University Daily Kansan
Monday, April 29, 1974
3
'Saddles' Is Nonsense
By KENN LOUDEN
Kansan Reviewer
Rock Ridge is plagued by a villain named Hedley Lama (nobody in the movie can pronounce his name correctly), who is trying to push all the citizens out of the town so a railroad can cheaply pass through the land. That is the plot of "Bizzarring Saddles." It is entertaining piece of Western nonsense now showing at the Varsity Theatre.
Nothing in the modern cinema can match "Blazing Saddles" for frantic, titillating comedy with the exception of a few scenes from movies by Woddy Allen. "Blazing Saddles" comes with the best of the Marx Brothers' companies—a genre that has been ignored too long.
Cleawen Little plays the hip, black sheriff who rescues Rock Ridge from Lamar, played by Harvey Korman of "The Carol Burnett Show." earlier, as a railroad man, and then in the new show Kick Out of You," when a white straw boss orders him to sing a "nigger work son."
Other bits of comedy fly on and off the screen as an anxious citizen yells that the man is an amputated arm and be cattle raped" and as a witch preys on the an ox fells a horse with a single blow.
Mel Brooks directed and wrote "Blazing Saddles." He also portrays a corrupt frontier governor and a Jewish Indian chief in the movie.
"Blazing Saddles" has some great creats including Gene Wilder, Stink Pickens, Dom DeLause and all of Madeline Kahn of "Paper Moon" and all of "What Up Doe?"
Kahn portarys Lili Von Stupp, a dancehall siren with a lisp like that of Elmer Fudd. Her performance is a wonderful parody of Marlene Dietrich in "Destroy Rides Again."
In one scene she invites Little to her "dressing woom" after singing a torch song in which she laments that she is tired of unbridled passion.
The movie ends flamboyantly as the entire cast becomes involved in a brail and breaks through an adjoining sound stage where a music is being shot.
Brooks' comedy is as subtle as a pie-in-the-face, "Blazing Saddles" will be condemned by efface nets as lacking in polish and wit. People don't go to films to have a good time.
In Brechten fashion Little heads to Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and Korman hails a taxi and says, "Drive me off this picture."
It took Hollywood and the Motion Picture Academy 40 years to recognize the genius of the Marx Brothers. Hopefully, Brooks won't have to wait until he is a withered old man like Groucho Marx before he is similarly recognized for his talent.
After too many art films and excesses of violence and perversion, some directors are forced to release their works.
Bogdanovich ("Paper Moon," "What's Up Doc?"), Woody Allen ("Play It Again, Sam"), Steven Spielberg ("Sugarland Express"), Francis Ford Coppola ("The Godfather") and Mel Brooks have taken time to study movies of the 1930s and 1940s. One can only thank them and question why it took someone so long.
Tricks Are for Kids; 'Normal' Back to Norm
By TIM BRADLEY
Kansas Rectewer
Because I used to think Martin Mull was in the biz more for the yuks than the bucks, I thought he'd be up to his old tricks again. Mull has apparently discovered that tricks are for kids and has successfully mixed grit to create an excellent third album, "Normal."
On two cuts the listener is treated to the ace guitar work of Amars Garrett, master of
First, on the technical side, "Normal" boasts nearly the whole crew of Capricorn crazies, like Tommy Tatton and Chuck Leavell from the Allman Brothers Band and jazz giants Thad Jones, Joe Farrell and Barry Galbraith.
Paperbacks
"FATHER FIGURE" Pocket, $1.25) by Beverley Nichols is the autobiography of a British author and lecturer. He tells a story that is grim and ugly—a Victorian boyhood surrounded by violence and grinding his wife and children and driving the author to make three attempts on his life.
"THE DEATH OF THE FUERHRE"
(Gold Medal, 75 cents) by Ronald Pucecchi is a novel that carries us back to that bunker in Berlin in the last days of World War II and to a secret laboratory and to the revelation that Hitler really didn't die at all.
"A RUN IN DIAMONDS" (Pocket, 1978) by Alex Saxon is the story of Carmody, an international go-between, whose life was marked by Spain with a fortune in stolen diamonds.
THE LONGER THE THREAAD
(Pocket, 95 cents) by Emma Latten is a John Putham Thatcher mystery. A Puerto Rican writer sets the setting for this entertaining mystery novel.
the musical understatement. Rock guitarists are seldom reputed for their taste and restraint, and when given a solo passage, tend to cram as many notes as physically fit into a few mismatched measures. Garrett has an uncanny knack for making sparsity special; instead of playing against the chords as most guitarists do, he plays against the melody to create the rhythm without breathtaking simplicity. Look for more of his work with Paul Butterfield and Geoff and Maria Muldau's various albums.
