Faces-human mel

Go to see Faces, directed by
John Cassavetes, with John
Marley, Gena Rowlands, Lynn
Carlin, Seymour Cassel, Fred
Draper and Val Avery. You'll
find it a welcome break from
the current flood of escapist
movies, relying on mysticism
and photographic technique to
make money. Faces stems from
the realistic school of film.

The story delineates the situa-
tion of two middle-aged, middle-
class‘ people, married but, un-
fortunately, no longer in love
and no longer with sex. The man,
Dick, chairman of the board,
goes off to try his sexual
prowess with a lonely 28-
(“whoops, fellows, I meant 23-’)
year-old call girl, while his wife

Mania (her only role in society) .

ends up in a discotheque with
three women friends, picking up
a younger turned-on guy.

In the morning, Maria has
tried to kill herself, is revived
by Chet, the young man, and
discovered by her husband. The
story ends with the premonition
that the relationship will con-
a tattered and tired though
t is.

All right, why should I bother
with, such melodrama? Because,
of course, this isn’t mere melo-
drama, but a moving and human-
istic treatment of a rather com-
mon human problem. Contrast-
ing this film with Weekend, we
see the latter makes the two pri-
mary characters into stereo-
types, violent, confused, lost. It
deals with some of the philoso-
phical ramifications of violence,
but mostly seems to delight in
gore. It shows no sympathies for
the types it creates, nor any in-
terest in finding methods of
changing their lives.

Faces, on the other hand,
creates individuals. Consider the
scene where the husband and
wife are discussing the sexual
fantasies of her closest friend.

Cancer Ward

Neither is portrayed as monster
material. Or the use of his
friend, Freddy, to set off his
own more developed sympathies
in their treatment of the call girl.
Or the antics of the other wo-
men with Chet, whom they can
only see as a sexually attractive
boy, and according to taste,
either glitter at him snake-like
or smother him rabbit-like. Ma-
ria is the only one to maintain
dignity, and is the only one to
eventually break out enough to
reach him. The scene where Chet
discovers Maria after her suicide
attempt is also moving, and con-
cern for another human being is
evinced, unlike Weekend where
suicide, rape and all other vicis-
situdes are met indifferently.

The most ironic scene occurs
when Dick, the husband, re-
turns home after his night with
Jeannie. He feels great, revived,
until he sees Chet leave. Sudden-
ly his moral sense returns, and
he berails his wife for her infide-
lity, exposing completely his own
double standard. For him, Chet
is a “ten year old rapist,” but
he is himself guilty of a greater
wrong, in not being able to
reach either Jeannie or Maria in
any permanent way or with any
lasting compassion.

Technically the film is intri-
guing. The shot of Chet streak-
ing out of the bedroom window,
across a roof, down an incline,
and down the road is hilarious
slapstick comedy. The shot of
the two men with the call girl,
Jeannie, where we see her knee
as a continual reminder of her
fleshy role, while they cavort for
her favors, is very effective. Un-
fortunately the sound of the
movie is rather garbled and ren-
ders whole small sections of
dialogue unrecognizable.

In Toronto Faces is at the
New Yorker. Watch for it across
the country.

—Sharon Stevenson

odrama

A grotesque miniature

It is always misleading to
form an opinion of a book on
the basis of the publishers’
blubs on its dust jacket, which
usually are of the same calibre
as any real estate agent’s en-
thusiastic advertising. But in
their eagerness to sell the
Soviet author Alexander Sol-
zhenitsyn’s latest novel Cancer
Ward, its English publishers The
Bodley Head seem to have over-
stepped the usual degree of am-
biguity and tend thus, against
their own intention, to create
suspicion about the value of
their literary product:

“A well-known Russian writ-
er said (after the publication of
a previous novel by Solzhenit-
syn ‘One day in the life of Ivan
Donisovich’): ‘After this we
cannot go on writing as be-
fore.’ Yet the main body of S.’s
work remain unpublished, ban-
ned by the Soviet authorities.
The author himself considers

ask for...

communist
viewpoint

at you local newsstand
only 75 cents
Publication date: March . 1969

’Cancer Ward’ his most impor-
tant novel. It’s publication is an
event of major importance.”
Whether or not One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich de-
serves the above mentioned —
but anonymous — Russian au-
thor’s praise, does have very
little bearing on Cancer Ward,
just as an enthusiastic review
of Grapes of Wrath would hard-
ly reflect a sober appraisal of
Steinbeck’s later works.
However, aperusal of Cancer
Ward in English seems to give
some kind of an answer to the
mute question, whether or not
this work is kept off the Soviet
market ‘for political or esthe-
tical reasons; even if its 338

_ pages only constitutes the first

of a two-part story, with the
second to appear later.

This volume is—as far as it
goes—a novel about the pa-
tients in the cancer wing of a
hospital at the time of the
change from the short-lived
Malenkov government to the
Kaganovich-Krushchev _leader-
ship and the “thaw” which lead
up to the de-Stalinization period.
The hospital is located in a
small city somewhere on the
other side of the Ural moun-
tains, to where thousands of
people had been transfered dur-
ing the war. Thus the hospital
is populated by all kinds of na-

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FEBRUARY 21, 1969—Page 10

tionals, and, being in the Asia-
tic part of the Soviet Union,
also by former inhabitants of
the Siberian labor camps, part
of whose sentences were further
exile. It is a collective story in
the sense, that the author, with-
out much preference, paints a
picture of all the patients in the
ward — supplied with numerous
flash-backs to their former exist-
ence—tied together by the one
single fact that everyone suffers
from advanced cancer and the
prospect of an early end. It is
thus a small community, held
together by common physical
misery, by forlorn hopes when
wondercures by folkloristic
treatments are mentioned; and
by everybody being forced by
their circumstances to consider
death as an imminent possibility.

