Word: duke
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...presented her story led me to distrust its accuracy: She was making a pitch, and she injected symptoms of social malfunction in an almost rhetorical way; the foggy soundtrack and sloppy camerawork were clearly meant to give the movie a documentary veneer; she didn't tell enough about Duke or anyone else in the movie to make them convincing as individuals. My point about the scuffies was that because they were so isolated, the audience had little idea of what was going on in the participants' heads...
...glance at college newspapers of the past month shows that there is agitation on local political issues on nearly every campus. Reflecting the civil rights spirit, movements to ban fraternities or at least to punish them for racial and religious discrimination have sprung into being at many colleges. At Duke a faculty-student committee is supervising the ban; at Ohio State and the University of Michigan individual fraternities are fighting it out. At Michigan--perhaps in a last-ditch battle for existence--the fraternities themselves have entered the civil rights fray: the Panhellenic Council recently endorsed an Ann Arbor civil...
...closed culture of Harlem is really a set of defenses. Violence and sexual abandon arise as the most natural outlets for courage and energy among limited alternatives. They are last resorts, founded on a certain despair. But Duke radiates the glamor of a criminal and debauchee without knowing the suffering. He and his gang act out the forms laid down by their elders, without yet knowing...
Pursuing this social realism angle, Miss Clarke throws out little cliches of social criticism. Duke's mother gives a self-conscious declamation against government indifference, a busload of Harlem schoolboys is shown touring Wall Street, a college boy comes home unable to understand his junkie brother...
This propagandistic effort destroys the coherence of Duke's personal story. There are too many characters thrown in. Sordid incidents are strung together in an impressionistic way that works in photographic sequences, but diffuses the story. No doubt violence does rear up without warning in real Harlem life, but these scuffles come too fast in the movie to glean any human relevance. The audience I sat with laughed lightheartedly when a member of the gang pulled a knife on his father, when Duke stole a purse, and when a rival whom Duke stabbed rolled over and said "Thank...