The Revolt of the Pendulum (26 page)

The Americans can do some weird and wonderful stuff, but they can’t do anything as bent as that. Us British have got Laurence Sterne in the background. Us British have got Jane Austen in
the background. Let’s face it: us British have got background in the background. Administrative talent – the talent to handle talent – might always be hard to find, but creative
talent has been omnipresent since Shakespeare wrote his first Oscar-winning original screenplays for Larry. Some of it has even been creative enough to do the whole thing in Britain, with no
concessions to the Americans at all.

That’s what Coogan says he wants to do, although the British press, incurably servile in this respect, finds it impossible to accept that a British filmmaker has dreams of anything except
Hollywood. Joe Wright, the director of
Atonement
, has announced that he wants to make more films in this country. The press will no doubt remind him that his wife, Rosamund Pike, wants to
make films in America. She is too lovely and gifted not to. Half a century ago, the equally lovely Patricia Roc was lashed by her contract to a small island, waiting for the British Film Industry
to materialise and save her. It never did.

By now, though, the penny has irretrievably dropped. Rosamund Pike will appear in American films, in that strange land where men make love with their clothes on, even to someone as beautiful as
her. If she appeared only in British films, she would hardly ever appear. The duality is the reality. But at least we can now see the reality for what it is. What makes the post-imperial era so
much more interesting than the imperial era is that it nurses fewer delusions. When I first saw
The Sound Barrier
I fell so hard for Ann Todd that I believed the script, and concluded that
the British really had been the first to go supersonic. But it was the Americans.

Even then, they had the financial power. Luckily they have not always used it as crassly as it suits the rest of us to suppose. For a miracle, the final script of
British Film Forever
didn’t end with a phone-in quiz. My ideal script does. Who insisted that
The Third Man
, perhaps the greatest film us British ever made, should have a scene to convince the audience
about the hideous effects of Harry Lime’s dud penicillin – the scene that gives the story its moral core? Was it (a) Carol Reed, (b) Graham Greene, or (c) the clumsily interfering
American producer David O. Selznick? But you already knew.

TLS
, September 28, 2007

Postscript

Out there in the remains of the old Empire, we were brought up on British war films. They were invariably less silly than the American equivalent. But they were fighting a
losing battle. John Mills was boring as the ordinary chap doing his bit, Richard Attenborough was boring as the apprehensive chap below decks, Richard Todd was boring as the heroic chap with his
hands on his hips delivering an inspiring address to all the other chaps. It helped that Richard Todd really had been a war hero, whereas John Wayne in
The Sands of Iwo Jima
had never left
Hollywood. But in the long run the American war movies had the excitement, and the British war movie finally reached its imploding apotheosis when David Puttnam made
Memphis Belle
, which was
all about how the Americans bombed Germany. In the long run, the money talked. British television, however, is better protected against global market forces. It can go to hell on its own tab. I
should add that my remarks about the decline of British television’s documentary style, though I think they have general validity, are subject to conspicuous exceptions. Under the guidance of
Laurence Rees, historical programmes about the wartime period have never been better, and just because most of the TV producers can’t tell the difference between good writing and rubbish
doesn’t mean that a one-off writer-performer like Jonathan Meades isn’t turning out work comparable with Betjeman’s at his height. But the general trend is downwards, and not
because visual techniques are inadequate. On the contrary, they get better all the time. But the language is in decline. No British television company could produce a series like
Californication
even if it wanted to. The imbalance might be redressed, however: predictions about creativity are often confounded. Nobody ever expected that American network TV, in all its
mediocrity, would be rivalled in power by the output of the cable channels whose competitive energy revitalized the networks before going on to conquer the world. In Spain, Pedro Almodo´var
became a film industry all by himself. It depends on the people. But when art is an industry, there are a lot of people to organize, and the shortage is always in the number of people who can do
the organizing. That’s where the money should be spent, if there is any.

MOVIE CRITICISM IN AMERICA

American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now
,
edited by Phillip Lopate

Since all of us are deeply learned experts on the movies even when we don’t know much about anything else, people wishing to make their mark as movie critics must either
be able to express opinions like ours better than we can, or else they must be in charge of a big idea, preferably one that can be dignified by being called a theory.

In
American Movie Critics
, a Library of America collection drawn from the work of almost 70 high-profile professional critics active at various times since their preferred medium was
invented the day before yesterday, most of the practitioners fall neatly into one category or the other.

It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who’s so funny about the
Star Wars
tradition of frightful hairstyles for women
(in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how
science-fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren’t just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation,
they’re also more explanatory.

The editor, Phillip Lopate, an essayist and film critic, has a catholic scope, and might not agree that the nontheorists clearly win out. They do, though, and one of the subsidiary functions
that this hefty compilation might perform – subsidiary, that is, to its being sheerly entertaining on a high level – is to help settle a nagging question.

In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it could be that I just don’t like it when a critic’s
hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available
from the critic’s mind at the price of decoding his prose.

For as long as the sonar-riddled soundtrack of
The Hunt for Red October
has me mouthing the word ‘ping’ while I keep reaching for the popcorn, I don’t want to hear that
what I’m seeing is an example of anything, or a step to anywhere, or a characteristic statement by anyone. What I’m seeing is a whole thing on its own. The real question is why none of
it saps my willingness to be involved, not even Sean Connery’s shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a Shoviet shubmarine, not even that spliced-in footage of the same
old Grumman F9F Panther that has been crashing into the aircraft carrier’s deck since the Korean War.

