The reverse of that is Agee's Disease, the determination to see greatness in what one approves of for doctrinal reasons (Roger Ebert has this too). How many must have come to Monsieur Verdoux, say, fresh off Agee hailing it the work of a free and restless spirit, and found a rather dour and didactic black comedy which isn't a patch on the similarly mordant Kind Hearts and Coronets, say. Or even as funny as The Boogie Man Will Get You.
I've had two books by two prominent reviewers for some months in, well, let's just say a room of my house where a few minutes' reading is often possible. One is a book of collected criticism; one a book compiled after a lifetime of writing criticism (which isn't done with yet). I like one of them a lot more than the other.
The introduction to Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies lavishes an Agee-level encomium on Farber's supposedly magical degree of insight: "Farber's prose was unflaggingly humorous, swift, relentlessly declarative, and everywhere intricately constructed. He possessed an unerring eye and ear for identifying and exposing cliches, anything remotely corny, and the dead on arrival." That is supposed to be an argument that builds, but I eventually came to see it as the supposed virtues in the second sentence undoing the real virtues of the first.
Farber could write clearly and amusingly, with none of Agee's wishful thinking that the movie is better than it is. And the early Farber has a terrific eye for what we would come to recognize later:
That's 1943, folks. At the height of Disney's ascendancy, Farber not only gets Warner Brothers cartoons but manages to actually put the names Jones, Freleng and McKimson into print, instead of assuming that Leon Schlesinger is the genius behind them all. A capsule review of The Thing instantly perceives everything that was essentially, gloriously cinematic about Hawks:Some of the best movies of the year are seven-minute cartoons called by names like All This and Rabbit Stew or The Fighting 69 1/2, which come on as unheralded transitions in the double bill and feature the notorious Bugs Bunny, a rabbit that not only performs physical feats of a Paul Bunyan magnitude but is equally sharp with his mind.
Given that the very next review is Losey's The Prowler ("sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well"), you can see why Farber is admired for being one of the first to see the virtues of what he named for all time "termite art versus white elephant art," that there's more likely to be a smart slice of reality and real cinematic ingenuity in a B shot under the studio radar than in a bloated big star superproduction with all its corporate compromises.fast, crisp and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atomic age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that cry for human blood as human babies cry for milk); Kenneth Tobey's fine, unpolished performance as a nice, clean, lecherous American Air Force officer
The problem is... that period of acuity doesn't seem to have lasted more than a decade. Maybe it's exacerbated by the fact that this anthology favors the arthouse 60s, more Bergman and Richard Lester than Val Lewton and Chuck Jones, but Farber seems jaded at a very early point. For me where this anthology begins to curdle is in a 1952 essay called "The Gimp":
The first part of this suggests that Farber objects to what Orson Welles called "dollar-book Freud" in the movies, the cheap psychologizing that could certainly be overdone in the 1940s. But the second part seems to be a repudiation of every form of sharpened technique descended from Citizen Kane (which he does indeed blame) and film noir— and really, does anyone want to make the case for flatly bright lighting in crime films? For action that isn't timed to be adequately suspenseful? For, say, George Macready to lighten it up a little in Gilda and try to seem more like a regular guy? What does Farber want here, exactly? When he gets down to cases, the movies he cites as the worst of it are things like Sunset Boulevard and A Streetcar Named Desire, where exactly what makes them so memorable is what bugs him for making them apparently less like a Raoul Walsh Warners picture from 1938.Whenever the modern film-maker feels that his movie has taken too conventional a direction and is neglecting "art," he need only jerk the Gimp-striong and— behold!— curious and exotic but "psychic" images are flashed before the audience, making you think such thoughts as 'The Hero has a mother complex"...
Over the past couple of years, one movie after another has been filled with low-key photography, shallow perspectives, screwy pantomime, ominously timed action, hollow-sounding voices...
Admittedly, Howard Hawks felt the same way— he famously said that Kazan in Streetcar had put back in the movies every bad acting habit he'd spent his life getting out of them— but when Farber applies this logic to things like The Third Man or The Asphalt Jungle, I feel he's lost touch with the movies. Asphalt Jungle may have a certain didactic structure, but fundamentally what it's about is how the criminal professional is also a human being and in some way that will slip him up in the end; it's as sharply drawn on that as anything in Bresson, a coolly pitiless yet not unempathetic movie about fate. If one objects in general to Huston's work tending to underline its points, nevertheless to me Asphalt Jungle is a near-perfect melding of that tendency with the realistic grit of film noir, with moments of character that will tear your heart out (the wife pleading, too late, for her doomed bigshot lawyer husband's attentions). And Farber objects, basically, to any moment in the movie that sets out its intentions and then delivers on them; it's not termite enough for him.
Pauline Kael said that "movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them." I feel at some point Farber got too cool for school, too hip for the room, he couldn't appreciate directors working consciously because he had enjoyed being the first one to discover unconscious art a decade earlier (not realizing that unconscious art almost never is, really). And the logical end result of that attitude is the kind of "movie buff" who laughs at serious old movies but loves the ineptitude of Ed Wood— which is to say, someone who doesn't really like movies much at all.
