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Everybody’s a Critic
“I Was a Teenage Film Critic” sounds B-movie-ish, but it’s the truth. In 1966, Brother Thomas Allen, S.C. started the Bishop Reilly High School Film Society, and that’s where I became a dedicated lifelong film nut. Brother Thomas worked out a deal for half a dozen of us to review movies at local theaters after school each Wednesday, write reviews overnight, edit a weekly newsletter on Thursdays, copy it and hand out The Reilly Reviewer in school on Friday in time for the weekend. It was a Tinkertoy version of what actual film critics did, but when you got a strong positive reaction on Monday morning from people who followed your advice, it sure felt like the real thing. There’s the same impact when—let’s face it—they didn’t like the advice. Either way, you learn fast.
The first lesson of a reviewer: my opinion is no better or worse than yours. That’s a cold fact. But you can describe and discuss a film entertainingly without ever being able to flat-out prove its worth. Like most areas of life, experience usually counts for something. Seeing a lot of movies helps with comparisons that tell a potential viewer how the subject of this week’s review may fit in, or not, with other ones they liked, competing for their dollars and/or time. Do ‘em right, and they’ll read you every week.
Reading the reviews now, mine and others, they aren’t bad. Most of them, anyway. We did a good job describing what was good or bad about movies like Planet of the Apes, You Only Live Twice, Madigan, and In Cold Blood. You learn, at first, by imitating, consciously or not, and our teenage prose echoed the punchy style of the Daily News, New York’s blue-collar tabloid.
After school on other days of the week, we screened borrowed 16mm copies of old movies like Double Indemnity, Red River, and The Big Sleep. Although these films were then only twenty years old, they were already from a vanished world of the past. Those of us who also hoped to make films someday started teaching ourselves the craft, in 8mm and Super 8. There were surprisingly few books about any of this back then; that would all change, big time, and soon.
The postwar era was a golden one for American Catholicism. Our numbers, and our wealth, were booming. JFK-era Catholics were no longer just Father Flanigan and the East Side Kids; we were setting trends and going places. Modern communications were a Church specialty, and Reilly was no exception, with lots of film-based instruction and even a pioneering, Archdiocese-wide closed-circuit microwave TV network. The instigator of that network, Father John Culkin, Cardinal Spellman’s advisor on mass media, was on the founding board of the brand-new American Film Institute. On the West Coast, his counterpart was Father Ellwood “Bud” Kieser, a benevolent agitator in Hollywood (and six-time Emmy winner!). Kieser and Culkin had cultural clout. Hard to picture that precise situation today.
Film critics were not that big a deal back then. Your hometown newspaper had one, or ran a syndicated column. Time and Newsweek had some film reviews. But there really weren’t any nationally famous ones. Siskel and Ebert were still 20 years in the future. The first coast-to-coast film reviewer was Judith Crist, who appeared on The Today Show from 1964 to 1973. (Her television reviews continued in TV Guide.) She was the first critic whose word could move millions of dollars.
She wasn’t a great writer—her one book fizzled—but Crist had a wicked entertainer’s touch for the well-aimed stiletto, the mean joke, the career-crippling dismissal that got repeated around the water cooler later that morning. Studios feared her. Her press screenings had to be solo, no other critics; and in her heyday, she was known to interrupt a film to take a phone call, an arrogant breach of professional courtesy so blatant that she’d be blackballed now. And no, they aren’t all like that.
I’ve been asked, are film critics corrupt? In some cases morally, no doubt, but no, in the usual mercenary sense they weren’t. Studios couldn’t buy Vincent Canby of The New York Times. They couldn’t or didn’t even try to buy the critics of Sheboygan, WI; Utica, NY; Altoona, PA or Provo, UT; although in the old days, it was not unheard of for grateful bottles of studio Scotch to appear at Christmastime. (Well, okay, not in Provo.)
