A Critic Champions Cinema’s Golden Age

According to Richard Schickel, surely one of our most knowledgeable cinema critics, few of today’s film students have even heard of, let alone seen, the great movie classics. Back in the 1950s, when Schickel was a student in Madison, Wis., there was almost no such thing as a college film course. Yet ironically, as he recalls, “almost every week something exciting was opening in the art houses.” Not only cinema buffs, but ordinary intelligent people loved talking about films.

Is something to be inferred from this inverse relation between the growth of film studies and the decline of the art of cinema? Schickel makes no such farfetched claim. But a theme that resounds throughout the 20 essays assembled here is one movie lover’s dismay at what has--and hasn’t--happened in the world of film since the mid-1970s. Schickel is not simply indulging in nostalgia, although he astutely observes that the movies we see between the ages of 10 and 20 “get into our heads in a way that those we encounter later . . . rarely do.” Quite apart from this, he believes that something special went on in filmmaking between the ‘50s and ‘70s that has, unfortunately, passed. It was a time of exciting cross-cultural influences: French New Wave filmmakers like Truffaut, Japan’s Kurosawa, India’s Satyajit Ray, Sweden’s Bergman, Spain’s Bunuel, Italy’s Fellini and British films like “Billy Liar.” American cinema was equally vibrant.

But by the mid-1970s, as Schickel sees it, the American film industry had begun to transform itself into the global monster we’ve come to know all too well. By the 1980s, young males of dating age became the chief consumers. What they chiefly consumed were action films with special effects. It wasn’t long before, as Schickel tartly puts it, “Hollywood noticed that what played so well for brain-damaged American teenagers was also going down very well overseas.” I would quibble only with Schickel’s tacit acceptance of the general assumption that action films somehow speak to young men’s high testosterone levels. Back in the ‘60s, many a horny youth was eager to take his date to see “Tom Jones,” “8 1/2” or “The Graduate.”

Although Schickel is dismissive of those who berate today’s films for undue violence, he cannot take much pleasure in the current state of what used to be more of an art. Somewhat ironically, though, the trend he so deplores--dumbing down content while cranking up violence and special effects--can also be seen as consonant with the film aesthetic he champions. Schickel believes that visual images and montage, rather than dialogue and script, are the essence of great filmmaking. In his ideal world, this sensibility would yield more films like “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But one might argue that, in fact, it has led to films in which drama and coherence are sacrificed to sensationalism.

One needn’t agree with all of Schickel’s views to enjoy his book. Reading him is not only thought-provoking but a pleasure. Smart, discerning yet unpretentious, he’s a writer who never minces words. His essays on Greta Garbo, Frank Capra, Irene Dunne and others show his unerring instinct for zeroing in on the unique qualities of each: “Maybe one didn’t--doesn’t--meet many women like Irene Dunne in life, but because her reactions . . . were so unforced, so free of mannerism, one felt--feels--comfortable in her presence. . . . To put it another way, Dunne makes you think she is less unusual than she actually is.” Schickel’s gifts bear a more than passing resemblance to Dunne’s.