fathers, and they're going to say: ''What is this? It's enough that if our boy is shot, he's killed by an enemy. Does it have to be his own friend who shoots him?" Yes! It does.

That's what happens.

The scene of the night fight was done without any lights. The only lights we had were from the explosions. I had thirty-six explosions for the first shot.

The first take was ruined, because the explosions knocked the camera right down.

The Naked Kiss Kelly (Constance Towers), a prostitute, arrives in a small town. After sleeping with the police chief (Anthony Eisley), she is promptly directed across the river to the local bordello. She somehow gets the directions mixed up, and she winds up leading a respectable life. Sh e falls in love with Grant (Michael D ante), the m illionaire civic leader, and becomes engaged to him, although she withdraws mysteriously from his first kiss. The day before their marriage, sh e finds him molesting a child. The kiss she had received from him is known in prostitutes' parlance as a " Naked Kiss": the kiss of a pervert. Her dreams shattered, she bludgeons him to death with a telephone receiver. She is arraigned for murder, and the town refuses to believe the truth about Grant. Eventually the child is found, and Kelly is exonerated. She leaves town and goes back to being a prostitute.

I think The Naked Kiss is in many ways more "shocking" than Shock Corridor.

9 1The New Journal ! March 9, 1969

It is.

In fact, I would say that it's the most shocking film you've made. It seemed that you deliberately went to lengths to get a reaction from the audience, especially when you pull the rug out from under everything in the child-molesting scene.

In Naked Kiss, I maintained that (I tried to get this in Pickup, too) no matter how low someone is, in the depths of his or her profession, there's someone lower.

Then, no matter how low that person is, when he finds someone lower, he's · shocked, he's hurt. The hookers, who resent that they are resented by the country club set, would resent someone lower than they are. Do you understand? That's the first thing I wanted to bring out.

I wanted to bring something else out, but I don't know if I succeeded, because we were short on loot there, the bastards. I had a scene where Constance Towers confronts the townspeople after they find out that she's innocent. First they were ready to lynch her, and now they want vindication. She tells them to go to hell. I didn't shoot this sceneno money. She calls them hypocrites, which is all right, but the important thing is that she realizes how happy she was in her profession. She says, in effect: "What a thrill it is, when you get through laying any of those bastards, he pays you off and leaves. You don't have to listen to him or to his stories or to his lies, like I have to listen to your lies every day." That's what I wanted.

Another thing I like about the picture, which maybe millions hated or thousands or two hundred that saw it, was the idea of a girl going back to be a hooker. I just like it.

I thought it would be very effective if a girl kills a saint, and no one will believe that the saint is really guilty of a horrible crime. That's the premise I wanted: a girl kills a saint. How do I make this man saintly and canonize him? I make him the sweetest man in the world, with all sorts of charitable gadgets: hospitals, a town named after him, and so on.

So when I started the film as a shocker, the original impression I wanted was of a wonderful, almost dull, very, very ordinary love story: the poor girl from the wrong s ide of the tracks; the rich man, he falls in love with her. Well, I hate those kinds of stories. So I knew I was going to have fun the minute she finds him molesting the child. Now, when you saw the picture, did that scene shock you?

To say the least.

Good. That's what I wanted. I don't mean that I wanted it to shock you con·

tent-wise; I wanted it to shock you story-wise.

A lot of people didn't like that picture. Certain friends of mine said, "Oh, why'd you have him try to lay a little girl?" I don't know, maybe they resented it because of some secret, hidden desire. What would you expect me to do? Suppose there's no child-molesting

Well, there you are. Then I'm wrong.

The subject matter was not too distasteful . Or else, maybe I didn't handle it subtly enough. I thought I handled it pretty well, because I got past the cen· sors. They said, "How are you going to shoot tf1e scene where she comes in and sees the little girl being molested?" I said, "We just go on faces : The little girl. The man. The older woman. Then the little girl just trotting out. That's all."

I thought that worked.

The opening scene is astonishing, where Towers beats up the pimp as her wig is falling off. The viewer is assaulted before the credits even come on.

Did that surprise you, that beginning?

There's no fade-in, you know. We open with a direct cut. In that scene, the actors utilized the camera. They held the camera; it was strapped on them. For the first shot, the pimp has the camera strapped on his chest. I say to Towers, " Hit the camera!" She hits the camera, the lens. Then I reverse it. I put the camera on her, and she whacks the hell out of him. I thought it was effective.

She had a difficult time making herself up at the end of the scene, because she had to use the lens as a mirror. As the titles come on, she's looking into the lens.

scene. I wouldn't have made the story.

There is no story, in that case, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not interested in the girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

They made those stories at Metro and Warners' for fifty years. There's always a happy ending.

