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University Daily Kansan Friday.Feb.12.1960
Crackdown on Speeders
New Jersey has come up with a program for dealing with speeding automobile drivers that other states should imitate.
New Jersey's law, in effect since January 1959, requires mandatory suspension for a specified period for drivers who exceed posted speed limits by more than 10 miles an hour. During the law's first year of application, 31,000 drivers were barred from driving.
Checks on speeding drivers have become increasingly important in recent years because of the horsepower race among automobile manufacturers. Detroit engineers have insisted, until recently, that more motorpower gives a driver greater safety because he can get his automobile out of difficult situations quickly.
This is ridiculous. Drivers would not find
themselves in dangerous situations nearly so often if they did not have so much power, and speed, under the drop of their feet.
A law such as New Jersey's might bring relief from some of the childish drivers who abound on this campus and who demonstrate their warped conception of manliness by speeding up and down Indiana and Mississippi streets with mufflers roaring. These drivers imperil the lives of pedestrians who attempt to cross these streets.
Children have a fascination for noise, and it it not to be expected that these drivers will suddenly become mature enough to appreciate silence rather than cacophony in mufflers. But a severely enforced speeding law would at least slow them down.
Jack Morton
New Maturity for Movies?
By Jack Harrison
There was a relentlessness among the Hollywood producers and film company executives in 1959, as they sought to woo former moviegoers away from their television sets. "Maturity" is the byword of the new look in American movies. Several excellent pictures produced in the U.S. in 1959 may proclaim the coming of a renaissance in the movie industry.
A stimulus to the raising of the standards in American movies has been the drop in attendance at U.S. movie theaters in the years since television sets became standard household equipment in this country. In 1947 weekly movie attendance was 95,000,000. Ten years later it had dropped to less than half that number, at 45,000,000 a week.
In attempting to regain its lost popularity, the movie industry has turned more to the serious problems of our society for its subject material. Arthur Knight, movie critic for the Saturday Review, wrote that "social consciousness is seeping back into American films."
The "growing up" of the film industry during the past year is perhaps best illustrated by Stanley Kramer's production of "On the Beach," from Nevil Shute's book about survival in the atomic age.
Facing up to the problems and issues of the day has been a failure of the American movie makers. But "On the Beach" has done much to discount that criticism. The story is set in Melbourne, Australia, after World War III, as deadly radiation clouds spread southward over the earth to wipe out the last men alive. It is a sobering movie, carrying a plea for a sane policy in the handling of the tremendous
nuclear weapons now in existence.
The sensitive question of race relations is handled in an intelligent and compassionate manner in "Take a Giant Step," a movie which shows what it means to be a Negro in a white man's world.
It is not a story of the violent race feeling found in the South, but rather it portrays the subtle prejudice of the North, and shows the wounding effects of racial bias upon people whose only problem is the color of their skin.
A sympathetic view of innocent persons caught up in the forces of war is presented in George Stevens' production of "The Diary of Anne Frank."
Eight persons hide out from the Germans by taking refuge in an attic in Amsterdam during World War II. The fear and hope they feel during their day-to-day existence in the cramped quarters and the final futility of it all is shown in a penetrating manner. This movie is one of the best of 1959 and adds to the prestige of the industry at a time when it is striving for added maturity in its products.
Another triumph for Hollywood in 1959 was the appearance of a large-budget "spectacular" without idiocy. William Wyler directed the screen version of "Ben-Hur," Lew Wallace's novel.
More than $15 million was spent on the making of the picture, which is more than $3½ hours long. It is a film spectacular of taste and intelligence, breaking the rule that "a cast of thousands" means a low-grade and lengthy adventure movie.
The new frankness of 1959, in motion picture dialogue and script situation, was best illustrated by
"Anatomy of a Murder," produced and directed by Otto Preminger.
It is strictly an adult film, dealing with a rape and murder case in upper Michigan. Besides being a frank inspection of a set of complex characters, the film is a searching examination of our legal procedures. The story is based on a novel by Judge John Voelker, who writes under the name of Robert Traver.
Dignity was added to the film fare of 1959 by "The Nun's Story," adapted from Kathryn Hulme's book about a Belgian girl who gave up her life as a nun after 17 years because she could not accept the necessary ultimate of self-denial.
Skill and delicacy in creating a religious movie of substance are shown by Fred Zinneman, the director; Robert Anderson, the screen writer, and Audrey Hepburn, the star.
A mature approach to a problem of society was presented in "Compulsion," the motion picture version of the famed Leopold-Leoeb murder case in Chicago, in 1920.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
The movie, adapted from Meyer Levin's book of the same title, concentrates on the distorted superman philosophy of the two brilliant college students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in an attempt to commit the perfect crime.
The 1959 movie menu had its share of humor as well. Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot," a wild and racy screwball comedy about the Roaring Twenties, was the best in humor during 1959.
