Reviewing Reviewers

Abstract

Reviewing Reviewers Ed Minus (bio) American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now edited by Phillip Lopate (Library of America, 2006, xxviii + 720 pages. $40) American Movie Critics is arranged chronologically, thereby creating an illusion of greater variety than other formats might have conveyed. Had the book been organized in terms of modes there would have been fewer [End Page xxxiv] than a dozen categories: appreciation, description, argument, analysis, classification, definition, revision, demolition, and theory. On the other hand the number and variety of movies represented are impressive (although musicals get slightly shortchanged). Some of the earlier, more general pieces offer observations and insights that were undoubtedly fresh in their time but now seem obvious and too familiar to warrant inclusion except on historical grounds. And there are later entries, some from what Lopate calls "The Golden Age of Movie Criticism: The 1950s through the 1970s," that now seem dated in other ways. Manny Farber's machismo verges on the ludicrous, and he seems to recognize only one kind of superior movie, the kind he himself, a man's man with a vengeance, would have made. (In contrast see Carl Sandburg on What Price Glory? or Jonas Mekas on Marilyn Monroe.) The other side in the gender wars is represented by Molly Haskell's "The Woman's Film," which, despite undeniable validities, becomes an interminable whine. In general the longer pieces fare less well than the shorter, the brilliant exception being Pauline Kael's thirty-page "Trash, Art, and the Movies," surely the high point of the whole book: "All art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art"; "The lowest action trash is preferable to wholesome family entertainment. When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable." As for individual movies and individual actors, the most enjoyable essays are the genuinely appreciative and the sincerely scathing. I especially liked Otis Ferguson in praise of Mae West and Jimmy Cagney, and the theater critic Walter Kerr's wonderful savoring of the art of Buster Keaton; as for movies, there is James Agee's contagious enthusiasm for Story of G.I. Joe and Shoeshine, Arlene Croce's celebration of Ray's Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Kael's tribute to Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Armond White's perceptive pleasure in response to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing; on the thumbs-down side Melvin B. Tolson's "Gone with the Wind Is More Dangerous Than Birth of a Nation" and bell hooks's put-down of Pulp Fiction are acute and persuasive. Surprisingly few articles are devoted principally to directors, but Harry Alan Potamkin on D. W. Griffith, William S. Pechter on Buñuel, and David Thomson on Howard Hawks are all valuable. Out-and-out theory is wisely kept to a minimum. Surely the most incisive piece written in that mode is the excerpt from Siegfried Kracauer's introduction to his influential book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. But Parker Tyler on Warhol is also civilized and substantive: "In sexual matters, more than other matters, the movies become profound." It remains only to say that the quality of the writing here is generally strong but variable. At the top of the heap, after Agee, Kerr, and Kael, I would place William Troy, Ralph Ellison, and Carrie Rickey—all five masters of lucid, personal, beautifully modulated styles. But Cecilia Ager, writing in the 30s, seems to have been helplessly under the influence of Dorothy Parker; and Paul Goodman, whose books on education I admire, [End Page xxxv] seems less than cogent on the subject of technical innovations in films. Paul Schrader, by contrast, offers a carefully shaped and thoroughly satisfying definition and defense of film noir. The funniest piece is "A Boy Named Sioux" (about Dances with Wolves) by Paul Rudnick (writing as Libby Gelman-Waxner). And the most intellectually rewarding essay is by Stanley Cavell on The Lady Eve, from his thoughtful and entertaining book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard, 1981). American Movie Critics, then, is like a jeroboam-size...