I do know that when you have a movie like The Naked Kiss and you use a cast with star-values, instead of unknowns like I used, the reaction is different. For example, I just saw a picture on television called Suddenly Last Summer. I know that if it had not been written by Tennesee Williams, and if Mankiewicz had used a couple of unknowns, and it was for a couple of dollars, and it was shuffted out by someone like Allied Artists, you never would have heard of it. If you had heard of it, you would have said, " It's too despicable." I'm not complaining. I don't usually like to think of big names when I'm making a picture; I've made quite a number of films completely with unknowns. I just know that sometimes, with a delicate or shocking subject, you're better off using good old-fashioned Hollywood names.

I thought I had some good stuff in Naked Kiss. I liked the idea that the townspeople could not believe that their canonized leader could do anything wrong, when we knew differently. There's nothing unusual about that.

To me, what was unusual was to show a woman who searches for some damn kind of happiness, a kind of security that she envies, that other women have, and when she finds it, it's all smuhed and blasted.

I don't know why some people don't like it. I like The Naked Kiss. There ue little things I probably should have done. When I say "little things," I mean story-wise, nothing else. Maybe the subject matter was too distasteful. I don't know. Was Suddenly Last Summer a very big hit?

Yes.

There are many artistic references in the film, mostly connected with Grant, the millionaire. The most outstanding ones are to Beethoven.

Ahl First of all, I wanted to show that millionaire's a very " nice" man; he likes to sit and listen to music, and all that stuff. The girl is very hungry for some-

thing like th11t. Beethoven is • symbol.

It could have been any other composer or •rtist. l w•ntec:l to show • contrast between Grant •nd the cop, who says, " I don't know •nything •bout Beethoven." I put in that line for a reason. I h•d to h•ve • hook, so that when she meets the rich m•n, and he brings up • certain subject-Beethoven--we would s11y, "Oh, my! This is wonderful.

He likes what I like. But the cop doesn't." That's the primary reason I used that.

Second reuon: I love Beethoven. I'd

squeeze him in anyplace. I want to tell you a story. This actually happened.

In the war, when we went into Bonn, Germany, we holed up in certain houses. I went into this one house with a man called Johnson, who was from Nashville, Tennesee. We had to sleep there until morning. When the light came through the window I looked up, and I saw manuscripts on the wall: Eroica, the Fifth, the Ninth, a sonata.

Letters. Busts. Paintings. And it hit me.

Naturally, this was the famous Beethoven museum. I woke up Johnson.

He was terrified. He said, "What's the matter?!" I said, "Beethoven was here!"

He said, ''Who?" I said, "Beethoven!"

And he said, ''What outfit?" I said, " Johnson, you must have heard of Beethoven." I started to hum (Beethoven's Fifth), " Bom-bom-bom-bom. He wrote that." He said, "Oh! A songwriter!" I said, ''Well, not exactly. He wrote music." Johnson said,"You mean like Irving Berlin! 'White Christmas'!"

That's a true story.

What were you intending with the imaginary trip to Venice during the big love scene?

I w•nted thilt very badly for so many reasons. First of all, I'm trying to sell him as a poetic, musical type-the fellow she wants so badly. She's never had anything like this before. The Venice scenes gave me a chance to show that pictorially.

But what I wanted more than anything else was to use that to build up to The Kiss, The Naked Kiss. I have him kiss her in the gondola, with the leaves falling. I cut on that position to them kissing on the couch. One more leaf falls. We'll never know whether that's in her mind or it really happened. The minute she kisses him, she draws away.

He says, ''What's the matter?" She says, " Nothing." That's when she should have said, "There's something wrong with you." But she didn't.

I had to have something highly molasses-like, even cornily romantic, in that scene. I couldn't just have them kissing on the couch. I had to have all that phony mood for one reason: I thought if I gave him an overload of gibble-gabbt.---about poets and painters and writers and musicians-we would understand why she doesn't object right then. I had to get a man who symbolized everything she was hungry for. I even went overboard. I had to.

When she does find out this man's secret and she realizes that he had

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A Do uble Bill of O ff-B'd w y Hits: .

The Indian Wants the Bronx and It's Called the Sugar Plum

by Israel Ho rovitz O bie a nd Drama Desk-Ve rnon Rice Awa rd W inners in 1968 " Indian is an extraordinary study of the psychology of terrorism ... cool fluid, swaggering." Village Voice " Indian ... is one of the most hopeful things in the New York theatre."

Clive Barnes, NY Times "Sugar Plum: a funny premise, just 'sick' eooullh to be piq uant, and Horovitz develops it skillfully." Sullivan, NY Times

Free limousine service from Hotel T aft to theatre for Sat. matinee.

