Everybody’s a Critic

The 1960s and early 1970s were heady times for film criticism. In colleges and universities, in cafes, bars, movie theater lobbies and surrounding sidewalks, movies were the subject of heated debates. Neither moviegoing nor movie reviewing was new, but youthful hordes--uncomfortable with literature and not yet enslaved by television--found something to get excited about in the movies. More than ever before and perhaps ever since, they looked to critics to stimulate, shape or confirm their opinions, and they gravitated toward the critics who best satisfied their bents.

Though precise terminology is elusive, there were at the time two kinds of critics: the eggheads, who preferred what were loosely called art films, and the populists, who grooved on Hollywood movies and their foreign counterparts. The eggheads were Stanley Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, Vernon Young, Charles Thomas Samuels and I, with relatively few adherents. The populists were Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael and Manny Farber, with their legions of followers.

From today’s vantage, the terms “egghead” and “populist” are hardly sufficient. Macdonald and his like were engaged with movies but were interested in other critical fields as well. They valued film no higher or lower than the other arts, while the populists, mostly younger men and women, were nurtured exclusively on film. It was an intoxicant.

Enhanced with popcorn and awash in Cokes, nerds and wallflowers could fantasize that the glamorous stars were making love to them. Eventually college film courses and film societies enabled the young to get academic credit and easy dates from among the like-minded. And it did not take long for die-hard movie fans to upgrade themselves to buffs and eventually to cineastes or cinephiles. To establish true superiority, they spurned most mainstream movies, which everyone had seen; instead, they exalted the obscure, the ragged, the lowest-budget genre movies.

While Kauffmann, Macdonald and the rest of them struggled to separate the chaff from the wheat, the buffs chewed on the chaff as if it were spearmint gum. And there were critics to encourage them: Good souls like James Agee, Robert Warshow and Otis Ferguson who, feeling ashamed that the domestic product fell short of the imports, valiantly ferreted out the few diamonds in the rough.

Sarris was a young American film buff doing research at the celebrated Cinematheque Francaise in Paris in the early 1960s. At the time, Francois Truffaut, a young critic for the journal Cahiers du Cinema, was advancing what he called the “politique des auteurs”: positing the supremacy of the director, downgrading some reputations and extolling the techniques of certain Hollywood filmmakers for their real or putative strengths. Sarris immediately saw the potential of transplanting what was to be called auteurism to America. Meanwhile populist criticism had another rising non-auteurist star: Pauline Kael, who started writing in 1953 and whose basic philosophy was that movies were like sex--some good, some bad--and that what mattered was what turned her on. She and Sarris became the sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly co-leaders of populist criticism.

The editor of “Citizen Sarris,” Emanuel Levy, observes in passing that “Kauffmann and Simon wrote for smaller magazines” and were, partly for that reason, less influential. This is an important point. Because Kael ended up writing for the New Yorker, the most prestigious mainstream magazine, and Sarris for the Village Voice, the then-leading countercultural organ, both had bully pulpits.

Be that as it may, the clash of the two film-criticism movements stirred up the 1960s film community. As the critic Molly Haskell explains in “Citizen Sarris”: “There was something wonderfully outrageous in the controversies of the sixties, with Andrew and Pauline and John Simon and Dwight MacDonald [sic] going toe to toe in passionate and personal debate, frothing at the mouth, sparks flying, diatribes flowing, at parties and in the pages of outlets both respectable and obscure.”

But those days are gone. Kael’s famous attack on Sarris and auteurism, and his reply, would not resonate today. Few publications now would run parallel criticism by Sarris and Kauffmann, as the New York Times once did, pitting Sarris’ credo against my own on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. More’s the pity, but at least now we have two challenging film books that accomplish the same: “Regarding Film,” Kauffmann’s latest collection, and “Citizen Sarris.” The former is mostly criticism; the latter is a festschrift, a celebratory volume of essays by many hands.

Of the egghead critics, Kauffmann is the least dogmatic and the least elitist. For more than 40 years, he has been writing about film in The New Republic and elsewhere and teaching film courses at Yale, Hunter College and beyond. His is a civilized, easygoing style, though not chattily egocentric like Kael’s or cultishly soul-baring like Sarris’ or olympianly ironic like Macdonald’s. He is a man at home in film history, conversant with culture and the arts, informative without being preachy, using his writing to think about his subject and pleased to take us into his confidence.

He is most certainly a master of the felicitous phrase and memorable characterization. So he describes Emma Thompson as the “first film actress since Katharine Hepburn to make intelligence sexy”; he finds in “Amistad” “a sense of presence in the past” he hasn’t experienced since Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring”; and he notes that Oliver Stone “in appalling measure” succeeds in “Natural Born Killers.” He is acute about “Pulp Fiction,” which “nourishes, abets cultural slumming [with] calculated grunginess.” Sensitive to cinematography, he writes of “Stalingrad,” “the colors don’t glamorize, they confirm,” and in the camera work of “Sister My Sister,” he finds “the everyday put before us as evidence of strangeness.” In “Carrington,” “appurtenances of class and of conscious bohemianism are integral to the characters themselves, not imposed as decor. Setting and story are unified.”

