Word: nelsoned
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There is more to it than politics. States and cities everywhere are in a fiscal crisis. New York, Cleveland, Newark and Detroit have had to cut back on services. On a single day last month, three Governors-all Republicans -sounded separate doleful warnings. Nelson Rockefeller reported New York to be in "a bleak fiscal situation," Thomas Meskill said Connecticut is "wallowing in debt," and Linwood Holton predicted for Virginia a $16 million state deficit by mid-1972 and no emergency state aid for hard-pressed local governments...
...cold spell, Manhattan stores and boutiques can barely match supply to demand. Designers like Halston, Adolfo, Sant Angelo and Betsey Johnson are grinding them out for customers from Jackie Onassis, who stocked up on Halston's shorties for yacht wear, to career girls like Celanese Fabric Coordinator Jacquie Nelson, whose bosses last week granted her permission to wear her knit shorts to work. Bloomingdale's department store ran a hot-pants advertisement this month, only to discover that the resulting zoom in sales was partly due to a cross-town rush by Seventh Avenue manufacturers intent on snapping...
HOWEVER, it is in flaunting history and historical truth that Nelson is most outrageous. Soldier Blue is obviously saturated with references to Vietnam. The massacre even includes a My Lai type round-up and murder of the village mothers and children. When the mad major applauds his troops at film's end, he tells them they have made the West "a more decent place to live in." Nelson throws caricatures of imperialism and racism at us. We are expected to fill in the blanks. He's using our disgust with the Vietnam War to sell his film...
...that last Friday night's audience at the Harvard Square Theatre, sitting there in their two-fifty seats and wasting away three or four useless hours, grabbed at the bait. A couple of the more astute even yelling out, "America is doing that in Vietnam!" during Nelson's specially effected massacre...
...will be won at all. But at least I can claim for myself the partial victory that lies in honesty. I can refuse to applaud Soldier Blue and, by so doing, refuse to applaud my impotent understanding of the need for revolution. For the killing doesn't stop with Nelson's final reel. It continues and it would be criminal for me to pretend otherwise. I may not be able to end the murder in this world, but at least I can force myself to recognize its ongoing existence. Applauding Nelson's film only permits me to pretend that...