My tribute to George Romero and a Night to remember

For a variety of reasons, I have never seen any of the sequels to George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead — well, unless you want to count Dan O’Bannon’s gruesomely amusing The Return of the Living Dead (1985) — perhaps I’ve always considered it a tough act to follow. Or, more likely, because I don’t think any audience response to any sequel (or remake) — at any time, anywhere — could top the one I noted, and shared, when I first saw Romero’s classic 1968 horror opus during my college days.

While I was attending Loyola University in New Orleans back in the 1970s, I attended an evening screening in a large auditorium on campus. The crowd (including me) was impressed and attentive. Indeed, at least one of my fellow students may have been a little too impressed and attentive.

The first time a group of the shambling undead appeared on screen, a shriek rang out from the darkness: “Don’t let them get me! Don’t let them get me!” At first, I figured someone was goofing off, or encouraging some kind of audience participation. (Little did I know that, only a couple years later, such behavior would become commonplace at midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) But then it happened a second time. Louder. And a third time. Louder still. By that point, it was quite obvious that whoever was screaming was totally, unabashedly, nearly-scared-to-death terrified.

After the third outburst, two people — friends? faculty? security personnel? I never found out — more or less lifted this frightened fellow from his seat and carried him (gently, as far as I could tell) out of the auditorium. But not before the guy had managed to make some of us (again, including me) even more uneasy while watching Romero’s masterwork.

Maybe his fear was a natural reaction, maybe it was, ahem, chemically enhanced. But, either way, that fear obviously was contagious. And how do I know this? Well, here’s the thing: None of the other people in the audience laughed when he screamed the second and third times. Come to think of it, as I recall, no one told him to shut the hell up, either.

George Romero passed away Sunday at age 77. He often is credited with starting the zombie movie genre – even though no one in his Night of the Living Dead ever actually uses the term “zombie” to describe the reanimated corpses that makes such nuisances of themselves. I’ll leave it up to others whether he deserves that acknowledgement. All I can say is, all these years later, I smile whenever I think of the night he enabled me to experience something that was, you know, really scary.

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.

All the President's Men joins all the worthy movies in the National Film Registry

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit at the outset that I was a journalism major in college –- Loyola University in New Orleans, where my mentor was the late, great Tom Bell -- during the tragicomic sideshow of Watergate. So my view of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as true-blue American heroes – as fearless and relentless seekers of truth who helped to bring down the most corrupt President in U.S. history – is, perhaps, a bit skewed.

But trust me: That isn’t the only reason why I consider Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men to be first among equals in the batch of movies announced today as this year’s selections for preservation by the Library of Congress in the National Film Registry.

The simple fact is, just as Woodward and Bernstein (collectively nicknamed Woodstein) set new standards for American journalism, and inspired thousands of idealists – along with more than a few amoral glory-hounds – to follow in their paths, All the President’s Men established a new paradigm for big-screen docudramas in general, and true-life tales of uncovered malfeasance in particular. (Just wait until you read all the allusions to Pakula’s classic – and the 1974 Woodward-Bernstein book on which it’s based -- when critics write about the inevitable Wikileaks movie.)

Just as important, Pakula’s 1976 masterwork also provided an invaluable and long overdue counterbalance to the stereotypical movie image of newspaper reporters as boozy buccaneers who talk fast, crack wise and raise hell while they comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. (A stereotype, it should be noted, that was indelibly defined in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 play The Front Page -- which inspired a 1931 film that, coincidentally or otherwise, also is included in this year’s National Film Registry honor roll.) In the world according to Pakula, reporters spend most of their time getting doors slammed in their faces, digging through voluminous records, and walking or driving endless miles to follow leads that go nowhere.

Glamorous, it ain’t.

Robert Redford (who also produced the picture) plays Woodward, Dustin Hoffman plays Bernstein, and they’re both terrific. (Hoffman is slightly more terrific, if only because he gets some meatier, showier scenes, but never mind.) And Jason Robards is a hoot in his Oscar-winning portrayal of Post editor Ben Bradlee, who pops up periodically to remind Woodstein – and the audience – just how high the stakes are. (“We are about to accuse Bob Halderman – who only happens to be the second most important man in this country – of conducting a criminal conspiracy from inside the White House. It would be nice if we were right.”) But the leads give full-blooded performances, not one-dimensional star turns, and the movie’s enduring stature has relatively little to do with their celebrity.

