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NY TIMES
June 4, 2006
'American Movie Critics'
How to Write About Film
Review by CLIVE JAMES
SINCE all of us are deeply learned experts on the movies even when we don't know
much about anything else, people wishing to make their mark as movie critics
must either be able to express opinions like ours better than we can, or else
they must be in charge of a big idea, preferably one that can be dignified by
being called a theory. In "American Movie Critics," a Library of America
collection drawn from the work of almost 70 high-profile professional critics
active at various times since their preferred medium was invented the day before
yesterday - the whole history of narrative movies for exhibition still fits
inside a mere hundred years - most of the practitioners fall neatly into one
category or the other.
It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already
knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of
frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel,
Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is
much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction
movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that
history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal
schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.
The editor, Phillip Lopate, an essayist and film critic, has a catholic scope,
and might not agree that the nontheorists clearly win out. They do, though, and
one of the subsidiary functions that this hefty compilation might perform -
subsidiary, that is, to its being sheerly entertaining on a high level - is to
help settle a nagging question. In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory
give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it
could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way
of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes
its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being
available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.
For as long as the sonar-riddled soundtrack of "The Hunt for Red October" has me
mouthing the word "ping" while I keep reaching for the popcorn, I don't want to
hear that what I'm seeing is an example of anything, or a step to anywhere, or a
characteristic statement by anyone. What I'm seeing is a whole thing on its own.
The real question is why none of it saps my willingness to be involved, not even
Sean Connery's shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a
Shoviet shubmarine, not even that spliced-in footage of the same old Grumman F9F
Panther that has been crashing into the aircraft carrier's deck since the Korean
War.
On the other hand, no prodigies of acting by Tom Cruise in "Eyes Wide Shut,"
climaxed by his partial success in acting himself tall, convinced me for a
minute that Stanley Kubrick, when he made his bravely investigative capital work
about the human sexual imagination, had the slightest clue what he was doing. In
my nonhumble ticket purchaser's opinion, the great Stanley K., as Terry Southern
called him, was, when he made "Eyes Wide Shut," finally and irretrievably out to
lunch. Does this discrepancy of reaction on my part mean that the frivolous
movie was serious, and the serious movie frivolous? Only, you might say, if
first impressions are everything.
But in the movies they are. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there
are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have
stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an
unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the
impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right. By and large, it's the
movie itself that tells you it means business. It does that by telling a story.
No story, no movie. Robert Bresson only did with increasing slowness what other
directors had done in a hurry. But when Bresson, somewhere in the vicinity of
Camelot, reached the point where almost nothing happening became nothing
happening at all, you were gone. A movie has to glue you to your seat even when
it's pretending not to.
As the chronological arrangement of this volume reveals, there were good
American critics who realized this fact very early on. Several of the post-World
War I critics will come as revelations to anybody who assumed, as many of us
have long been led to assume, that America was slow to discover the fruitfulness
of its own cinema. The usual history runs roughly thus: Even in the
Hollywood-haunted America of the years between the wars, the best critics
concentrated on the work of obviously major artists, most of them foreign. Then,
after World War II, when victory in Europe could well have led the liberated
nations to sneer in resentment at the triumph of American might, generous young
French critics armed with the auteur theory discovered that a cluster, or
pantheon, of directors within the Hollywood system had always been major artists
too: Nicholas Ray was up there with Carl Dreyer, and so on. After that, American
film criticism grew up to match European maturity.
It took a theory to work the switch, and the essence of the auteur theory was
that the director, the controlling hand, shaped the movie with his artistic
personality even if it was made within a commercial system as businesslike as
Hollywood's. This fact having at last been discovered, film criticism in America
came of age. It's a neat progression, but this book, simply by its layout, shows
it to be bogus.
Among the early critical big names, some were big names in other fields. Vachel
Lindsay and Carl Sandburg were bardic poets, Edmund Wilson was a high-flying man
of letters, H. L. Mencken was the perennial star reporter-cum-philologist of the
American language, Gilbert Seldes wrote about all of what he christened "the
lively arts," Robert E. Sherwood was a Broadway playwright. None of them had any
real trouble figuring out what the commercial filmmakers were up to. Edmund
Wilson didn't just praise Chaplin at the level due to him, but dispraised
Hollywood "gag writers" at the level due to them: he didn't, that is, dismiss
them out of hand, but pointed out, correctly, that their chief concern was
necessarily with storytelling structures that worked cinematically, and that
there might be limitations involved in doing that. There were and there still
are.