To that sturdy studio skeleton, add the meat of Mull's mirth, music and mistrelsy and clothe it in a smooth-sweat sampler of pseudo-soul, samba and soft swing. And while Mull's own instrumental and arranging talents are top drawer, left hand side, it is a humorist-lystic that he is most noted. Not the sad saint sadden who seeks to make a statement, but it is the gentle cynic moved by the same frustrations and joys as his audience.
In "Woodstock Samba," Mull asks the ageless musical question "I'd love to go to Holland, wooden shoe?" and in "Jesus Christ's Sword," Mull asks the chorus chants, "Let him run through the crossbars, half of which he's seen before." "Woodshop" features the Power Tool Chorus composed of Crosby, Stills, Black and New Yorker, these twins are immortalized in "Jim n. 1"
Though some of the songs have the potential for grave breaches of taste, Mull treats his subjects with subtlety, wit and what amounts to a genuine sentimentality.
"Birthday," "Dailing for Dollars" and "Rome and Bored" are all cleverly phrased, but beneath the surface gloss, the songs are touching slice-of-life vignettes that warm the heart and adjacent gibbles. Martin Mull seems toyearm for the Ozzie and the Kid, and even in the equally happy and sad. His new LP reassures us that that's really quite normal.
'Alive' Depicts Self-Preservation
A Tale of Plane Crash Victims' Struggle to Survive
By ALISON GWINN Kansan Reviewer
*ALIVE* by Biers Paul Read (352 pages);
J. P. Linnencott; $140; 810.
On Oct. 13, 1972, a Uruguay aircraft carrying members of an amateur rugby team, their families and friends crashed on the banks of the Rio Grande early spring, and the Andes had received an extremely heavy fall of snow that winter. The roof of the plane was white, and the hopes of finding it were almost negligible. But for finding survivors was even smaller.
Ten weeks later, on Dec. 21, a Chilean shepherd in a remote Andean valley noticed
fascinating because the story he works with is fascinating. Self-preservation is one of the most instructive, ubiquitous human actions we are all capable of doing. It provokes extreme, incredible behavior.
"Alive," by Piers Paul Read, is a chronicle of the survival of 16 of the passengers of the Uruguay Fairchild, from the moment that the 45 original passengers of the plane were rescued a half months later, when two of the survivors finally find help. Read's book is
two figures waving at him from the other side of a mountain torrent. He threw them a piece of paper and a pen wrapped to a rock. They sat in a row, holding the reef it hilt. The message read: "I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am coming back, my young going to come and fetch us. Please."
Read very nicely wibble the story with a minimum of imposed paths. One never receives the impression that he has overglorified or over-dramatized the adventure, although he does treat the characters with a great deal of personal depth. Some of the survivors are physically weak; others are strong enough to accumb to the psychological pressures of desperate situations and refuse to help themselves. Others emerge as leaders, inventors (as of a snowmelting device that produces drinking water) and organizers.
Perhaps the idea that Read imposes most clearly is that those men who survived, or at least for a time fought to survive, were virtually as handcuffed as any typical man of urban household in that they knew nothing of their own past, naive and unaccustomed to anything less than modernized luxury living. For that reason, one can strongly empathize with them. The possibility that anyone could find facing imminent death makes one approach even more futile of discovering just how well he himself could survive given negative chances.
Read heavily chronicles the growth of a society among the survivors, and the emotions that such a society evokes. One frequently finds himself thumping over to the picture section to keep the faces straight with the personalities, as Read relates the frequent quarrels over petty matters, or the strange possessiveness between
A Documentary Film Titled
"WHO IS GURU MAHARAJ JI?"
Winner at the Atlantic International Film Festival
WILL BE SHOWN
7:30 p.m. Monday, April 29, 303 Bailey Hall
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 30, 3140 Wescoe
ADMISSION IS FREE
FUTURE CPA'S
sleeping partners for each other, or the father-son relationships which develop between men of the same age. He is straightforward with his comments on the personalities of the man, oddly objective- "babyish" or "other man," hot-tempered "babyshift" or "other man," hot-tempered "babyshift"
forgotten,and escape seems impossible
"Alive" is not outstanding for Read's narrative abilities or for any superfluous, fictionalized dramatic effect. It is simply a tribute to the reader without padding and without sparing the gory details of survival. It is an adventure, to be sure, but a rather low-key, starkly different one, which leaves the reader with a feeling of martiness at having spared such an ordinal.
The book is virtually crammed with anecdotal details, a though Read were a survivor himself. He deals extensively with the idea of religion, how it affects the men's decision to eat the flesh from their dead and what they do when they die; the faith that keeps the survivors' families in search planes and contacting caviaryants to discover the plane's position.
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He tells of the heirarchical, routine jobs that each man is assigned to, stressing the increasing weakness of each person surrounded by his partners' muscle and living in a fuelage almost completely exposed to the sub-zero weather of the Andes. And he describes the men's revulsion to eating the organs of their dead mother, to being madness when rescue seems to have been
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