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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
Yeah, I read The Disney Version and had the same reaction. I suspect there were a lot of critics and others in the Hollywood community who still carry a grudge against Walt because he was a fervent anti-Communist and minced no words about what he thought of Communist sympathizers or true believers in Hollywood in the 1950s. The slanted history of that period is starting to be rewritten (I highly recommend the book “Red Star Over Hollywood – The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left” by Ronald and Allis Radosh). Schickel’s “The Men Who Made the Movies” documentary series on PBS in the 1970s was well done but virtually impossible to find now.
Six years ago, I did a Ricochet post about the 1941 Disney strike, and the effect it had on Walt.
Great post, Gary. What a coup you pulled off in getting your name and your “Future World” review broadcast by the New York Times!
You said: “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.” So your indie voice made and caught waves that the more well known critics couldn’t catch that time around.
I relate to your idea that this was the era of the rise of Irish Catholics. As a fellow Catholic back in the day, we Irish Catholics had much to be grateful for.
My Catholic HS had a state of the art theater, complete with winches, pulleys and high ceilings that allowed for the production of “Peter Pan” to be as realistic as the Broadway play.
Within ten years of my graduating HS, the Chicagoland area felt proud that our “native sons” Siskel and Ebert were becoming “Big Time.”
They became established critic/reviewers whose catch phrase “Two Thumbs Up” quickly became a household word. Their rise was due to their having authentic voices. Since the duo lived in Chicago at the time of the wider public catching on to them, no Hollywood movie studios thought of paying them off to review the films.
Although they still lacked the overall established training and polish that NYT’s reviewers had, they sure were a better way to judge a film than the reviewers from Newsweek, Time, Look or Life magazines offered the public. It was also fun as well as informative when they so often disagreed with one another over a film’s actual value. Meanwhile the more established critics let their readers know it was their way or the highway. The Pauline Kaels of the film review world let the public know if you disagreed with their professional assessment, then you clearly lacked class and film savvy.
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Gary, have you seen The Critic?
Great column!
When I was growing up in the 70’s, I loved the reviewer in Newsday back when it was Long Island’s newspaper (now New York Newsday). I’m not sure if he was a movie reviewer or a TV critic or both (after I wrote this, I decided he must have been a TV critic). It might have been Marvin Kittman but I don’t remember. I still quote lines that I believe came from whomever he was:
That last one was from a review of the Jazz Singer, the original one not the Neil Diamond one. He said something along the lines of: the acting was terrible, the script hackneyed, but the screen talked. I used to use that line with my computer programmers when they had a breakthrough. Even though the code was buggy and the computer crashed, if it was a leap forward, I used to say “but the screen talked”.
Maybe you should have gone with something more recognizable, such as “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.”
The programmers actually picked up my line.
Stanley Kauffman was the man for me. I really can’t put my finger on what I need from a reviewer, but he was it.
Yes, I have, Ke. Thanks for finding this clip!
It looks like all of the full episodes are available now.
The critic was probably Joseph Gelmis, one of Kubrick’s favorites, and the editor IIRC of “The Film Director as Superstar”, a good summary of where ambitious moviemaking was headed circa 1969.
Funny thing about The Jazz Singer: In production, Warner Bros. didn’t think of it as a talking picture, but as a conventional (silent) film with synchronized songs, starring the best known stage musical star of the day, Al Jolson. It was Jolson who got carried away, improvising bits of talk at the beginning and end of the numbers. They saw the effect and added a couple of short dialog scenes, but fewer than people remember. The film still had intertitles, like a silent film.
When my wife was the film print controller of the Samuel Goldwyn Company, she knew what everyone in the field knew: don’t screw up a Siskel and Ebert press screening. The critics themselves were not all that prima-donna-ish, and understood situations like bad winter weather delaying a copy of a movie, but the studios were always on tenterhooks about Siskel and Ebert’s reaction, and anxious not to do anything that jinxed it.
Slap Shot was pretty good, though at the time I felt that Nancy Dowd, a female scriptwriter when that was still considered newsworthy (like it hadn’t happened since the turn of the century), wrote men cleverly but a little heavy-handedly. Yeah, we’re crude beasts all right, but most of us don’t go around all the time saying “SonofaRedacted!”, “Gimme a brew, you (limp-wristed) (redacted)” “Don’t (redact) it up, you (redacted) (redacted).” Sure, once in a while, but not all the time.
You were born at a hinge of history. The Fifties world I knew as a kid, a relatively conservative one, was effectively gone well before I was twenty. For you, it happened in the background of your childhood. You never lived in a predominantly black and white TV world. But for both of us, even though there were occasional films and TV shows in deliberate defiance of color, like The Last Picture Show, b&w meant the past.
