The Revolt of the Pendulum (27 page)

Ferguson’s sensitivity to the standard output made him more adventurous, not less, when it came to the indisputable works of art. Sometimes it made him adventurous enough to dispute them.
He wasn’t taken in by the original or the re-edit of Eisenstein’s movie about Mexico, which he could see was an incorrigible heap of random footage that would have continued to go
nowhere indefinitely if it hadn’t been forcibly removed from the master’s control. ‘A way to be a film critic for years was to holler about this rape of great art, though it
should have taken no more critical equipment than common sense to see that whatever was cut out, its clumping repetitions and lack of film motion could not have been cut in.’

With a good notion of how hard it is to make ordinary film narrative unnoticeably subtle (‘story, story, story – or, How can we do it to them so they don’t know beforehand that
it’s being done?’), Ferguson was properly suspicious of any claims that
Citizen Kane
represented an advance in technique. He admired it, but not as a breakthrough: ‘In the
line of the narrative film, as developed in all countries but most highly on the West Coast of America, it holds no great place.’ A harsh judgment, but Ferguson had put in the groundwork to
back it up, and Welles, after the first flush of his apotheosis, might have reached the same conclusion:
The Magnificent Ambersons
, even in its unfinished state, is a clear and admirable
attempt by the boy genius to get a grip on the technical heritage he had thought to supersede.

One could go on quoting from Ferguson, and expatiating on the quotations, until hell looked like the set of
Ice Station Zebra
: there is a book buried in every essay. But the same is true
of every good critic. The poet Melvin B. Tolson, who wrote about movies for the African-American newspaper
The Washington Tribune
, saw
Gone With the Wind
when it came out and reviewed
it in terms that could have been expanded into a handbook for the civil rights movement twenty years before the event. One look at the relevant piece will tell you why a critic has to know about
the world as well as the movies: Tolson could see that
Gone With the Wind
was well made. But he could also see that the script was a crass and callous rewriting of history, a Klan pamphlet
in sugared form, a racial insult.

If, then, the selection from James Agee shines out of these pages a bit less than you might expect, it isn’t because he’s lost his lustre; it’s because there’s so much
light from those around him. And Agee, as well as possessing the comprehensive intelligence that the critical heritage had already made a requirement, also possessed an extra quality that we later
on, and perhaps dangerously, came to expect from everybody: he had the wit. At the time, it was a first when he wrote this punch line to his review of Billy Wilder’s sodden saga about
dipsomania,
The Lost Weekend
: ‘I undershtand that liquor interesh: innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough.’ Today, you can easily imagine Anthony
Lane of the
New Yorker
doing that. Lane, being British, isn’t in the book, which is a bit like not letting Tiger Woods play at St Andrews. And Peter Bogdanovich – surely a key
figure, and not just as an archivist, in the appreciation of American movies – is another conspicuous absentee. But it’s a sign of a good anthology when you start bitching about Who
Isn’t In It – not a bad title for a book by Bogdanovich, come to think of it.

And Stanley Kauffmann isn’t in it enough. A film critic still in action after more than half a century (most of that time spent at the
New Republic
), he was the one who took
Ferguson’s approach, the only approach that really matters, and developed it to its full potential. He knew a lot about every department of the business, but especially acting. He was kind
but firm about Marilyn Monroe in
The Misfits
: ‘Her hysterical scene near the end will seem virtuoso acting to those who are overwhelmed by the fact that she has been induced to
shout.’ He could see what was wonderful about Antoni-oni’s
L’Avventura
. So could I, at the time; but later, after suffering through
Blowup
and
Zabriskie
Point
, I started to forget what had once thrilled me. Here is the reminder: ‘Obviously it is not real time or we would all have to bring along sandwiches and blankets; but a difference of
10 seconds in a scene is a tremendous step toward veristic reproduction rather than theatrical abstraction.’ (And, he forgot to add, it gives you 10 more seconds to look at a veristic
close-up of Monica Vitti, who did to us in those days what Monica Bellucci is doing to a new generation of horny male intellectuals right now.)