The musical of the year, "Porgy and Bess", unheld the high standards set in the closing year of the decade of the fifties.
Samuel Goldwyn's production of the George Gershwin classic featured an excellent cast. The movie had some of the best music ever heard in American motion picture theaters, enhanced by the use of the Todd-A-O six-channel sound system. Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Brock Peters and Sammy Davis Jr., starred in the movie, under the direction of Otto Preminger.
"THIS IS THE TEXT FOR UNDERGRADUATE, BUT ILL EXPECT A LITTLE MORE FROM THOSE ENROLLED FOR GRADUATE CREDIT"
Hollywood's increased concern over the quality of the products it turns out is due mainly to the problem of attendance. Television has replaced movies as a mode of entertainment for many Americans. But the drop in attendance also has been caused by the insistence by many movie makers on keving their films to a teenage level. The American public is ready for adult motion pictures. As Hollywood turns out mature pictures, the film industry will add to its stature.
There is also a need for original scripts, and less reliance upon best-sellers in the literary field to provide stories for movies.
Producers and directors need increased freedom from the movie company executives and policies. They enjoyed more such freedom during 1959 and probably will see it increase in the sixties.
"We must be imaginative different, stimulating and adult." Clifton Fadiman stated in the Saturday Review, in outlining the program the American motion picture industry must adopt if it is to make its comeback.
. . . Books in Review . . .
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
WHERE THE BOYS ARE, by Glendon Swarthout. Random House,
$3.50
Merrit is a student who goes to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., "where the boys are," because she has had "mono" and is "Uncom" for the coming semester. Merrit is quite unlike the heroes and cowards who inhabited Mr. Swarthout's previous novel, "They Came to Cordura," which, just for the record, I didn't like, and she's much more fun.
An uninhibited gal. Completely natural. Very "Big Ten." She's decided that if something—like, say, virtue—belongs to her that she can dispose of it as she wishes. She says that she and her ego and her id function as a team, that she doesn't hate her parents, that she has two fine brothers (a younger one called "Have Gun," an older one, addicted to cars, called "Will Travel"))
In Florida she has a big time. She gets mixed up, first, with a big-timer from Michigan State who's called TV Thompson. TV is an operator, who tramps up and down the beaches with a white cane and colored glasses. He has been a campus politician, an impassioned orator who breaks up a panty raid and solidifies himself with the dean of students. He says that Barbara Hutton helped send him to school (she provided the money for his yellow convertible).
As Merrit put it:
"Bag up in one flesh Norman Vincent Peale and Manolete and Ann Landers and J. Paul Getty and Mort Sahl and Juan Peron and Ed Sullivan and Mickey Cohen and Bishop Sheen and other such wheeler-dealers and big-time operators and you would have TV Thompson."
Her next encounter (her euphemism is "playing house") is with a man from Brown—after all, the girls from Midwestern universities go to Florida to find a man who goes to a "League" school. His name is Ryder and he's committed to a straight "B" average, because he can get a better job than with an "A" here or there. He's worried about an "A" in political science, for example, because it might indicate that he'd vote a split ticket. Very other-directed, and proud of it.
Then comes Basil, a rich boy who has a combo that plays dialectic jazz. He and Merrit discover dialectic sex. Then the whole gang gets mixed up in a plot to aid Castro in Cuba, in a wild finale that is a bit Max Schulmanish, but funny in its way.
Swarthout imparts to Merrit some acute observations along the way. Her Florida apartment is furnished in "J. C. Penney Danish." Walt Disney has become a substitute for God, for, after all, Disneyland is a child's idea of heaven. Here is dialectic jazz: "a kind of search in which the music, its line and chord-structure, asks the most basic questions of the musician, and he, in attempting to answer them, supplies the fullest answers of which he is capable at any given moment."
"We have pimples but no suffering, money but no wealth, silence but no depth, artists but no giants, delinquency but no evil, television but no insight, sorrow but no tragedy, . . . warmth, not passion; dacron, not sackcloth; happiness, not rapture; music, not song; . . . Cinemascope without imagination, challenge without* cause, laughs without comedy..."
And here's Basil's ode to an organization man:
"Don't marry an Organization Man, Or after you are wed: Though he's talented and witty— He'll adore you by committee! Marry me, Instead."
Libraries are bastions of culture and freedom, outposts for fresh adventures of the human spirit.-Nathan M. Pusey
I think the sea's bottom is just as interesting as the moon's behind.—An oceanographer quoted by Sir Julian Huxley
Peace-mongering will sell papers better than sex.—Edwin A. Lahey
Today we face a test no society has ever fully met: how to make competition the life, not death, of nations.—Christian A. Herter
Dailu fransam
University of Kansas student newspaper
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extended 911, news room
Extension 775, business office
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Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 420 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the university year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Jack Morton ... Managing Editor
Douglas Yocom and Jack Harrison ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bruce Lewellyn ... Business Manager
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Jack Harrison
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