FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM, a documentary by Gerald Peary

My earliest movie memories consist of a pair of large hands creepily emerging from a furnace door to wrap about a man’s throat in the Abbott and Costello comedy HOLD THAT GHOST and the ‘til-death-do-us-part dance of Moira Shearer in the finale of THE RED SHOES (1948). I was about six years old when I saw those films at the tiny Coronet Theater in Dallas. The common factor between the struggle in the basement and Shearer’s final dance was terror and fear of uncontrollable forces. Eliciting those and other emotions is precisely how movies often have the deepest initial impact on viewers. So, it’s no surprise that Gerald Peary begins his delightful and thought-provoking documentary, FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM, with a tale of terror evoked in film critic/fan Harry Knowles when, as a baby, he first saw King Kong making Fay Wray scream. Those early cinematic fears form a thread running throughout Peary’s documentary as other critics talk about their primal responses to the medium. Elvis Mitchell was overwhelmed by the infamous barrel scene of TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964). While Molly Haskell was frightened by the corpse rising from his watery bathtub grave in DIABOLIQUE (please, the original one from 1955), Andrew Sarris admits to screaming during the shower scene in PSYCHO.

It is on this visceral level that film affects us the earliest, but as we grow older we begin to find other pleasures in watching films – following a complex story, getting to know fascinating characters, traveling to exciting locales, and discovering a morally complex world of many points of view. And for some the film becomes an art, which can be studied for meaning conveyed through composition and framing, camera movement and position, lighting, use of shadows or color, and music and sound. From that latter group, who have realized that film is truly an art, come the critics. The uninspired ones tell us the plot and something about the stars and then tell us to save our money or rush to the nearest theater. But there are also more profound ones.

America has been blessed with an amazing array of film critics who sprang up a decade after the first movies were seen in nickelodeons or on screens. Film critic/author/professor Gerald Peary has focused his attention on the rise and fall of diverse groups of American film critics over the past century. His documentary (available on DVD here) is most timely as the traditional print-based form of film criticism, practiced by a relatively small number of critics in America, is rapidly disappearing under the thundering hooves of thousands of film critics, fans, hacks, haters, journalists, historians, and “just plain folks” who have found their voice on the Web.

Where did film criticism in America begin? In an era before even radio and television, the only place for writing about film was in newspapers and magazines. Peary calls this “The Dawn of Criticism, 1907-1929.” Working from simplistic plot synopses, provided by the production companies and then studio publicity departments as the industry became more standardized, these early “critics” at least gave the readers/potential moviegoers an idea of the events of the film and the kind of characters involved. Richard Schickel, longtime critic for Time magazine, acknowledges Frank E. Woods as the first American film critic worthy of the name because he developed a point-of-view when discussing films, rather than simply parroting the plot synopsis. When Woods first began writing about film, the standard movie length was one reel (about 10 minutes), not enough time for a complex story, but the budding critic saw great potential for film to become an art, especially when practiced by D.W. Griffith. Woods was also the earliest American critic to suggest that stage acting and movie acting were two different things. With its ability to focus right on the face in close-up, the movie camera demanded a subtler, more subdued acting style than that of the stage, where full bodies were seen, often at a distance from the audience in a large theater. The movie camera could take the audience right up next to the performer in a very intimate space. While writing about films, Woods was also writing story ideas and scenarios for the new industry as early as 1908. The highpoint was reached in 1915 when he was credited as co-writer of Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION.

Poet/artist Vachel Lindsay is recognized for writing the first serious book about film in America – The Art of the Moving Picture (1915). He talked about film as “painting in motion” and “poetry of the eye” and considered the arrival of film as a “key moment in the history of human consciousness,” one which would “change the way people thought, dreamed, fantasized, and shaped their inner selves.” Considered nearly a hundred years later, his words have proved quite accurate. Like most film fans, critics or not, Lindsay also loved certain actors, particularly Mae Marsh, John Bunny, and “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford.

