Scribbling in the dark

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT reckoned that no little boy ever wanted to grow up to be a movie critic. Graham Greene said he arrived at the idea of becoming one only after an unwise third martini. Yet, Philip Lopate writes in his introduction to the celebratory “American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now,” the job has, over the course of a century, turned into “a legitimate profession,” which is a bummer for those who cling to the idea that watching a new flick by Wong Kar-Wei or Wes Anderson at 10 in the morning and getting paid to write about it is somehow renegade and cool.

Movies can be a mania, or, as Meyer Levin notes here, a “hypnotic, habit-forming need.” People sit in the dark and will themselves to be seduced, even by the lousy ones, especially by the lousy ones. On an average film-festival day, a critic might see four, five or even six films. The eyes glaze over and glee turns, not necessarily to boredom, but to numbness. Then the hunger gets fired up again by something great. Over time, this roller coaster is a killer. At the end of her career, Pauline Kael said she was only too happy to quit: She’d never again have to watch a picture by Oliver Stone. It’s an odd job, once described by the Cuban novelist, screenwriter and sometime critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante in terms of a biblical curse.

“American Movie Critics” is a fat book -- 700-plus pages, more than 75 writers -- and Lopate organizes it chronologically, starting in 1914 with poet and critic Vachel Lindsay, who describes the early action film (“such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American”) and ending with the excellent Manohla Dargis -- formerly a Los Angeles Times critic, now with The New York Times -- on “A History of Violence” and its director David Cronenberg: “He knows that movie violence turns us on: we kiss to the bang-bang.” The erotic inner nature of movies hasn’t changed at all, in other words, only the ways they’re made and written about. Dargis’ play on “Kiss-Kiss, Bang-Bang,” the title of one of Kael’s collections, suggests that so much has by now been written about film that living critics inevitably find themselves in conversation with dead ones. Knowingness and irony are part of the game.

In the early days, critics roamed terra incognita. Lindsay’s points of reference were the stage and the novel. Movies, however, grew up quickly. Less than 15 years separates Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” from Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” and you could argue that it’s been downhill from there. Film criticism matured with the same swiftness. By the late 1930s, Otis Ferguson was y arguing that Hollywood reflected the inner life of America. For James Agee, in the 1940s, movies weren’t entertainment but matters of life and death; the good ones soul-changing epiphanies; the bad, personal affronts.

Agee, glamorous and doomed, introduced to future generations the idea that writing about the movies might be romantic, as well as a way in. He was dashing, a self-proclaimed poete maudit who found himself on the payroll of Henry Luce at Time and later wrote screenplays for John Huston and Charles Laughton. His review of “The Lost Weekend” proceeds on the basis that neither Billy Wilder, who directed the movie, nor Charles Jackson, author of the novel on which it was based, really understood alcoholism like Agee did. “There is very little appreciation, for instance,” he suggests, “of the many and subtle moods possible in drunkenness; almost no registration of the workings of the several minds inside a drinker’s brain; hardly a trace of the narcissism and self-deceit which are so indispensable or of the self-loathing and self-pity which are so invariable; hardly a hint, except through abrupt action, of the desperation of thirst; no hint at all of the many colorings possible in the desperation. The hangovers lack the weakness, sickness, and horrible distortions of time-sense which they need.”

It’s genius writing -- rhythmic, funny, scary, and we know the depths to which Agee sank to secure those insights. He himself was dead of drink at 46, but his work still blazes off the page, proof that movies provoked some of the best prose written in America in the last century. Take Robert Warshow, on the famous scene in “Limelight” where Chaplin and Buster Keaton attempt a musical performance: “The universe stands in their way, and not because the universe is imperfect, either, but just because it exists; God himself could not conceive a universe in which these two could accomplish the simplest thing without mishap.”

