Word: ballads
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...Ballad of a Soldier Today at 7 and 9; The Pink Panther (Peter Sellers, David Niven) Friday and Saturday...
...Harvard-Radcliffe Progressive Film Society (whoever they are) is presenting a Soviet Film festival this spring and Ballad of a Soldier, tonight's offering, is a true masterpiece. If bourgeois sentimentality is your bag, and it is ours, then this is the film of a lifetime for you. A virginal 18 year old recruit in the Red Army, which is reeling from the German assault of 1941, is decorated for heroism at the front and granted a short leave home to visit his mother. This journey home, through the interior of war-torn Russia is complete with a love affair...
SLINKY PROSTITUTES CARESS and proposition unaccompanied males, a bearded ruffian distributes bee to members of the audience, the whole cast of underworld denizens bursts into spontaneous ballad--and that's only the beginning...
While the assumptions underlying Gay's 1728 ballad-opera--that human nature is universally corrupt, that greed, vice and pettiness are not limited to any one social class--are as valid as ever, much of the play's humor derives from specific references to 18th century mores that are necessarily dated. To be sure, high class ladies still affect airs and politicians are still crooks, but we no longer comprehend Gay's jabs at Walpole and his ministers, nor do we have as much patience with the constant appellation of every woman as "hussy" or "slut". Not, for that matter...
...other people's songs on side one. "Losing You," with Pete Carr's pulsating electric guitar and Charlie Caniel's soaring fiddle, is very fine musically, but the mood of this basically sad song is spoiled by the uptempo beat they provide. "On Susan's Floor" is a pleasant ballad, which seems out of place on this album. The best song on the side is again one of Williams's own, "(Baby I Loved You) I Really Did," which details a break-up as bitter as it is timely...