On the other hand, no prodigies of acting by Tom Cruise in
Eyes Wide Shut
, climaxed by his partial success in acting himself tall, convinced me for a minute that Stanley Kubrick, when he
made his bravely investigative capital work about the human sexual imagination, had the slightest clue what he was doing. In my nonhumble ticket purchaser’s opinion, the great Stanley K., as
Terry Southern called him, was, when he made
Eyes Wide Shut
, finally and irretrievably out to lunch. Does this discrepancy of reaction on my part mean that the frivolous movie was serious,
and the serious movie frivolous? Only, you might say, if first impressions are everything.

But in the movies they are. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic
persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right. By and large, it’s the movie itself
that tells you it means business. It does that by telling a story. No story, no movie. Robert Bresson only did with increasing slowness what other directors had done in a hurry. But when Bresson,
somewhere in the vicinity of Camelot, reached the point where almost nothing happening became nothing happening at all, you were gone. A movie has to glue you to your seat even when it’s
pretending not to.

As the chronological arrangement of this volume reveals, there were good American critics who realized this fact very early on. Several of the post-World War I critics will come as revelations
to anybody who assumed, as many of us have long been led to assume, that America was slow to discover the fruitfulness of its own cinema. The usual history runs roughly thus: even in the
Hollywood-haunted America of the years between the wars, the best critics concentrated on the work of obviously major artists, most of them foreign. Then, after World War II, generous young French
critics armed with the
auteur
theory discovered that a cluster, or pantheon, of directors within the Hollywood system had always been major artists too: Nicholas Ray was up there with Carl
Dreyer, and so on. After that, American film criticism grew up to match European maturity.

It took a theory to work the switch, and the essence of the
auteur
theory was that the director, the controlling hand, shaped the movie with his artistic personality even if it was made
within a commercial system as businesslike as Hollywood’s. This fact having at last been discovered, film criticism in America came of age. It’s a neat progression, but this book,
simply by its layout, shows it to be bogus.

Among the early critical big names, some were big names in other fields. Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg were bardic poets, Edmund Wilson was a high-flying man of letters, H. L. Mencken was the
perennial star reporter-cum-philologist of the American language. None of them had any real trouble figuring out what the commercial filmmakers were up to. Edmund Wilson didn’t just praise
Chaplin at the level due to him, but dispraised Hollywood ‘gag writers’ at the level due to them: he didn’t, that is, dismiss them out of hand, but pointed out, correctly, that
their chief concern was necessarily with storytelling structures that worked cinematically, and that there might be limitations involved in doing that. There were and there still are.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ ‘Five, four, three, two, one!’ ‘Take care of yourself up there/out there/in there.’ It doesn’t matter how formulaic the words sound,
because at those moments the movies are essentially still silent. The writing all goes into deciding who falls backward through the window, has his head ripped off by the alien, bares his bottom
amusingly to get his shots from the pretty nurse, or pouts tensely when the sonar says, ‘Ping!’

Mencken fancied himself above it all, but he had a penetrating understanding of star power. Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his
poetry. (‘The craziest, wildest, shivery movie that has come wriggling across the silversheet of a cinema house,’ he wrote of
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, his grammar flapping
irrepressibly in the rhetorical wind.) The important consideration here is that everything these superior minds approved of in the foreign art film they also looked for diligently in the American
industrial product, and were touchingly glad to find any signs of its flowering.

They were more likely to find those signs, however, if they weren’t functioning as general commentators on the arts or as visiting firemen from ritzier boroughs, but had a regular job
reviewing the product as it came out. Hence the first critic in the lineup likely to knock the reader sideways is Otis Ferguson, who started reviewing movies for the
New Republic
in 1934 and
kept it up until the year before his lamentably early death at the age of thirty-six. Had he lived, none of the later pantheon aberration might have got a purchase, because he was perfectly capable
of seeing not only that some of the American movies were terrific, but that even the best of them often took a lot more than a director to put together. This last bit was the key perception that
the pantheon’s attendant incense burners later managed to obscure with wreaths of perfumed smoke, but before we get to that, let’s be sure of just how good Ferguson was.

As a first qualification, Ferguson could see that there was such a thing as a hierarchy of trash. He enjoyed
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
even where it was corny, because the corn
(‘execrable . . . and I like it’) was being dished out with brio. This basic capacity for delight underlay the vigour of his prose when it came to the hierarchy of quality, which he
realized had its starting point in the same basement as the trash. A Fred Astaire movie was made on the same bean-counting system as a North-West Frontier epic in which dacoits and dervishes lurked
treacherously on the back lot, and Astaire wasn’t even a star presence compared with a Bengal lancer like Gary Cooper. ‘As an actor he is too much of a dancer, tending toward pantomime;
and as a dancer he is occasionally too ballroomy. But as a man who can create figures, intricate, unpredictable, constantly varied and yet simple, seemingly effortless . . . he brings the strange
high quality of genius to one of the baser and more common arts.’

Decades later, Arlene Croce wrote about Astaire at greater length, and possibly in greater technical depth, but when she got the snap of his dancing into a sentence, she was following a line
that Ferguson had already laid down. Hear how he rounds it out: ‘Fred Astaire, whatever he may do in whatever picture he is in, has the beat, the swing, the debonair and damn-your-eyes
violence of rhythm, all the gay contradiction and irresponsibility, of the best thing this country can contribute to musical history, which is the best American jazz.’ Take out the word
‘gay’ and it could be something written now, although there aren’t many who could write it. Look at the perfect placement of that word ‘violence’, for example.
It’s not enough to have the vocabulary. You have to have the sensory equipment. You have to spot the way Astaire, in the full flight of a light-foot routine, could slap the sole of his shoe
into the floor as if he were rubbing out a bunch of dust mites.