"Go! Go! Go!" "Five, four, three, two, one!" "Take care of yourself up there/out
there/in there." It doesn't matter how formulaic the words sound, because at
those moments the movies are essentially still silent. The writing all goes into
deciding who falls backward through the window, has his head ripped off by the
alien, bares his bottom amusingly to get his shots from the pretty nurse, or
pouts tensely when the sonar says "Ping!"
Mencken fancied himself above it all, but he had a penetrating understanding of
star power. Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His
prose was bad poetry, like his poetry. ("The craziest, wildest, shivery movie
that has come wriggling across the silversheet of a cinema house," he wrote of
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," his grammar flapping irrepressibly in the
rhetorical wind.) The important consideration here is that everything these
superior minds approved of in the foreign art film they also looked for
diligently in the American industrial product, and were touchingly glad to find
any signs of its flowering.
They were more likely to find those signs, however, if they weren't functioning
as general commentators on the arts or as visiting firemen from ritzier
boroughs, but had a regular job reviewing the product as it came out. Hence the
first critic in the lineup likely to knock the reader sideways is Otis Ferguson,
who started reviewing movies for The New Republic in 1934 and kept it up until
1942, the year before his lamentably early death at the age of 36. Had he lived,
none of the later pantheon aberration might have got a purchase, because he was
perfectly capable of seeing not only that some of the American movies were
terrific, but that even the best of them often took a lot more than a director
to put together. This last bit was the key perception that the pantheon's
attendant incense burners later managed to obscure with wreaths of perfumed
smoke, but before we get to that, let's be sure of just how good Ferguson was.
As a first qualification, Ferguson could see that there was such a thing as a
hierarchy of trash. He enjoyed "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" even where it was
corny, because the corn ("execrable . . . and I like it") was being dished out
with brio. This basic capacity for delight underlay the vigor of his prose when
it came to the hierarchy of quality, which he realized had its starting point in
the same basement as the trash. A Fred Astaire movie was made on the same
bean-counting system as a North-West Frontier epic in which dacoits and
dervishes lurked treacherously on the back lot, and Astaire wasn't even a star
presence compared with a Bengal lancer like Gary Cooper. "As an actor he is too
much of a dancer, tending toward pantomime; and as a dancer he is occasionally
too ballroomy. But as a man who can create figures, intricate, unpredictable,
constantly varied and yet simple, seemingly effortless . . . he brings the
strange high quality of genius to one of the baser and more common arts."
Decades later, Arlene Croce wrote about Astaire at greater length, and possibly
in greater technical depth, but when she got the snap of his dancing into a
sentence, she was following a line that Ferguson had already laid down. Hear how
he rounds it out: "Fred Astaire, whatever he may do in whatever picture he is
in, has the beat, the swing, the debonair and darn-your-eyes violence of rhythm,
all the gay contradiction and irresponsibility, of the best thing this country
can contribute to musical history, which is the best American jazz." Take out
the word "gay" and it could be something written now, although there aren't many
who could write it. Look at the perfect placement of that word "violence," for
example. It's not enough to have the vocabulary. You have to have the sensory
equipment. You have to spot the way Astaire, in the full flight of a light-foot
routine, could slap the sole of his shoe into the floor as if he were rubbing
out a bunch of dust mites.
FERGUSON'S sensitivity to the standard output made him more adventurous, not
less, when it came to the indisputable works of art. Sometimes it made him
adventurous enough to dispute them. He wasn't taken in by the original or the
re-edit of Eisenstein's movie about Mexico, which he could see was an
incorrigible heap of random footage that would have continued to go nowhere
indefinitely if it hadn't been forcibly removed from the master's control. "A
way to be a film critic for years was to holler about this rape of great art,
though it should have taken no more critical equipment than common sense to see
that whatever was cut out, its clumping repetitions and lack of film motion
could not have been cut in."
With a good notion of how hard it is to make ordinary film narrative
unnoticeably subtle ("story, story, story - or, How can we do it to them so they
don't know beforehand that it's being done?"), Ferguson was properly suspicious
of any claims that "Citizen Kane" represented an advance in technique. He
admired it, but not as a breakthrough: "In the line of the narrative film, as
developed in all countries but most highly on the West Coast of America, it
holds no great place." A harsh judgment, but Ferguson had put in the groundwork
to back it up, and Welles, after the first flush of his apotheosis, might have
reached the same conclusion: "The Magnificent Ambersons," even in its unfinished
state, is a clear and admirable attempt by the boy genius to get a grip on the
technical heritage he had thought to supersede.
