Page Four SCARLET AND BLACK Friday May 24 I
H
"CHANGE IN THE MAKING"— BRILLIANT COMEDY

ANIMAL
BEHAVIOUR

Tho notorious Mr. Gait, or
Ray, or whatever, hasn't been
captured yet, but the Asso-
ciated Press noted a few day:
ago that, supposedly before he
fled Memphis, he supposedly
made a long-distance telephone
call to the lngall’s Shipyards
in Pascagoula, Miss. The Beloit
College Roundtable — in a May
9 followup on the 5&B’s expose
or President Leggett's nprll
trip to Longfellow House, a
posh, discriminatory hotel-mo—
tel in Pascagoula — noted that
Longfellow House is owned by

be lngall's Shipyards, which is
division of Litton Industries.

&!%@*&l%@*

A Raloron sophomore has
been hailed into Judicial
Council on the charge that
he bought beer with hull
funds. on, my, there’s some-
thiiig that's ncucr been (lone

before.
&l%@*& l%@*

Henry Wilhelm’s yearbook
has been postponed again.
Let’s see, -is this the fourth
time or the fifth time now? In
a letter mailed to purchasers
last week, Wilhelm said: “We
now tllink of the book as an
‘hiStorical document‘ I 3 !h E 1'
than a yearbook. it becomes
more so all the time.”

&!%@*&l%@*

TODAY lN HISTORY: it
was just eight months ago to-
day that President Leggelt told
an open senate meeting in
ARH that he advocated “a con-
:cious College policy of permit-
ting more upperclass students
to live oil-campus in either pri—
vate homes or apartments...
the option for upperclassmen
who do not choose to abide by
college social regulations to
find oil-campus housing and
abide by whatever regulations
meir landlords or the Commu-
nity or Grinnell imposes.” Jun-
iors next year will doubtless
remember that bit or presi-
dential rhetoric when they try
to study in their Loose Hall
rooms — since none of them
have been given permission to
live oii-campus.

&!%@*&l%@*

Informal sources said to-
day that the next meeting of
the Associated Colleges of the
Midwest may actually be in
the Midwest.

&!%@*&!%@*

Members of the new SGA fl-
nanoe committee have a new
rorrnula ror determining next
year’s budgets tor campus or-
ganizations. They ask the out-
going heads of those organiza<
lions in to propose a budget
and tell them how much money
they’ll need. Asked by the
committee, the present editors
of the 5&3 said that I budget
Increase oi at least 51,000 was
necessary tor the survival or
the campus newspaper. The

' ANIMAL—
(Continiied on Page I)

CHANGE IN THE MAKING:

screenplay by James Avis
son; directed by James
Hormel; produced by Camp-
bell Films; photographed by
Milton Bellows and Laverne
Hanssen; script assistant,
Fred Hess; narrated by
Peter Hackes; special as
ristants for on - location
scenes, Howard Currant and
barrel lrcenen; music play-
ed by Dru and Ann; color;
291/, minutes.

By the S&B‘s
smrr FILM CRITIC

Among recent films, “Bonnie
and Clyde" is probably the
most imaginative in its use at
the medium, “The Graduate"
is surely the most sensitive ex-

plorntlon oi the spiritual
agonies oi young people mov-
ing from college into a iraudu-
lent world. “Change in the
Making,” a lowrbudget, inde-
pendently produced sleeper I
happened to see last week,
may be the best recent exam-
ple irom the film genre which
spoofs college liie, though per-
haps not as funny as the Marx
Brothers’ classic “Horse Feath-
ers.”

The college, of course, is a
s or all, coeducational liberal
arts college in the middle west.
The form is imaginative: 't is
a pseudodocumentary — the
sort of thing one can imagine
some slightly desperate college
actually using for promotional
purposes, All of the cliches are
there.

ln the beginning, the camera
moves from a pastoral land-
scape to a long study of the
tall, handsome Athlete in bi!

letter jacket and his leggy
Beauty Queen girl friend, hand
in hand, returning down the
railroad tracks to their cam-
pus, having been God knows
where.

