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Films
——

Eye of the Needle
is dull watching

EYE OF THE NEEDLE, starring Donald Sutherland, Kate Nel-
ligan, lan Bannen, Christopher Cazenove; screenplay by
Staniey Mann; based on the novel by Ken Follett; music by
Miklos Rozsa; produced by Stephen Friedman; directed by
Richard Marquand. :

Poor Richard Marquand. He’s the director of this spy thriller
set in England during World War II, and I doubt that it will be
possible for him to escape comparison to Alfred Hitchcock.
Comparisons, at best, dull the edge of originality, though com-
parison to the late master of the suspense genre is hardly some-
thing to be ashamed of.

Not having read the novel I can’t say how much of what
appeared on the screen is straight Follett or straight Marquand.
But translating something from one medium to another puts the
ball in the translator’s ballpark. In this case it’s a ballpark whose
star player was Hitchcock. Thus the inevitable comparison.

I must say that the suspensities in ‘‘ Needle” are old hat. When
the heroine is trying to escape the villain and gets into her car you
know she won't be able to get it started until his hand is about to
get a grip on the rear seat. And when the car gets lodged ina ditch
in sight of her destination you ask yourself how many times
you've seen that one. And when she loses her pistol as the »
menacing spy is advancing on the lighthouse in which she has
énsconced herselfand her child you feel pretty sure she will find it
in the nick of time. Certain, in fact, since the ad for the movie
shows her pointing the enormous weapon straight out.

This important aspect of the film aside, the tale of a nazi spy
who leaves a bloody trail from London to Storm Island is well-
unravelled. The acting is uniformly good, with Donald Suther-
land giving a convincing performance as a cold-blooded spy
whose iciness thaws in the arms of Kate Nelligan, whose warmth
of contour and characterization make such a digression from
commitment believable. She has a.youthful Bergmanesque qual-
ity (Ingrid of course), that is perforce for this role.

Watchers of public TV are bound to feel at home with this film,
thanks to England's excellent output. The star, Kate Nelligan,
recently appeared as Emile Zola’s tragic heroine Therese Ra-
quin. Christopher Cazenove, who plays her crippled husband,
was in the series “The Duchess of Duke Street.’” And Ian Ban-
nen, the film’s tenacious spy catcher, may be remembered as the
agent who was set up in ‘‘Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”* All were
excellent here. ;

All those interested in this type of film have more than enough to
be satisfied with. But a little less predictability would have done it
to a turn. :

—S, a

NEW YORK — Several days after the death of
songwriter Lee Hays, member of the Weavers, a
quartet of true people’s artists, Mike Glick, himself a
singer-songwriter, asked Pete Seeger to talk about
his memories of Lee.

Songwriters aré very lucky people. After
songwriters are dead and gone their bad songs are
forgotten and their good songs are remembered
and taken into the hearts of the people. This is true
of the Ukrainian songwriter Taras Shevchenko,
Scottish poet Robert Bums, of Woody Guthrie,
and also of Lee Hays. j

Those songs like, ‘‘Kisses sweeter than wine,”’
and ‘‘If I had a hammer,”’ will be sung for a long
time. Some of Lee’s songs are not so well known
up here in New York but are still remembered in
the South.

Lee Hays was a young man during the early
1930s when he met Claude Williams, the preacher.

Williams said we must organize Black and: white’

together. Some of the old-line trade union people
wanted to have Black unions and white unions.
There were some Socialists who argued that if you
brought too many Blacks into the Socialist move-
ment it would drive the whites out. It was the

Communists in the 1930s who declared there must -

be a broad attack on racism and some broad or-
ganizing of farm people as well as working people.
And Lee Hays was in the middle of that. He be-
came a student and then a teacher at Common-
wealth College in Arkansas and it was Lee singing
with the sharecroppers that brought out songs like
‘‘Oh Freedom,”’ *‘Before I’d be a slave, I'd be
buried in my grave.”

My favorite is ‘‘Raggedy, raggedy are we, just as
raggedy as we can be. We don’t get nothing for our
labor, so raggedy, raggedy are we.”’ Lee called it a
zipper song because you could change one word,
zip in a new word and you had a new verse.
‘*Homeless, homeless are we.” But no matter

what verses you added, you always ended up with.

Union, union are we, we're gonna get something
for our labor, so union, union are we.”

Lee Hays came to New York in 1940 because he
wanted to publish a book of labor songs. I came to
New York from New England and was interested
also in working on a labgr songbook. So we just
naturally met each other and pooled whatever re-
sources we had and started singing together in a
group called the Almanac Singers, later joined by
Woodie Guthrie and Sis Cunningham, and many
others. :

Some of our best songs were ones that Lee made
up. ‘The boss came up to me with a $5 bill. Says,
get you some whiskey, boy, and get your fill. Get
thee behind me Satan and travel on down the line. I
am a union man, gonna leave you behind.”’ Thanks
to the LP recordings you can still get that old
Talking Union record that we made in 1941.

