R.I.P.: Judith Crist (1922-2012)

I used to half-joke that, back when I was in my early teens, the two most prominent film critics in America arguably were Pauline Kael and Judith Crist – meaning that, while I was growing up, I wanted to do a girl’s job.

Unfortunately, I more or less had to give up on making that jest quite a while back – and, no, not because so many people would instantly respond, “Hey, what the hell about Andrew Sarris? Or Stanley Kauffmann?”

The melancholy truth is that, despite her impressive span of glory days in the 1960s and early ‘70s, a period during which she served simultaneously as film critic for New York magazine, TV Guide and The Today Show, thereby ensuring a consistently high profile, Crist – who passed away Tuesday at age 90 – slipped into relative obscurity a long time ago. So much so, in fact, that throughout the last couple of decades, I found myself more often than not having to explain who she was – and what she meant – whenever I made that tongue-in-cheek but not entirely untrue remark about my early influences.

In her prime, Crist was a trailblazer as well an opinion-shaper, earning at least a footnote in the history of American film criticism when she became the first full-time female film critic for a major American newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune, in 1963. After that, as New York Times writer Douglas Martin notes in an appreciative obit that is well worth reading in full:

Her commentary had many homes: The New York Herald Tribune, where she was the first woman to be made a full-time critic for a major American newspaper; New York magazine, where she was the founding film critic; and TV Guide, which most defined her to readers. Her reviews appeared there for 22 years at a time when the magazine blanketed the country, reaching a peak readership of more than 20 million. She was the Today show’s first regular movie critic, a morning fixture on NBC from 1963 to 1973. And she wrote for Saturday Review, Gourmet and Ladies’ Home Journal.

A Harris Poll of moviegoers in the 1960s cited her as their favorite critic. In 1968, Film Quarterly called her “the American critic with the widest impact on the mass audience.” When TV Guide decided to dismiss her in 1983 to replace her column with a computerized movie summary, executives told her they might come crawling back to her in six months to beg her to return. The magazine was deluged with letters, and asked her back three weeks later. She was given a raise and stayed until 1988.

And yet: Tastes change, influence wanes. As early as 1973, she was eased out of her spot at The Today Show and replaced by quipster Gene Shalit. She continued to write – and, at Columbia University, teach – past the turn of the century. By 2009, however, she had fallen so far off the radar that writer-director Gerald Peary opted to not mention her at all in his documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism -- a questionable decision that I did indeed question in my Variety review of the film.

As you likely already have surmised: I was an ardent fan of Crist’s work during my formative years, and continue to be an admirer even as I stagger into my dotage. (While typing this in my home office, I can spot my well-thumbed, personally autographed copy of her book The Private Eye, The Cowboy and the Very Naked Girl on a nearby shelf.) She could launch lethal zingers with the best of them – she once described The Sound of Music as fodder “for the 5-to-7 set and their mommies who think their kids aren’t up to the stinging sophistication and biting wit of Mary Poppins ” – but I enjoyed her more for the unbridled enthusiasm she brought to praising both serious cinema and what she called “delicious trash.”

Crist -- like Kael, Sarris, Kauffmann and a handful of others -- was a must-read critic during a golden age much beloved by movie buffs, stretching roughly from 1967 to 1980, when there seemed to be so very many must-see movies. Consider, if you will, her Top Ten for 1967:

1. Bonnie and Clyde 2. La Guerre est Finie 3. The Graduate 4. In the Heat of the Night 5. In Cold Blood 6. Ulysses 7. The Battle of Algiers 8. Falstaff  9. Father 10. The President’s Analyst

Worthy choices, all. Movies, much like Crist’s own best work, that have stood the test of time, even if some, like Crist, are no longer as widely recognized as they once were.

