Word: maori
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TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). For Two Lovers, MGM built New Zealand in Culver City, cast Shirley MacLaine as a spinster schoolmarm who has this frigidity problem with men - like Laurence Harvey and Jack Hawkins. The result is somewhat Metro-Goldwyn-Maori...
...perfect; real rabbits must emerge from the trick hat. The reader, noting that Sylvia Ashton-Warner's novel is dedicated to a river (New Zealand's Whanganui), that among the chief characters are 13 darling children, most of them under one tin roof, and that various Maori gods and spirits are freely invoked, may suspect that he is being conjured into accepting a crock of anthropological whimsy. Not so; the magic here is real...
Greenstone is a story of two races-the Polynesian Maori, who came to New Zealand from their legendary oceanic island homeland in the 14th century, and the Scotch-English, who arrived in the 19th with the usual guns, Bibles and technological superiority. This, however, is no sad, simple story of savage innocence overwhelmed by progress. Miss Ashton-Warner grinds no stone axes against the bad white man. She does something a great deal more complicated and valuable; she sets in motion a sort of dance of language and imagery in which the childhood of the sophisticated race meets the stubborn...
...Whanganui River in the North Island of New Zealand. His wife, mother of all but one of the children, buys groceries by teaching school. Seasons pass; in the end the family is "rescued" from rural misery and taken downriver to a big house in town. Only Huia, a half-Maori girl sired by one of Considine's sons, remains behind to live as a Polynesian princess with her people across the river...
...child Huia, with her ancestral talisman, a carved greenstone, and the grace of an imagination that has been touched by the best in two worlds. Sylvia Ashton-Warner does other things easily that most current writers would not attempt to contrive. Huia watches a fight between a brown-skin Maori and a white boy. They are not fighting for status, or out of racial bitterness. The boys are fighting over something real-her, a princess...