Entertainment’s Critics Get a Thumbs-Down : Media: Movie reviewer Gene Siskel says politicians are wrong to blame Hollywood for problems in American society.

One of America’s most popular movie critics used a luncheon address Monday at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art to criticize politicians who accuse the entertainment industry of glorifying violence.

Gene Siskel, half of television’s “Siskel & Ebert” review team and film critic for the Chicago Tribune, said he thinks filmmakers, record producers and others in show business should always “be responsible for the products that they sell,” but it is disingenuous to blame them for the sins of society.

“When it diverts the national agenda from the real problems,” Siskel said, “when the same person is saying ‘Cancel the violent movies but let’s make sure we have plenty of assault weapons’--that’s sinful, isn’t it?”

Siskel’s appearance before about 300 clients of the American Maize-Products Co. of Hammond, Ind., who are attending a convention in Anaheim, had been scheduled months before Senate Majority Leader and presidential candidate Bob Dole (R-Kan.) delivered a major speech in Los Angeles accusing the film and music industries of churning out “nightmares of depravity” and of “mainstreaming deviancy.”

Siskel said he assumes that Dole, former Secretary of Education and national drug czar William J. Bennett and others attacking the industries “are well-meaning. They have children; they want them to be raised well. I have three myself. I supervise what my children see as best I can. If I don’t, it’s my fault.”

“This notion that you’re going to solve the world’s problems by focusing the national agenda on movies and music--and one specific kind of music, gangsta rap as opposed to white heavy metal--well. . . . We’ve got these problems we’re having a difficult time solving, so let’s solve them in the movie theater?”

Siskel acknowledged that “there are plenty of things wrong with American movies. No one on Planet Earth has knocked American movies more than me--52 weeks a year, 26 years. . . . Most of the films I see are not good. . . . I have never defended rotten stuff. I tell you it’s rotten before anybody else tells you it’s rotten. I wish the movies were better--more than you. You go to one movie a month, I go to six a week. . . . I’m not new to this, like some of the politicians.

“So if I differ with them, you cannot label me [as] one of these Hollywood liberals, or [as one who] makes his money off of movies.”

He questioned the credentials of those calling for artistic reforms. “One of the people leading the charge for better values in movies served as the secretary of education and as national drug czar--and the schools are worse than ever, the drug problem is worse than ever. Now he’s focusing on the movies.”

Dole, Siskel said, “said he did not see any of the pictures that he had commented on. I can’t afford to do that.”

Siskel said that “there are good movies with violence and bad movies with violence” and asserted that the better ones might do more good than harm.

When someone in the audience asked him to name his favorite movie, he answered “Taxi Driver,” a Martin Scorsese film about a psychopath named Travis Bickel. “It’s funny,” he said, “because this is one of the pictures they might have wanted to shut down.

“ ‘Taxi Driver’ is a serious film,” he said, “about faceless men. I’ll always remember a phrase from that movie: ‘Loneliness follows me all the days of my life.’ It’s brutal and hard to watch, but this is not the kind of film to try and shut down. I don’t know if it’s the movies that made Travis Bickel the way he was.”