STUDENT PREV IEWS Wed . Ma r. 5; Thu rs. Ma r. 6

XEROX COPIES ON YOUR MIND?

given her a Naked Kiss, she's shocked and he's shocked that she's shocked. ' Since she's a hooker, he thought that she would understand why he likes little girls. Why should she be surprized? He just hit the wrong girl.

I thought that was good copy.

Shark . (Caine.) (T wist of the Knife.)

I had what I felt was a brainstorm: doing a story about four amoral characters. One is a scientist: no morals. One is the girl he's laying: no morals. One is the young hero: no morals. One is the cop: no morals. I thought it would be interesting to show not only a doublecross on a double-cross, but when we think we know who the heavy is, we find out that the real heavy behind it is the girl. She's the lowest. She does have a chance to get out of it alive, if she levels with the lead. But she doesn't.

She is responsible for her own death.

He lets her die. In other words, I tried something different there. They're in love and all that stuff, and I have the hero not only allow her to die, but he shrugs it off. I thought that was exciting.

I like the idea of a love affair where the man finds out the girl has used him.

I gave her a great line of dialogue. In the last line of the picture (now I find out t.h~t the producers put it in ahead, and 1t s no longer the last line), she says to him, "You're a bastard, and I'm a bitch." That's the whole flavor I wanted.

I shot some great stuff. For instance, when the boat is sinking at the end he takes a lighted cigarette and throw~ it into the sea. I just stay on that cigarette.

A fish sees it (the fish being a symbol of the ~hark), thinks it' s something, and grabs 1t-pashht! That's the end of the picture. Now I think they've cut it out. A lot of things like that were cut out.

As you know, I asked them to take my name off the damn thing, because I didn't like the cut I saw. I thought it was terrible. I told them I wanted to restore my origin4111, or I'd try to get my name taken off it. They said they didn't know if they could get the film from Mexico. They couldn't locate it. It was such a confused state of affairs. Finally, I told them, "Don't bother me about it anymore." It may be the world's worst picture, or it may turn out to be a surprise to me. I don't know. I do know I had fun with the characters, because I went beyond the 411verage switch of revealing the villain. I also didn't have a guy just letting a girl go off to jail; he lets her be eaten up by sharks. I've never seen anything like that in a picture before. Have you? That's my ending. That's what I shot.

The only reason I first called the picture Caine is that we went to a restaurant in Mexico where the service was bad. I got sore, and while I was getting sore, I felt like Cain, so I said, "Well, we' ll call it Cain." That's all. Hell. I felt like hell. Then the producer saw a layout in Life magazine some pictures of a guy being killed by a shark or something like that, and it said, "Shark." So they changed the titlel Well, that's the checkered career of an ex-copyboy. That's "-30--" The Big Red One Future. Fuller's most cherished project. A treatment of the progress of the First Infantry Division in World War II. To be realized as both a film and a novel.

My big love is The Big Red One. I think I've been working on it since the Second Battle of Bull Run. That's how long it seems. I want to shoot in seven countries. Seven countries, seven women, five men: that's the wf,ole story. It's a three-hour show. I don't think that's asking too much, because it starts out in Africa 411nd ends up in Czechoslovakia.

It shows the beginning of a war. This is where my story begins: Who fires the first shot? How does a war actually physically start? War may be decla;ed, but, somebody has to kill somebody before it can begin. I go to the very last d411y of the war. This one man does not know the war is over. What happens to him is the really important thing in the story, because the verb "kill" becomes "murder." :;:: The following films by Samuel Fuller will be shown by the Yale Film Society Wednesday, Apri/23-I Shot Jesse James Saturday, Aprii26-Park Row T hursday, Aprii 24-R un of the Arrow and F o rty Guns Saturday, M ay 3-Pickup on South Street and C hina Gate

Teaching black studies at Yale

by Austin Clarke

This is not the first time that I find myself teaching-perhaps I should have said, trying to teach-white and black students.

It is, however, the first time I am constantly aware that there are white and black students in my classes. Obviously, this awareness does not come of any great erudition on my part. Rather it spririgs from a greater awareness which begins out there on the streets, in the city streets of the ghetto and in the various avenues of mind and attitudes. This, after all, is America.

Even though one can, like me, ignore with a certain amount of success the difference in colour, if that colour is predicated upon some intellectual advantagein spite of this, I say that there are moments when I wonder whether I am not more of an image (in the meanest, most reprehensible sense of that term) both for my white students and my black students. I use the personal possessive adjective not without great care. I am, after all, much more free of prejudices that have to do with race than they can possibly ever be.

And when my awareness of this position in which I am held by my students becomes clouded by the proximity of the street mentality to the classroom mentality, then I become extremely depressed and wonder whether in the heat of the various white and black nationalisms and hatreds, the entire idea of education in this country, and in this university in particular, is not in need of a radical overhauling.

I do not intend to perform this function.