Given the task of fashioning a compelling narrative from events at once overly familiar and off-puttingly confusing to a 1976 moviegoing public, screenwriter William Goldman earned an Academy Award by rising brilliantly to the challenge of imposing structure and generating suspense. Director Pakula -- whose thrillers Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974) can be viewed in retrospect as warm-up exercises – does his utmost to ensure that every scene of All the President’s Men percolates with paranoia. At the same time, though, he strives for a realistic, even semi-documentary look, and rarely invokes his dramatic license to hype the truth with Hollywooden hyperbole.

On a couple of occasions, Pakula and ace cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather) artfully underscore the against-all-odds nature of the Woodstein investigation by viewing the reporters at a distance, from far, far overhead. (Note the casually brilliant sequence in the Library of Congress, as the camera pulls further and further back to show the dutifully plodding duo seeking the truth in the very center of a labyrinth.) And while the two reporters spend much of their time in dimly illuminated rooms and shadow-streaked garages while following their leads, the Washington Post newsroom set always remains brightly lit – underscoring the newspaper’s importance (in this movie, at least) as a beacon of truth.

More often, however, Pakula eschews stylistic flourishes and goes for unvarnished verisimilitude, occasionally allowing scenes to unfold in what feels like real time.

About midway through the movie, there’s a mesmerizing cat-and-mouse game played by Bernstein and a Committee to Re-Elect the President bookkeeper (Oscar-nominated Jane Alexander) who’s too sacred to be forthcoming, but too honest to be deceptive. Bernstein finagles his way into the woman’s living room, and plants himself on her couch while her sister – obviously no fan of the bookkeeper’s bosses – brings him coffee. The CREEP bookkeeper refuses to talk. Bernstein insists he will listen. And then, gradually, the ice starts to melt.

Against her better judgment, and despite her worst fears, the bookkeeper speaks volumes with tremulous nods and half-whispered monosyllables. Bernstein listens attentively, sympathetically. All you have to do is look at his eyes to tell what the guy is thinking – “Jeez, I can’t believe what I’m hearing! God, don’t let me screw this up!” – and note his tense body posture to appreciate what an effort he’s making to appear relaxed. But his smile remains pleasant and deferential; his voice, noncommittal but gently prodding. He’s not merely coaxing information from her – he’s seducing her into doing what she really wants to do.

Ever wonder how reporters get ordinary people to make extraordinary revelations? Pay close attention to this scene, which should be mandatory viewing at every journalism school.

Other scenes – including some of the movie’s funniest -- resound with a similar ring of truth. At one point, Woodward makes a cold call to a GOP official, and is so amazed when the official himself answers the phone that he’s momentarily lost for words. (He vamps, none too effectively, by twice introducing himself as “Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.”) Later, as the Woodstein team questions Hugh Sloan (Stephen Collins), a former White House insider, Sloan insists that he’s a good Republican. “So am I,” Woodward interjects, obviously trying to ingratiate himself. Bernstein says nothing, but shoots his partner an ambiguous glance that can be read as hectoring skepticism (“What a crock!”) or stunned disbelief (“You’re a what?”)

Pakula and Goldman wisely chose to conclude All the President’s Men shortly after Woodward and Bernstein make a major goof that briefly stalls their investigation. It’s a daring move, ending a movie when it appears the protagonists have been defeated. (It’s also a quintessentially ’70s touch that few contemporary filmmakers would or could risk.) But the final image of Woodward and Bernstein at work in the newsroom, pounding away at their typewriters as a televised Richard M. Nixon looms triumphantly, is a masterstroke. We don’t need to read the newswire bulletins that, in the movie’s final moments, chart Nixon’s eventual downfall. All we need to see are the two reporters doggedly pursuing the truth, illustrating how doing the right thing entails so much hard, thankless and seemingly unexciting work.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that Chris Carter, creator-producer of The X-Files, freely admits his cult TV series and its movie spin-offs were strongly influenced by All the President’s Men. Indeed, the Cigarette Smoking Man, a figure who looms large in the X-Files mythos, is an explicit hat-tip to Pakula’s film noirish depiction of “Deep Throat,” the cryptic informer (memorably played by Hal Holbrook) who pointedly warns Woodward to “follow the money.”

All the President’s Men “was a great film that just broke so many rules,” Carter told Variety in a 1999 interview. “To use the non-dramatic image of someone sitting on a telephone trying to glean information took some guts. And as a former journalist interested in investigative journalism as a young man, that kind of storytelling and investigative approach fascinated me.”

Trouble is, Carter added, “It’s a kind of entertainment that largely doesn't play anymore. Tabloidization has had a great impact, unfortunately. We’re not interested in journalists who adhere to a standard of their own. So you couldn’t do an All the President’s Men anymore.”

But thanks to the Library of Congress, you’ll always have the chance to see it.