One could go on quoting from Ferguson, and expatiating on the quotations, until
hell looked like the set of "Ice Station Zebra": there is a book buried in every
essay. But the same is true of every good critic. The poet Melvin B. Tolson, who
wrote about movies for the African-American newspaper The Washington Tribune,
saw "Gone With the Wind" when it came out and reviewed it in terms that could
have been expanded into a handbook for the civil rights movement 20 years before
the event. One look at the relevant piece will tell you why a critic has to know
about the world as well as the movies: Tolson could see that "GWTW" was well
made. But he could also see that the script was a crass and callous rewriting of
history, a Klan pamphlet in sugared form, a racial insult.
If, then, the selection from James Agee shines out of these pages a bit less
than you might expect, it isn't because he's lost his luster; it's because
there's so much light from those around him. And Agee, as well as possessing the
comprehensive intelligence that the critical heritage had already made a
requirement, also possessed an extra quality that we later on, and perhaps
dangerously, came to expect from everybody: he had the wit. At the time, it was
a first when he wrote this punch line to his review of Billy Wilder's sodden
saga about dipsomania, "The Lost Weekend": "I undershtand that liquor interesh:
innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough." Today,
you can easily imagine Anthony Lane of The New Yorker doing that. (Lane, being
British, isn't in the book, which is a bit like not letting Tiger Woods play at
St. Andrews. And Peter Bogdanovich - surely a key figure, and not just as an
archivist, in the appreciation of American movies - is another conspicuous
absentee. But it's a sign of a good anthology when you start bitching about Who
Isn't in It - not a bad title for a book by Bogdanovich, come to think of it.)
And Stanley Kauffmann isn't in it enough. A film critic still in action after
more than half a century (most of that time spent at The New Republic), he was
the one who took Ferguson's approach, the only approach that really matters, and
developed it to its full potential. He knew a lot about every department of the
business, but especially acting. He was kind but firm about Marilyn Monroe in
"The Misfits": "Her hysterical scene near the end will seem virtuoso acting to
those who are overwhelmed by the fact that she has been induced to shout." He
could see what was wonderful about Antonioni's "L'Avventura." So could I, at the
time; but later, after suffering through "Blowup" and "Zabriskie Point," I
started to forget what had once thrilled me. Here is the reminder: "Obviously it
is not real time or we would all have to bring along sandwiches and blankets;
but a difference of 10 seconds in a scene is a tremendous step toward veristic
reproduction rather than theatrical abstraction." (And, he forgot to add, it
gives you 10 more seconds to look at a veristic close-up of Monica Vitti, who
did to us in those days what Monica Bellucci is doing to a new generation of
horny male intellectuals right now.)
Kauffmann had an acute sensitivity to the story behind the technique. It meant
that he didn't fail to spot real quality, and it also meant that he was rarely
fooled by empty virtuosity. His classic review of Max Ophuls's supposed
masterpiece, "Lola Montes," a review mercifully included here as the finale to
his oddly meager selection, tells you in advance everything that would be wrong
about the auteur theory. Kauffmann could see that "Lola Montes" was indeed the
supreme example of Ophuls's characteristic style of the traveling shot that went
on forever. But Kauffmann could also see that even if the title role of the
bewitching courtesan had been incarnated by a bewitching actress - and Martine
Carol, through no fault of her own, was no more bewitching than a bus driver in
Communist Kiev - the movie would still have been ruined by its dumb happy-hooker
script. In other words, no story.
In Hollywood, for a true masterpiece like "Letter From an Unknown Woman," Ophuls
had had the writers, the actors and the right kind of head office breathing down
his neck. On "Lola Montes" he was out on his own. The auteur theory depended on
the idea that any pantheon director had an artistic personality so strong that
it was bound to express itself whatever the compromising circumstances. But all
too often, the compromising circumstances helped to make the movie good. That,
however, was a tale too complicated to tell for those commentators who wanted to
get into business as deep thinkers.