Kauffmann had an acute sensitivity to the story behind the technique. It meant that he didn’t fail to spot real quality, and it also meant that he was rarely fooled by empty virtuosity.
His classic review of Max Ophuls’s supposed masterpiece,
Lola Montes
, a review mercifully included here as the finale to his oddly meagre selection, tells you in advance everything
that would be wrong about the
auteur
theory. Kauffmann could see that
Lola Montes
was indeed the supreme example of Ophuls’s characteristic style of the travelling shot that
went on forever. But Kauffmann could also see that even if the title role of the bewitching courtesan had been incarnated by a bewitching actress – and Martine Carol, through no fault of her
own, was no more bewitching than a bus driver in Communist Kiev – the movie would still have been ruined by its dumb happy-hooker script. In other words, no story.

In Hollywood, for a true masterpiece like
Letter From an Unknown Woman
, Ophuls had had the writers, the actors and the right kind of head office breathing down his neck. On
Lola
Montes
he was out on his own. The
auteur
theory depended on the idea that any pantheon director had an artistic personality so strong that it was bound to express itself whatever the
compromising circumstances. But all too often, the compromising circumstances helped to make the movie good. That, however, was a tale too complicated to tell for those commentators who wanted to
get into business as deep thinkers.

The likelihood that to think deep meant to think less didn’t strike any of them until their critical mass movement had worn itself out. Some useful work was done – movies by a
cigar-chomping, hard-swearing maverick like Samuel Fuller were resurrected long enough for us all to find out why they had been forgotten – but the absurdities were all too obvious. John
Ford’s late clunker
7 Women
was praised because it was ‘Fordian’. The adjective they should have been looking for was ‘unwatchable’. Howard Hawks’s
Hatari!
, in which the same old Hawks plot about John Wayne and the drunken friend and the no-bull broad and the young hotshot and the cackling old-timer was eked out with footage of rhinos
and buffaloes, turned out to be quintessentially ‘Hawksian’. And so it went, but it couldn’t go on for long, because unless the undiscovered Fordian–Hawksian masterpiece was
actually any good, it never got any further than the film societies. As for the articles and the anthologies and the monographs, they never could outweigh the aggregate of
ad hoc
judgments
coming from individual critics. Those judgments might have been right or wrong, but they were seldom crazy, unless the critic had a theory of his or her own.

Some did. Robert Warshow, yet another cultural commentator who died young, wrote a famous long article (which Lopate includes) called ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’. Citing but not
evoking scores of movies to prove that the American gangster is doomed by the pressures of a society that worships success, it says little in a long space, thereby reversing the desirable
relationship of form and content, which, as we have seen, had already been established by critics with fewer pretensions to a sociological overview.

The same could be said, and said twice, for Parker Tyler’s equally celebrated long article purporting to show that
Double Indemnity
was always psychologically much more complex than
was ever thought possible by those who made it or us who watched. You might have deduced that the claims adjuster Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) was secretly hot for the insurance salesman Neff (Fred
MacMurray), but could you ever have guessed that Neff was driven to crime because he had
failed
sexually with Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck)? And there we all were thinking he’d succeeded.
But stay! For Tyler has some wordplay yet to deploy. ‘Neff, let us assume, wants permanent insurance against Keyes’s subtle inquisition into the ostensible claims of his sexual
life.’ Oh, come on, let’s not assume it.

But we don’t have to fight for justice very hard, because the fight has already been won by the sanity brigade. The late Vincent Canby could have won it by himself. There might have been
even more here from such informed yet readable solo acts – David Denby, Kenneth Turan, David Thomson and A. O. Scott are only a few of the many recent exponents on the bill – if the
worthy bores had not been given their democratic chance, but hey, that’s America. Nevertheless, Lopate would have done better to stick to the principle that brevity, up to the point where
compression collapses, invariably carries more implication than expansiveness ever can. But he might not have recognized the principle, even while dealing with the best of its consequences. There
have been plenty of editors who didn’t get it. The legendary William Shawn of the
New Yorker
never grasped that he was giving Pauline Kael too much room for her own good.