I have faced myself and have concluded that to be a sane writer, a black man with a strong conviction of the beauty and truth in creative work, is sufficiently hazardous and sometimes, in my personal topsy-turvy life, sufficiently revolutionary also.

I dislike greatly the attempt on the part of some of my students to tear me limb from limb and to presume that they can remake me to suit their various radical, their various reactionary specifications. It is equally obscene of them to imagine that apart from basicaJly different views of black literature, their approach to intellectual analysis of their views can effectively be couched in the afterbirth of their radical hangups.

Now, I am not making a judgement upon the validity of the various brands of nationalism one faces here at Yale. I am merely stating that education in itself cannot be circumscribed by racial preferences and racial resentments: education after all is not a prerogative of whiteness -or even of blackness-although it is understood that one group has laid some sort of foundation which is not today totally binding, as far as either its application or its applicability.

In the classroom I have found two basic reactions to the course which I gave last semester in black literature. Ironically and, for some, startlingly, these reactions were shared by the black students as well as the white students. The first reaction was an almost non-serious approach to the studies. Black literature after all, as far as so-called established critical judgements go, is the bastard discipline, if most regard it as a discipline at all. Students were reflecting this traditional attitude; and the irony lay in the acceptance by some black students of this attitude. This was done in spite of the revolutionary consciousness Austin C. Clarke, lecturer on black literature in the 20th century, is a visiting professor in the American studies and English departments at Yale.

which some display in the whole area of college education.

The second reaction was, apart from the sceptical approach, a seriousness expressed for the studies by both black and white st_udents, with such a refreshing warmth that it shattered certain misconceptions and crystallized others.

I think that the security and what is called the "relevancy" of the courses on the university curriculum has a greater significance than the cutting of the classes.

For it means that real freedom is being experienced. Why should a black student have to attend a lecture merely because it is in black literature? And if the answer to this question proves difficult--or even if it seems nonsensical to pose the

question, perhaps I should add that the "relevancy" of the course lies not so much in its being attended by the black students as in its availability in an academic community which most black students-if not in fact all-regard with a profound foreboding.

In some cases, Yale presents a distinctly hostile environment to these black students. Apart from their participation in such courses, by their attendance, their feeling seems to be one of achievement that the institution has been made "relevant" by its rather belated recognition of a precious slice of an experience, which on the one hand is accepted as having contributed to the total experience of the country and which on the other is not recognized as worthy of study. Sometimes I get the feeling that to "elevate" black studies to a discipline in the same way as Slavonic Studies is regarded here as a legitimate academic discipline-whatever that term, "discipline¡¡ means-is tantamount to elevating the people whom that experience is concerned with: and this is taken to be racially unacceptable.

For how can you regard seriously such things as black studies and black history -that is to say, the history of the black people in this country, if their history can be separated from the history of the

country-how in the name of hell can you regard black studies in this way and continue to regard black people in a less serious way? It can't happen. So then it ought to pe clear that black studies programs on the white university curriculum are an obvious step toward the radicalization of the university itself, and, in turn, of society.

This brings us to what might be termed the heart in the problem of approaches to black studies: the intention of such a course. Is the intention merely to present the black experience to the rest of the society, in a vindictive, blind fashion of racial retribution? Is it to present this black experience only to the black section of the society, that section not being concerned that whites are present during this kind of instruction? Or is to present this black experience in the hope that it clarifies certain racial misconceptions held by both black and white people?

One could ask another question: is the intention to present this body of black "facts'' so that it inculcates into the black listeners an intellectual-cultural drug and imbues them with a blacker black consciousness of themselves-which consciousness, in the framework of a decidedly racist society might perhaps make them more revolutionary (or make them commit suicide), in the sense in which Eldridge Cleaver and other black intellectuals, like Leroi Jones and Ron Karenga, understand that term?

I feel that the intention of the white university is contained in its approach to these black studies. In some cases, the university would only agree to accommodate black students' demand for black studies if it was felt that refusal might bring out some disruption of the university itself.

The disruption could be real: burning down buildings and holding university officers captive; or academic: cutting classes and refusing to write examinations.

The black studies programme at Yale University-which I know best--can be said to be functioning to the general satisfaction of everyone involved. Ironically, it came without physical disruption: it essentially was so "intelligently sanguine" that Yale has the reputation of being the first American university to have black studies (the administration caJls it Afro-American studies) as a university major. There are some doubts, of course-mainly about the black literature course given at Yale. The underlying political nature of the motivation for black studies does nothing to aJiay suspicions. But the criticism from students -black and white-that I have heard centers entirely on the question of inadequate teaching staff. It is not an ideological criticism.

There is, however, a feeling in some quarters that black American literature, like black American history, can best be taught by a black American. (Can Russian literature be taught best by Russians?)