His style curdles at that point, too, producing impenetrable observations in something as arch and hard to read for long as Timese. Here's Farber on The Graduate:
One or two sharp observations jump out of this— the walks toward something observation is quite good, the bit about people darting encapsulates Nichols' style. But the rest, besides being too densely packed to make pleasurable reading, suggests someone who checked out of Nichols' movie very early on, is noting the outward characteristics of the character because he's given up on paying attention as any inward ones are revealed.A life of innocuousness marches over the spectator and greenhorn hero. A little stump of a man, dragging himself around with weighty reluctance (he walks toward something as though going away from it), Dustin Hoffman is laid out like an improbable menu. People are always darting into his periphery to point him out as a boy wonder, from captain of the track team to debating captain and literary editor. Benjamin, as it turns out, is Bill Bradley crossed with Denny Dimwit.
And if you aren't interested in The Graduate, it's hard to see why you should be going to the movies in 1968 at all— except maybe for a Raoul Walsh revival somewhere. Indeed, Farber turned to painting during this period. Too much of his writing suggests that he should have made it a clean break. In the end he became one of those cineastes who likes street-level naivete from Hollywood and forbiddingly high art from Europe (Fassbinder, Straub-Huillet), but despises any attempt by Hollywood to rise above mere animal cunning as being insufferably middlebrow. (An interview at the back spends an astonishingly long time berating The Far Country for the blocking of one scene, which somehow strikes Farber as inauthentic to the point of criminal.) That's a deadly combination of impossibly high standards with nostalgic sentimentalism, I think.
* * *
Andrew Sarris wrote a famous book, The American Cinema, which was an important work in its time and a pernicious one in the long term. Important in 1963 because it set down, with mock gravity which too many took seriously, a pantheon of major directors and a perdition full of those who didn't measure up. The pantheon wasn't so bad, directing serious attention at the likes of Hawks or Keaton, but the damned (Wyler, Wilder, etc.) deserved better, and more attention and serious consideration than they've gotten from blind pantheon-followers ever since.
To judge by You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet, a far longer volume published in 2000, no one would agree with the above more than Andrew Sarris. He's explicitly apologetic toward Wilder (in person and in the book) and the rest of the book seems his attempt to tone down the rhetoric and appreciate what there is to be appreciated among dozens of major figures and films. The tone is no longer polemical; it's more like a chat at dinner at a film convention, full of clear-eyed affection for the movies. Sarris knows when this or that movie is cutting corners, going for the cheap play, just as Farber does, but he isn't going to damn a filmmaker or an entire decade for it this time. His love for the movies is bigger than than any one failure of nerves with money on the line; he has the generous attitude that the filmmaker always has another chance at bat, and our job is to treasure the high points later and forgive the lesser ones.
It's that generous affection for the movies, happy when they turn out to be better than they could be, that makes Sarris' book an infinitely more congenial read. But it also makes him a sharper observer than the fed-up Farber ultimately is. Time and again, I found passages that seemed to capture something perfectly, almost epigrammatically, not so much explaining what I had missed as perfectly encapsulating what I'd always felt. Here's a particularly lovely bit from Sarris on Margaret Sullavan:
If you've seen her at all, you can see her perfectly in that....tragic but not maudlin, playful but not frivolous, all too wise but quickly weary of the consequences of wisdom. In her fearful eyes one can see the end from the very beginning, but, wait, the lips and chin are moving whimsically, and there is hope and humor for a very little while...
The book takes a range of subjects in turn, everything from major directors to screwball and film noir. In some ways I'm a little disappointed that Sarris is still plowing the ground of the big names he called out in 1963— there are long sections on Ford and Preston Sturges and Hitchcock when I might have wished for a keen, knowledgable analysis of Roy Del Ruth, or even Michael Curtiz, the great-movie maker who never seems to get credit as a great moviemaker. Yet there's always new insight to be found even on old subjects, and the Ford section begins not with westerns or social insights but with a lengthy appreciation of the mostly overlooked Ford-Will Rogers collaboration, contrasting it with Frank Borzage's version of Rogers:
And indeed, if anyone is rescued from semi-obscurity and given his overdue, it's Borzage here. (The inverse of Borzage is Robert Flaherty, a pantheon director in 1963 mentioned exactly once in passing in 2000.) Similarly, if there's any filmmaker I'm tired of reading about it's Griffith, who I suspect often had no idea what effect he was going after or how to get it, hence the incredible variability in his movies, from heartrending to stiff as a board. But Sarris makes me believe in Griffith for a moment in his last film, The Struggle:With Borzage, it is a matter of Rogers having a last fling. With Ford, it is a matter of Rogers making a last stand.
Not sure if I buy this or not— I can think of other reasons Griffith did things awkwardly from time to time— but the passion that makes such a case from such an obscure film is worth spending time with.There has never been a director anywhere who could have brought to The Struggle the intense feeling for family that Griffith gives us on the screen... When Skelly's wife has had her baby, Griffith leaves Skelly awkwardly bent over her bedside for so long that the audience begins to cringe from the forlorn helplessness of the male before the mystery of life.