During the Course of the film,
we are given to understand
that such a place is populated
chietly by kindly preceptors
over 80, and by other Beauty
Queens; that the autumn ritual
of football playing and Queen
crowning is still taken serious-
ly by a considerable number
of students; that learning con-
sists very largely of manipu-
lating a r n a n e paraphernalia
which have been devised by
electronics engineering with
s t r o n g propensities towards
witchcrait; that the sylvan set-
ting or such a place somehow
has a steadying effect on the
twitchy nervous systems of
young people engaged in the
inchoale rite of passage our
culture prescribes; and other
nonsense.

Most of the actors are ob-
viously amateurs, but, true to
the tradition of the old movies
in which Walter Winchell play-
ed Walter Winchell, Peter
Hackes plays Peter Hackes. it
is a brilliant Stroke; the husky-
voiced Mr. Hackes has made
his name reporting about
spacecraft, and the space age’s
cliches about liberal learning,
broadcast over the mass media.
are surely a different matter
from earlier pietier communi-
cated in more primitive ways.
Hackes utters them with a sol-
emn pomposity which gives
ballast to the comic strategy
of the film

For a climax to the film, the
writers have invented a hilari-
ous sequence in which practic-
cally all of the great ones of

the intellectual community con-
verge on this remote spot,
heatedly discuss weighty mat-
ters for two or three days, ass
cept their rewards —- honorary
degrees — and depart. “These
were the three most important
days in the college’s history,"
we hear Hackes say sententb
ously. (The Lord help us all,
there might be college people
nowadays who actually believe
this; or there might be col-
leges that are so poverty-strick-
en intellectually, that this
might be true or them.)

All or this, naturally, is In
technicolor; the low»budget pro-
ducers knew better than to
skimp here. (Think how incom-
plete the joke would have been,
in black and white.) Best of
all. however, is the almost in-
penetraole dead pan which
masks this presentation

Almost impenetrable. Per-
haps the film is slightly ilawed
in that the mask is allowed
sometimes to slip, to make very
clear to the drowsy viewer that
he is watching a parody, and
not the real thing. in one of
the great comic scenes, some
students are shown looking at
a painting; but at ahout the
moment when one might ex-
pect them to have deciphered
its mysteries, two men, appar-
ently from the ﬁnance com-
pany, come along and haul the
painting away. During the loot
ball scene, while Hackes’s
voice is telling us about the
"excited tans,” the camera is
showing us six mini—skirted
cheerleaders irentically trying
to arouse the fans, while from
the stands comes —— absolute
lilence.

The most subtle joke of the
tilm, perhaps, shows an incred-
ibly beautiful coed, in I pose

ture of introspection, whllo
Hackes's voice simulates the
run of her meditations; just all
the is beginning to ask herself
- you guessed it: “Who Am
I?”.— the camera contrives to
blur the perfect lines oi her
nose into a bulbous blob.

Perhaps some or the humor
is too occult: probably only the
relatively small circle oi people
who follow the talents of Ann
Kirschner and Dru McCon-
aughy know from tho twinkle
with which they sing the sac-
charine lyrics or “The Happy
Song" that they aren’t buying
its Hubert Humphrey Pollyan-
naism; the camera, however,
illustrates the lyrics literally,
complete with a happy little
squirrel in a happy old elm
tree.

The boldest stroke oi the dls
rector was to photograph this
film on location at Glinnell Cole
lege, in Iowa, and then to ao<
tually call the college “Grin-
nell.” I don’t know enough
about the law oi libel and slanv
der to assess the degree of his
liability, though i can imagine
an irate alumnus, having spent
money in ﬁve iigures and en-
ergy in millions oi ergs in on
der to win a degree from this
college, suing the producers
for making that degree an obs
ject of ridicule. They’re repom
edly good students out there
however, and Will probably}
take this film in the spirit at
Iun In which it was made 01
perhaps, remembering Nous
Dame, the producers hope for
the publicity that a law suit
can bring, tor minors along the
Rialto have it that none of th!
big distributors have bought
this splendid motion picture.
The more’s the pity.

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FOUR-POINT DOODLES .

When his classes would get
dull. senior Mil-re Schwartz
would put his notebook to a
diiierent purpose. Mike found
that doodling was a pleasant
way to pass the time, and be-
sides, it kept him irom tailing
asleep.

 

