Out Of The Past, Back To The Future

I just read Do The Movies Have A Future? by film critic David Denby.  The title is a bit of a misnomer, since the book is mostly a reprint of (rewritten) pieces first published in The New Yorker.  As such, it's not bad, but it's a book to be enjoyed piecemeal.

He arranges chapters according to certain categories, such as trends, stars, director and critics.  The best stuff is found in the essays, as opposed to the reviews.  There's a nice piece on appreciating Joan Crawford in an age when it's hard to take her seriously. I also liked his look at Victor Fleming, a man's man of a director who made some memorable films in his day yet is so often forgotten by the critics when they look back at the studio era.

But the piece that makes the book worthwhile is his discussion of fellow critic Pauline Kael.  This is because it's personal.  Kael had spent decades in the wilderness before becoming a--perhaps the--major film critic.  Suddenly, at 50, she was an oracle, writing the reviews everyone talked about, helping to form the opinions of a new generation of critics.

And she didn't just do this over a distance, she often did it directly.  Many young people, usually men, would send her letters or samples of their work, and if she saw something, she'd invite them over.  She would give her opinions, good or bad, on their work, goad them to do better, and often recommend them for jobs at various papers and periodicals.  This group was often referred to as the "Paulettes," and Denby was one.  After he convinced her of his worth, she got him a job writing on film for the Atlantic.

It could be intoxicating to be in her presence, but also dangerous.  She was funny and smart, but quite insistent that her opinion was the only one that mattered.  You could disagree with her for a while, but if you kept it up you'd soon be out of the charmed circle. Many of her discoveries who didn't leave on their own were eventually cut off--as happened to Denby a few years after he met her.  In fact, she made a pronouncement: criticism wasn't for him.  Denby, needless to say, wasn't thrilled, but he didn't quit.  For the rest of her life (she died in 2001--Denby wrote this piece looking back), she was cold toward him.

Denby's portrait is mostly positive, praising her lively, powerful prose, but he's hardly blind to her flaws. (He also sees flaws in his early writing, too easily following Kael's style.) For instance, she preferred the rough to the smooth, which made her suspicious of work that was too controlled, and sometimes made her feel highbrow work was lifeless.  And while her take--often raising up work that other critics might have dismissed as pop, and questioning those that followed modern pieties--was helpful coming out of the tradition she did, it wasn't so helpful by the end of her career, when pop had decidedly taken over, and the new generation was seduced by it.

Denby got in at a time when the film world--and the critics who wrote about it--was hopping as it never had before, and perhaps never will again.  Kael's books, generally collections of her reviews and essays, were bestsellers.  I doubt the same thing will happen to Denby.  Maybe a better title would be "Does Movie Reviewing Have A Future?"