Teacher / Critic Looks Back on 40 Years in the Movies

There comes a time in every man’s life, I imagine, when he stops, looks around and asks, “What in the world am I doing here? What have I contributed?”

A film critic and film teacher for almost 40 years, I have spent the last two of them in Australia, removed from the Hollywood scene. It makes that kind of spiritual stock-taking a great deal easier--and also a great deal more painful.

What, after all, does a critic hope to achieve? George Bernard Shaw once wrote that an audience receives the art it deserves. Accepting that, I have been writing to make audiences more informed and perceptive about film, to serve--hopefully--as a bridge between the creative film maker and an audience that presumably wants something better.

And yet, judging by current box-office grosses, public taste has never been lower. Although there always are the few exceptions of quality, we’re generally left with the impression that Sylvester Stallone can do no wrong.

Unfortunately, film has become such a costly commodity that it takes a unique combination of circumstances for such off-beat items as “Amadeus,” “The China Syndrome,” “Ordinary People” “Platoon” or “Terms of Endearment” ever to see the light of a projector. “Play it safe” is the first law of production.

As King Vidor observed toward the end of his long and estimable career: “The only barrier between the public and the film maker lies in the mind of the latter. When the makers of films are as unafraid of good films as the latter, we shall really have a renaissance.” This would ceem to be even more valid today than when he said it, almost 25 years ago.

For me, I’m afraid, the bloom is off the peach. For years, I would set out for the preview rooms in a glow of anticipation. A really great movie, like “Citizen Kane” or Fellini’s “La Strada,” would leave me speechless for hours. Even a-run-of-DeMille production could have its felicitous moments in terms of direction, performance or sheer technical artistry. I once wrote that I found a bad movie infinitely more watchable than a bad play, simply because there was so much more going on.

Not any more, unless you get your kicks from noting which camera set-ups in current movies were inspired by directors such as Hawks, Hitchcock or Welles. There came a time, probably as little as five years ago, when I began to avoid certain movies, sending out junior members of the Hollywood Reporter’s staff to cover the latest rock-video derivative, teen-age sex comedy, space saga or gore-and-grue horror show. Gradually, I came to realize that this discrimination left precious few films from which to choose.

While I frankly admit that I have gotten out of touch with what passes for today’s entertainments, somehow it doesn’t bother me. I feel more like a disappointed lover than a rejected suitor. I would be far more concerned were I to be out there manufacturing enthusiasm for the likes of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Innerspace,” “Jaws: The Revenge” or “Superman IV.” When a movie critic no longer looks forward to going to the movies, it’s time to quit.

As a film teacher, I have small cause for complacency either. Naturally, I derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that my classes have included such high-ranking contemporaries as John Carpenter, Richard Franklin, George Lucas, Randal Kleiser and John Milius. Actually, toward the end of my 25-year tenure at USC, scarcely a week went by without a call from a former student who had either just produced, directed, written, edited or photographed his first feature and would like to present it at one of my Theatrical Film Symposiums. Many were kind enough to add that they had found it to be their most valuable experience at the school because it introduced them to the realities of film making.

Perhaps it did. But in addition to the realities, shouldn’t I perhaps have placed a bit more emphasis on the idealism and greatness of purpose that once animated the film makers? True, we had sessions with Rouben Mamoulian, who spoke eloquently of the artistic potential of the medium; with Jean Renoir, who was almost messianic in his belief that film could change all mankind for the better; with Frank Capra and Lina Wertmuller, each preaching a version of one man, one film; and with such bracing iconoclasts as Richard Brooks and Orson Welles, who nipped enthusiastically at the hand that fed them.

But more often--out of sheer necessity, I suppose--our guests were people who had learned to cope with and live comfortably within the confines of the system, people like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Clint Eastwood and Jerry Lewis. Without necessarily flaunting their success, they undoubtedly opened up vistas of material gain for my starry-eyed students. I remember one of them asking Lewis, “How far should a nice Jewish boy compromise himself to make it in Hollywood?”

“Kid,” Lewis replied, “we’ve got professionals for that sort of thing”--and proceeded to read an extended passage from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” on the evils of compromise.

I suppose what really nagged at me week after week was the realization that these were the same young people to whom, in my history classes, I had introduced D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau and Carl Dreyer, Rene Clair and Orson Welles. And what were they coming back with? Their own version of the Saturday afternoon serials, their own “homage to Hitchcock,” horror movies that were explicit in their violence, or teen-age comedies that were no less explicit in their sex scenes.

