MALIBU BEACH TO THE VALLEY OF ASHES: Last Year's Films: Yesteryear's Life Styles

OTHER FILMS, it is true, were more talked about in '74, notably The Exorcist and Last Tango, each arguably depicting a gadarene trend of our times. But The Sting, Gatsby, and The Way We Were probably tell us more about middle‐class, and perhaps middle‐aged, opinion, British and American, in that year of inflation and confusion; indeed, as New Society almost noticed wordily in November, about middle‐class reaction from just those trends Bertolucci and Friekdin exhibit. They deserve thus a clinical, although they ask insistently a roseate, retrospect.