The definition of "best", if one could be forthcoming from these dissident students, would perhaps explain the shortcomings they saw in a professor who was black, let us say, from the Caribbean or from Africa, but who was not a black American.In that word, "best" lies the inteiJectual chauvanism of the American black student, who sometimes feels that black studies courses could have relevance to himself only if they were held in closed, homogeneously black circumstances.

There is also an indication that the content should be a lower-key "blowing of whitey's mind." I do not think that the e n

r 12 I The New Journal I March 9, 1969

purpose of black studies is to "blow whitey's mind''nor to blow the black man's mind. It should mainly and purely be instructive. It should be instructive to the black student trying to understand better his peculiar predicament in white society.

Whether a white student (who symbolically and in racial terms is regarded by blacks as an agent of that white oppressive predicament, can benefit from such exposure, which is bound to be traumatic, is another question. But the difficult question which has been raised by some white students is the legitimacy of their place among black students in a class on black literature. They wonder what contribution they can make to a discussion which, say, is centered around the idea of manhood and the insistence of equality and justice for the black American, which are two elements in the book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Would their contribution be irrelevant or would it be an admission of their oppressive agency, since they are made to feel, heavily, the guilt of the society that denies that very manhood, equality and justice? If that feeling is justified, if their presence and participation in that feeling causes and establishes the sense that their presence and participation are unwanted, then the original approach of the course is wrong.

This is not to deny that, in some cases, the criticism of a white student or a white inteiJectual on some of the more recent problematical black gut-writing may be relevant. Richard Gilman, writing in the New Republic, acknowledges the intellectual inadequacy of the white critic. But Mr. Gilman's point is worthwhile only so long as America remains politically repressive, with racism being a component of that repression. The weakness of Mr. Gilman's statement is that it presumes that the present "phase of interracial existence in American moral and intellectual truths" is not really a phase, but an absolute condition.

But black writing is not so different from white writing, except in the sense that it does not qualify as high art, is political and Marxist oriented, and has nothing to do with literary imperatives, except in so far as that black writing is the expression of an experience which is fashioned by a special kind of cultural oppressiveness, contended by the black writers themselves and by the black society as a whole.

But then the question remains: is this black revolutionary writing so pure, so black, that it cannot be "corrected", "emended", "rejected", or "approved"not by white partiality- but by white intellectualism, the same white intellectualism that is confident of correcting, emending, rejecting and approving white literary works? Critical problems are not being discussed here: rather, white racism is being sophisticatedly discussed.

But then the corollary can be posed: can white intellectuals be so impartial and so academically capable as to give a valid judgment on this type of black writing?

Mr. Gilman's point is relevant only in the consideration of political writing by blacks. It is absolutely idiotic if it is applied to a consideration of creative writing, which is literature even if it is produced by blacks. M y point is, ironically, substantiated by Mr. Gilman himself, who feels that a "book like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the type and highest achievement of "the genre," forges its own special value and importance partly through its adamant specificity, its inapplicability as a model for many kinds of existence. Its way

of looking at the world, its formulation of experience is not the potential possession --even by imaginative appropriation--cf us all; hard, local, intransigent, alien, it remains in some sense unassirnilable for those of us who aren't black."

For those of us who aren't black: to what extent then does this voluntary cultural alienation reflect a kind of intellectual patronage, a kind of sophisticated pushing aside of issues, the whole of which is to get the attention of those "who aren't black"? Isn't this attitude a reflection of white liberal attitude implicit in the demand for more black studies, that those of "us who aren't black" might see, perhaps for the first time, the contribution of the black experience to the total American

experience; and isn't it some kind of racial, if not moral, insurance against a conceivable apocalyptic conclusion of the heightened tension of non-communication which now exists between the two races, and which the teaching of black studies might be construed to serve by some form of intellectual blood-letting?

Ralph Ellison, in his book, Shadow and Act, was concerned with this problem too.

He asked three questions which, rather than being answered by white intellectuals - if in fact they could be answered-were permitted to fall by the wayside of intellectual unassimiJability, of the kind propounded by Mr. Gilman. Mr. Ellison's questions are: ''Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro, they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive models of analysis? Why is it that sociologyoriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project?

Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?"

Mr. Gilman does not really presume to

tell us who are not white the meaning of Negro life, nor does he rate literature below politics and ideology; he commits another crime: he rates black writing as "unassimilable" and "inapplicable" because he sees special qualities in it. Nevertheless, Mr. E llison's questions seem to me to be the questions that should be raised by the white professor and the white intellectual involved in the teaching of black studies; and these questions are relevant whether the course is taught to a mixed class of black and white students or to a class that is homogeneously black or homogeneously white.

