THE UNIVERSITY DAILY kansan
A student newspaper serving KU
KU
78th Year, No.124
LAWRENCE, KANSAS
Wednesday, May 1, 1968
Films portray myth. NYT film critic says
"Magic, myth and monotony" is the basic pattern followed by films since the motion picture came into being, Bosley Crowther, long-time movie critic for the New York Times, said yesterday.
Speaking at the sixth and final lecture in the William Allen White Seminar on "The Role of the Mass Media in a Free Society," Crowther said when movies were first exhibited to the public, they were sheer magic. This novel experience of seeing movement on the screen didn't last long, however.
Then movie-makers started on the long road from magic to myth, making their films tell, quite by chance, little stories which were essentially yours, Crowther said.
"They may have been grossly myths, or they may have been myths that came so close to the romantic ideals, heroic concepts and wishful thinking to the great middle-class that most of us were delighted and moved by them and regarded them as revelations of truth." he said.
But rarely, Crowther said, has the screen been a portrayer of truth, of the real nature of man and the frequent injustices and ironies of society as they exist.
"The movie medium is essentially engineered to provide the people with entertainment, indulgence, and escape," he said, "and the prime aim of movie-makers is to catch the customers, to provide them with distraction and enjoyment by means of representations that conform to the customers' calculated prejudices and interests, and thus send them forth contented that their tastes and intelligences have been satisfied."
Hatfield talk scheduled for Thursday
Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.), an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam, will give a lecture at 3:30 p.m. Thursday in Hoch Auditorium.
Mark O. Hatfield
Hatfield, governor of Oregon from 1959-67, was one of the candidates listed on the Choice '68 ballot at KU last week. He is considered to be a possibility for the Republican vice-presidential nomination.
Hatfield will speak on "Political Priorities in 1968."
A reception and dinner sponsored by the All Student Council (ASC) will follow the talk, according to Clif Conrad, Bismarck, N.D., junior and student body president. "Attendance at the reception and dinner is by invitation only," he said.
Since "The Great Train Robbery," Crowther said, ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths per cent of the movies made in the United States have communicated myths of one sort or another.
Silent movies were sufficient all through the First World War, but the coming of radio made movies without voices monotonous, he said. With the magic of sound, the movies came back strong.
Television quickly exposed the monotony of the conventional film and film-makers turned to the pseudo - three - dimensional screen to recapture the public's interest, he said.
Since television has turned to showing movies in prime time, the film industry has countered with costly production films on a bigger and grander scale.
Crowther said that mechanical innovation, more than any essential improvement in dramatic content and social philosophy, has accounted for the apparent progress of the commercial movie in our free society.
The great majority of U.S. movies, and many of those imported from abroad, do nothing more than assist our self-indulgence and support our eternal optimism and complacency, the former critic said.
Few movies, he said, have actually tried to explore the subconscious chambers of the mind, and the few imported movies, such as some of the early Swedish films by Ingmar Bergman, have been generally poorly received by the public.
There is a great deal of emphasis placed on sex and violence in today's motion pictures, Crowher said, and he objected to the way it was presented.
He said he wasn't concerned about too much sex in movies, but that it's simply artless and tasteless, "like kids ogling nudie postcards."
"I suspect it is likely to generate an eventual mass monotony—not toward sex," he said, "but towards these movies about sex."
In citing the artful minimum of actual graphic show of violence in "In Cold Blood," Crowther said that not showing the actual murders only fired the imagination that much more.
"The taste for 'Bonnie and Clyde' is one of the strangest manifests of sentiment I have ever seen," the former critic said. He said that "In Cold Blood" was a study and drama that shows something of the madness in the world.
Crowther objected strenuously to the motion picture "Bonnie and Clyde," saying it pictured its two leading characters as a couple of fun-loving kids who just happen to rob banks and kill people.
There is too much bloody, nauseous violence on the screen in this motion picture, Crowther said, and nothing is left to the imagination.
War films of the past have not prepared us for revulsion to the war in Vietnam, Crowther said, and they have not made us sense war's horror, degradation, dehumanization and futility.
"Outside of a few films such as the French 'La Grande Illusion' and Stanley Kubrick's 'The Paths of Glory', which grimly said that
war is madness, the run of war films is aimed at supporting the popular myth that war may be hell, but it is one of those things that good fellows just have to do for their country every now and then," Crowther said.
Movies have not shown us, except in one or two minor feature pictures, the immensity and tragedy of racial injustice, Crowther said.
Citing several pictures which dramatized some of the surface aspects of racial conflict, Crowther named "The Defiant Ones," "Intruder in the Dust," and "Nothing But a Man."