If it was hard not to congratulate them on their good fortune, it was harder still not to feel that somehow I had failed.

Unfortunately, I know how difficult it is to get a movie--any movie--off the ground these days, much less to have it emerge reasonably close to its author’s original concept. Time after time, the very premise that sold the script in the first place has been eroded away by executive indecision, by subsequent writing teams brought in to “lick the script,” or by power-happy stars who want to bend it to their own image of themselves. The marvel is not that a few good films manage to get made each year, but that any get made at all.

And my former students, the ones who are making it today, would seem to have learned more about playing the Hollywood game than about films as an art or as a potent social force.

But was it really all that much better decades ago when eight major studios ruled the Hollywood roost, each with its own fearsome mogul in charge of production?

Perhaps we didn’t think so then, with each studio churning out as many as 50 pictures a year. We couldn’t see the wheat for the chaff. Simply because there was that much production, however, the studio chiefs could afford to take the occasional chance.

Besides, as veteran writer-director Richard Brooks is fond of saying of those old studio heads, “They may have been bastards but, by God, they loved movies.”

I remember visiting the third floor of MGM’s Thalberg Building on my first trip to Hollywood back in 1939, and it was like browsing through a shelf laden with Modern Library giants. Robert Benchley, William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, James Hilton, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood--they all were there, and more. They may not have been doing their proudest work, but I’m sure they never got paid better for it. The fact is that time has turned many of what we then regarded as mere program pictures--”Bringing Up Baby,” “Casablanca,” “Gunga Din,” “The Sea Hawk,” “Stagecoach”--into enduring classics.

Long before the cult of the director took hold, the stamp of the studio dominated every frame that came through the cameras. And yet under this system, some of our best directors did most of their finest work.

Also a product of the much-maligned studio system were the stars. The studios had the resources to make them shine their brightest. Tied by long-term contracts, they were carefully groomed, artfully lit, glamorously photographed, skillfully promoted (and just as skillfully protected) by the studios’ vast publicity departments.

One other factor that helps account for the former popularity of the Hollywood film is that, almost without exception, those first heads of production came out of the exhibition side of the business. At some point in their lives, they actually had contact with their audiences and learned what pleased the crowds. The world may not have been wired to Harry Cohn’s rear end, as he liked to believe, but when he wriggled in his chair, he had the acumen to realize that he would not be the only wriggler--and he used his power to make changes accordingly.

Unfortunately, very few of today’s movie executives can claim a similar expertise. Former lawyers, accountants, agents or TV executives, they rarely go to the movies themselves (unless it be for a sneak preview of one of their releases), preferring to view new product in the privacy of their own projection rooms. And because they have no real concept of audience tastes or preferences, they are almost pathetically vulnerable to any bubble-headed notion--and even more likely to leap aboard the bandwagon of a proven success, particularly if it can be buttressed by the hottest new star from TV or the rock scene.

I wish I could end this farewell on a happier note, but even here in Australia commerciality raises its unlovely, uncreative head. For more than a year, I have been working as a kind of production adviser for Hoyts, a large theater chain with its own distribution and production wings.

There is considerable lip service paid here to the concept of making films to project an Australian image, yet there is little local backing--in fact, only four new productions have been scheduled for this coming year (down from about 40 last year). Recently, as part of a marathon four-hour television show celebrating the Australian Bicentennial, Paul Hogan declared, “I didn’t make ‘Crocodile Dundee’ as an Australian comedy. I just wanted to make a comedy--and I happen to be Australian.”

Still, I don’t discount the Australian scene. In fact, I have nothing but admiration for the men and women who, against insuperable odds and on heart-breakingly low budgets, manage to turn out films that are creative, original, humanistic--and entertaining. Occasionally, they are even profitable.

What the American studios seem unable to comprehend is that these are the same qualities that once characterized the Hollywood movie. Today, by and large, the American film industry has become imitative, mechanical and made for the buck--”deal movies.” Bill Cosby’s dud, “Leonard Part 6,” is merely one recent example of what can happen when one of these deals goes sour.

It may yet be too early to mourn the death of originality in Hollywood; but until the kind of creativity that brought greatness to the American film is recognized, revitalized, nurtured and encouraged, I’d just as soon not be there to watch. Not when I can rent my old favorites from the local video marts and relive pleasures past.

So it’s ave atque vale , Hollywood. And I wish you better than you presently deserve.