The Daily Tar Heel from Chapel Hill, North Carolina • Page 8

The Daily Tar Heel Tuesday, February 2. 1971 Leaven reviews 8 fauns Mash for NEW ALBUMS Al I RECORD BAR I had not seen Alan Arkin before in a lead role if one can dismiss "The Russians Are Coming" but he is marvelous. his usual the rest of Martin Balsam turns in competent performance and BLACK SABBATH the cast is as good. "Little Fauss and Big Halsey" is "PARANOID NOW Reg. $4.98 ONLY MOUNTAIN beyond that, finally, and the recurring scene between Yossarian and the wounded gunner Snowdon at last breaks through all the ironies and self-degense mechanisms the mind builds to protect itself and makes us understand of "Catch-22" that, as Wilfred Owen wrote: "The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity." When it achieves this kind of cathartic effect, "Catch-22" is great moviemaking. Other times, however, it is merely flashy or just flat. For Director Nichols, it is yet another step on the road to a maturity which I fear he will never reach. Nichols is one of the best directors we have, and he's versatile and extraordinarily capable. But somehow he fails to make a film truly his own.

"Catch-22," for the reocrd, is a "Mike Nichols Film." But, in fact, one is always aware of the director's presence, like a gloss over the subject matter of the film. There is a point at which a director begins to conceive of his movie: with Arthur Perm or Bergman, I suspect it right at the core of the fable; and somehow they bring every aspect of the production into a harmonious relationship with every other. Nichols, however, always is clearly handling someone else's story, and one has the uneasy feeling that his films' brilliance and the films themselves are somehow separable. "Catch-22's" acting is extremely fine. saw it again and praised it, is that they entered the theater expecting to see the adolescent pranks of "Mash." But "Catch-22" isn't very funny, at least not in a conventional way.

It doesn't run AC-DC: that is to say, it doesn't evoke a stock response against war's inhumanity and then ask you to laugh at its protagonists' fundamentally cruel humor. "Catch-22" knows which side it's on, and it stays there. The result is that parts of "Catch-22" are screamingly funny-but you're not screaming with laughter. In a way, the film reminded me of the perhaps unintentional humor of was exploited so well in "Dr. Strangelove." In the former film, Henry Fonda, as the President, advises his Moscow Ambassador that a B-52 is about to hydrogen bomb that city and asks him to take the phone out ot the porch atop the embassy there.

"In about three minutes," says Fonda, "111 hear a high-pitched whine. That will be the wires at your end melting." Fonda's quiet earnestness at the time struck me as astounding more, as insane. Because the basic facts with which he was dealing were simply too frightening for a rational mind to conceive of. I felt an inclination to laugh- as he spoke, though not with pleasure. This is the kind of humor "Catch-22" develops at its best points.

But it goes Two recent area films have taken well-trod paths, though with surprisingly different results. Mike Nichols "Catch-22" and Sidney Furie's "Little Fauss and Big Halsey" are both genre films, but there the comparison ends. 4tCath-22," with all its flaws, is perhaps the best anti-war "comedy" an American has yet made. "Little distillation of all the most blatant elements of "Easy Rider" and only lacking that film's healthy cynicism -is a kind of object lesson for anyone interested in examining the disintegration of a genre's relevance through popularization. Simply, the movie should never have been made.

"Catch-22" is an ambitious and fascinating film however you look at it. Anyone who thought "Mash" was a compelling anti-war movie is forewarned: "Catch-22" is not for you. It captures the horror of violent death and the irrationality of a society in which Spencerian "Social survival of the fittest economically has naturally evolved into fascism. In "Catch-22," militarism and rampant capitalism become metaphors for one another, with murder and oppression the ultimate end of both. This hardly seems the stuff out of which comedies are made.

Perhaps one reason why many critics reacted badly to "Catch-22" on first reviewing it, and then NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE" NOW another story entirely. Here Director Furie and screen-writer Charles Eastman were working in the well-established genre of hip pi-youth-cycle flicks. Bolstered by big names like Michale Pollard and Robert Redford, they may have figured that no one was going to pay much attention to the story anyhow. And the truth is, that's the only wayyouTl get through this illiterate and foolish disaster. "Little Fauss" has that particularly nasty habit I described earlier in this review: it works both sides of the track.