The teaching of black studies in the present strained racial relationship between black and white in this country may defeat its intention, if that intention is to clear the racial air and permit some mutually honest examination of the two groups. The political nuances underlying that black-white relationship will crystallize the racial tensions that already exist and bring about a more definite polarization of thinking.

There is feeling that teaching black studies today cannot help but contribute to the black militant's predilection for cultural separatism. It is ironic that when a minority group rediscovers some of its past which it likes, that discovery contributes to a hardening, a kind of chauvinistic super morality which sets the minority group adrift from the oppressive majority establishment and forces it into some kind of anti-integrationist cultural autonomy.

But this cultural autonomy is a temporary condition. It is one phase in a quest for power: power in all its meanings. But with the acquisition of power, the silent, understood intention of white universities toward the teaching of black studies will begin to re-appear. This is a roundabout way of arriving at assimilation.

The desire for black studies is in itself antithetical to a desire for integration so long as integration presents a possibility of assimilation into the oppressive and more culturally powerful majority.Black studies were desired simply because white consciousness, through certain vicissitudes of liberalism and patronization, permitted its existence; the permission was meant to emphasize the superiority of one cultural consciousness over the other. This is contrary to the basic comprehension of Black Power. It is contrary to the basic black comprehension of black studies.

If black militant intellectualism can afford to be humanistic, if it is derived from the black humanism that Leroi J ones insists is the characteristic of black life, then it will have to come to accept the existence of another kind of intellectualism: white intellectualism. It may even be forced to accept its validity.

If, on the other hand, the motivation to total black awareness is based on a special predilection among black Americans that they have this special right, not as human beings, or as Americans, but a kind of divine right of blacks which permits them to forge a separate cultural awareness in the teeth of a gnawing white establishment power, then that black cultural awareness must be seen, and will always be seen, as a threat, an intellectual threat; and more importantly, it will be regarded as an indication of black ingratitude.

It does not matter that this accusation of ingratitude comes of an admission of guilt, of immorality, of injustice: what matters is that America believes there is one America, indivisible and free. For

13 I The New Journal I March 9, 1969

Yale F ilm Society

any group, its moral justification notwithstanding, to presume to be able to exist · an d operate outside of this political-cultural and fanatical belief, is to bring down a self-righteousness, a racial vengeance upon those who presume to take a different direction.

The teaching of black studies as it exists today is most often an intellectual black assault upon this white American point of view. The successful teaching of these stud ies, and the not so successful teaching of them, will prepare a predilection for black cultural separatism. The fact that white universities are teaching courses in black studies means one of two things: either these universities are certain that the kind of black students they have is not of the same militant and revolutionary genre as those blacks in established black political organizations; or that those students are quite simply what Malcolm X called "house niggers." For the white university, being a special representative of the total white establishment, could not be unaware that they are possibly training the radical elements to bring about their destruction.

Thus white universities will cease to contain and to entertain any black student w ish or demand or threat the moment the satisfaction of those demands is suspected to contain the destruction of the universities. White universities were not founded, after all, for the benefit of black Americans, so much as they are establishm ent for the perpetuation of white cultural consciousness-whatever that consciousness may be in terms of particular political and social environments.

Ironically, and lamentably, black studies is not taught with the same intensity, nor with the same direction, in predominan tly black universities. Apparently, one does not have to be made constantly aware of one's cultural contribution to the country if one is placed in a psychologically secure position-a majority position in a black university, which could be regarded as a psychological oasis in the midst of a desert.

Apparently, blacks in this situation do not need to advertise themselves culturally and historically when there are no whites around to question or compromise that cultural and historical contribution. Apparently, also, blacks are content to be ignorant about themselves among themselves ("We know where we art at!") and when there are no whites in their academic vicinity.

The non-academic considerations which limit the approach and the effectiveness of the teaching of black studies in predominantly white universities will victimize white intellectuals who seek, "out of a clear conscience," to teach such studies after years of academic preparation. There are, conceivably, some well-intentioned white intellectuals who have a real interest in black studies in the same way that it can be said that there are white people who have a non-liberal, non-white-participatory interest outside of political organizations, in the black man.

This must be the case. Since this type of white man would confess that the fate of the country is bound up in the respective fates of the blacks and of the whites, no logic, be it derived from black nationalism, black consciousness, black manhood, can refuse to admit to the possibility of the sincerity and the valuable contribution that these types of white people can give-perhaps it should be said, can offer.

What then is going to happen to the

white intellectual, himself a kind of radical because of his commitment to the essentiality of black studies, who feels strongly that he can contribute, academically? Is the black revolution in ideas going to throw him out with the bath water of disillusioned white liberalism? Is the humanism that is a characteristic of the psyche of the black man going to be sacrificed in order to adhere to the strictest principles of black intellectual chauvinists?

