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American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now (paperback)

“American Movie Critics has earned its place in the library of any devoted cinephile, and on the shelves of readers interested in the development of the critical essay in America.”— San Francisco Chronicle

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Interviews “She was a writer, and her subject was movies”—new documentary celebrates Pauline Kael ahead of her 100th birthday
February 17, 2021

Interviews “A project of self-transformation”—Benjamin Moser on the life and work of Susan Sontag
September 25, 2019

Interviews David Rieff on how his mother, Susan Sontag, lived as “a citizen of the Republic of Letters”
September 17, 2019

Now available in an expanded paperback edition, American Movie Critics is an anthology of unparalleled scope that charts the rise of movies as art, industry, and mass entertainment. Beginning in the silent era—with poets Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg hailing the new medium and Edmund Wilson paying tribute to Chaplin’s Gold Rush—the collection traces the rapid evolution of the medium in an age of tumultuous political and social changes. Here are the great movie critics who forged a forceful vernacular idiom for talking about the new art: Otis Ferguson in the 1930s finding in James Cagney “the dignity of the genuine worn as easily as his skin”; James Agee in the 1940s on American war films and the advent of Italian neo-realism; Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Vincent Canby, and others from what Lopate calls “the golden age of movie criticism” from the 1950s through the ’70s, a period when enthusiasms ran high, and arguments over style and content often took on a larger-than-life quality. Here too are the finest film reviewers on the contemporary scene, including Richard Schickel, Roger Ebert, and Manohla Dargis.

New to this edition are selections featuring Stephanie Zacharek, Nathan Lee, and David Bordwell that highlight the influence of Internet-based criticism and the impact of new technology on film-viewing.

Joining the full-time film writers are many distinguished American authors weighing in on a range of cinematic experiences, including Ralph Ellison, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Brendan Gill, and John Ashbery. Together they define an often underappreciated genre of American writing, a tradition filled with the “energy, passion, and analytical juice” that for Lopate mark the best in movie criticism.

Phillip Lopate, editor, is an essayist, novelist, and poet, whose books include Bachelorhood; Against Joie de Vivre; Portrait of My Body; and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. He has edited The Art of the Personal Essay and, for The Library of America, Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. His selected film criticism appeared in Totally Tenderly Tragically, and he currently serves on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.

Project support for this volume was provided by: The Sidney J. Weinberg, Jr. Foundation
News & Views

Interviews “She was a writer, and her subject was movies”—new documentary celebrates Pauline Kael ahead of her 100th birthday
February 17, 2021

Interviews “A project of self-transformation”—Benjamin Moser on the life and work of Susan Sontag
September 25, 2019

Interviews David Rieff on how his mother, Susan Sontag, lived as “a citizen of the Republic of Letters”
September 17, 2019

Interviews Sanford Schwartz on the “emotional rightness and believability” of Pauline Kael’s film criticism
June 18, 2019

Interviews Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way
April 18, 2018
Table of Contents

I. Pioneers: The Silent Era and the Transition to Sound
Vachel Lindsay
The Photoplay of Action
The Artistic Position of Douglas Fairbanks and The Thief of Bagdad Production
Hugo Münsterberg
The Function of the Photoplay
Carl Sandburg
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Nanook of the North
A Woman of Paris
Manhandled
The Temptress
What Price Glory?
Robert E. Sherwood
The Ten Commandments
Greed
Edmund Wilson
The New Chaplin Comedy (The Gold Rush)
H. L. Mencken
from Appendix from Moronia: Note on Technic
H.D.
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Alexander Bakshy
The “Talkies”
Harry Alan Potamkin
“A” in the Art of the Movie and Kino
Remarks on D. W. Griffith
Gilbert Seldes
from An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies
Pare Lorentz
Anna Christie
Good Art, Good Propaganda
William Troy
King Kong
The Invisible Man
Cecilia Ager
Parachute Jumper
Hallelujah I’m a Bum
Ladies They Talk About
Our Betters
King Kong
Night Flight
Camille
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
Personal Property
Another Dawn
A Day at the Races
André Sennwald
The Devil Is a Woman
The Future of Color
Rudolf Arnheim
The Film Critic of Tomorrow
Lincoln Kirstein
Dancing in Films
Meyer Levin
The Charge of the Light Brigade

II. Masters and Moonlighters: The Late 1930s, World War II, and the Postwar Era
Otis Ferguson
It’s Up to the Kiddies (Stand Up and Cheer)
Stars and Garters (Belle of the Nineties)
Artist Among the Flickers (Three Songs about Lenin)
Arms and Men (Lives of a Bengal Lancer)
Words and Music (Broadway Melody of 1936)
In a Dry Month (Hands across the Table)
Cagney: Great Guy
Through the Looking Glass (Stage Door)
Walt Disney’s Grimm Reality (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
Hitchcock in Hollywood (Foreign Correspondent)
For Better, For Worse (Time in the Sun)
Handsome Is . . . (High Sierra)
Citizen Welles
Welles and His Wonders: II
Melvin B. Tolson
Gone with the Wind Is More Dangerous Than Birth of a Nation
Paul Goodman
Griffith and the Technical Innovations
James Agee
The Song of Bernadette
Annual Wrap-Up of 1944
A Great Film (The Story of G.I. Joe)
The Lost Weekend
Shoeshine
Day of Wrath
Siegfried Kracauer
Introduction to From Caligari to Hitler
Robert Warshow
The Gangster as Tragic Hero
A Feeling of Sad Dignity (Limelight)
Ralph Ellison
The Shadow and the Act
Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites
Got a Match?

