SMUG REVIEW

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I found your review of "The Cool World" smug, pretentious, and worst of all, full of both ignorance and insensitivity. It did a gross injustice to a first-rate film that movingly, and in my experience accurately, shows what it means for a Negro child to grow up (and go "wrong") in a slum.

Your writer essentially dismisses the film out of hand as sentimental, fake, and propagandistic. To substantiate such charges he comes up with such strenuous exertions as "the closed culture of Harlem is really a set of defenses," or"... children are an easy mark for sentimental demonstrations." It is good, finally, to have Harlem approximated; and as a child psychiatrist who has worked with Negro and white children in the South's desegregated school's and in northern ghettoes, I had heretofore overlooked the susceptibility of those children to "sentimental demonstrations." Mr. Smock tells us exactly the stuff of those demonstrations: "childish naivete is set against hopeless circumstances for maximum pathos." I'll have to remember that the next time I treat a young Negro delinquent of seven or eight, already tough, yet soon, in treatment, able to speak his fears and confusions.

While a movie is naturally more than a collection of clinical case histories, your reviewer has drawn upon his extensive knowledge of children faced with slum life to make sure we don't forget the clinical. The picture is said to tell of a world that "exists for sure only in ... (the director's) imagination." Moreover: "No doubt violence does rear up without warning in real Harlem life, but these scuffies come too fast in the movie to glean any human relevance." Precisely, and a cheer for Mr. Smock. At long last I can understand what really ails the slum children I've been treating. Their difficulty has been one of experiencing scuffles that come too fast for their own comprehension as human beings. At least "The Cool World" has stimulated that discovery, and to be frank, I can hardly wait to tell it to the children.

Finally we are told that the audience "laughed light-heartedly" at the sight of violence, stealing, and murder, thereby proving the picture a failure. Laughter can signify nervous comprehension, too; the truth, the pain and anguish, the cruelty of life brought to focus, can be too much for the audience--and apparently the critic, also. Robert Coles, M.D.   Research Psychiatrist

Mr. Smock replies:

Mr. Coles is excellently qualified to judge this movie's accuracy, and I accept his judgment. Clearly The Cool World is more worthwhile than I thought it was. My point about Shirley Clarke's imagination is that the way she presented her story led me to distrust its accuracy: She was making a pitch, and she injected symptoms of social malfunction in an almost rhetorical way; the foggy soundtrack and sloppy camerawork were clearly meant to give the movie a documentary veneer; she didn't tell enough about Duke or anyone else in the movie to make them convincing as individuals. My point about the scuffies was that because they were so isolated, the audience had little idea of what was going on in the participants' heads.

Therefore I wasn't sure that the writers hadn't simply fabricated Duke, as a naive, generalised adolescent who would elicit sympathy for their cause and their movie. That suspicion was based on an ignorance of Harlem teenagers, but an ignorance that I share with almost everyone to whom the movie is addressed.

The uncalled-for flippancy of the review made it unclear that I was criticizing the movie's exposition rather than its appeal.