In the era of Prohibition, flappers, jazz, and Scott & Zelda, writer Robert E. Sherwood had a ten-year run at Life magazine (a witty, not photo-essay, magazine). With his genial discussions of films and their makers, Sherwood was just the kind of critic that Hollywood moguls liked. He was often invited to visit the studios and was eventually lured into screenwriting (REBECCA, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES) or selling his own successful plays for adaptation to the screen (THE PETRIFIED FOREST, WATERLOO BRIDGE). His fellow Algonquin Round Table friends Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker were likewise seduced into accepting the easy money of Hollywood.

Peary next considers American film critics during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar period in a segment entitled “Cult Critics and Crowther: 1930-1953.” This was the era in which the five principal Hollywood studios were at the height of their power in production, distribution, and exhibition in their huge theater chains reaching across America. The big downtown movie theaters and the smaller neighborhood theaters gave audiences unprecedented access to the magic of the movies. Cheaply escaping from the economic woes of the 30s or the psychological damage of wartime, people could lose themselves in the faces, actions, words, emotions, and music emanating from the screens. The main factors in deciding “what to go see” were “who’s in it and what kind of movie is it” – romance, Western, war, drama, comedy. Movie ads and simple reviews in the local newspapers answered those questions.

But there were also more demanding, intellectually stimulating critics on the rise, often showing up in smaller, more liberal or even leftist, publications. Harry Alan Potamkin considered cinema “a high modernist art form” and touted the more complex works of European directors F.W. Murnau, Pudovkin, and Dreyer. Otis Ferguson was another critic exploring new ways to talk about films. His style (for columns in The New Republic) was influenced by Hemingway and hard-boiled detective novelists like Hammett and Chandler, but unfortunately his voice was silenced by World War II.

Ferguson’s death made way for a new, even more exciting voice to join the critical discussion – that of Manny Farber, who followed Ferguson at the New Republic in 1942. Stuart Klawans (film critic for The Nation) states admiringly that “Farber writes nothing that could be considered standard English.” Farber himself has described his critical approach: “I circumvented describing story and plot and dived right into the center of the movie” with an emphasis on “gesture, action, scene.” He slyly reveals that by doing so, “I was on safe, safe ground.” But that approach had more to do with his being a visual artist and preferring what he called “termite art” (gritty films from the edge) over “white elephant art” (bloated, predetermined Hollywood excess). The late 40s and early 50s provided a mother lode of brilliant examples of termite art in films noir and fast-paced, no-holds-barred crime films. Farber exemplifies the statement by Jonathan Rosenbaum (ex-Chicago Reader critic) that the “best thing that you can say about a critic is that what they write is so singular that you can’t turn it into advertising.” As with other critics admired by Rosenbaum (and exemplified in his own writing), “You can’t even tell if he likes the movie or hates it. It doesn’t matter.”

A. O. Scott (New York Times) and other writers reserve the title of “the first great American movie critic” for James Agee, who wrote for Time and the Nation. Even before the Cahiers du Cinema crowd coined the term politique des auteurs, Agee was attributing his favorite films to the directors: “The best films are personal ones, made by forceful directors.” Just as much as for his film criticism, Agee is remembered for his lyrical text about share croppers (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans, 1941), his novel A Death in the Family (posthumous Pulitizer prize), and his screenplays for THE AFRICAN QUEEN and THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. This multi-faced artist died at the age of 45 from heart failure complicated by alcoholism. His fame was primarily posthumous.

Concurrent with Farber and Agee came the mid-century lion of mainstream film criticism, Bosley Crowther, who started writing reviews for the New York Times in 1940. He was the one that Hollywood had to reckon with over the next 25 years. Andrew Sarris (best known for popularizing the “auteur theory” in the US through his columns for the Village Voice) has described Crowther as a “lively and entertaining writer,” who served as a “booster for subtitled foreign films” and attacked McCarthyism and the Hollywood Black List of writers, directors, and actors swept off the employment roles. Molly Haskell (former critic for the Village Voice and author of the ground-breaking From Reverence to Rape) fills in her husband’s portrait of Crowther by saying that [unlike Farber] the Times critic had “little feel for cynical films noir.” Instead, Crowther was a progressive liberal of the time in his demand that a worthy film have a moral theme. To him that was more important than the cinematic style. Inevitably young critics, especially Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, would finally challenge the lofty peaks dominated by Crowther and predominantly look at the aesthetic maneuvers of a film. As Sarris says, “We didn’t give a rat’s ass about what its effects were on a 12-year-old.” Thus laid out were the battle grounds of film criticism in the 1960s.