The likelihood that to think deep meant to think less didn't strike any of them
until their critical mass movement had worn itself out. Some useful work was
done - movies by a cigar-chomping, hard-swearing maverick like Samuel Fuller
were resurrected long enough for us all to find out why they had been forgotten
- but the absurdities were all too obvious. John Ford's late clunker "7 Women"
was praised because it was "Fordian." The adjective they should have been
looking for was "unwatchable." Howard Hawks's "Hatari!," in which the same old
Hawks plot about John Wayne and the drunken friend and the no-bull broad and the
young hotshot and the cackling old-timer was eked out with footage of rhinos and
buffaloes, turned out to be quintessentially "Hawksian." And so it went, but it
couldn't go on for long, because unless the undiscovered Fordian-Hawksian
masterpiece was actually any good, it never got any further than the film
societies. As for the articles and the anthologies and the monographs, they
never could outweigh the aggregate of ad hoc judgments coming from individual
critics. Those judgments might have been right or wrong, but they were seldom
crazy, unless the critic had a theory of his or her own.
Some did. Robert Warshow, yet another cultural commentator who died young, wrote
a famous long article (which Lopate all too dutifully includes) called "The
Gangster as Tragic Hero." Citing but not evoking scores of movies to prove that
the American gangster is doomed by the pressures of a society that worships
success, it says little in a long space, thereby reversing the desirable
relationship of form and content, which, as we have seen, had already been
established by critics with fewer pretensions to a sociological overview.
The same could be said, and said twice, for Parker Tyler's equally celebrated
long article purporting to show that "Double Indemnity" was always
psychologically much more complex than was ever thought possible by those who
made it or us who watched. You might have deduced that the claims adjuster Keyes
(Edward G. Robinson) was secretly hot for the insurance salesman Neff (Fred
MacMurray), but could you ever have guessed that Neff was driven to crime
because he had failed sexually with Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck)? And there we all
were thinking he'd succeeded. But stay! For Tyler has some wordplay yet to
deploy. "Neff, let us assume, wants permanent insurance against Keyes's subtle
inquisition into the ostensible claims of his sexual life." Oh, come on, let's
not assume it.
But we don't have to fight for justice very hard, because the fight has already
been won by the sanity brigade. Vincent Canby could have won it by himself.
There might have been even more here from such informed yet readable solo acts -
David Denby, Kenneth Turan, David Thomson and A. O. Scott are only a few of the
many recent exponents on the bill - if the worthy bores had not been given their
democratic chance, but hey, that's America. Nevertheless, Lopate would have done
better to stick to the principle that brevity, up to the point where compression
collapses, invariably carries more implication than expansiveness ever can. But
he might not have recognized the principle, even while dealing with the best of
its consequences. There have been plenty of editors who didn't get it. The
legendary William Shawn of The New Yorker never grasped that he was giving
Pauline Kael too much room for her own good.
Although Kael knew comparatively little about how movies got made, she was
unbeatable at taking off from what she had seen. But beyond that, she would take
off from what she had written, and there was a new theory every two weeks. A lot
of her theories had to do with loves and hates. She thought Robert Altman was a
genius. He can certainly make a movie, but if it hasn't got a script, then he
makes "Prêt-à-Porter." That's one of the most salutary lessons of this book:
what makes the movie isn't just who directed it, or who's in it, it's how it
relates to the real world.
That principle really starts to matter when it comes to movies that profess to
understand history, and thus to affect the future. Several quite good critics in
various parts of the world knew there was something seriously wrong with Steven
Spielberg's "Munich," but they didn't know how to take it down. If they could
have put the lessons of this book together, they would have found out how.
"Munich" might have survived being directed by someone who knows about nothing
except movies. But it was also written by people who don't know half enough
about politics. That was why the crucial meeting of Golda Meir's cabinet went
for nothing. The movie could have got by with its John Woo-style gunfight
face-offs, but without an articulate laying out of the arguments it was a waste
of effort.
Similarly, if you know too much about the movies but not enough about the world,
you won't be able to see that "Downfall" is dangerously sentimental. Realistic
in every observable detail, it is nevertheless a fantasy to the roots, because
the pretty girl who plays the secretary looks shocked when Hitler inveighs
against the Jews. It comes as a surprise to her.
Well, it couldn't have; but to know why that is so, you have to have read a few
books. No matter how many movies you have seen, they won't give you the truth of
the matter, because it can't be shown as action. To know what can't be shown by
the gag writers, however, you have to know about a world beyond the movies. But
the best critics do, as this book proves; because when we say that the
nontheorists are the better writers, that's what we mean. That extra edge that a
good writer has is a knowledge of the world, transmuted into a style.
Clive James's most recent book is "As of This Writing: The Essential Essays,
1968-2002."
