Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...because of the usual Harvard problem of trying to do too much in too short a time. If the Carpenter was limited to a solid, rigorous introduction to drawing and painting for undergraduates it could work wonders. But instead students are barraged with courses on everything from design to film-making, many of which have nothing to do with serious art and are only really of value to a student intent on a career in advertising. Most striking is the fact that the general air of amateurism in the arts at Harvard is not reflected in the faculty themselves...
Church groups have also protested the film in Lewiston, Maine, and caused a run of the movie to be canceled in Laconia, N.H. A Valdosta, Ga., judge issued a restraining order preventing showing of the film, but later removed the order...
...society's mighty engines of banality can reduce anything to a bore, and death, the fad that replaced tennis, has lately been talked to death. A viewer may approach Promises in the Dark with some wariness, therefore, because the subject of the film is a 17-year-old girl's death after a long battle with cancer. But Promises is clear, direct and honest, and free of both cant and sentimentality. It is also lively, in the exact sense of the word; the flow of intelligence and feeling between Buffy, the sick girl, and her family and friends...
...film is not entirely cliché-free. The character played by Mason is a fairly standard woman-doctor stereotype: pretty but prim, with deep-frozen attitudes toward men and a sharp tongue, at first, for the handsome radiologist (Michael Brandon) who wants to cuddle. Oddly, it is the teen-age romance that escapes stereotype: the scenes between Buffy and her boyfriend (Paul Clemens) are remarkably real and touching. In balance, the film is decent and compassionate, and truthful enough not to disguise too much the fact that truth can hurt terribly. -John Skow
DIED. Sir Barnes Neville Wallis, 92, British wizard of aircraft design who invented the "bouncing bombs" used to destroy German dams along the Ruhr, a World War II exploit celebrated in a book and the film The Dam Busters; in Leatherhead, England. Sir Barnes' career began with his World War I work on a British counterpart to the German zeppelin, included his development of the first swing-wing jet aircraft and hollow aerofoil design, and ended in 1971 with his efforts to improve upon the supersonic Concorde, a machine he considered rather primitive...