See Crowther, page 12
Young says no to Kennedy bid for Ohio votes
WASHINGTON —(UPI)—Sen.
Stephen M. Young, D-Ohio, today
withdrew his endorsement of Sen.
Robert F. Kennedy for the Democ-
ratic presidential nomination.
Young switched to a neutral
stance in the race.
Young outlined his new position in a letter to all Ohio candidates for delegate to the August convention in Chicago.
A spontaneous write-in vote gave Nelson A. Rockefeller a stunning victory in Tuesday's Massachusetts presidential primary.
Young, certain to be named Ohio's favorite son candidate to the Democratic convention, said:
Rocky pulls upset win
He said in an interview on NBC-TV's Today Show that he lunched Tuesday with Sen. Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, a supporter, and that Brooke had cautioned him not to be disappointed if he fared poorly in Massachusetts.
The New York governor captured Massachusetts' 34 votes on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention by polling more votes than Gov. John A. Volpe, who had expected to win the primary easily as a favorite son candidate.
Volpe, whose name was the only one listed on the GOP ballot, said Rockefeller's astonishing showing was "without a doubt" at least partly attributable to the New York governor's forenoon announcement Tuesday that he would actively seek the GOP nomination.
Rockefeller said today he was "very much surprised" by his victory in Massachusetts.
WEATHER
Fair and continued warm today and tonight becoming partly cloudy and a little cooler Thursday. Southwest winds 10 to 20 miles per hour today. High today upper 88s. Low tonight mid 50s. Precipitation probabilities less than 5 per cent today and tonight 20 per cent Thursday.
Bosley Crowther
Photo by Bruce Patterson
But with the unofficial count of Massachusetts votes almost complete today, Rockefeller held a lead of more than 1,300 votes over Volpe and almost 5,000 over Nixon, also a write-in.
While Rockefeller was scoring an upset victory, Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy as expected won the Democratic primary with more than 105,000 votes. He was the only man on the ballot.
But Sen, Robert F. Kennedy got an impressive write-in of more than 62,000 and Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, newly in the race, pulled more than 40,000.
McCarthy was assured of the 72 Massachusetts votes on the first ballot at the Democratic convention and Rockefeller, assuming his lead stands up in official counts, would stand to get that state's 34 first ballot votes at the GOP convention. The delegations would be free to vote as they pleased after the first ballot.
Rockefeller was in Philadelphia today for the first speech of his campaign, breaking a virtual silence on Vietnam War policy with criticism of what he said was a "misconception" by U.S. planners of the nature of the war.
He said U.S. policy has failed because "we applied the maxim that victory depended on control territory" while the Communists' aim was to "disrupt orderly government."
"Our misconception led to open-ended escalation — easily matched by Hanoi, Peking and Moscow—and a stalemate at an ever-higher level of violence. Meanwhile, the war became 'Americanized' in manpower and direction."
He said in a prepared speech to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia that South Vietnam must assume a greater responsibility for its own destiny.
Media together CBS official says
A vice-president of the Columbia Broadcasting System Tuesday complained that criticism of television "has become one of America's favorite sports," despite the fact that 64% of adult Americans consider television as their prime news source.
Theodore Koop, speaking on "Television: America's Star Reporter" for the William Allen White Centennial Seminar on "The Role of the Mass Media in a Free Society," said that although broadcasting was the "modern, twentieth century form of journalism" this does not mean other news sources would go out of business.
"Today I think all of us acknowledge that the print and electronic media, however competitive, complement each other," Koop said. "I would not want to live without newspapers, and I hope you feel the same way about news on the air. If it happens that the latest Roper survey shows that most Americans get most of their news from television, there are also figures that report unparalleled newspaper circulation."
Saying that there will also be critics who will condemn what is enjoyed by the mass of the American people, Koop said that the
size and spread of television's audience creates special problems for the broadcaster. "Most programs must interest the bulk of the potential audience," Koop said, "but programs also must be provided for smaller groups with diversified interests and needs."
"The one common denominator of our society's many interests is quite clearly entertainment . . . it is not surprising that both the most popular and most available elements in television are entertainment programs. It is the continued availability of entertainment that provides massive audience support. Just as broadcasters need this support to stay in business, so those who would use television to inform need a massive audience base to be heard at all. If a society's sights are to be raised through a mass medium, the society must first be brought to the medium."
Koop also brought up the problems of overplaying the horrors of the Vietnam war and the coverage of civil disorders. He pointed out that while films of the war shown in America will probably have little or no effect on the military operations in Vietnam, showing films of men inciting riots in the streets of a big city may only bring on more disorders.
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