NY TIMES
June 4, 2006
'American Movie Critics'
How to Write About Film
Review by CLIVE JAMES
SINCE all of us are deeply learned experts on the movies even when we don't know
much about anything else, people wishing to make their mark as movie critics
must either be able to express opinions like ours better than we can, or else
they must be in charge of a big idea, preferably one that can be dignified by
being called a theory. In "American Movie Critics," a Library of America
collection drawn from the work of almost 70 high-profile professional critics
active at various times since their preferred medium was invented the day before
yesterday - the whole history of narrative movies for exhibition still fits
inside a mere hundred years - most of the practitioners fall neatly into one
category or the other.
It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already
knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of
frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel,
Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is
much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction
movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that
history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal
schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.
The editor, Phillip Lopate, an essayist and film critic, has a catholic scope,
and might not agree that the nontheorists clearly win out. They do, though, and
one of the subsidiary functions that this hefty compilation might perform -
subsidiary, that is, to its being sheerly entertaining on a high level - is to
help settle a nagging question. In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory
give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it
could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way
of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes
its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being
available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.
For as long as the sonar-riddled soundtrack of "The Hunt for Red October" has me
mouthing the word "ping" while I keep reaching for the popcorn, I don't want to
hear that what I'm seeing is an example of anything, or a step to anywhere, or a
characteristic statement by anyone. What I'm seeing is a whole thing on its own.
The real question is why none of it saps my willingness to be involved, not even
Sean Connery's shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a
Shoviet shubmarine, not even that spliced-in footage of the same old Grumman F9F
Panther that has been crashing into the aircraft carrier's deck since the Korean
War.
On the other hand, no prodigies of acting by Tom Cruise in "Eyes Wide Shut,"
climaxed by his partial success in acting himself tall, convinced me for a
minute that Stanley Kubrick, when he made his bravely investigative capital work
about the human sexual imagination, had the slightest clue what he was doing. In
my nonhumble ticket purchaser's opinion, the great Stanley K., as Terry Southern
called him, was, when he made "Eyes Wide Shut," finally and irretrievably out to
lunch. Does this discrepancy of reaction on my part mean that the frivolous
movie was serious, and the serious movie frivolous? Only, you might say, if
first impressions are everything.
But in the movies they are. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there
are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have
stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an
unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the
impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right. By and large, it's the
movie itself that tells you it means business. It does that by telling a story.
No story, no movie. Robert Bresson only did with increasing slowness what other
directors had done in a hurry. But when Bresson, somewhere in the vicinity of
Camelot, reached the point where almost nothing happening became nothing
happening at all, you were gone. A movie has to glue you to your seat even when
it's pretending not to.
As the chronological arrangement of this volume reveals, there were good
American critics who realized this fact very early on. Several of the post-World
War I critics will come as revelations to anybody who assumed, as many of us
have long been led to assume, that America was slow to discover the fruitfulness
of its own cinema. The usual history runs roughly thus: Even in the
Hollywood-haunted America of the years between the wars, the best critics
concentrated on the work of obviously major artists, most of them foreign. Then,
after World War II, when victory in Europe could well have led the liberated
nations to sneer in resentment at the triumph of American might, generous young
French critics armed with the auteur theory discovered that a cluster, or
pantheon, of directors within the Hollywood system had always been major artists
too: Nicholas Ray was up there with Carl Dreyer, and so on. After that, American
film criticism grew up to match European maturity.
It took a theory to work the switch, and the essence of the auteur theory was
that the director, the controlling hand, shaped the movie with his artistic
personality even if it was made within a commercial system as businesslike as
Hollywood's. This fact having at last been discovered, film criticism in America
came of age. It's a neat progression, but this book, simply by its layout, shows
it to be bogus.
Among the early critical big names, some were big names in other fields. Vachel
Lindsay and Carl Sandburg were bardic poets, Edmund Wilson was a high-flying man
of letters, H. L. Mencken was the perennial star reporter-cum-philologist of the
American language, Gilbert Seldes wrote about all of what he christened "the
lively arts," Robert E. Sherwood was a Broadway playwright. None of them had any
real trouble figuring out what the commercial filmmakers were up to. Edmund
Wilson didn't just praise Chaplin at the level due to him, but dispraised
Hollywood "gag writers" at the level due to them: he didn't, that is, dismiss
them out of hand, but pointed out, correctly, that their chief concern was
necessarily with storytelling structures that worked cinematically, and that
there might be limitations involved in doing that. There were and there still
are.