To put the question quite simply, can the black revolution in ideas and practices afford to sacrifice this natural resource of exploitable white radicalism? :,:; Friday, March 7 THE NAVIGATOR (1926) Directed by and starring Buster Keaton Keaton's famous, surreal comedy. Also a Keaton short.

Saturday, March 8 FEAR {1955) Directed by Roberto Rossellini starring Ingrid Bergman A stark and terrifying picture of a modern world devoid of emotion Wednesday, March 12 Jean Renoir, TH E SOUTHERNER {1945)

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14 1The New Journal ! March 9, 1969

Shmo? continued from page 2 could be put together out of all these virtuosi. Dancing lessons used to be almost as popular as musical instruction in the suburbs of the 1950s, so our chorus line will form itself. As for our actors, anyone who has undergone a departmental tea knows that graduate students surely can play a role.

I grow lyrical whenever I muse about what will happen the first night the grad revue is produced. There is no limit to the disasters that might befall us and keep our tongues wagging for years. The avantgarde set which someone will surely design might collapse. The band is likely to quit midway through the first act, claiming that their musical integrity is compromised by the hams on the stage. And there is no doubt that the unfortunate actors will fail to make old saws the writers provide them with sing like violins.

If the grad revue will be such a botch, what purpose will it serve other than to give its crew an image of the kind of good time they think they had when they were ten? I submit that even a brief and frivolous excursion into the "creative" arts will stop their g.P b prattle about how easy it is to be both whimsical and serious at the same time. Who knows, it might give them some respect for the artist's work and an appreciation of their own worth as critics.

It might even make them see th at there is more bitter truth than bad poetry ih the lines by Aristotle I had to Jearn while a freshman: The middle class within the state fares best, /ween May I be neither low nor great, but e'en between.

Robert D. Schul zinger.

Wretched excess Mr. Ribuffo replies: Gee, Bob, I've always wanted to have one of these wither ing exchanges in a ritzy intellectual magazine, and now you've given me the chance. If this were the New Masses thirty years ago, I could denounce you as a Trotskyite revisionist traitor to the "nice" revolution in graduate school (with my own eyes I have seen books by Isaac Deutscher in your apartment) and be done with it; but these days, withering exchanges must take a more subdued form. Since you've opened with the wh imsically erudite style of the New York Review of Books, combining equal parts charm and in-group allusion, I'll reply in kind.

To begin, I must admit a possible error in my essay. A local AI Capp scholar has informed me that the furry creature I had in mind was not the schmoo at all, but the " kick-me." I am trying to confirm this correction, but the only doctoral dissertation on Capp (in American studies at Oregon) has not yet arrived from University Microfilms: A Xerox Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48106. In the mean time, however, let me express willingness to assist you in preparing the libretto for your grad-school revue. Although we are not at Northwestern, a quick walking tour of L & B will provide enough buxom honeys to fill out the chorus line. I am aware of the Plymouth Rock project, and I am willing to contribute a score entitled, " I Can't Get No Sanctification." Jf, however, you decide to write the great chro ni-

cle about the drop-out "who becomes in turn a dentist, lawyer and novelist while living in a forest and destroying his mind by blowing the oboe," I cannot be of much help. Alas, my stylistic roots barely reach to Nathanael West. But you, Bob, the grand connoisseur of Thomas Mann, can produce a grad school epic. Could not H GS be the Magic Mountain?

OK, so much for whimsy; now for some seriousness. Perhaps my article sounded too self-righteous, and you have put me in my place for my smugness. Nevertheless, I still believe that my description of the atmosphere in graduate school is essentially valid. I never said that "most of these poor wretches" could "blossom" into anything. I don't really know. Rather, I argued that most graduate students don't consider doing anything other than their current "scholarship"; nor do they reflect on why they are doing that. The exceptions often go off to be novelists or forest rangers (you know and respect the two men I have in mind), and some of us wallow in survival guilt when they leave.

This past week, 1 sampled responses to my article, and I have found evidence fully to confirm my arguments. For every person who appreciated the attempted wit, whether or not he agreed with me, there was at least one other who complained that 1 wasn't adequately serious, that my tone wasn't scholarly enough, that I didn't offer "positive programs" for reform. I have always known that there are folks who read "The Wasteland" and mutter that Eliot should have written a statistical study of suicides in London, but I didn't expect that kind of mentality to be so widespread--even in grad school. Shall I make up an annotated reading list of Swift and Veblen to show that serious points can be made-sometimes must be made-by satire and ridicule? Or shall I polish my seminar-paper prose, drop allusions to Mannheim and David Riesman, and point to the Ph.D.s in 1910 who "improved" Emily Dickinson's poetry by making it rhyme; the Ph.D.s of 1920 who lavished praises on Howells and never read M oby Dick; the Ph.D.s of 1933 who explained that one must not tamper with the business cycle? This comment, unfortunately, is not the place to offer historical evidence of the too frequent narrowness and overconfidence of academic men, characteristics which survive well into our generation. 1 can only suggest that we note with Emerson-who was barred for twenty years from Harvardthat there is an important difference between "Man Thinking" and "the parrot of other men's thinking," and that we should try to be the former.

