KWSAN REVIEWS
FILMS: 'Charly' and 'Greetings'
By BOB BUTLER
Kansan Arts and Revie
In Arts and Reviews Editor "Charly" and "Greetings" are about as different as any two films can be. "Charly" is a high-budget film which took a pretty good story and ruined it; "Greetings" is a low-budget film which has no story at all and is still a clever piece of entertainment.
Aside from Cliff Robertson's Academy Award-winning performance, "Charly" is a dismal failure. The plot sounds intriguing: a middle-aged retard with the mind of an eight-year-old undergoes an operation which makes him a near-genuis, only to find after discovering love and knowledge that he will slip once again back to his former state.
It could be a real tear-jerker. Unfortunately director Ralph Nelson didn't know what to do with his material and "Charly" comes off as a clumsy, boring exercise in split-screen editing.
Let me tell you about these split screen effects. Nelson throws them in for no apparent reason. Perhaps he realized how static much of the film was and tried to dress it up a bit. It
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Apr.18 1969 KANSAN 5
Summer Language Institute
FRENCH
GERMAN
RUSSIAN
SPANISH
June 23 - August 18, 1969
University of California
Santa Cruz
Living - learning language programs for beginning and intermediate students. Intensive eight-week summer sessions in residence at Cowell College
CSC. Live-in native speakers
15 units University credit offered. Financial aid available.
Application deadline: May 1st
Aside from Robertson's performance, the acting is also pretty ho-hum. Robertson is at his best as the retarded Charly—his performance here is truly heart-rending. But as soon as he gets his smarts he becomes incapable of projecting the horror the man must feel when once again confronted with a future of incomprehension. Claire Bloom, usually a fine actress, gives an uninspired performance.
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"Greetings," is, to say the least, interesting. Parents who think they know their kids after seeing "The Graduate" would be better off by seeing this film. No Benjamins here. No clean-cut kids either.
didn't work. His use of a multiple screen is embarrassing-it looks like a Coca-Cola TV ad.
"Greetings" is about three turned-on freaks in New York City and how they kill their time waiting for the draft to wisk them away to be killed. At least, it's sort of about that. Actually the film is plotless, jumping in and out of scenes (also in and out of beds, which earned it an "X" rating).
Coordinator, Ben T. Clark,
Summer Language Institute;
UCSC; Santa Cruz,
California 95060
The ads called "Greetings" an "Overground Sex-Protest Film." I guess that's about as accurate a description as one could wish for. The film protests, but it doesn't preach.
"Greetings" opens with a televised speech by L. B. J. in which he defends American involvement in Vietnam. It is hysterical. He rumbles, stutters, mispronounces, and his use of logic would make Aristotle revolve in his grave.
Next a young man is being advised by his friends on how to show up for his Army physical: "Wear tight pants, pointed shoes, black silk panties, stuff a couple of socks in the panties so they bulge, walk up to the
sergeant and say 'Hi, Sarge. My name is Jeffry. My friends call me Jeff but you can call me Geranium.'
Then there's the unfortunate who dressed as a super-militant Bircher, screaming "Let me at the Gooks! I want to kill!" He's immediately drafted.
One young man talks his dates into posing for stag reels. "OK, honey, hurry up and take more clothes off, we're running out of film. And remember this is a beautiful experience for art's sake."
One of the characters, Lloyd, is sure the CIA killed John Kennedy and spends most of his time trying to convince his friends that Officer Tippet was the real murderer. He wears shirts with bullet holes marked off where Kennedy was shot. This may sound incredibly tasteless, but oddly enough it comes off well in the context of the rest of the film. It's just one more incongruity in a very mixed up (at least through these youngsters' eyes) America.
"Greetings" was directed by Brian de Palma, who is not always successful at keeping boredom away from his movie's door. There are a few scenes which are almost neorealistic in their drawn out pacing, such as the one in which a beady-eyed pornographer stops one of the characters and harrasses him until he buys a stag reel entitled "The Delivery Boy and the Bored Housewife."
But "Greetings" is worth seeing just for the laughs. The D.A.R. may not appreciate it and some people are bound to find it tasteless. Yet it has some important things to say about America and American's youth, and it says them with wit and truth.
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TV ratings interpreted
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) - Paul Klein, NBC-TV's resident research whiz, works basically at trying to understand national television audiences. Statistics are his raw material, but as an intelligent man his eventual pursuits are human values and programing philosophy.
In a recent note, for example, he observed: "The problem is not the rating services but rather the unsophisticated analysis of rating data that causes Doris Day, for instance, a program with no audience in urban areas, to be considered successful by CBS and possibly even by advertisers."
His pragmatic thinking is an extension of Klein's thoughts as expressed a while back in an article for the show business newspaper "Variety," in which, among other things, he wrote of the demise of studio drama:
"When TV was young, the people who owned sets lived in big cities and had above average incomes and above average education. Because the audience was upper-slant the programs that were successful, by and large, appealed to the upper-slant taste . . .
"As the years went on, TV's growth tended to fill in the lower slant, lower brow and the less urban and rural areas. These new owners who brought to the TV audience their rather unsophisticated taste, did not view the sophisticated 'Golden age' drama . . ."
On the other hand, Klein noted in his article, "The Nielsen meter measure did lead to programming which sold sets to all people in the United States and created the greatest mass medium ever devised.