The Importance of an Image

Like a venerable bank or a vintage Bordeaux, a great university must be ever watchful of its reputation, and the University of Notre Dame is more watchful than most. Once the school's fame lay in its fightin'-Irish football cult; then the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh became president, and the school got academic quality too. This year a great new coach, Ara Parseghian, offered hope of a fine Olympic balance.

Now, says Hesburgh, the hard-won image is endangered by a $4,000,000 Hollywood farce called John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, in which Shirley MacLaine and a platoon of harem houris corrupt the Notre Dame football team. Last week in Manhattan, Notre Dame charged foul play, filed an in junction in New York State Supreme Court to block 20th Century-Fox from showing the movie.

Claiming misappropriation and exploitation of its name and insignia, the suit protested that Notre Dame would suffer "irreparable and immeasurable injury" if Goldfarb were shown, but the school did not ask for damages. "The University of Notre Dame is not for sale for such uses," said the petition. What particularly annoyed Hesburgh was the way-out plot that depicts Notre Dame players "as undisciplined gluttons and drunks."

The film is about a U-2 pilot who bungles a CIA mission over the U.S.S.R. and bails out in the kingdom ruled by Fawz (Peter Ustinov), a peeved potentate whose son failed to make the Notre Dame varsity. Shirley MacLaine just happens to be at hand as a reporter getting a picture-magazine scoop inside the seraglio. The vengeful Fawz fields a football team of his own and blackmails Goldfarb into coaching it. An eager U.S. State Department sends the Irish to the Middle East, where they are wined, dined, wiggled at, and ultimately defeated (34-29) by the burnoosed bandits of Fawz U.

Fox officials rushed to the defense, calling the film "a zany fantasy, a free-swinging satire." Doubleday & Co., one of two publishers also named in the suit, added informatively that the original book, heretofore ignored by the university, "couldn't be funnier." Everyone waited to see who would have the last laugh, but preview audiences in Hollywood and Manhattan were already spreading the word that John Goldfarb had handily outFoxed itself long before the roar from South Bend. It is not simply a bad movie; it is a truly breathtaking display of tastelessness, ineptitude and wretched humor, crudely written and performed as one long leer. Only with a break like getting sued did Goldfarb appear to stand much chance at the box office.

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