Word: conroy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...opened in New York a month ago. It received two pre-reviews. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael praised the freshness of the story: a young South Carolinian goes to isolated Yamacraw Island to teach illiterate black children. Kael loved the lustiness and poetic charm of the hero, Pat Conroy (known to his students as Conrack), who overcomes reactionary school officials and intransigent students and parents to give his class a sense of the world beyond Yamacraw--before he is fired. She dunned some of the film's simplifications but saluted its spirit. Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic, applauded...
...such corniness. Newsweek's Paul Zimmerman asked, "Who needs a film about a white man who teaches blacks how to think?" (But if black children are taught to think by blacks or liberated whites, aren't the rednecks the only ones who lose?) And in Time, Richard Schickel compared Conroy's relentless idealism to Chinese water torture...
...headed idealists, overwhelmed by uplift. But the critics Mad Andrew wrote about are figments of his imagination, since the only famous critics who praised the film (Kael and Kauffmann) are rigorous, not at all the "melting marsh-mallows" of his bile-ridden column. Sarris took potshots at the actual Conroy as well as at the film and its defenders, vaguely condemning him--though rhetorically denying it--for being young, energetic, individualistic, and anti-establishment. (Everything film critics are not, these days...
...follows from her profession (she teaches black literature at a Baltimore college). But her professional disposition may well be the sole source of her criticism. Although she says, "the Sea Islands actually have a very rich folk culture," she reiterates her charge instead of proving her argument. According to Conroy's book, The Water is Wide (the basis for Irving Ravetch and Harriett Frank Jr.'s script) pollution from surrounding factories ruined Yamacraw Island and starved its hunters and fishermen. Frustration spurred violence that scarred all families. Perhaps Collier cannot believe that a black culture's "wisdom, strength and humor...
...movie Conroy has no such qualms. In the film's most egregious invention, he hires a sound truck to tour white districts, lecturing about his grievances and their indifference. At which point the movie's insistence on reducing a complex character to a single, simple-minded dimension becomes too vulgar to bear. Ironically, the people who made Conrack commit the same errors as the educational system their hero rebelled against: they too distrust and patronize the intelligence of those they would instruct...