The precedents for such a seemingly amoral approach were found in France, among the oft-mentioned Cahiers du Cinema posse – Godard, Truffaut, Melville, Rohmer, et al. To introduce this heady era, Gerald Peary slips into a look at “Auteurism and After, 1954-1967.” Echoing Agee’s director-centric writing, the energetic Hollywoodophiliacs in Paris roamed all over the films of the 1940s and 1950s and found much to savor and shout about. By 1957 they issued a near-manifesto proclaiming the director as the dominant creator of film. Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times) sums up the “auteur theory” by positing the director as “the guiding intelligence, the guiding spirit of the film. You can see a through-line through all his work, no matter who the writer is, who the cinematographer is, the actors are. The director’s spirit overwhelms everything else.” Excited by what he was discovering in the French periodical Cahiers du Cinema, Andrew Sarris took up the battle standard and rushed into the fray with such statements as “a film director can be as much an artist as a painter or a novelist” and presented Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray among his pantheon of exemplary auteurs.

Applying this auteur approach to PSYCHO, Sarris proclaimed Alfred Hitchcock a member of the highest rank, something which seems so incredibly obvious today but which was rather bold at the time, despite Hitch’s finely honed publicity maneuvers. Less obvious auteurs chosen by Sarris to be among the gods were John Ford, Howard Hawks, and the by-then nearly forgotten, DW Griffith. At the time Sarris wrote, audiences were more likely thinking in terms of “a John Wayne movie” than a “John Ford western.” Most moviegoers were star-gazers and rarely knew who made the film. The worst misunderstanding was that the actors made up their lines while somebody caught them on camera. In the 1960s, Andrew Sarris completely revolutionized the way my generation of cinephiles (verging on cinephiliacs) looked at films. From 1963-1973 I devoured every issue of the Village Voice and learned so much from Sarris. Eventually he put a lot of those earlier columns into the seminal American auteurist study, The American Cinema, Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. J. Hoberman, who would eventually become a critic for the Village Voice, admits, “I had practically memorized Sarris’s book when I was in college.”

But not everyone who loved movies loved Sarris. Pauline Kael attacked the auteur theory and its major proponent, thus setting off the most famous critics’ war in American film history. She called the auteur theory silly, dangerous, anti-art. Sarris found her bitchy but tough. Hers was a more eclectic critical style which seemed to approach each film in different ways, with no consistent, underlying theory into which she could fit films. Her attack was “wrong-headed but effective because it was so funny,” according to Michael Wilmington (ex-critic, Chicago Tribune). Kael’s snide homophobic references to the “auteur boys” didn’t keep her from gathering her own coterie of young male critics she eventually placed all over American media.

It was eventually realized that Pauline Kael was something of an auteurist but interested in a different set of directors than those canonized by Sarris. In Peary’s documentary Kael is described as “Dionysian with a playful, fun, enjoyable approach to film criticism,” in contrast to the Apollonian Sarris, who “catalogs and studies film seriously.” Sarris is incredulous of Kael’s statement that she sees each film only once and retorts that for good films he can’t wait to see them again. In that regard I am solidly in the Sarris camp. Andrew Sarris very wisely points out that he and Kael “made each other” by “creating a dialectic.” Their feud made criticism hot.

But there was one thing both Sarris and Kael could agree on – Bosley Crowther at the New York Times was increasingly out of touch with contemporary film culture. He was morally shocked by the new French films, made by those Cahiers du Cinema critics, who put away their typewriters and picked up lightweight cameras. Crowther was especially disturbed by the American New Wave film, BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967). Kael, perhaps smelling the blood of a wounded animal, wrote a review full of praise for BONNIE AND CLYDE. Her career sky-rocketed. Shortly thereafter Crowther retired from the Times and Kael began a long reign at New Yorker magazine.