Agee’s wayward, brilliant, almost physical response to film ushered in what Lopate labels “the golden age of movie criticism: the 1950s through the 70s.” In an example of why anthologies like this can work so well, he pairs two contradictory pieces by Andrew Sarris, in which Sarris argues with himself -- tortures himself, more like -- about Wilder. It’s infuriating at first, then fascinating. Sarris initially proposes that Wilder “never caught the brass ring of absolute auteurist pre-eminence” because he is “too clever and cynical for his own and everyone else’s good.” But the issue keeps nagging at him. Fashion and his intellect together command that he should dismiss Wilder -- so why does he keep going back to see “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Apartment”? The anguish is clear. At last he achieves the breakthrough, realizing that Wilder’s “apparent cynicism was the only way he could make his raging romanticism palatable.” Yes! No better or more concise summary of Wilder’s appeal has ever been offered: “passion beneath the polish.”

The presiding figure of Lopate’s heady and committed golden age is, of course, Pauline Kael. She was in her mid-30s when she wrote her first review for the San Francisco quarterly City Lights and close to 50 when she arrived at the New Yorker, in 1967, with a now legendary rescue of “Bonnie and Clyde.” She was voracious, slangy, sometimes unfair, often funny, big on the magical, fairy-tale appeal of movies. Her freshness and spirit, together with the power the New Yorker gave her, helped launch the careers of Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola, a great generation of American moviemakers over whom she seemed to brood like a ferocious den mother. Like Agee, she forged a unique style, popping and conversational and much more crafty than it looks. Here she is on Julie Christie in Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”: “She’s a weird, hounded beauty as the junky madam Mrs. Miller -- that great, fat underlip the only flesh on her, and her gaunt, emaciated face surrounded by frizzy ringlets. She’s like an animal hiding in its own fur.” Kael made reputations. She caused fights. Her banner was, “Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.” Never since has a critic mattered so much.

The value of “American Movie Critics” lies in its sweep, its attempt to grab the whole history of a vibrant and underappreciated genre, a mode of conversation, often of provocation. Lopate thoughtfully brings together daily reviews and longer, more personal essays, the pithy deadline judgments of Vincent Canby sitting beside the high intellect of Susan Sontag and the rococo camp flourishes of Parker Tyler. Some of the pieces -- Warshow’s “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”; Ralph Ellison’s “The Shadow and the Act,” about Hollywood racism; and Paul Schrader’s “Notes on Film Noir” -- feel like anthology war horses by now, but there’s no doubt of their importance, and people will argue endlessly about who’s in and who’s not. Among more recent critics: no Janet Maslin, no Peter Biskind, no John Powers, no Stephen Hunter.

I especially regret the omission of Terrence Rafferty (his gorgeous essay on Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” would be an early pick for my own dream anthology) and the exuberant if sometimes wacky Elvis Mitchell. At the same time, I could name a score of pieces I’d rather see included than Stuart Klawan’s slam of “Gladiator” from the Nation. So Ridley Scott isn’t Edward Gibbon. Well, duh! Roger Ebert’s paean to Ernst Lubitsch’s “Trouble in Paradise” contains a lazy redundancy, a repetitive plot exposition, that made me throw the book aside. And not pick it up again for at least three minutes.

More problematic is the exclusion of Peter Bogdanovich, who, as a critic, championed John Ford, Fritz Lang and Welles. Bogdanovich’s love for film is inspiring, but he gets no look here, and neither, really, does Ford, which means the classic western, and what it tells us about America’s fantasy relationship with its own history, is thus shortchanged as a subject. It’s a pity. And the fact that a 720-page survey of American movie criticism contains nothing about Steven Spielberg seems, well, odd. Kael herself celebrated Spielberg’s early fluency, writing typically eloquent, dreamy reviews of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.,” and the story of how the wunderkind evolved into today’s mogul and liberal patriarch is as central to Hollywood as Chaplin’s. A part of the anthologist’s job, and not only the critic’s, is surely to reveal the vistas: This was out there then, and now it’s this.

So there are lacunae, perhaps unplotted, perhaps not. Maybe some simpatico spirits have been given the nod. Maybe a few scores are being settled too. But that’s as it should be, for anthologies are arguments and secret autobiographies. I loved this book even when I disagreed with it. Secure your copy before Quentin Tarantino makes off with the entire print run. *

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