ABC’s Rona Barrett was a media reporter, not a critic, but as her fame rose in the Seventies, a nationally televised minute with Miss Rona became a desperately sought-after Hollywood prize. Rex Reed combined the roles of reporter and critic, as well as the roles “photogenic” and “bitchy”. Gene Shalit became famous in Judith Crist’s former chair on NBC. Finally, the real game changer came when Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s Sneak Previews appeared on PBS from 1975 through 1982. The show jumped to commercial television and became At the Movies in 1986, making its hosts the most influential film critics of their time.
I’ll say this about Roger Ebert; although he was at the top of the field, fame-and-fortune-wise, he stuck to the basics and did the work. When I was at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990, I’d see him ignoring onlookers, nodding to a couple of friends as he sat at breakfast in one of Park City’s diners, marking up his day’s screenings schedule, just like the rest of us. No Judith Crist behavior for him.
Jump back to 1976. I’d graduated college by then, and working at the Bleecker Street Cinema in downtown Manhattan. I was also one of the film reviewers at the Soho Weekly News, a grittier junior rival to the Village Voice, New York’s established alternative paper. As a second-string critic, I had my pick of bargain basement movies, horror movies, and one-shots aiming for their big chance. It was interesting work, and fun.
I’ll post scan captures of a couple of those Bicentennial-era reviews in the comments section. One that I especially enjoyed doing was Futureworld, a low-budget sequel to 1973’s Westworld. The original film, a modest hit, was a Michael Crichton script and his first directorial job. (Two decades later, he’d write a more elaborate and more successful story about a science fiction theme park turned deadly, Jurassic Park.)
American Independent Productions, Roger Corman’s former company, bought the rights, and did ol’ Roger one better at stretching a dollar. They managed to get the enthusiastic cooperation of everybody and every futuristic-looking location in Texas. It gave the film high-tech production value far in excess of its budget. Futureworld was, let’s be honest, a wee bit cheesier than the original, but it looked better, and above all, it was funnier than its glum predecessor. I filed my review.
Two days later, I got a phone call from my mother. “Gary, your name is in the Times!” “The New York Times?” I said, incredulously. She said a film ad quoted me. This was baffling because that week’s Soho News wasn’t even in print yet. I ran out and bought a copy of the Times, and there it was, right there in pole position, the left-hand top of the ad. “It’s a Good Deal Better than Westworld…Futureworld Should Provide an Entertaining Time”—Gary McVey, Soho Weekly News.
Okay, it wasn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material, but for a 24-year-old, it was hot stuff. How did it happen? Unbeknownst to me, papers sent proofs of the reviews to the studio days in advance as a courtesy, for reasons just like this. Sure, it was a positive review, but the reason that I got a “pull quote” was I’d innocently stumbled onto a specific goal of the publicist: get people to see the independently made Futureworld as a worthy, even livelier film than its studio-made successor. Later on, I’d realize how many smaller-time reviewers pimped themselves out solely to see their names in quotes. Spy Magazine invented mocking fake reviews to show how easy it was.
Film critics once strode, high and mighty, over Hollywood. Today, a few are still high, but very few are mighty anymore. The rise of social media reduced the gatekeeping role of the legacy press. Rotten Tomatoes is a more useful guide to a film’s prospects than The Atlantic is. Any reader of this website knows that well-informed critical intelligence is more widely distributed than the gatekeepers ever believed.
I worked for the Los Angeles Film Festival, the American Film Institute, and the American Cinema Foundation for almost forty years. Few people I encountered there could have matched, let alone topped, the movie knowledge I’ve admired among computer programmers, retired military, Baptist philosophers, policemen, graphics designers, moms and dads. Because everyone’s a critic. Some people are especially good at it.
Published in General
I remember back around 2005-2010, when a young woman laughed when I referred to Slap Shot, from 1975, as an old movie. Hey, it was over 30 years old at that point, noticeably older than she was. In the late 60s, when I was watching The Early Show with Flippo the Clown, an old movie was more like 10 years old.