He is an equally good judge of acting. Take this analysis of the two stars who have portrayed Humbert Humbert in “Lolita”: “James Mason is the ideal Humbert. He gives us a doomed man, conscious of it, accepting it. [Jeremy] Irons in the role [gives] it his customary vestments of intelligence and sensitive reticence, but at his deepest he is no more than melancholy. Mason suggested a tragic fall.” And, much as he admires Julianne Moore, he finds her “frigid” in “The End of the Affair,” leaving the great moments “uninflected.”

Knowledgeableness is quietly integrated, not flashily displayed. Thus Kauffmann notices in Warren Beatty’s “Bulworth” an unacknowledged debt not only to Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” but also to a Finnish and a Ukrainian film. He can be understatedly but effectively witty, as about “Fargo”: “The hot news about Joel and Ethan Coen is that they have made a tolerable film.” About “Touch of Evil”: “Heston’s attempts to be a dashing young man were painful even when he was young.” Or, at greater length, apropos Mike Leigh’s film about them: “If Gilbert had never met Sullivan [a clause that makes me shudder as I write it], he would still have a small place in literary history. Sullivan without Gilbert would now be remembered as the composer of ‘The Lost Chord’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’”

In “Regarding Film,” there are also impressive essays on various attempts to adapt opera to the screen, on the changing attitudes of moviegoers toward film and film criticism, on the problems of documenting the Holocaust and on the careers of Akira Kurosawa, Billy Wilder and David Lean. Only once, in a brief obituary notice for James Stewart, does Kauffmann become a rather too prideful fan.

My own cavils with Kauffmann concern what I consider his overpraise of the filmmakers David O. Russell, Neil LaBute, Todd Solondz and Peter Sellars. Nor do I share his enthusiasm for Wallace Shawn, Ben Stiller, Jim Jarmusch and Chantal Akerman. Much more rarely, I find him overcritical, as of Giulietta Masina in “Nights of Cabiria.”

But as critics know, agreement matters much less than recognition of the ability to summon up the memory of films enjoyed, to evoke the pleasure of and build up the appetite for films unseen and, on privileged occasions, to change our long-held but obsolete critical estimates. There is humane wisdom in these pieces, as when Kauffmann, noting that the 10-year-old Billy Wilder witnessed Emperor Franz Josef’s funeral, is reminded “yet again how short and how long a century is.” Or when he reflects on something magical that happened to some men born at the right time for the arrival of film to transform them. Without it, “Josef von Sternberg might have spent his life in the lace business; Howard Hawks might have remained an engineer, William A. Wellman an aviator .... Lean might have browned out his life as a London accountant.” So too did Kauffmann discover film criticism at the right time, to his and everybody’s gain.

Such praise is more difficult when assessing the work of Sarris. While there is no underestimating Sarris’ effect on his readers and his film students at Columbia University--auteurism called long overdue attention to the importance of the director--his particular categories, as covered in his 1968 “The American Cinema” (the greatly influential catalogue raisonne that listed and rated the works of 200 mostly, but not exclusively, American directors) are more questionable.

About who belongs in which category (“Pantheon Directors,” “The Far Side of Paradise,” “Expressive Esoterica,” “Lightly Likable,” “Less Than Meets the Eye” and “Strained Seriousness,” to name a few), not to mention the worth of individual films, I am in enormous disagreement. I cannot begin to understand how someone could have sat through the oeuvre of the likes of Edgar G. Ulmer and Joseph H. Lewis or placed Samuel Fuller, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher (who is one of the contributors to the book) on pedestals. And I do not share the exaggerated passion for Max Ophuls (though I’m glad to learn that Sarris no longer considers “Lola Montes” the greatest film ever made), F.W. Murnau and Sternberg (the aristocratic von is pure fabrication). Conversely I cannot comprehend Sarris’ contempt for John Huston, Elia Kazan and Lean or the outbursts against Fred Zinnemann. And although I enjoy some John Ford westerns, I consign anyone considering “The Searchers” a masterpiece (as most contributors here do) beyond the critical pale.

Almost every contributor to “Citizen Sarris” dwells raptly on Sarris’ “passion.” Why is it that critics of the other arts are not so glorified for their passion? Is it because it is understood that they love their fields and passion would merely imply blindness and besottedness? Or is it that film, as a newer medium, required such fanatical passion to give it full respectibility ?

Passion is, of itself, no fault except when it descends into sanctification that ranges from fervid adulation to ferocious zealotry. Profuse but undiscriminating quotations from Sarris’ writings and spectacularly exaggerated ways of extolling Sarris’ style, intended as homage, have the opposite effect, and the acolytes, encouraged by the master’s ecstatic self-revelations, indulge in their own unrestrained autobiography. Regrettably “Citizen Sarris” is the worst-edited book I have ever read, and most of the writing in it isn’t much better.

What, in retrospect, was the significance of the populist-egghead controversy? It made clear that there were two standards by which movies could be evaluated. In essence, the populists exalted the B-movie, which offered technique above content, fun above depth, strictly cinematic values to which all others were subordinated. Conversely, the eggheads, while not ignoring technique, considered moral, social, political, psychological and aesthetic questions of equal importance.

The way all this has translated into today’s practices is as a recession of the egghead approach and dilution of even the populist one. Reviewing has become largely simplistic consumer guidance, with the broader, more speculative view rarely in evidence and decreasingly in demand.