Although Kael knew comparatively little about how movies got made, she was unbeatable at taking off from what she had seen. But beyond that, she would take off from what she had written, and
there was a new theory every two weeks. A lot of her theories had to do with loves and hates. She thought Robert Altman was a genius. He can certainly make a movie, but if it hasn’t got a
script, then he makes
Pret-a-Porter.
That’s one of the most salutary lessons of this book: what makes the movie isn’t just who directed it, or who’s in it, it’s how
it relates to the real world.

That principle really starts to matter when it comes to movies that profess to understand history, and thus to affect the future. Several quite good critics in various parts of the world knew
there was something seriously wrong with Steven Spielberg’s
Munich,
but they didn’t know how to take it down. If they could have put the lessons of this book together, they would
have found out how.
Munich
might have survived being directed by someone who knows about nothing except movies. But it was also written by people who don’t know half enough about
politics. That was why the crucial meeting of Golda Meir’s cabinet went for nothing. The movie could have got by with its John Woo-style gunfight face-offs, but without an articulate laying
out of the arguments it was a waste of effort.

Similarly, if you know too much about the movies but not enough about the world, you won’t be able to see that
Downfall
is dangerously sentimental. Realistic in every observable
detail, it is nevertheless a fantasy to the roots, because the pretty girl who plays the secretary looks shocked when Hitler inveighs against the Jews. It comes as a surprise to her.

Well, it couldn’t have; but to know why that is so, you have to have read a few books. No matter how many movies you have seen, they won’t give you the truth of the matter, because
it can’t be shown as action. To know what can’t be shown by the gag writers, however, you have to know about a world beyond the movies. But the best critics do, as this book proves;
because when we say that the non-theorists are the better writers, that’s what we mean. That extra edge that a good writer has is a knowledge of the world, transmuted into a style.

New York Times
, June 4, 2006

Postscript

Like any other movie by Stanley Kubrick, the dire
Eyes Wide Shut
has its explicators who can tell you why every apparent clumsiness is a piercing insight. But
Frederic Raphael, who wrote the screenplay, has since told us the story of how Kubrick encouraged Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to improvise ‘beyond the script’. Beware the director who
thinks that his actors will find, out of their own linguistic resources, a naturalism that is not there on the page. To return to the exemplary case of Robert Altman, there is a wealth of
unintended hilarity to be obtained from those commentators who can’t see that the crucial difference between
Gosford Park
and
Preˆt-a`-Porter
is that whereas Julian
Fellowes wrote everything in the first movie, nobody wrote anything in the second. Luckily the best American critics, careful writers themselves, have usually been proof against such wilful
deafness.

SHOW ME THE HORROR

‘There are more bad director’s movies than bad producer’s movies.’

Anon

A standard piece of Hollywood wisdom would have us believe that there are more bad director’s movies than bad producer’s movies. I first heard this maxim from
Marty Elfand, the producer of
David
, directed by my friend Bruce Beresford. Later on, Beresford became celebrated throughout the film industry because of the Oscar he failed to receive for
Driving Miss Daisy
, which set a strange precedent through being honoured as Best Film while its director was not even invited to the ceremony. The host, Billy Crystal, did something to
restore sanity by sardonically referring to
Driving Miss Daisy
as ‘the film that directed itself’. Beresford had been through madder moments than that:
David
, for example,
which was reviewed as if its director had set out with the intention of destroying Richard Gere’s career. Thus launched into a river of acid, the movie sank immediately. I was there while it
was still being built. The movie was in the last stages of its studio schedule at Pinewood. Later, on location in southern Italy, which was deputising for the Holy Land, the project was to be
fatally compromised by acts of God. In that part of southern Italy, for the first time since the last Ice Age, it snowed in April for weeks on end. The snow formed deep drifts on the pitiless
deserts of Palestine, thus restricting complicated action sequences beyond credibility. Taking into consideration that God was practically the hero of the picture, it seems reasonable to conclude
that He had visited his wrath on the project for a sound Old Testament reason: human presumption would be conspicuously punished, so that nobody could miss the message.