Show Business: Ali MacGraw: A Return to Basics

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histrionic equipment these days. But put them all together, and Ali makes them go. In two pictures, she has managed to suggest the incarnate campus heroine, full of itchy, bitchy resolve. Ultimately, she seems to suggest, if the right records are on the hi-fi and the right poetry is read aloud, well . . . In short, she is the kind of girl a boy would want to take home even if his parents were there, but especially if they were not.

Typically Rigged

Ali and half a dozen other handsome new faces (see color pages) represent a return to something basic in the U.S. cinema. To a fresh flowering of the romance and sentimentalism of the '30s and '40s. To a time when pictures told a story, when you could go to the movies and take the family, when you could lose yourself in fantasy, when you got chills at the final fadeout. Her appeal —and that of Love Story—is strong enough to counter gravity. Before it is finished, the movie will probably outgross The Graduate and Easy Rider, and perhaps come close to that alltime mint, The Sound of Music.

On the tinted face of it, Love Story is a typically rigged success, a prepackaged blockbuster. Take a bestseller, aim it for blue-haired old ladies, put in a sprinkling of borderline obscenities, add a couple of attractive young people to get the kids, and that's it.

Or is it? If wishes were pencils, beggars could write—and today Love Stories would be churning out of studios like episodes of Get Smart. If packaging a hit were as easy as kidding it, show business would now be impervious to hard times. Instead, it is melting and sliding into recession like an ice cube on a stove. Love Story is a calculated movie, but not an automatic smash. Such things no longer exist. Aesthetically, it may be worth no more than the price of admission. As an example of historical irony, though, it is impossible to overprice.

Tuning Out Pollution

Irony is a joke that letters play on numbers, that humanity works on demographers. When the researchers decide that the nation hungers for raw meat, the country develops an appetite for Crunchy Granola; when politicians polarize, the voters cross party lines. Last year the television networks pushed relevance, but the viewers quickly bounced Storefront Lawyers out of their hole in the wall and into a respectable walnut-paneled office with paying clients. The explosive Young Rebels are out; Marcus Welby, M.D. (Middleclass, Dependable) is in. Last month James E. Duffy, president of ABC-TV, told the Broadcasters' Promotion Association that "while we were addressing ourselves to the very real concerns of our times —pollution, drug addiction, increasing crime, the generation gap—many viewers were tuning these problems out."

In book publishing, the situation is identical, only more so. Strome Lamon, advertising director of Simon & Schuster, figures that Love Story is about an inch from where it's at. "I think black study books and Women's Lib books have shot their wad," he says. "The kids want romance. They're discovering again that going to college is a wonderful little world. I can see them bringing back the Homecoming Queen and the pantie raids." James Silberman. Random House's editor in chief, agrees: "People are tired of reading about drugs and blacks. These books don't have