Ostensibly, it is the story of Big Halsey, a dyed-in-the-grain slob, a beautiful, callous bastard out to race his bike and get all the ass he can, and how his tuner Little Fauss finds him out and becomes a big-time racer on his own. This alone, with its implication that integrity wins the race, would be bad enough. But to devote an entire film to Robert Redford acting cool without his shirt and making cycle-chicks and then slap a moralizing ending on to it it's too much. Anyhow, can you picture Michael Pollard beating Robert Redford at -at anything? Reg. $5.98 1 C't.

(OtO! ONLY CKRttlXKt 1 1 P.M. Sunday Mon. Sat I -fPt i a i- iclhme Ha veins supplies ecstasy Ecstatic he is, abounding in warmth and infinite spiritual resources. "I found says Richie, "there are just two places to be. Happy and unhappy.

Everything I do is looking at that one big question what are we doing here, why and how? That's part of what I have to say in my music. And it's gonna be great. It's gonna be beautiful." let me find out about things. So when I left, it was just that I had to find out what was like somewhere else." A driving necessity to find out, to do, to be is still the propelling force in Havens' personality. "Havens," wrote critic Ralph Gleason, "is a pure example of the ecstatic open to love and to emotion and on fire.t-with a glorious view of the future." EVEN MAJORITY recognize.

I call it recognizing it again 'cause somehow it's inside of you anyway. Music is really just a symbol of something larger." Richie Havens was born January 21, 1941, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, now one of the volatile black ghettoes but then an area still populated by a mixture of Italian, Negro, Puerto Rican and Jewish families. Richie was the oldest of nine children. His father was a pianist who earned his living as an electroplater. His mother, to help in support of their large family, worked in a bookbinding factory.

Play for Richie was singing on street corners with other neighborhood kids and by the time he was fourteen, he'd organized a group called the McCrea Gospel Singers but just for fun. "I really thought I'd be a surgeon," he recalls. Though an outstanding student, Richie dropped out of Franklin K. Lane High School shortly before graduation. "I loved school," he says; laughing at the apparent contradiction.

"I mean, here was this one big building with a lot of people in it. But we used to laugh a lot and they'd never let us laugh. I liked learning too, but I couldn't see any reason why I had to go over something already knew. You know, we'd go over a lesson a week and then on Friday, the teachers say, it's time for I said, 'why? I already knew it. So I quit.

It was just time to go I guess. I've always known when it was time. For the same reason, Richie left home when he was seventeen. "See my mother was groovy. She made me move around, "When I sing," says Richie Havens, mind is busy looking at the pictures the writer created.

My body has something to do, which is play the guitar. And my spirit is feeling the song's sensations all over again. It's like this. I sing from what I see. It goes out and then It comes back to me." What Richie Havens sees is hope.

What goes out is a mystical gentleness and a surging sense of affirmation. What he gets is his own and his audience's heightened level of understanding. That is the core of Richie Havens' phenomenal power as a performer: music less a means of self-expression than a path to self-awareness. It hardly matters if he is swinging in a fast-paced blues or rambling lyrically through a reflective ballad. The rich sweet melancholy, the throbbing huskiness, the uncanny rhythmic certainty aside, the effect is a miraculous Wholly empathetic' Involvement "with his 'audience.

Totally committed and open in his emotions, Havens makes music an extension of himself and, in so doing, his listeners in a point of contact that is vivid and unforgotten. "What I want to do," he explains, "is communicate with people on a basic level, to help bring them together. Every man can tell "you about his story you know. But I'm finding out the story is the same, that everybody has gone through practically the same experiences that everyone else has gone through at one time or another in their life. Everybody I've ever sung to has sort of picked it up.

If it's not the words, it's the music they Come and share in the fabulous savings of a lifetime. We have further reduced our complete stock of BRAND NEW winter merchandise this, qofie-j3yeac1 Give-Away Sale. This is our final ifi3eKkvi Sale start Mopday; FbJ. at 9:00 A. M.

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12.00 FOR SALEr Used refrigerator; good condition. $30 or best offer. Phone 933-6044 Lease for sale in Granville Towers East, South, or West reduced 100 from regular price for quick sale as am leaving school. Call 966-2536. "HAROLD HUGHES in HZ" Bumperstickers and buttons newsletter available.

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