LeoRibuffo

Balcony The Yale Dramat's tear-it-yourself poster made their recent production of Genet's The Balcony probably their best-publicized production in years. It is sad that the originality of the poster was not matched by the originality and effectiveness of the performance, any more than their ambitiousness in choosing The Balcony was matched by their ability to do justice to the imagination of the playwright. Genet's script has as many flaws as it has openings into the depths of human nature, and the Dramat production clearly came from a director and a company who were as hesitant to acknowledge the shortcomings as

they were to plunge into the possibilities.

Perhaps "shortcomings" is the wrong word, because everything in the play is very long in coming. This, first of all, the Dramat did not face up to. Judicious cutting and considerably more attention to the pace of the first scenes might have overcome in part Genet's wordiness.

But if Genet wrote a wordy play, he also wrote a rich one, and the Dramat company continuaJly failed to convey the deep humanness inherent in the perverted fantasies of the Grand Balcony brothel.

Genet's characters are caricatures of human nature, but they are valid caricatures, reflecting much that we don't like to admit about ourselves. This production treated them as ludicrous without conveying the closeness of their fantasies to what all of us dream about. The morbidity of the "visitors' "fantasies was emphasized instead of their delight, and the result was an image uniformly dark and heavy where it should have had many sparks of light.

(The Yale Daily News's somewhat fawning review claimed that the humor "came through with great comic effect," but I don't recall a single solid laugh from the near-capacity house that sat through the show with me.) If there had been some delight in the activities of the brothels, some evidence that the fantasies were not chores but pleasures, there would have been much more compelling force to Genet's perverted images of human nature.

Time helps to erase the impression of monotony from my mind and in this perspective it is easier to see what the production might have been. Above all, there was a fine sense of style in the visual aspect of the production. The set was complex and interesting, though its extreme clumsiness disqualifies it from being, in the words of the News review, "a theatrical marvel."

No set that monopolizes so much of the running time can be called marvelous or theatrical. ¡ Just as the set was well-conceived but ineffectual in operation, the acting style of ¡ the show had considerable potential but did not tit the needs of the company. The problem was most acute for the most stylized characters, the male-<:ast Madame Irma and Carmen. Limited by the masks they wore, they had to r ise into a different level of stylization from the rest of the play, and though Dean Pickford as Carmen managed to come through with a remarkably subtle and convincing performance, Jeff Pressman in the central and difficult role of Madame Irma all too often lost contact with the other characters and turned conversation into soliloquy. This was the fate of the first-a.c t scene between Irma and Carmen, a scene well designed and directed in all the externals but Jacking the essential interaction between characters.

Though Charles Maryan's direction of The Balcony showed a skill in the manipulation of style that might have produced a striking production with more experienced actors, he has failed once more, as he did in The H ostage, to fill the particular requirements for the director of the Yale Dramat. However much the Yale Dramat may have accomplished, it is an amateur group, and its actors need a director who can lead them on to performances far beyond what they could do on their own.

Their needs are special, and almost three hours of The Balcony were ample proof that it is no kindness to pretend Mr. Maryan fills those needs.

Paul Bennett

Classifieds 20¢ per word Ads may be mailed to: Classifieds, The New Journal, 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut, 06520.

Raccoons do not hibernate. If there is a raccoon hibernating in your basement, chances are he is dead.

Rudolf Lowenthal gives the lowdown on the copyright question in China. No holds barred. Yenching Journal of Social Studies, August, 1941.

Gary Trudeau is a genius. While his "Bull Tales" are the only possible reason to read the Yalie Daily, Trudeau is so smar t he has put "Bull Tales" out in book form, and saved us that trouble.

SAVE THE 360 Tibor Scitovsky, Jacob J . Finkelstein and David Apter: welcome.

So you th ink you're liberated, huh? A real radical, right? Wrong. We think you're a bigot. The New Journal, Volume two, number nine.

You sympathize with peace marches, understand the black sit-ins, and hope Eldridge makes it out OK. You even fancy yourself a radical at times, right? Wrong.

We think you are a bigot. The New Journal, Volume two, number nine.

1

Yale Law School Film Society

Introducing the

CB

from MG

March 10 Ashes and Diamonds 1958 directed by Andrzej Wajda Apple Blossom Time in Poland 1951

March 24 Murder, She Said 1961 directed by George Pollock with Margaret Rutherford also The Pharmacist 1933 with W. C. Fields

March 31 Maratj Sade 1967

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