Lee had a very perceptive, acute sense of criti-
cism. But it was sometimes so sharp it let him tear

THE ARTS

‘if had a hammer’
writer Lee Hays dies

; ‘ nae ¢ my, ‘ —
on ws: ww : ‘
weg ft fF Ratiies

-bers of the group. (I. to r.) include: Pete Seeger,

_All that I am will feed the trees, and fishes in the |

Lee Hays (second from left) was a member of the
singing group the Weavers, who were forced to
dismantle during the McCarthy period. Other mem-

Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, with a picture of
the group taken in 1950.

up his writing because he was disgusted with it. He
probably tore up three quarters of the. things he
wrote. But it was thanks to Lee’s very acute per-
ception that I learned some things I never would
have learned otherwise.-One of the things I learned
is by gosh, you keep your sense of humor no matter |
what happens. And in Lee’s last days when he was |
battling diabetes, he never lost his sense of humor. —

When the doctors amputated his little toe, he
says, I wrote an ode to my little toe, “‘It was nice
having you, it was nice knowing you.’’ When they
amputated his foot, he said us diabetics get shorter
and shorter. And even when he was in the wheel-
chair with both legs cut off, he was writing wonder-
fully humorous songs, like one I’ve been singing all |
around, ‘‘If I should die before I wake, all my bone
and sinew take, put me in the compost pile, to
decompose me for a while. Worms, water, sun,
will have their way, returning me to common clay-

seas. When radishes and corn you munch, you may
be having me for lunch. And then excrete me witha
grin, chuckling, there goes Lee again. Twill be my
happiest destiny, to die and live eternally.

In his last years, Lee became much moré |
compassionate, in the sense he had the reputation
as a curmudgeon, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly.
But he came to feel that we really are all respon-_
sible for each other no matter how many mistakes
we made, or even how many crimes we commit.
We can’t disregard each other’s humanity. And he
wrote this poem which I quoted today, ‘‘If I should
one day die by violence, please take this as my
written will, and in the name of common sense,
treat my killer only as one ill. As one who needs fat
more than I could give, as one who never really |
learned to live in peace and charity and love for life; |
but was diseased and plagued by hate and strife.
My vanished life might have some meaning still, |
when my destroyer learns to know goodwill.”’

Space Research Corporation:

How a transnational munitions.

company used a West Indies
government to test artillery
shells for the South African

armed forces. By Michael

Cummins and Norman Faria. A
Southern African Liberation
’ Committee Publication. Bar-
bados: 1981. Availabie from
Bookworld, 118 Avenue Rd. To-
ronto.

Part of the military equipment
which the South African armed
forces probably took with them in
their recent illegal campaigns
against SWAPO militants and the
sovereign nation of Angola were
howitzers of the 155 mm type.

The technology for these long ,

range cannons, reported tobe so
accurate that they can hit a target
the size of an automobile from a
range of over 24 kilometres (15
miles) was partially developed by
a Canadian munitions firm named
Space Research Corporation
(SRC). Now out of business
following protests from anti-
apartheid forces and United Na-
tions members that the company
was engaged in illegal shipments
of arms to South Africa, SRC had
test ranges on the West Indian is-
lands of Barbados and Antigua.

This dimension of the horren-
dous gun running activity to Pre-
toria is the subject of a recently

_ PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCT. 2, 1981—Page 10

published pamphlet by an anti-
apartheid group in Barbados. The
pamphlet is entitled “Space Re-
search Corporation: How a
Trans-national munitions com-
pany used a West Indies govern:
ment to test artillery shells for the
South African armed forces’’ and
is a look into the questions arising
from the incredible political
phenomenon of a West Indian
government's relationship with
the munitions company.

The pamphlet argues that there
is some speculation that the Bar-
bados Labor Party administration
of Prime Minister Tom Adams
cannot really wash its hands Pon-
tius Pilate-like and say that it is

free froin all sins in its relationship
with SRC.

Both the Barbados and Antigua
governments moved to expel
SRC from the islands in late 1978.

Fop executives. of the company;

were lated convicted in U.S. and
Canadian courts of shipping gun
barrels to South Africa. How-
ever, the SALC point out that
both governments made. their
move over a year after Zimbab-
wean Patriotic Front leader
Joshua Nkomo raised the ques-
tions of SRC wrong doings at a
Toronto; Canada press confer-
ence. e TEA:
Says the SALC in the pam-
phlet: ‘‘We know that during this
period the BLP (Barbados Labor

iment, should, be apen to, the pub:

Party) knew about SRC’s links t0 |
the U.S. military.”

The SALC points out that 4.
secret file on SRC now in pos
session of the Barbadian govern |

lic.

“The whole affair has beet)
swept under the rug’’, says)
SALC. ;

The publication also gives 4)
useful overview of how thé
trans-national armaments com ||
panies serve to prop up the apart
heid system. The SALC suggests -
that there is work to be done t0
not only stop this wicked practice |
but to identify those governments
who seemingly assist it.

NE