Word: calcuttas
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When the nude revue Oh! Calcutta! opened in New York in 1969, it became at once an asterisk in theatrical history. Devised by Britain's man-about-the-theater Kenneth Tynan, it sought unabashedly to tap the voyeur market - or rather, that part of it unwilling to get its jollies in a topless go-go bar. Tynan's tease was dressed up with skits by Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer and Tennessee Williams, among others, and it was billed as an evening of "elegant erotica." Outraged clerics and unimpressed critics called it other things, but Calcutta ran three years...
...continuing box office appeal may have been one reason why Tynan, 49, decided to go back on the bawds with a successor to Calcutta. Somewhat coyly called Carte Blanche and co-produced by Hillard Elkins, Tynan's Calcutta confrere, the project was not without risk. As Elkins noted: "Calcutta was easier in a way because nothing like it had been done before. Now we are competing with other sexual shows and films." Or, to put it in terms that Gypsy Rose Lee would understand: After you take it all off, what do you do for an encore...
...solution is to concede that Calcutta may not have been so elegantly erotic, after all. Carte Blanche, says Tynan, "is a more ambitious show than Calcutta, which had inevitable crudities and had to be more aggressive because it was trying to establish a beachhead." This time he has sought "elegant candor." In lieu of such Calcutta concerns as masturbation, rape and wife swapping, what would Carte Blanche offer...
Breaking Bread. Clad in her spotless blue-bordered white sari, Mother Teresa, who ministers to the starving people of Calcutta (TIME, Dec. 29), was the cynosure of the congress. At the world-hunger symposium, the diminutive nun prayed over a table laden with bread, then broke a loaf of bread and invited those in attendance to do likewise to symbolize the sharing of food. To her, both the U.S. and India are in deep trouble. "There is spiritual poverty and there is material poverty," she told her audience of 6,000 faithful, "and I think each...
...become India's seventh-largest industry. In all, 65 studios and 38 film laboratories spend $82 million to supply movies in 15 official languages to almost 9,000 Indian theaters (annual box office: $256 million). Bombay is the home of the big-budget Hindi hits, but it is Calcutta that has earned for India most of its international cinematic acclaim. That is mainly because of Satyajit Ray. Using Calcutta's swirling misery as a background for his low-budget masterpieces, Director Ray depicts Indian life with poignant realism. His famous trilogy, Song of the Road, The Unvanquished...