"Go! Go! Go!" "Five, four, three, two, one!" "Take care of yourself up there/out
there/in there." It doesn't matter how formulaic the words sound, because at
those moments the movies are essentially still silent. The writing all goes into
deciding who falls backward through the window, has his head ripped off by the
alien, bares his bottom amusingly to get his shots from the pretty nurse, or
pouts tensely when the sonar says "Ping!"
Mencken fancied himself above it all, but he had a penetrating understanding of
star power. Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His
prose was bad poetry, like his poetry. ("The craziest, wildest, shivery movie
that has come wriggling across the silversheet of a cinema house," he wrote of
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," his grammar flapping irrepressibly in the
rhetorical wind.) The important consideration here is that everything these
superior minds approved of in the foreign art film they also looked for
diligently in the American industrial product, and were touchingly glad to find
any signs of its flowering.
They were more likely to find those signs, however, if they weren't functioning
as general commentators on the arts or as visiting firemen from ritzier
boroughs, but had a regular job reviewing the product as it came out. Hence the
first critic in the lineup likely to knock the reader sideways is Otis Ferguson,
who started reviewing movies for The New Republic in 1934 and kept it up until
1942, the year before his lamentably early death at the age of 36. Had he lived,
none of the later pantheon aberration might have got a purchase, because he was
perfectly capable of seeing not only that some of the American movies were
terrific, but that even the best of them often took a lot more than a director
to put together. This last bit was the key perception that the pantheon's
attendant incense burners later managed to obscure with wreaths of perfumed
smoke, but before we get to that, let's be sure of just how good Ferguson was.
As a first qualification, Ferguson could see that there was such a thing as a
hierarchy of trash. He enjoyed "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" even where it was
corny, because the corn ("execrable . . . and I like it") was being dished out
with brio. This basic capacity for delight underlay the vigor of his prose when
it came to the hierarchy of quality, which he realized had its starting point in
the same basement as the trash. A Fred Astaire movie was made on the same
bean-counting system as a North-West Frontier epic in which dacoits and
dervishes lurked treacherously on the back lot, and Astaire wasn't even a star
presence compared with a Bengal lancer like Gary Cooper. "As an actor he is too
much of a dancer, tending toward pantomime; and as a dancer he is occasionally
too ballroomy. But as a man who can create figures, intricate, unpredictable,
constantly varied and yet simple, seemingly effortless . . . he brings the
strange high quality of genius to one of the baser and more common arts."
Decades later, Arlene Croce wrote about Astaire at greater length, and possibly
in greater technical depth, but when she got the snap of his dancing into a
sentence, she was following a line that Ferguson had already laid down. Hear how
he rounds it out: "Fred Astaire, whatever he may do in whatever picture he is
in, has the beat, the swing, the debonair and darn-your-eyes violence of rhythm,
all the gay contradiction and irresponsibility, of the best thing this country
can contribute to musical history, which is the best American jazz." Take out
the word "gay" and it could be something written now, although there aren't many
who could write it. Look at the perfect placement of that word "violence," for
example. It's not enough to have the vocabulary. You have to have the sensory
equipment. You have to spot the way Astaire, in the full flight of a light-foot
routine, could slap the sole of his shoe into the floor as if he were rubbing
out a bunch of dust mites.
FERGUSON'S sensitivity to the standard output made him more adventurous, not
less, when it came to the indisputable works of art. Sometimes it made him
adventurous enough to dispute them. He wasn't taken in by the original or the
re-edit of Eisenstein's movie about Mexico, which he could see was an
incorrigible heap of random footage that would have continued to go nowhere
indefinitely if it hadn't been forcibly removed from the master's control. "A
way to be a film critic for years was to holler about this rape of great art,
though it should have taken no more critical equipment than common sense to see
that whatever was cut out, its clumping repetitions and lack of film motion
could not have been cut in."
With a good notion of how hard it is to make ordinary film narrative
unnoticeably subtle ("story, story, story - or, How can we do it to them so they
don't know beforehand that it's being done?"), Ferguson was properly suspicious
of any claims that "Citizen Kane" represented an advance in technique. He
admired it, but not as a breakthrough: "In the line of the narrative film, as
developed in all countries but most highly on the West Coast of America, it
holds no great place." A harsh judgment, but Ferguson had put in the groundwork
to back it up, and Welles, after the first flush of his apotheosis, might have
reached the same conclusion: "The Magnificent Ambersons," even in its unfinished
state, is a clear and admirable attempt by the boy genius to get a grip on the
technical heritage he had thought to supersede.
