Saints and Sycophants

Though the frenzy's wearing out, interest in film criticism holds firm these days. It has even acquired a patina of academic respectability and professional pride. There has always been a handful of good critics writing on film. Until recent times, however, most newspaper critics were 'altered' sportswriters and second-string drama men, and most magazine film writers--failed book critics.

The good film critics haven't changed. There are still only a few, mostly the same ones who wrote ten years ago. But there is also a slough of college-educated hipsters and slick-journalist hypesters who probably wanted to be film critics since the time when they scanned their first blurb. And for no better reason than wanting to be a blurb themselves someday.

So, whereas a year ago I could partially agree with enthusiastic sorts who waxed panegyrically over the legitimacy film has gained via the written word, I doubt whether anyone with a clear head and a stake in the art would do so today. Film criticism is reaching new audiences, and out of the deluge doubtless some good will come. But I don't see it meaningfully broadening out.

There is now more attention to formal details, greater openness to alien and avant garde forms. But there is also laxity at the most basic levels: at judging whether films being made are simply interesting enough to an audience involved in cultural and social action, whether the men who make the films are interested in changing or analyzing the world--even as small a part of it as Hollywood. The agonizing tension communicated by the old crusaders--Agee, MacDonald, Warshow--is now lacking. Since the educated came to recognize that talented men have already created lasting works of cinema art, it's become more acceptable to say, sniff, that Dreyer is a poet in light; or, sigh, that John Ford is the lyricist of the American past. Just sit back, go to sleep, and watch the once subversively free art form ossify for want of criticism which demands its best.

What brings these doom prognostications to the fore are two books which, the ads would have it, give us some of the best cultural criticism of our time. The first, Film 70-71, is a collection of reviews by the most quoted of movie reviewers, the members of the National Society of Film Critics, who write mainly for New York-based national magazines. The one big exception is Gary Arnold of The Washington Post. He's the first daily critic to make the membership list; as he's a Kael protege of some renown, I'd love to know the politics of that nomination.

If it seems odd to emphasize personal jockeying, it won't after you've read the book. For only the personalities emerge from it with some clarity and vigor. You may not find much important about The Virgin and the Gypsy and Five Easy Pieces from Penelope Gilliatt's and Jacob Brackman's respective reviews in the New Yorker and Esquire, but you will remember that the critics write long summaries in seamless prose, and are apt to get a bit drippy when the right nerve-end is touched. You might remember even more: that Gilliatt likes cultural detachment and civility (in order to justify Peckinpah she evokes Brecht, for God's sake.) Or that Brackman had his adolescence in the late '50's, and never has recovered. After reading both of them, you'll have spent some pleasant moments with fine company. But the harsher might wonder what brought them to this business in the first place.

I wonder. I also wonder how such excitable young men as Jay Cocks and Paul Zimmerman, able to praise Frank Perry or Paul Williams as film masters at a moment's notice, acquired positions at Time and Newsweek held by tougher fellows long ago--James Agee and John O'Hara. Or, why doesn't Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. deem film important enough to bring some of his secular history to it to make for a relevant panache? And why did Joseph Morgenstern, one of the best of the lot, one of the few with human concerns broader than Panavision, drop films to write social commentary. Perhaps I know the answer to that one. Perhaps he wanted to preserve his conscience and sanity from a film context too generally frivolous.

The good people--Kael (The New Yorker), Hatch (Nation), Kauffmann (New Republic), and Sarris (Village Voice)--each have an axe to grind, and make no bones about grinding it. Kael has a perversely radical culture-consciousness, loving most those films which, rooted to a trashy crowd-pleasing base, manage to transcend it. Simon is a classicist, and treats film with the same stern regard as theater; his occasional fault is literary pretension. Hatch and Kauffmann retain the social concern of the more serious '50's liberals, while Sarris's devotion to the Great God Cinema is at least more passionate and entertaining than that of his film-school acolytes.

But what of the others? The Atlantic's Denby, free-lancer Brad Darrach, Saturday Review's Alpert, Life's Schickel, Playboy's Bruce Williamson? They're all likable writers, all riding home on their easiest talents, with little seeming to worry them beyond filling a page with sprightly opinionation--devil take the relevant focus. Film criticism has reached its premature middle-age, gaining pot bellies and pot heads instead of mature vitality.

Stacked up against these losers from the NSFC, Wilfred Sheed's virtues look better and better. First, he at least has some goal for the kind of art he likes: he hopes it will preserve vital distinctions in human consciousness. If it is a claim less grandiose than that of Kael or Simon, he applies it to more different kinds of subject matter. Second, he has what it takes to know when to tub-thump hard, and when to leave well enough alone. It's called "Balance". Third, he's a better writer than even the smoothest of the slick mags' stable. His style is extremely personal: mostly wryly clever, but sometimes almost lyrical. And it moves as cleanly as a well-oiled trip-lock.