I don’t know if it was just the factory nature of the old studio system producing vast numbers of movies that did it, but they aged a lot faster in those days.
In today’s crowded media world, one would think the role of a critic would be even more important. Isn’t the biggest issue today “what to watch?” in the face of so many choices? But I suppose that is why consumer ratings like Rotten Tomatoes are valuable. There is so much choice it would be hard to know which critics to read.
I suppose it still can work for the weekly releases in theaters, although one of the most prolific producers of feature length content doesn’t release to the theater. That is Netflix.
While social media has made word of mouth king, this look back at history is great. Thanks again Gary for an informative and thoughtful piece.
And for hearing about your brush with greatness.
Good one, Gary.
Wow, top billing. Beat out UPI.
I thought it was our brush with greatness. I’m impressed, anyway.
I owe some thanks.
Bishop Reilly was a new and ultra-modern facility in a prosperous suburb in New York City. (It exists to this day as St. John’s Prep). It was a Sixties architectural showplace, with what for a high school was a huge library, and some of the finest school science labs in the whole city—public, parochial, or private. As students, we were very aware that generations of people had worked and given us their best. We had a hazy but strong understanding that we were obliged to give back our best.
The actual movie passes were credit-card sized, embossed with our names, and the local theater ran them through (this was a decade and a half before online lookup; they ran the card and pulled carbon copies.) The theater owners, many of them in their sixties, were puzzled by the back of the card. Like all Bishop Reilly IDs, it read “I Am a Catholic. In Case of Mortal Emergency Please Call a Priest.”
Invariably he’d joke, or only half-joke, “Shouldn’t you call a doctor first?”
Within even the first few comments on the post, anyone can see what I was getting at. If I’d had you characters at my side in the Eighties and Nineties, who knows what cultural goals we could have accomplished. Not that we didn’t get some things accomplished. And not that we’re necessarily finished accomplishing things now.
Long ago, I read some writer explaining that a critic told you if something was “art,” while a reviewer could help you figure out if it was any good, worth seeing/reading/whatever.
Reasonably true, and a good quote. When I was a kid, The New York Post, decades before being a Murdoch-run conservative paper, was a genuinely old fashioned liberal-but-not-socialist daily newspaper. In an attempt to de-snootify movie reviews, they instituted the Movie Meter. Their critic, Archer Winston, rated films on a 0-100 scale. It was widely treated as a joke. So simplistic!
But at least it was more finely calibrated by the standard in our time, “Two Thumbs Up!”
Gary – I’m shocked…shocked… you didn’t mention Pauline Kael who was revered, especially by the New York elite, as the greatest film critic to have ever lived. Personally, I couldn’t stand the woman, and read a few reviews I felt were quite petty and just lousy criticism. A case in point would be Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet which she panned and which I would contend is still the best film presentation of the Shakespeare play. And of course, when she and her fellow critics tore into David Lean for his casting choice of Robert Mitchum in Ryan’s Daughter, Lean was so shocked that he actually took a sabbatical from filmmaking. Artists can be a sensitive lot. When you think of the scope and complexity of some of Lean’s films, just being able to manage budgets, his crew, local politicians, shoot around inclement weather, etc. etc., it’s a bit much to be savaged from a snooty New York film critic who hasn’t created much of anything except typed up complaints or occasional praise. Here is an interview Lean gave to Melvin Bragg of the Southbank Show regarding that moment in his life.
Did you ever hear any of the movie hours on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, with “Emmett of the Unblinking Eye?” Good stuff. Movie “trailers” were reviewed as with other trailers: single wide, double wide, triple… sometimes with a porch… “Sometimes just a slab, but that’s generally reserved for ‘Glitter.'”
Looking back, I’m kind of ambivalent of what they were doing. Case in point: There Will Be Blood. When I watched that, I found it disappointing, even though it’s generally considered very good, if not great. My problem was that it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype they had given it.