Hospitals in general are usu-
ally anything but gay, and can-
cer wards—where they exist as
specialized entities— must, at
least until quite recently, have
been very somber on account of
the hopelessness of their pa-
tients.

The characters are somehow
chosen along the same lines: a
morally depraved martinet of a

small official inside the Stalinist’

law enforcement set-up and his
dishonest and self-seeking fam-
ily and, as a contrast, an ideal-
istic Comsomol youth, a former

Paul Hellyer and his Task
Force on Housing attended
the February 4 session of the
Vancouver and District Labor
Council (VLC), he would have
received an earful scarcely
complimentary of his ultimate
recommendations on an ur-
gent and pressing problem
upon which, as one delegate
observed, “Hellyer has taken
the Canadian people for a
bunch of suckers.”

To the above observation
another delegate from the
Carpenters Union, where the
boys know what they are
talking about when it comes
to the subject of housing,
acidly observed that this
“Hell-yer say” task force om-
mitted from its long report
two principle basic questions,
—that of skyrocketing high
interest rates and astronomic-
al land costs These are barely
touched upon en passant in
the Hellyer Report, mainly
because to really come to
grips with them would have
required that the Trudeau
government and its farcical
task force would have had to
take on the powerful realtors
and land sharks, together
with the big financial usurers
and manipulators who amass
fortunes in their financial
juggling in the realm of rent,
interest and profits.

“Aw, let’s stop dreaming,”
retorted a postal workers
delegate, “why kid ourselves
that this Trudeaumania out-
fit with its ‘Just Society’ car-
rot will ever do anything for
the people. Workingclass poli-
tical action is the only solu-
tion to the task of housing
and everyhing else.”

Prophetic words these, as
the thumping majority won
by NDP national leader Tom-
my Douglas in Nanaimo-The
Islands on February 10 so
well and truly illustrated. Per-
haps a happy augury of the
“shape of things to come.”

While Hellyer and company
were rhapsodizing on housing
in Vancouver, 22 old age pen-
sioners in the 1600 block on
Haro Street were being serv-
ed eviction notices to “get
out,” period. On Hellyer’s 40-
year plan of “easy purchase”
on a rental basis, one VLC
delegate who has been build-
ing houses the better part of
a lifetime, described the
single dwellings now going up
as “boxes just thrown toge-
ther” which won’t even last
40 years. Let’s tell Hellyer
that.

“The Hell-yer say,” why

“The Hell-yer say.” Had

not? Nothing rattles the clap-~
boards on this “Just Society”
so much as a few hard plain
truths.

@

During the last few weeks
of the Nanaimo federal by-
election not a few federal
cabinet ministers and other
Liberal big brass were visitors
to B.C. Most of them came to
“assist” their Liberal stan-
dard-bearer Eric Winch put
the political skids to Tommy
Douglas. Others came, as they
said for the public weal—or
at least a reasonable facsimile
thereof.

Among these Liberal minis-
terial tourists was Trade
Minister M. Jean-Luc Pepin,
out in Vancouver to deter-
mine how he (and his govern-
ment) might help.to get the
huge flotilla of cargo ships
(all under foreign registry and
flags) moving out of Vancou-
ver with the cargoes of
wheat they had come to load.

M. Jean-Luc Pepin was soli-
citous, urbane, polite, inquir-
ing, deeply concerned and
apologetic, (as well he might
be), and above all keenly in-
terested in “sharing the
blame” for the long hold-up of
wheat deliveries to our over-
seas customers. “We are all
to blame” purred trade minis-
ter Pepin—the government,
the Canadian Wheat Pool, the
rail barons, and oh yes, the
weather — don’t forget the
weather. Even the farmer
himself, desperately trying to
inch his way out from under
a mountain of damp and
tough wheat, he too must
share a little of the “blame”
too.

In a prepared statement for
public consumption via TV,
which the minister had ob-
viously never seen until some
departmental understrapper
handed it to him to read, all
the “share-the-blame” was
neatly packaged and appar-
ently accepted by all, so—
“we hope to get everything
moving smoothly in a week
or two” or words to that ef-
fect, which at least let the
Trudeau government “off the
hook” so to speak—if not the
scores of ships lying idle at
anchor in the port of Van-
couver.

One can well imagine the
salty comments of numerous
skippers (with their mud-
hooks down) when they heard
trade minister Jean-Luc Pe-
pin’s dulcet tones giving out
with the latest Trudeaumania
ditty—‘“‘we are all to blame.”

labor camp inmate who, accord-
ing to his own word, had been
sent to Siberia for some juvenile
spouting; a raw, unpoliticized
laborer, a pastoral-innocent pea-
sant, a mild and long-suffering
old mountaineer, etc., etc. The
characterizations suffer from a
total white-or-black blight, with
no traces of the shadings which
distinguish the novelist as an
artist from the hack writer. And
the whole picture is topped off
by a couple of extra white hos-
pital doctors and an exiled phy-
sician and his wife, who are so
much whiter than white that
even their dogs are fitted out
with halos and angel wings.

In these surroundings and with

this gallery of persons Cancer
Ward becomes in the mind of
this reader a grotesque minia-
ture of the Soviet Union at the
end of the Stalin era, with the
physical tumors of the patients
combined with the political ab
scesses of the system; too over”
drawn to be accepted by any”
body above the stage of true
story reading, and too dull and
draggy for this category. One cat
thus sympathize with the Soviet
publishers from any point °
view, if they did reject the nov |
el. And if the English promoters
had had no ulterior motives
they should have known better
than to fall for their own adver
tising. —Henry Mey: —