Vincent Canby; Sophisticated, Wry Film Critic for N.Y. Times

Vincent Canby, who influenced moviegoers and theater audiences for more than three decades with his sophisticated, often wryly humorous reviews in the New York Times, died of cancer Sunday in Manhattan. He was 76.

Canby occupied a powerful position as the paper’s senior film critic for 28 years, an era that spanned the development of French New Wave movies and mega-budget Hollywood blockbusters.

He championed filmmakers such as Woody Allen, Jane Campion, Spike Lee and James Ivory. His columns sometimes featured a mythical producer named Stanley, who personified Hollywood and its excesses.

Yet he did not regard himself as powerful or as a celebrity critic, even though a good word from him might translate into riches at the box office.

“He was a wry and civilized man who took the job seriously but didn’t take himself too seriously,” said critic and film historian Richard Schickel. “He had a kind of balance in his view of movies that was particularly useful for a critic appearing before the public on an almost daily basis.”

Canby was born in Chicago and grew up in Lake Forest, Ill. He served in the Navy during World War II, then lived in Paris, where he supported himself in part by writing summaries of French scripts.

Back in the United States, he studied English literature at Dartmouth, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947. After brief stints at the Chicago Journal of Commerce and in public relations work in New York, he moved into entertainment journalism for the Motion Picture Herald and later at Variety.

He was hired as a film writer at the New York Times in 1965. For the next three decades, he turned out daily reviews well-grounded in the history of movies, as well as longer features and analysis pieces that appeared on Sundays.

Canby, who was also a playwright and novelist, preferred a conversational tone and wrote reviews that were at least as entertaining as the movies themselves. He made humorous asides about actors, such as a reference to the sculpted bulges of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique as something the actor ought to exchange for something more comfortable.

In a review of “Jaws” in 1975, he wrote that if you are what you eat, “then one of the sharks in ‘Jaws’ is a beer can, half a mackerel and a Louisiana license plate.” His columns featuring the fictional Stanley, “my movie producer friend,” skewered the whims and foibles of the film business. The pieces were written as dialogues that usually took place over lunch at Sardi’s, the New York hangout, or at Stanley’s Trump Tower pied-a-terre.

In one column in the early 1980s, Canby described Stanley guzzling Perriers with lime twists and reeking of “at least $500 worth of cologne that evaporated during our talk.” The conversation focused on the recession-driven trend for glamour in movies.

Canby often wrote of the challenges of the critic’s life, once attributing the frequent gap between the tastes of reviewers and those of ticket buyers to a buildup of memories--”like plaque on teeth”--of the thousands of movies a critic sees.

The vast majority of movies and films, he said last year, are “neither very good nor very bad. And as writers, there is a problem with trying to make that interesting to read.”

He switched to theater criticism in 1993, the same year his longtime companion, fellow writer and film critic Penelope Gilliatt, died.

He served as the Sunday theater critic for a year, becoming the chief theater critic in 1994. In 1996, he returned to the post of Sunday critic. He used his position to lament troubling trends in theater, such as overamplification of actors’ voices, and decried developments that seemed bent on making the live stage more like the movies.

Never married, Canby is survived by a first cousin, Ann Barker Turfant of Cincinnati, and her daughter, Ridgely, of New York.