Back in 1973, not too long after her ouster from The Today Show, Crist gave a lecture at Loyola University in New Orleans while I was in my final year as a journalism major. I had the opportunity to speak with her – and, yes, get my book autographed -- during a pre-lecture reception, and was greatly charmed by the lady. (I admit it: I laughed out loud, like the most transparent sort of sycophant, when she made a passing reference to her Today Show replacement as “Gene Shallow.” Sorry, Mr. Shalit, I couldn’t resist.) And during the lecture itself…

OK, there’s no way to write this without sounding like ego-tripping, so I’ll try to be brief. On a couple of occasions during her lecture, she paused while trying to remember the name of a specific actor or director. The first time this happened, I impulsively blurted out the name she was fumbling for – and immediately felt embarrassed for being a presumptuous jerk. But, wonder of wonders, Crist merely smiled in my direction, and said, “Thanks.” So I felt emboldened to chime in again when she had a second stumble.

The third time she couldn’t remember a name, I briefly held back – after all, this was her lecture, not mine, and I didn’t want to look like a complete doofus. So Crist turned, looked directly at me in the auditorium audience, smiled once one more and asked, “OK, you know, who is it?” I did know – she was trying to remember Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry – so I told her. And she thanked me. And I felt the way mortals usually feel after they’ve been of some small service to a deity.

I have dined out on that story for decades, of course. (At least, I have done so while breaking bread with fellow film buffs.) But what I really took to heart that evening was something Crist said when asked about the difference between her reaction to a film as a critic, and an average moviegoer’s response.

“I’m just like you,” Crist told the Loyola University audience. “I’ll see a movie, and think, ‘Yay!’ Or, ‘Ugh!’

“The only difference is, I take that ‘Yay!’ or ‘Ugh!’ – and stretch it out to four or five hundred words.”

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the same thing I’ve been doing for the last 40 years or so.

So you see, I was right: I did grow up to a do a girl’s job.

From Psycho to Juno: Andrew Sarris wrote about the movies that mattered

If you are a film buff of a certain age, you almost certainly have somewhere on your bookshelf a battered, well-thumbed paperback copy of Andrew Sarris’ The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, one of the handful of truly indispensable books about movies ever published. I’m the proud owner of a first-edition copy, purchased back in the day for the princely sum of $2.95, and I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have stolen from… er, referenced it, and been inspired by it, during the past several decades.

It’s the book that more or less established the ground rules for judging the works of key American film directors (and foreign filmmakers who dabbled in English-language cinema) according to the standards of the auteur theory, a still-controversial concept -- despite the contributions of myriad collaborators, every significant film ultimately reflects the vision of one individual, its director, who is that film’s sole “author” – that originated with French critics (and future filmmakers) such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, but was popularized on these shores by the esteemed Andrew Sarris himself. Like millions of other academics, film critics and plain ol' movie buffs, I devoured the volume at an impressionable age, and took Sarris' judgments (even those I disagreed with) to heart.

I was honored to meet Sarris on just a few occasions, most memorably during a panel discussion at the 1989 Sarasota French Film Festival, when I found myself on stage next to him and Molly Haskell, his lovely wife and fellow cineaste, and silently thanked God that the festival organizers inexplicably considered me worthy to be seated up there alongside them (and a few other august folks). The effortlessly ingratiating couple actually made me feel, fleetingly, like an equal – but, of course, I knew, and know, better.

At the time, I asked Sarris, politely but eagerly, when he might be writing a sequel to his masterwork. Sarris smiled warmly – as I’m sure he smiled the zillion or so other times some acolyte posed the same question – and offered a vague promise of “considering” the idea. Truth to tell, though, I always suspected that, like most film critics, he had a natural-born aversion to sequels.  

Andrew Sarris died Wednesday at the age of 83 – decades after solidifying his position among the pantheon of influential and essential American film critics, and after more than six decades of offering erudite, perceptive, and just plain fun to read essays and reviews for The Village Voice, New York Observer and other outlets. To give you some idea of his range: He was one of the first U.S. critics to recognize the greatness of Psycho – his annual Ten Best lists routinely embraced a stunning diversity of films and filmmakers – and nearly 50 years later, he chose, with an almost gleefully defiant fervor, Juno as the best American movie of 2007.

My deepest sympathies and best wishes go out to Molly Haskell, and to those friends and colleagues who knew Sarris intimately. As for myself, I feel disconsolately melancholy right now, as I consider that halcyon era – roughly speaking, the early 1960s to the late ‘70s – when film critics like Sarris, Haskell, Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Judith Crist and a young whippersnapper named Roger Ebert wrote passionately and provocatively about cinema as art and entertainment. At the risk of sounding like someone besotted with nostalgia: It was a time when films and the people who wrote about them seemed a great deal more substantial, and were taken much more seriously, than they are in our present time.

