Knightfall of the Movies? A Rejoinder to a Critic’s Auto-Obituary

It is a sad day when a hero dies--and Arthur Knight’s auto-obituary (“Teacher/Critic Looks Back on 40 Years in the Movies,” March 13) brought a tear to my eye. I remember Arthur in the full bloom of his love affair with the movies--when, as an 11-year-old movie fan (was it really 27 years ago?), I plunked down 50 cents for a paperback edition of his book, “The Liveliest Art.” His words brought the thrill and magic and artistry of the movies to an inquiring mind--and fired a desire to devote my life’s energies to the celluloid muse.

Today, Arthur Knight looks at the movies and sees only the worst where once we saw only the best--and because of who he is, it is quite possible that he could influence some to give up on the liveliest art, just as once he inspired many to take a closer look. If so, he will betray the art he once held so dear--and he will find that he has betrayed himself as well.

While “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Innerspace,” “Jaws: The Revenge” and “Superman IV” do not represent the peak of cinematic achievement (and undoubtedly there are those who would even champion some of these), they are hardly representative of everything the cinema has to offer to the audience today. “Moonstruck,” “The Last Emperor,” “Hope and Glory” and “Stand and Deliver” can be offered to demonstrate that, in many ways, the movies are better than ever (though I’m equally certain that each of these films might have its detractors).

It is true that Hollywood used to turn out many more films each year, and this probably made for better movies--after all, the more you make, the more opportunities you have to make it right. But over the last few years (bolstered by videocassettes and cable TV) feature production has been up, and that increase in production has brought with it often untold riches. Indeed, time may turn many of what we may regard as mere program pictures into enduring classics--”Five Corners,” “Cutter’s Way,” “Something Wild,” “After Hours,” “About Last Night” and “The Wanderers” come immediately to mind.

As for literary input, one need only turn to the stage section of the very Calendar issue of Arthur Knight’s lament to see that Hollywood has not turned its back on the best and the brightest among our writers. It would be pointless here to speculate on the relative screenwriting talents of William Faulkner and Robert Benchley vs. David Mamet and Beth Henley et al., but the irony that these two articles should appear between the same covers could not be lost on even the most casual reader.

The studio system of another day had many virtues--perhaps the chief one being that every production had call on the vast facilities of these cinematic Camelots and the film makers did not have to reinvent the wheel with each new project that came before the cameras. In this atmosphere, film makers and craftsmen were able to work regularly at making movies. Often today it does seem that the only regular employees of the studios are the lawyers and accountants and marketing specialists--people who would be standing in line collecting their $166 a week if it weren’t for those who actually made the product that they buy and sell.

Still, it would be a mistake to think that Hollywood was substantially different in the good old days. Stars could turn down projects (George Raft was among the first choices for the Bogart role in “Casablanca”), directors could be fired (George Cukor was bumped from “Gone With the Wind”), pictures could be savaged by studio-directed recuts (“All Quiet on the Western Front” and the 1954 “A Star Is Born,” just to name two) and marketing reports were often responsible for a contract not being renewed. (Katharine Hepburn was considered to be box-office poison in 1938--the year of “Holiday” and “Bringing Up Baby.”)

The studio heads were not as autonomous as one would like to believe--Louis B. Mayer answered to Nick Schenck in New York, Darryl F. Zanuck was beholden to Nick’s brother Joe. Even he of the wired fanny, Mr. Harry Cohn himself, was dictated to by the marketing boys in the Big Apple.

It was possible under the studio system for an artist like Ernst Lubitsch to turn out box-office failure after box-office failure and still continue making pictures simply because Hollywood liked him and his work, but in recent years Robert Altman has demonstrated that it is still possible to be prolific in the face of repeated commercial disaster--again because he and his work have their champions.

The virtue of the Hollywood film of old was that it worked on many levels--not unlike, say, “Fatal Attraction” today. Thrills, romance, action, a touch of psychology, some humor and a willingness to deal (at least on a superficial level) with the issues of the day. One could argue that “Fatal Attraction” lacks some of the refined wit of, say, “Laura,” but it should be pointed out that during many of the years that Arthur Knight was introducing his students to Griffith and Eisenstein and Murnau, he was also pandering to the lowest of cinematic instincts with his annual surveys of “Sex in the Cinema” for Playboy. Is it possible that Knight’s influence has been more pervasive than even he can imagine?

In fact, what Knight (unknowingly) reveals in his observations from exile is that he does not understand the cinema as an art form at all. He has fallen victim to the 30-year syndrome--the same disease that fuels the current nostalgia for the 1950s with ersatz diners and large crowds for revivals of “Howdy Doody.”

One of the great gifts of film is that it can capture “pieces of time” and carry us back to the world of our youth--whether through documentary or artistic reminiscence. In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, there was a fascination with the Gay ‘90s and the teens (“The Bowery,” “She Done Him Wrong,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”).

In the 1940s and ‘50s, it was the Roaring ‘20s (“Margie,” “Singin’ in the Rain” and TV’s “Untouchables”). At the present time it’s the ‘50s and ‘60s that occupy the national consciousness.

This is a natural phenomenon, but it is only the most obvious and least important of the movies’ powers.

As an art, the movies have begat greater and lesser works throughout their history. It is a cultural crime to ignore the works of the past or to remember only those of our own experience, but it is equally shortsighted to give up on the present and the future when, with each dimming of the lights, a new masterpiece may (just may) suddenly flicker on the screen--and those goose bumps come over you, and the images stay with you, and you know why you love sitting there in the dark with your very own window to the soul. That is what the movies are all about.

”. . . The capacity to change, to grow is the very essence of every living art--and especially the movies, the liveliest of all the arts,” wrote Arthur Knight just over 30 years ago when he was less jaded.

Today, as he cries “Crocodile Dundee” tears in his Foster’s, that Arthur Knight is dead--more’s the pity. Let us remember Arthur Knight, champion of “The Liveliest Art,” and long may his spirit live.