Unthinkable thoughts
VISITING COSTA Rican students recently met with several KU student leaders and talked about student government. According to the UDK article on the meeting, the students decided the main difference between their school governments was that in Costa Rica, the student government could take action on off-campus issues.
issues.
THE ARTICLE reported that "the KU group agreed that it would be unthinkable for the ASC to take such actions."
ITS PROBABLY not the first time that the ASC has considered some action unthinkable.In fact, thinking things unthinkable is too often the ASC's approach to government.
FIRST, WHY shouldn't the student government express student opinion on those off-campus issues that affect the student body? Student leaders should be the spokesmen of the student whom they claim to represent, although admittedly it is hard to picture some of the contemporary student leaders actually representing anyone, including themselves.
STUDENT GOVERNMENT'S purpose is primarily to represent students on campus issues, and should not be turned into an international debating society, although the high quality of ASC debates is well-known. But on occasion, students need representation beyond the campus confines, and on those occasions the ASC has a responsibility to represent, as it claims, the student body.
THERE ARE other things that apparently ASC student leaders think unthinkable.
THE MOST IMPORTANT of these is acting as an independent body and not as a satellite of the chancellor's office. The ASC is dependent on Strong Hall's approval and everyone knows that wise puppy dogs do not bite the hand that pets them.
UNTHINKABLE, too, is the ASC ever doing anything of any real importance. It conducts elections, runs campus chest, and holds biweekly debating sessions, too inane to be educational and too dull to be entertaining.
PERHAPS IT is time that the ASC began thinking about the unthinkable, even if the unthinkable includes responsibility.
Justin Beck
a kansan review—
Hallelujah Trail is rutty ride In best Hollywood tradition
The Hallelujah Trail turns into a rut In the best tradition of Hollywood Trail begins as a pleasant, and even funny, farce and degenerates into a hodgepodge of endless dialogue and action.
The plot of Trail, whence comes its title, concerns the disconcerting journey of a wagon train of whisky en route from Julesburg to Denver in the late 1860's and the perils, which include temperance marchers and firewater-hungry Indians, which it encounters in the desert. Needless to say, the train never reaches its destination, but everybody, save the thirst-plagued citizens of Denver who march at last to intercept their precious cargo, appear well-satisfied with the results.
Produced and directed by John Sturges, Hallelujah Trail sports a cast which includes such notables as Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Donald Pleasance, and Brian Keith; along with such barely noticeables as Jim Hutton and Pamela Tiffin.
Lancaster portrays a supposedly hard-boiled cavalry colonel; a veteran of 19 faithful years of service slaughtering Indians on the western front (a job which he supposedly detests, though one would never know it).
At any rate, Lancaster turns out to be not so much hard-boiled as he is soft and gooey. The script would hardly seem to call for a person of Lancaster's acting temper; there is little, if any, zeal in the role, and this becomes increasingly apparent with every preponderous turn of the plot.
Playing (one would be hard-put to say acting) opposite Lancaster in the role of an early cruiser for temperance and women's rights is Lee Remick, who is equally miscast. Miss Remick is hardly hatchet-faced and it seems hard to believe that she has already "lost two husbands to alcohol."
In point of fact, Miss Remick does not make a good temperance leader; she seems as if she were constantly on the verge of falling into her own pit. One finds oneself wondering why, instead of turning to the movement after the loss of her second husband, Miss Remick did not buy a brothel and settle down.
The only worthwhile performances of this half-hearted saga are turned in by Brian Keith and Donald Pleasance. Keith portrays the rabid "taxpayer and good Republican" whom the thirsty miners of Denver have hired to transport 40 wagon-loads of whisky to them from Julesburg before the winter sets in and causes many a case of delirium tremens Keith plays the role to perfection: he is as delightful as he is nasty, and his rough comedy never loses its dramatic force.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY kansan
Both Jim Hutton and Pamela Tiffin are wonders of mediocrity. They are neither good nor bad, but simply lame characters wallowing in an equally lame script. Hutton is cast as a well-meaning but rather-to-obviously stupid captain under Lancaster's command. His every move is an error that soon loses its original intention: to make him a low-comedy character.