At the same time, though, I think of Sarris maintaining his enthusiasm and optimism for cinema as long as he did. And I think of my friend Roger Ebert turning 70 a couple days ago, still going strong and writing brilliantly. With those two inspiring examples to guide me, how can I let a little thing like my upcoming 60^th birthday slow me down? Besides, I should remind myself, as I often remind my students, that great movies still are being made. And today, arguably now more than ever, those great movies – and the auteurs who make them – still need dedicated champions to keep spreading the good word. 

On Antonioni (and more)

Yes, I know: I’m ridiculously tardy in getting around to eulogizing Michelangelo Antonioni. My excuses? Well, OK, at the risk of sounding like a real wuss, I was already bummed out by other recent demises – especially by the loss of Ingmar Bergman – to face the grim task of writing yet another obit within so short a time. (That I got the news of Antonioni’s death one day before the first anniversary of my father’s passing certainly didn’t help matters.) And, yes, I’ll also admit that Antonioni always has been an auteur whose work I admired and respected without ever really liking, and that his enormous gift for conveying an almost palpable sense of ennui and alienation, disengagement and discontent, all the while suggesting the dark undercurrent of meaninglessness that seems (for some of us, at least) to lurk just beneath our day-to-day lives…. Well, being someone who’s already given to episodes of blue-funk melancholy, that’s simply not a part of the woods where I care to spend too much time, even while in the company of a demonstrably great artist.

Indeed, the only time I can remember actually having fun at an Antonioni film occurred during the mid ‘60s, when, in the midst of my guilt-tripping Catholic high school education, I managed (like many of my more venturesome classmates) to slip into three or four screenings of Blow-Up at the RKO Orpheum Theatre in downtown New Orleans. It was there, on the big screen, that I got my first glimpse at full-frontal female nudity – and better still, savored the iconic image of a topless Vanessa Redgrave. An image, not incidentally, that was preserved on a very popular poster of Redgrave with her arms strategically crossed over her, er, attributes. And to answer the obvious question: Yes, I had such a poster, and it had a place of honor on my bedroom wall.
Back to Antonioni: Check out GreenCine Daily’s copious coverage to fully appreciate the filmmaker’s influence and accomplishment. Jim Cheng’s appreciation in USA Today also is worth reading, as is Jeff Wells’ passionate tribute and Eric Harrison’s concise tutorial (which covers Bergman as well). I felt a bittersweet shock of recognition while considering Cheng’s observation that “[e]ven for those who were not intimately familiar with his work, Michelangelo Antonioni’s name was synonymous with art-house cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s…” Yes. Quite so. Thinking of Antonioni and Bergman reminds me of a bygone era – a time when I came of age as a lover of film -- when campus film societies programmed subtitled imports out of the Janus Films catalogue, book stores prominently displayed anthologies of serious film criticism (Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Judith Crist and Andrew Sarris, etc.) and art houses that routinely booked “the new Truffaut” or “the latest by Fellini” served free coffee in the lobby to encourage interaction, conversation and an overall sense of a “film community.” (It also encouraged attempts to pick up girls, though my success rate was tragically low.) And that, too, is part of the reason I’m so late with this Antonioni posting: At 54, going on 55, I don’t need many more reminders that, as Paddy Chayefksy wrote for William Holden to so memorably rant -– at age 58! -- in Sidney Lumet’s Network, “it’s closer to the end than it is to the beginning.”

Speaking of Francois Truffaut: I soon will be three years older than the great French filmmaker was when he died in 1984. This is depressing for any number of reasons, but here’s the worst part of it: Unlike, say, Antonioni (who died at age 94) or Bergman (who was 89 when Death dropped by for a final game of chess), Truffaut was just 52 at the time he went to the Great Screening Room in the Sky. And not for the first time, I find myself wondering: How many Truffaut movies were we denied by this untimely demise?

OK, that’s it: Time to stop writing and start drinking. Well, either that, or dig out that DVD of Airplane! to lift my spirits.