Word: ragni
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LION'S LOVE. Director Agnes Varda has some fun with this overlong, weird comedy. There is no plot and a lot of talk as Viva (superstar). James Rado and Gerome Ragni (co-authors of Hair ), and Shirley Clarke (underground filmmaker) gather in a Beverly Hills hacienda the weekend Robert Kennedy was shot...
...weave in and out. "My body is walking in space/ My soul is in orbit with God, face to face," the eerie voices tell us, and we can believe in their moonglow-bathed hallucinations. But no sooner is the mood established, than composer Galt Mac Dermot and lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado destroy it by tipping their hats to the Times Square crowd. All of a sudden the chorus hippies are yelling out a catalogue of hallucinatory cliches ("Red Light! White light. Your skin is soft!")--and the music descends into vulgarized pop-isms reminiscent of that TV monstrosity...
What holds Hair together is the score, which pulses with an insistent, primitive beat. With gleeful impertinence, the music by Gait MacDermot and the lyrics of Gerome Ragni and James Rado manage to release the pent-up yelps of the sons and daughters of the affluent society. A song like Ain't Got No ("Ain't got no class,/Ain't got no mother,/Ain't got no father,/Ain't got no culture") telegraphs the credo of the self-proclaimed have-nots of the '60s. Satire with a playful nip makes a treat...
Eleanor Roosevelt explained a nose-rubbing picture widely published in U.S. papers. She said that the head Maori guide in New Zealand, "a fine-looking woman" named Ragni, had asked permission to greet her "as we greet all distinguished visitors." Mrs. Roosevelt added that when she was a little girl her father "used to say, 'Let's have a Chinese kiss,' and then we would rub noses. ... I was very glad my father had taught me to rub noses properly...