III. The Golden Age of Movie Criticism: The 1950s through the 70s
Barbara Deming
The Reluctant War Hero (Casablanca)
Manny Farber
Underground Films
White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art
Kitchen Without Kitsch (with Patricia Patterson)
Parker Tyler
Double into Quadruple Indemnity
Warhol’s New Sex Film (Blue Movie)
Eugene Archer
A King in New York
Arlene Croce
Pather Panchali and Aparajito
A Note on La Belle, La Perfectly Swell, Romance
Jonas Mekas
The Creative Joy of the Independent Film-Maker
Renoir and Plotless Cinema
Marilyn Monroe and the Loveless World (The Misfits)
On Andy Warhol’s Sleep
Not Everything That Is Fun Is Cinema (A Hard Day’s Night)
On Bresson and Une Femme Douce
Stanley Kauffmann
The Misfits
L’Avventura
Lola Montes
Andrew Sarris
The Birds
La Guerre Est Finie
Falstaff and A Countess from Hong Kong
Science Fiction: The Forbin Project
Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder Reconsidered
John Wayne’s Strange Legacy
Susan Sontag
The Imagination of Disaster
Pauline Kael
Band of Outsiders
Funny Girl
Trash, Art, and the Movies
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Dwight Macdonald
8 1/2
Renata Adler
Cold Blood: Cheap Fiction
Donald Phelps
The Runners
Vincent Canby
Midnight Cowboy
The Wild Bunch
Easy Rider
Z
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Patton
Zabriskie Point
Is Fiddler More De Mille Than Sholem Aleichem?
William S. Pechter
These Are a Few of My Favorite Things
Buñuel
Molly Haskell
The Woman’s Film
Sophisticated Interiors
Melancholy Males or Movies About Men Turning 50
Paul Schrader
Notes on Film Noir
John Simon
The Last Picture Show
Jaundice of the Soul (Chinatown)
Brendan Gill
Blue Notes
Richard Corliss
M*A*S*H
James Baldwin
from The Devil Finds Work (Lady Sings the Blues)
Penelope Gilliatt
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

IV. Reconsiderations and Renegade Perspectives: The 1980s to the Present
Walter Kerr
The Keaton Quiet
J. Hoberman
Bad Movies
The Film Critic of Tomorrow, Today
Stanley Cavell
Cons and Pros (The Lady Eve)
Richard Schickel
Blue Velvet
Sam Fuller: Movie Bozo
Armond White
Rebirth of a Nation (Do the Right Thing)
Malcolm X’d Again (Malcolm X)
David Denby
The Real Thing
Geoffrey O’Brien
The Italian System
Paul Rudnick (aka Libby Gelman-Waxner)
A Boy Named Sioux (Dances with Wolves)
David Thomson
Cary Grant
Howard Hawks
bell hooks
Cool Cynicism: Pulp Fiction
Kenneth Turan
Titanic Sinks Again (Spectacularly)
Jonathan Rosenbaum
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Eyes Wide Shut)
Roger Ebert
Trouble in Paradise
Stuart Klawans
Gladiator
James Harvey
Imitation of Life
Kent Jones
Of Love and the City (In the Mood for Love)
John Ashbery
On Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim
Carrie Rickey
Ratpacks and Pack Males
Gilberto Perez
Saying “Ain’t” and Playing “Dixie”: Rhetoric and Comedy in Judge Priest
A. O. Scott
Good and Evil Locked in Violent Showdown (The Passion of the Christ)
The Most Overrated Film of the Year (Sideways)
Manohla Dargis
High Hopes (The Royal Tenenbaums)
Not-So-Nice Kitty (The Cat in the Hat)
Once Disaster Hits, It Seems Never To End (A History of Violence)
Stephanie Zacharek
United 93
Nathan Lee
To Catch a Predator (Zodiac)
David Bordwell
New Media and Old Storytelling
Contributors

Renata Adler
James Agee
Cecilia Ager
Eugene Archer
Rudolf Arnheim
John Ashbery
Alexander Bakshy
James Baldwin
Vincent Canby
Stanley Cavell
Richard Corliss
Arlene Croce
Manohla Dargis
Barbara Deming
David Denby
Roger Ebert
Ralph Ellison
Manny Farber
Otis Ferguson
Brendan Gill
Penelope Gilliatt
Paul Goodman
H. D.
James Harvey
Molly Haskell
J. Hoberman
bell hooks
Kent Jones
Pauline Kael
Stanley Kauffmann
Walter Kerr
Lincoln Kirstein
Stuart Klawans
Siegfried Kracauer
Nathan Leites
Meyer Levin
Vachel Lindsay
Pare Lorentz
Dwight Macdonald
Jonas Mekas
H. L. Mencken
Hugo Münsterberg
Geoffrey O’Brien
William S. Pechter
Gilberto Perez
Donald Phelps
Harry Alan Potamkin
Carrie Rickey
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Paul Rudnick (aka Libby Gelman-Waxner)
Carl Sandburg
Andrew Sarris
Richard Schickel
Paul Schrader
A. O. Scott
Gilbert Seldes
André Sennwald
Robert E. Sherwood
John Simon
Susan Sontag
David Thomson
Melvin B. Tolson
William Troy
Kenneth Turan
Parker Tyler
Robert Warshow
Armond White
Edmund Wilson
Martha Wolfenstein

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