Time-out for a confession: I have read only a handful of Pauline Kael’s reviews. While definitely a supporter of the Sarris viewpoint, I was nonetheless more drawn to European and Japanese cinema in the 1960s than to earlier American films made by Sarris’s pantheon. Living in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Puerto Rico during that decade, there was scarce chance to see older, classic films or the now much revered B-movies. I purposely didn’t own a television set and so couldn’t even see hacked up commercial-ridden versions. Fortunately for me some movie theaters, at least in Dallas and Austin, were showing lots of “foreign films” at the time, mainly because of a dearth of new Hollywood products. With auteur theory in hand, mind, and heart, I explored works by Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and so many more, all of whom I revered. Thanks to Jonas Mekas, writing about the experimental “underground cinema” of the time, I discovered Kenneth Anger (the first gay auteur I was ever aware of), Andy Warhol, the Kuchar Brothers, Stan Brakhage, and others. I also discovered the wonderful British film magazine Sight and Sound and its American equivalent, Film Comment, both of which carried essays on directors, genres, etc. It was a heady time and I wasn’t interested in musicals or Westerns. Only later in the early 80s, after meeting Texas Monthly critic George Morris – decidedly one of Sarris’s boys – did I reread Sarris’s book and, thanks to videotapes and a still thriving Varsity Theater here in Austin, began exploring classic American cinema in a more critical way.

And so my own personal experience with film coincides with Peary’s section entitled, “When Criticism Mattered, 1968-1980.” It was a golden age of film criticism in newspapers and magazines. But in the late 60s and early 70s there was one huge elephant in the critical room that couldn’t be ignored – Vietnam and the anti-war movement. With students leading the war protests, it is no wonder that so many alternative newspapers appeared in cities across America. And along with that explosion of new voices came a boom in film criticism. The new, younger critics spoke from their personal point-of-view, analyzed films in a host of new ways, and filtered the characters, themes, and stories through a political mesh, usually leftist. The weeklies gave a lot of space to their film critics. Movies were a serious business/art form and critics were right in the thick of the battle to win American hearts and minds.

Meanwhile back at the big dailies, Vincent Canby ascended to the top position in film criticism at the New York Times in the post-Crowther era. A.O. Scott, who is at the Times today, says that “Canby was the most powerful film critic in America for a quarter of a century,” writing with an “effortless style and grace.” Canby is famously quoted as saying, “I don’t know what I think [about a film] until I am writing.”

Besides the war in Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, the women’s movement was pushing new critics into the fray. Molly Haskell was on the front lines in that battle and began a campaign of championing women directors. Surprisingly, Pauline Kael, who was already a powerhouse, was seen as anti-feminist for not wanting “men to give up their fantasies because it’s one of the most fertile grounds of movies.” No “male gaze” critique for her.

Overlapping the “When Film Criticism Mattered” section is a different trend Peary calls “TV, Fans, and Videotape, 1975-1995.” It is marked by the beginning of the Siskel and Ebert TV show, first a local Chicago production, and then eventually going national. What Kael and Sarris had done in print, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert did on camera, but certainly in a less contentious manner. They disagreed on films publicly but without rancor. Still, each wanted to be “right” and to sway the audience. They made film criticism gentlemanly, erudite, and fun. After Siskel died, Ebert never found an appropriate replacement.

In considering the evolution of film criticism and reception, Peary uncovers a very interesting fact related to changing publicity modes. In 1975 Hollywood recognized the value of TV in marketing JAWS. 30-second ads ran on primetime TV and filled the theaters with people ready to be terrified by a “great white shark.” Fortunately it was a well-made, thrill-packed film which merited such box office rewards. STAR WARS expanded that campaign strategy and got images of the sci-fi films plastered everywhere, including magazine covers (not just film magazines, either). But STAR WARS signaled another shift in film criticism – it really didn’t matter what critics thought of the film. “Rabid fans claimed it as their own.” America was entering the post-critic era, when word-of-mouth (pre-Internet, pre-Twitter) made teenage audiences flock to theaters for slasher films and adolescent comedies. Hollywood in the 1980s became obsessed with one demographic – teenagers with expendable money. One critic describes the ideal viewer of the time as a “15-year-old male in a shopping mall.” Thus, the rise of the mall multiplexes.

