The Press: MAGAZINES

Ramparts Dropout

For its December issue, Ramparts magazine has put some fire on its cover, but what’s burning is not exactly yule logs. Three Ramparts editors and the art director are holding aloft their burning draft cards in a kind of New Left salute. Inside, Editor Warren Hinckle III writes: “If you’re looking for an editorial in the usual place this month, forget it. It’s on the cover.”*

Not all of the old hands are joining in Ramparts salutes these days. Conspicuously absent is Principal Stockholder and onetime Publisher Edward Keating, who was discovered “plotting” against the magazine last spring, as his detractors put it. The latest dropout is another major stockholder, Martin Peretz, 28, a Harvard lecturer in government who has contributed substantially to the magazine as well as to other New Left causes. He is also married to Anne Farnsworth, a Singer Sewing Machine heiress.

What bothers Peretz, he says in Commentary magazine, is Ramparts’ anti-Jewish attitude toward the Arab-Israeli war. Editor Hinckle, says Peretz, likes to be “flippy”—that is, perverse in a flip, hippie sort of way. This translates into articles like the one Peretz calls “the most carefully selective and skewed history of the conflict to come from any source save possibly the propaganda machines of the respective parties.” The article “occasionally takes note of Nasser’s calculating politics,” says Peretz, but “settles the burden of tragic events squarely on Israel.” All of this fits what Peretz says has become the New Left’s Middle East dogma: that “Israel and Israel alone must bear the blame for the past and the responsibility for the future. Not, it should be clear, only for the plight of the Arab refugees, but for the behavior of the Arab regimes as well, and even (how powerful little Israel must have become!) for the policy of the Soviet Union, its sycophants (at least when Jews are in question), and virtually the entire Third World.”

Season of Statistics

Americans, it is said, hunger for facts. If so, this is the feast season, with the appearance of Scripps-Howard’s World Almanac. One hundred years old this year, the Almanac offers 916 pages of facts on taxes, elections, strikes, natural disasters, population, Viet Nam and sports events.

Under Editor Luman H. Long, a staff of eight put out the nearly two-inch-thick book. About half of the Almanac is carried over from previous years; the rest consists of new facts and figures. The 1968 edition, for instance, contains the zip code for all communities of more than 2,500 population and color pictures of the flags of all nations, including those of newly independent Guyana (red, green and yellow) and Botswana (white, black and blue). Even so, fact-hungry readers are never satisfied. When the Almanac tries to drop some marginalia, such as the gestation period of animals or the equivalents of Roman numerals, it invariably gets complaints. A reader recently wrote to say that he was “shocked” that the Almanac had no statistics on lefthandedness. Never intimidated by a statistic, Editor Long says he will give it a try next year.

NEWSPAPERS

The Rigors of Criticism

After 30 years and some 10,000 movies, New York Times Film Critic Bosley Crowther, 62, is calling it quits. Not that he is tired of movies. Far from it. “One of the rewards is that I can still be enthusiastic about movies after all these years,” he says. But he would prefer to escape the daily grind and write about films and film makers at a more leisurely pace. Starting Jan. 1, 1968, when New Yorker Writer Renata Adler, 29, replaces him, he will do just that.

Despite all the time on the job, Crowther has never been predictable. Producers were seldom confident as to how he would react. He appreciated small-scale, low-budget efforts like David & Lisa; yet he also praised Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra as “one of the great epic films of our day.” An early, ardent booster of foreign films, he helped win acceptance for them in the U.S. with appreciative reviews of Open City and Bicycle Thief.

Tumbling Taboos. What appealed most to Crowther were movies of social content. Looking back at all those films, he nominates as his alltime favorites Citizen Kane, Grapes of Wrath and Gone With the Wind—all of them big movies with big messages. His criticism, however was not confined to movies alone. In the 1950s, he fought against the blacklisting of supposed Hollywood Communists and ridiculed some of the stridently patriotic, anti-Communist movies that were being brought out at that time. He was just as opposed to censorship movements, and has done his bit to bring the taboos tumbling down. As something of a sequel to two earlier books (The Lion’s Share and Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer), he has just published The Great Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures.

His replacement has never been a regular reviewer. A Bryn Mawr graduate who went on to study comparative literature at Harvard and spent a year at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Renata Adler has written wryly and perceptively on a variety of subjects in her five years with The New Yorker: literary critics, group therapy, civil rights marchers, and New Leftists. But fertile as she has been in ideas, she felt she was running out of them, and so looks forward to the rigors of daily criticism. Her taste in movies is eclective: she professes to like westerns along with Fellini. There is one obstacle. Like her predecessor, she is repelled by excessive violence, and walked out during the knifing in the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. “I have a problem about horror movies,” she says, “that I suppose I will have to get over.”

*Though all of them are over the usual draft cutoff age of 26. In addition, Hinckle is blind in one eye, Assistant Managing Editor Sol Stern has a medical deferment, and Art Director Dugald Stermer is married and a father.