Flippo! I caught Flippo every chance I got when I stayed with my grandma in Ohio for the summer. Here he is with some Navy guy.
When I was growing up I read Siskel and Ebert in the Tribune and the Sun-Times respectively. Didn’t trust Siskel on science fiction titles, but Ebert was a fan of notable discernment. Ebert was the go-to guy for flicks like Silent Running.
I’ve often had exactly that problem with “sure thing”, “can’t miss” picks, whether for the Oscars or just for where to spend a sawbuck or two. I will resist something that feels overhyped, especially if there’s the slightest touch of cultural hostility added in.
To be fair, like any other threshold, it can be set a little bit inexactly at first and need readjustment.
filmreviews_1976_epson
Seems like a good balance of trust. They’re an interesting case of a business-and-creative relationship. Like Gilbert and Sullivan, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, they were never friends to begin with, so their on-air chilly air of bare cordiality was reflective of real life and I think audiences liked them for it.
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There are some reviewers that are helpful in an inverse way. If Mick LeSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle hated something, I knew it might be worth catching, and visa versa. Great post, Gary, thanks.
This was another fun and interesting one. Thanks, sir!
I give this comment four and a half out of five stars.
Back before the internet when one had to rely more on quote blurbs in the ads for now-playing movies in the entertainment section of the newspaper, there were critics that one suspected crafted reviews to generate quotable lines that PR people would happily seize.
I will now review this OP in the style of Rex Reed:
I kinda like the Critical Drinker even if his negativity is often over the top.
A great critic must (a) understand the biz (b) be in tune with popular tastes while grasping the artistic merits (c) offer insights that enhance the movie-going experience and (d) write with verve and wit. That is a rare combination.
Boffo!
Often you can reverse-engineer what the film’s publicists wanted emphasized. Back in the Nineties, Sony had worrisome test marketing about Jumanji: it was borderline too scary for a family audience. So every cast appearance on TV and most print ads played up “a few chills, not really scary”.
A great find, Brian! It’s hard to believe that someone of Lean’s stature could be so hurt by a critic, but to paraphrase Arnold Schwarzenegger, not everyone has thick skin on their metal exoskeleton.
In the late 20th century battle of the highbrow critics, Pauline Kael’s rival was Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice. Given that choice, I’m a Sarris man (and Brother Thomas Allen would end up working for Sarris until Tom died in 1988.) But I’ll play devil’s advocate–a little. Kael started out with relatively conservative instincts. sarcastically complaining that too many indie filmmakers seemed to regard holding a camera steady as being overdisciplined, leading inevitably to Nazi rule and the atom bomb. She wasn’t a bad writer; Judith Crist would have killed to write as well. I didn’t like her taste, simple as that.
And to kill a famous canard: her supposedly clueless 1968 line, “How could Nixon have won? I didn’t know anyone who voted for him”, was a deliberate joke. She was making a point to her readership about the cultural and political bubble they all lived in. After all, at that time she was writing for The New Yorker.
Well, just a minor nitpick – “critics – plural”. Lean was invited to a meeting of several critics including Kael, Richard Schickel, and others at the Algonquin Hotel in New York where most if not all of them ganged up on him and treated him like dirt (for lack of a better more precise word). So, less of a cordial get together and more like an ambush.
Schickel’s another one who could write, but I’m still mad at him for The Disney Version, supposedly a debunking expose, but in reality something closer to libel. Disney had some of the prejudices of his age and birthplace; like Ford and Edison, he was a self-made man without much formal education. All three men had the abnormal situation of first encountering Jewish people as bankers or financiers, which tended to reinforce those prejudices.
Disney said some dumb things about Jews, but not hateful ones, and not publicly. He was wrong to say them, but he wasn’t a vicious antisemite. The Disney Version is unfair, and not just about that.