One could go on quoting from Ferguson, and expatiating on the quotations, until
hell looked like the set of "Ice Station Zebra": there is a book buried in every
essay. But the same is true of every good critic. The poet Melvin B. Tolson, who
wrote about movies for the African-American newspaper The Washington Tribune,
saw "Gone With the Wind" when it came out and reviewed it in terms that could
have been expanded into a handbook for the civil rights movement 20 years before
the event. One look at the relevant piece will tell you why a critic has to know
about the world as well as the movies: Tolson could see that "GWTW" was well
made. But he could also see that the script was a crass and callous rewriting of
history, a Klan pamphlet in sugared form, a racial insult.
If, then, the selection from James Agee shines out of these pages a bit less
than you might expect, it isn't because he's lost his luster; it's because
there's so much light from those around him. And Agee, as well as possessing the
comprehensive intelligence that the critical heritage had already made a
requirement, also possessed an extra quality that we later on, and perhaps
dangerously, came to expect from everybody: he had the wit. At the time, it was
a first when he wrote this punch line to his review of Billy Wilder's sodden
saga about dipsomania, "The Lost Weekend": "I undershtand that liquor interesh:
innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough." Today,
you can easily imagine Anthony Lane of The New Yorker doing that. (Lane, being
British, isn't in the book, which is a bit like not letting Tiger Woods play at
St. Andrews. And Peter Bogdanovich - surely a key figure, and not just as an
archivist, in the appreciation of American movies - is another conspicuous
absentee. But it's a sign of a good anthology when you start bitching about Who
Isn't in It - not a bad title for a book by Bogdanovich, come to think of it.)
And Stanley Kauffmann isn't in it enough. A film critic still in action after
more than half a century (most of that time spent at The New Republic), he was
the one who took Ferguson's approach, the only approach that really matters, and
developed it to its full potential. He knew a lot about every department of the
business, but especially acting. He was kind but firm about Marilyn Monroe in
"The Misfits": "Her hysterical scene near the end will seem virtuoso acting to
those who are overwhelmed by the fact that she has been induced to shout." He
could see what was wonderful about Antonioni's "L'Avventura." So could I, at the
time; but later, after suffering through "Blowup" and "Zabriskie Point," I
started to forget what had once thrilled me. Here is the reminder: "Obviously it
is not real time or we would all have to bring along sandwiches and blankets;
but a difference of 10 seconds in a scene is a tremendous step toward veristic
reproduction rather than theatrical abstraction." (And, he forgot to add, it
gives you 10 more seconds to look at a veristic close-up of Monica Vitti, who
did to us in those days what Monica Bellucci is doing to a new generation of
horny male intellectuals right now.)
Kauffmann had an acute sensitivity to the story behind the technique. It meant
that he didn't fail to spot real quality, and it also meant that he was rarely
fooled by empty virtuosity. His classic review of Max Ophuls's supposed
masterpiece, "Lola Montes," a review mercifully included here as the finale to
his oddly meager selection, tells you in advance everything that would be wrong
about the auteur theory. Kauffmann could see that "Lola Montes" was indeed the
supreme example of Ophuls's characteristic style of the traveling shot that went
on forever. But Kauffmann could also see that even if the title role of the
bewitching courtesan had been incarnated by a bewitching actress - and Martine
Carol, through no fault of her own, was no more bewitching than a bus driver in
Communist Kiev - the movie would still have been ruined by its dumb happy-hooker
script. In other words, no story.
In Hollywood, for a true masterpiece like "Letter From an Unknown Woman," Ophuls
had had the writers, the actors and the right kind of head office breathing down
his neck. On "Lola Montes" he was out on his own. The auteur theory depended on
the idea that any pantheon director had an artistic personality so strong that
it was bound to express itself whatever the compromising circumstances. But all
too often, the compromising circumstances helped to make the movie good. That,
however, was a tale too complicated to tell for those commentators who wanted to
get into business as deep thinkers.