Meanwhile there was another stream of films beginning to rise – the American independent cinema, led by STRANGERS IN PARADISE (1984), proven by SLACKER (1991), and bursting into mainstream consciousness with RESERVOIR DOGS (1992). There was a whole new world of American film to write about and Hollywood scarcely mattered to the independent fans. Unfortunately Peary doesn’t have the time to explore this democratization of the American film industry and the critics who began to take notice. That would be an entirely different documentary.

In 1993 Vincent Canby retired as the New York Times’ premiere film critic and was replaced by Janet Maslin. But this changing of the guard came at the very time that the American home was flooded with video. Thousands of new and old movies were suddenly available for rent or purchase. Budding cinephiles and film lovers of all ages could finally have a copy of favorite films and explore new ones. Film could be studied at home by taking Sarris’s film pantheon and seeking out the works of John Ford or Howard Hawks and studying them chronologically or thematically or through genre or stars. It certainly wasn’t as artistically delightful as seeing them in a movie theater, but the consumer was in charge and could order the movies as he/she saw fit, rather than relying on the whims of theater programmers and the availability of 35mm prints. Accessibility provided the freedom of exploration and discovery.

As had happened in the alternative music world, there came a flood of amateur film fanzines, poorly printed but exuberant and confrontational. These were reviews and diatribes for, by, and of young film fans. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was a critic…in print…even if just for a handful of readers. But that was about to change just as quickly.

Enter the digital age of emails, newsgroups, websites, and blogs. From the mid-90s onward the world (of film criticism and everything else) dramatically shifted. Vox populi finally had a very powerful soap box visible and audible throughout the world for anyone net-surfing and listening. The gatekeepers of criticism were suddenly trampled by the mob. Well-educated, well-read, cineliterate arbiters of taste with a broad view of history, culture, society, and art began to suffer the fate of being ignored or bypassed. They certainly continued to reach those who were still reading The New Yorker, the New York Times, Time, and “serious” film journals, but for those who consumed films in a different way, who cared how the Terminator could be compared to the Golem?

Yet, out of all this cacophony arose some young, thoughtful, knowledgeable, hip reviewers/commentators. The writers for new websites like Cinematical and GreenCine became must-reads.

As Peary indicates, not all the old-guard film critics had a knee-jerk reaction against the new criticism on the web. A.O. Scott was the first print critic to do pod-casts. Blogging has now become an essential part of a print critic’s job. Bypassing the occasional “letter to the editor” of print media, now comments from readers are considered an essential addition to any blog or review. Fans can now challenge the critic or begin a conversation with other readers (ideally, though such discussions often devolve into name-calling). In the process of this shift to the Internet, print media editors began panicking and replacing tried and true critics with younger ones, many of whom have emerged from the blogosphere like heroes (or monsters) in a movie. Perry cites a sobering Variety article which indicates that 28 film reviewers have been sacked in the past few years. Janet Maslin has become a New York Times book reviewer, while Elvis Mitchell (ex-New York Times film critic) has turned towards documentary production and hosting film programs on television. Roger Ebert hangs on at the Chicago Sun-Times, but is probably mostly read online. Others are finding their way over the new battlefields.

What is certain is that more is written about films today than at any other time in our history. With IMDB links, the Rotten Tomatoes website, and Google searches, we can find reviews, background articles, interviews, trailers, and clips for practically any film ever made. Along with this explosion of accessibility has inevitably come a democratization and boundless dispersal of film criticism. Some of the voices are young and inexperienced in the ways of the world; others have seen and done a lot and can weave those life experiences and knowledge into their discussions of films. But every film critic got his/her first big chance somehow — once upon a time in a journal or newspaper, now on the Web. Consumers will always find the critics they trust and admire, no matter where they are housed. The genie simply can’t be stuffed back into the ink bottle, so we will have to find our own way through this rich, new world of film criticism. Gerald Peary’s seminal cinematic exploration of the wealth of American film criticism provides a wonderful roadmap of where we have been and observes the many directions the whole endeavor is now moving.

Sources

• Gerald Peary (writer/director), FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM (AG Films,  2009). DVD available for purchase here.
• Colin Burnett, “Going to the Theatre at the Movies: Re-Examining the Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson“
• Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (Studio Vista, 1971)
• James Agee, Wikipedia

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