Finally, Sheed is also a novelist, privy to the nuances of atmosphere and feeling that only he can touch. His most famous (and respected) novel, Max Jamison tells of the gradual decline of an honest critic. Jamison continually embodies the critical faculty as an active presence, beset by New York critical politics and mass taste. He has no great philosophic commitment--which may be why, in Sheed's world, he is only a critic, and Sheed only a minor novelist. He does have a steadfast curiosity, a determined belief in the sublime and the perfect.

The Morning After is a compilation (by no means complete) of Sheed's own film, theater, book reviews and social comment; also, autobiographical essays and further writings on the situations of writers and reviewers themselves. Sheed is very contemporary in appreciating forms which are fragmented, or artworks specialized in their aim (though he may not--with good reason--give the latter wholehearted support). But he is most interested in analyzing the few experiences he deals with--be they artworks or political powerplays--which contain a grain of original truth in their reflection of contemporary life-trials. Even when reminiscing on his own childhood sports career, Sheed is not concerned with the sweaty playing-field grit of the sports columnist, or the heroicizing rhetoric of Mailer's "King of the Hill." Instead, he examines the extent to which sports made him, an English boy, into an American. He concludes that the socializing effects of the competitions were limited. Everything changes off the field.

No matter what he thinks of himself as a creative talent, Sheed--like Jamison--considers criticism a secondary art. This is, at first, disappointing to seekers after fire and advocacy. It certainly must have disconcerted Dwight MacDonald followers when Sheed took over the Esquire film column, which Sheed held between 1967 and 1970. Ice and detachment are apt, after generations of disinterested dons, to seem way-stations on the road to irrelevance. But in Sheed's practice, his Catholic temperament and catholicity of taste lead to a greater freedom for play with the unworthy than that of other critics. Since his playfulness is tempered by good judgement, he manages to bring genuine wit to an often gassy craft.

Sheed is not without sins, original and otherwise. Several of his film reviews are "automatic criticism," relating not to the work at hand but to mere opinionation. A review of Persona is remarkably evasive, a Bergman beatification with nothing but gratitude to show for itself. Attacking film violence, he hits some home truths about its brutal, de-personalizing necessities, but is too general and removed from specific detail to be persuasive. One of his Common weal theater pieces is, in fact, a conscious (and hilarious) demonstration of how unexamined criticism comes to be written when the drama considered is flaccid.

However, Sheed can't seem to write a book review lacking some artful penetration. His Couples piece shows him at his best: his careful analysis of formal structure as it supports textual meaning; his defense of those meanings by the literalness of their exposition and their felt impact; his statement of the novel's limits and worth in view of its author's career and its readers' lives. While Sheed is intent on letting the novel speak for itself, his writing undercuts and bolsters his subject at appropriate turns: "But enough meaning is enough. The book can also be read simply as a fiendish compendium of exurban manners--the dinner party scenes, the protocol of adultery, the care and neglect of children..." And though Sheed's opinions are hard-edged, he is never pedantic, or in any other way academic.

Sheed's political writings blatantly reveal his limits. An "I-am-only-a-writer" stance is thrust into the foreground, whether he describes Eugene McCarthy, or the other '68 election tragedies of Los Angeles and Chicago. His examination of personalities is revealing, but insulated from any examination of issues. Here, Sheed's Commonweal Catholicism restricts him as much as he claims it did Eugene. One gets the feeling that politics doesn't interest him excessively; that his basic emotional reaction to a political situation is so personal, and his intellectual impulse so morally abstract, that the modesty of the man for once restrains his criticism's impact. He has none of the ability to grasp the mass psychosis that a man like Mailer has. (It should be noted that he recognizes the usefulness of Mailer's talent, but sticks to his own game.)

Aside from his purely literary abilities, Sheed's work demonstrates the combined virtues of classical education and traditional liberalism. Discredited in politics and literature, G.K. Chesterton may inhabit mote-lined library shelves, but Sheed remembers the man's wiser aphorisms and brings them to bear on current culture. Whittaker Chambers may have been an abhorrent character, but he wasn't totally manic, and Sheed notes that his trial testimonies stand up pretty well years later. As artistic and social fads come and go, Sheed will probably remain, looking at them slightly askance, and somewhere finding a transcendent meaning.

For Sheed is, finally, despite all the Catholic apologia, an original--not a leader or philosopher of any school. He is both tough-minded and entertaining. Read The Morning After, and "The Good Word" in the Sunday Times. Pray that he tackles films once more. And forgive him his forfeits and trespasses.