The likelihood that to think deep meant to think less didn't strike any of them
until their critical mass movement had worn itself out. Some useful work was
done - movies by a cigar-chomping, hard-swearing maverick like Samuel Fuller
were resurrected long enough for us all to find out why they had been forgotten
- but the absurdities were all too obvious. John Ford's late clunker "7 Women"
was praised because it was "Fordian." The adjective they should have been
looking for was "unwatchable." Howard Hawks's "Hatari!," in which the same old
Hawks plot about John Wayne and the drunken friend and the no-bull broad and the
young hotshot and the cackling old-timer was eked out with footage of rhinos and
buffaloes, turned out to be quintessentially "Hawksian." And so it went, but it
couldn't go on for long, because unless the undiscovered Fordian-Hawksian
masterpiece was actually any good, it never got any further than the film
societies. As for the articles and the anthologies and the monographs, they
never could outweigh the aggregate of ad hoc judgments coming from individual
critics. Those judgments might have been right or wrong, but they were seldom
crazy, unless the critic had a theory of his or her own.
Some did. Robert Warshow, yet another cultural commentator who died young, wrote
a famous long article (which Lopate all too dutifully includes) called "The
Gangster as Tragic Hero." Citing but not evoking scores of movies to prove that
the American gangster is doomed by the pressures of a society that worships
success, it says little in a long space, thereby reversing the desirable
relationship of form and content, which, as we have seen, had already been
established by critics with fewer pretensions to a sociological overview.
The same could be said, and said twice, for Parker Tyler's equally celebrated
long article purporting to show that "Double Indemnity" was always
psychologically much more complex than was ever thought possible by those who
made it or us who watched. You might have deduced that the claims adjuster Keyes
(Edward G. Robinson) was secretly hot for the insurance salesman Neff (Fred
MacMurray), but could you ever have guessed that Neff was driven to crime
because he had failed sexually with Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck)? And there we all
were thinking he'd succeeded. But stay! For Tyler has some wordplay yet to
deploy. "Neff, let us assume, wants permanent insurance against Keyes's subtle
inquisition into the ostensible claims of his sexual life." Oh, come on, let's
not assume it.
But we don't have to fight for justice very hard, because the fight has already
been won by the sanity brigade. Vincent Canby could have won it by himself.
There might have been even more here from such informed yet readable solo acts -
David Denby, Kenneth Turan, David Thomson and A. O. Scott are only a few of the
many recent exponents on the bill - if the worthy bores had not been given their
democratic chance, but hey, that's America. Nevertheless, Lopate would have done
better to stick to the principle that brevity, up to the point where compression
collapses, invariably carries more implication than expansiveness ever can. But
he might not have recognized the principle, even while dealing with the best of
its consequences. There have been plenty of editors who didn't get it. The
legendary William Shawn of The New Yorker never grasped that he was giving
Pauline Kael too much room for her own good.
Although Kael knew comparatively little about how movies got made, she was
unbeatable at taking off from what she had seen. But beyond that, she would take
off from what she had written, and there was a new theory every two weeks. A lot
of her theories had to do with loves and hates. She thought Robert Altman was a
genius. He can certainly make a movie, but if it hasn't got a script, then he
makes "Prêt-à-Porter." That's one of the most salutary lessons of this book:
what makes the movie isn't just who directed it, or who's in it, it's how it
relates to the real world.
That principle really starts to matter when it comes to movies that profess to
understand history, and thus to affect the future. Several quite good critics in
various parts of the world knew there was something seriously wrong with Steven
Spielberg's "Munich," but they didn't know how to take it down. If they could
have put the lessons of this book together, they would have found out how.
"Munich" might have survived being directed by someone who knows about nothing
except movies. But it was also written by people who don't know half enough
about politics. That was why the crucial meeting of Golda Meir's cabinet went
for nothing. The movie could have got by with its John Woo-style gunfight
face-offs, but without an articulate laying out of the arguments it was a waste
of effort.
Similarly, if you know too much about the movies but not enough about the world,
you won't be able to see that "Downfall" is dangerously sentimental. Realistic
in every observable detail, it is nevertheless a fantasy to the roots, because
the pretty girl who plays the secretary looks shocked when Hitler inveighs
against the Jews. It comes as a surprise to her.
Well, it couldn't have; but to know why that is so, you have to have read a few
books. No matter how many movies you have seen, they won't give you the truth of
the matter, because it can't be shown as action. To know what can't be shown by
the gag writers, however, you have to know about a world beyond the movies. But
the best critics do, as this book proves; because when we say that the
nontheorists are the better writers, that's what we mean. That extra edge that a
good writer has is a knowledge of the world, transmuted into a style.
Clive James's most recent book is "As of This Writing: The Essential Essays,
1968-2002."
