antihistamine.nAllen wishes to visualize the poetrynof city lore, but those who remembernRenoir, Rene Clair, Capra or DeSica,nquickly realize the charmlessness of hisnefforts. He has no knack for telling anstory visually; he needs words, a delugenof words—in fact, in all of Manhattan,nthere’s only one sequence that relies onnwordlessness.nThe New York libcultural lobby toutsnhim as a major cineaste; actually hendoes not know how to make movies.nHe knows how to make skits. He’s annintelligent and witty writer of reflectivensatirical short stories; this is whynhis only good movie was Love and Death,nwhere the subject was literature andnliterary imagery, not people and humannvicissitudes. Movies—no way. Somensay that Manhattan and Annie Hall arenintelligent movies. Perhaps, in the samensense that Time is an intelligent magazine.nThis kind of intelligence is thenlast refuge of mediocrity. With propernadvertising, it can always be promotednto genius.nThese two movies, so far apart innambition and style, are nonetheless ansimilar celebration of jargon as the keynto culture and interpersonal understanding.nIf Manhattan glorifies the sociopsychoanalyticalnman/woman, SamenTime, Next Year sentimentalizes man/nwoman as a reproductive cliche’of mediantrendiness.nThe latter is a particularly shallowntreatment of the simple attributes ofnexistence: continuity of a love affair,nplain bonds of sexual attraction sustainednby infrequency of encounters.nIts two protagonists change their attitudes,ntheir outlooks on life, morality,nemotions and mutual attachments inntime with the fashionable poses andnpsychological accouterments dictatednby politics (not history), journalism (notnknowledge or education), modish predilectionsn(not inner transformations),nand linguistic fads (not understandingnof the changeable). Originally a play,n3SinChronicles of Culturenwhich might have had a modicum ofninoffensive artlessness on the stage, onnscreen Same Time, Next Year onlynexposes the power of the platitude as anmodern coordinator of our inferioritiesn—which are not always of our own makingnand which we owe to the giantnmanipulative forces of mass culture.n* * *nNewsfront.. . When the World WasnYoung; Directed by Phillip Noyce; anNew Yorker Films Release.nThis is an Australian import, rarelynseen here, and it doesn’t invite one tonlook for more. It breathes a kind ofnprimitive procommunism which, innthis country, is considered embarrassingneven in the living rooms of CentralnPark West; among West Virginia coalnminers, it would be considered cheapncomedy.nAustralia in the ’50s is called a policenstate, only fellow-travelers express coherentnviews, the Russian massacre innCorrespondencenHungary is viewed with full understanding,nwhile those who condemn itnare imperialists. When the movie tellsnsimple stories about people (weddings,nwork, funerals, house-building, children,nunrequited love, lethal accidents),nit becomes engaging. Whenever it returnsnto procommunist rhetoric it portraysnthose who use it as upright andnintelligent, and those who object asnNeanderthals with brows so low thatnbrains are eliminated, along with anynsensible argument for their persuasion.nWhich proves that the Australians ofnthe Marxist persuasion still have a longnway to go before they grasp that sadomasochismnis more effective againstndemocracy than fellow-traveler pro-nStalinism. The movie chronicles thennewsreel business in Australia and itsnfading under pressure from TV. Thenunrelenting leftish exegesis of everythingnthat goes wrong makes us onlynsmile sadly when the lights go up innthe theatre. DnLetter From Paris: An Exhibition andna Movie from the Other Europenby Leo F. RaditsanThere is now an extraordinary exhibitionnin Paris (which will be on viewnuntil the first days of November),n”Paris-Moscow 1900-1930.” The shownis huge, with over 2,500 objects. In annastonishing series of pictures it not onlynrecreates an epoch (roughly betweenn1905 to 1923) but it also makes it clearnthat Moscow understood better thennwhat was happening in Paris than didnParis itself.nThis show somehow reveals the couragenand strength of the times before thenDr. Raditsa is a historian who teachesnat St. John’s College, Annapolis,nMaryland.nnnFirst World War. Courage is in the canvasesnof Kazimir Malevitch, the samenMalevitch who said in April, 1915:n”Art needs truth, not sincerity.” But itnlives, too, in the works of painters younmight have imagined had grown toonfamiliar to surprise you, in Picasso, innan extraordinary portrait of his wifenOlga (1917) that is like nothing of hisnI have ever seen—a portrait in the traditionnof Goya and, through Goya, ofnAmerican portraits of the 18th century;nin a Matisse picture (1913) of a Moroccannwoman which was apparently meantnto instruct the painters of Russian societynat that time how to look at a facenwithout emptying it of insides; innChagall, especially in his cubist selfportraitn(1912-13), good enough to re-n