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Pleasance, on the other hand, is the constantly besotted brains behind the miner's plan to import the precious liquor. His comedy is continuously light and always funny; and it points to him as an excellent and versatile actor after his careful and serious portyal of the seedy old tramp of The Guest.
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Miss Tiffin is totally unconvincing as Lancaster's too-sweet daughter and Hutton's opposite. This fault, however, lies not with the script, but rather with Miss Tiffin's acting ability, which is negligible. She would be better off, it seems, as the terrified heroine in The Monster That Devoured Pacific Palisades and Redondo Beach.
The Hallelujah Trail, does, however, have its good points. The stunning panoramic photography of Robert Suttee far outpaces the dubious craft of John Gay's half funny screenplay; yet the belly laughs, when they come, are deserved.
Director Sturges might well take a lesson from his Hallelujah Trail. Good comedy is hard to produce under any circumstance, but mediocre scripts and casting certainly do not enhance any comedy's chances for success on the laugh market The Hallelujah Trail is a try, albeit an admirable try; but still only a try even in its funniest moments.
-Allen Miller
2
Daily Kansan
Friday, February 18, 1966
©1966 HERBLOCK
THE WASHINGTON POST
books in review
Controversy offered in new paperbacks
In the field of public affairs, paperback books get better all the time. More variety, more controversy, more opportunity for the reader to get into something not as bland as that offered in Life or The Reader's Digest.
One of the best of the new lot is Robert Penn Warren's "Who Speaks for the Negro?" (Vintage, $1.95). Some of this appeared in magazine form; the hardback volume scored a great success. Astonishingly, this is the same Warren who was one of the 12 southerners in retreat back in 1930. Now he is the interviewing spokesman for "white America," trying to understand what is happening within the Negro movement today.
SOME UNDOUBTEDLY will scorn this one; it is not militant enough. Yet Warren has sought out leaders in most ranks of the civil rights world. Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, William H. Hastie, Ralph Ellison. People concerned with the relatively conservative aspects of the racial revolution, in part, and people as radical as the Black Muslims.
Another smashing success of the last year or so is in paperback, too—Anthony Lewis" "Gideon's Trumpet" (Vintage, $1.95). If ever a book shook up the folks it was this one, as Lewis told how the Florida convict, Clarence Earl Gideon, had helped to revolutionize the American legal process by writing a letter from his prison cell.
LEWIS IS A New York Timesman, by the way. His book has become a historical landmark. Another new book on the law is H. L. A. Hart's Law, Liberty, and Morality (Vintage, $1.25). This consists of three lectures that consider whether it is the function of the law to enforce the moral convictions of a community. Hart is professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford.
And now to foreign affairs, Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall have edited a volume called "The Viet-Nam Reader" (Vintage, $2.45) that should have many readers. The whole range of U.S. policy is considered, with these, and others, on hand: President Johnson, Mao Tse-tung, Dean Acheson, De Gaulle, U Thant, McGeorge Bundy, Fulbright, Senator Dodd, Prince Sihanouk, Hans Morgenthau, McNamara, Wayne Morse. Plus such documents as the State Department White Papers on Viet Nam.
AND LATIN AMERICA. Frank Tannenbaum has written a book called Ten Keys to Latin America (Vintage, $1.65). It considers-as the 10 keys-the land and the people, race, religion regionalism, the hacienda, education, leadership, politics, the role of the United States, and Castro and social change.
It's hard to think of an angrier type than Paul Goodman. He blasts off at any number of things, and has a dedicated following. This following will get behind "Compulsory Mis-education" and "The Community of Schelars" (Vintage, $1.95) like the Hamnel children behind the Pied Piper. Education gets so many lumps these days that it almost needs a friend. Goodman is not that friend. He at least is not the friend of education as he sees it today. Listen:
"I THINK THAT the great majority of professors agree that grading hinders teaching and creates a bad spirit, going as far as cheating and plagiarizing."
Another new one is called "The Genius of American Education" (Vintage, $1.65), by Lawrence A. Cremin. It is a slight book, little more than an essay, and much kinder to the man up in front of the class, and the parents of the people in the class.