TELL LAURA I LOVE HER

A song from the movie - Going Steady "Tell Laura I Love Her", a teenage tragedy song written by Jeff Barry and Ben Raleigh, was an American Top Ten popular music hit for singer Ray Peterson in 1960 on RCA Victor Records, reaching #7 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Later that same year, the song was recorded and released by Ricky Valance in the United Kingdom, where it went all the way to the #1 spot in the UK Singles Chart.[1] "Tell Laura I Love Her" has been a hit in 14 countries, and has sold over seven million copies.[2] "Tell Laura I Love Her" is the tragic story of a teenage boy named Tommy who is desperately in love with a girl named Laura. Although they are only teenagers, he wants to marry her, so he enters a stock car race, hoping to win, and use the prize money to buy Laura a wedding ring. The second verse tells the mysterious story of how the boy's car overturned and burst into flames—though no-one knows why—and the boy was killed, his last words being "Tell Laura I love her... My love for her will never die." In the final verse, Laura prays inside the chapel, where she can still hear Tommy's voice intoning the title one more time, before it fades out. Going Steady: Film Writings 1968–1969 is the third collection of film reviews by the critic Pauline Kael, comprising the years 1968-1969, when she first began her film-reviewing duties at The New Yorker and which covers, " a crucial period of social and aesthetic change at the end of the sixties."[1] The collection for the most part consists of reviews of individual films, but includes one long essay, (which appeared originally in Harper's Magazine), entitled "Trash, Art, and the Movies ", perhaps the closest Kael comes to a manifesto defining her personal aesthetics in regards to films. In the essay, Kael dissects, compares, and contrasts the merits of "trash" films that are nevertheless entertaining, as well as "art" films that are uninteresting. In doing so, Kael lambastes "art" films such as Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, concluding her treatment of that particular film by declaring: "If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they've put it on a big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art." The essay is divided into ten parts, ranging from discussions of The Thomas Crown Affair to Petulia. Kael's overriding theme is to dismantle the intellectual pretences of those who deride films deemed to be "trash" on the basis of dubious aesthetic concerns, notwithstanding the entertainment appeal a particular "trash" film might possess. Other notable reviews include Kael's treatment of the Norman Mailer film Wild 90, its relation to cinéma vérité, and the implications of that particular film-making technique.