In high school I watched Forties films where all the women wore dresses and hats and gloves, and the men all wore suits and ties and hats and carried snub-nosed revolvers. Cars were big and lumpy-looking in the past, and the only black people you saw, if any, were servants and menials. The punch line: it was only 20 years earlier.
There’s never room enough for everything in a post; you never want to weigh it down too much. But one fairly obvious sidenote question is, where’s the Legion of Decency? You were Catholic kids at a time of some drastic cultural changes. Did we fight? Did we surrender?
Did we even comprehend, at the time, what was happening?
People misremember the Legion, but in truth it never exactly went out of its way to explain itself.
That language was mostly the diner scenes, and mostly the one guy, and yeah, even at that it was still weird.
My favorite Slap Shot trivia was about that leather suit that Paul Newman wore all the way through the movie. He wore it all day every day, and apparently by the end of the shoot you could smell him coming before he appeared over the horizon.
But I certainly lived in a black and white TV world, because even though very little was still being produced that way, plenty of people still had B&W sets. Including us, until I was seven or eight. Getting a color TV was a big deal, at least in my neighborhood.
If you want to feel old, compare the time between now and Slap Shot, and our kid eras and the original Universal horror movies, like Frankenstein. For me, seeing them for the first time in the mid to late sixties, it was the same spread, at least at the time in the Naughties that I first mentioned. About 35 years. For you, it’s even more lopsided.
From what I can find, in the 1960’s it was rejiggered as the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures with a less judgmental rating system and was gone by 1980. The one resource I’ve found along these lines is the National Catholic Register’s film reviews. I think Mother Angelica would be pleased, though they do not cover everything.
That’s right. Despite a slightly unfortunate acronym, there was nothing incompetent about NCOMP.
The Legion was never an official agency of the Church; technically, it was a voluntary, decentralized nationwide network in America’s parishes. But most US parishes had an annual pledge during Mass to avoid condemned films, and the theaters that showed them. You were not, in fact, obliged to raise your right hand and swear, but under some social pressure, few declined.
The Legion’s classifications were simple and blunt. It didn’t explain much, partly because the faith reasonably assumed that obedience was built in. To be fair, its judgments were well regarded, even among American Christians who were by no means inclined towards Catholicism. Back then, when it came to moral severity, our brand name was impeccable even among our Separated Brethren. That’s why it changed its name, dropping “Catholic” and becoming the National Legion of Decency.
But by 1957, its leaders decided to be more open about why a film failed, and it made finer distinctions between films that were bad for children, and films that were bad for everyone. It spelled out why. In those days, it wasn’t blatant sex scenes, but a casual attitude towards divorce, adultery, or suicide.
In 1965, the year I entered high school, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures took over. They did a good job in trying times.
Totally a tangent, some personal connection to Slap Shot.
Two of the of the Hanson brother characters, Jeff and Steve Carlson, played for the Marquette Iron Rangers based in Marquette, Michigan in 1973-74. My family had just moved to Marquette and the introduction to hockey as a sport left an impression on 13-year old me.
It was a great point of pride amongst my friends that these violent players in the 1977 movie had started in our home town.
If you take out the Paul Newman storyline, and the Michael Ontkean storyline, a shocking percentage of what remains is true story. Johnstown, instead of Charlestown, which is kind of given away when they do a scene next to a statue regarding the Johnstown Flood. The Hanson Brothers were the Carlson Brothers, and Killer Carlson was Killer Hanson. They did win a game by beating up the other team during warmups. The beat up bus, the extra bus of fans, the mooning… all true story.
Tangent: For some reason I am reminded of a pithy comparison that British film critic Alex Walker made between two Bonds, as if they were in “public” (in US terms, private) school:
“Roger, as class prefect, would go all out to win. Sean would corner his opponent right before marching onto the field, and deliver a sharp knee to the groin”.
I’ve made this point in other threads…
In college in the early 1980s every night my roommates and I watched reruns of Burns and Allen and The Jack Benny show on CBN. Those shows originally aired between the early 1950s and 1965 (when Jack Benny went off the air), so the oldest episodes were maybe 30 years old, the newest not even 20. Many/most of them LOOKED old. Black and white, some of the oldest ones were kinescopes.
At about the same time, Cheers premiered on NBC in 1982, followed by Seinfeld in 1989. The oldest episodes of Cheers are now more than 40 years old.
My family got our first color set sometime in the mid-late 1970s.
I watched the 1982 World Series on a 13″ Black and White portable.
Thank you! I think it was Joseph Gelmis. I was hoping you would know the answer, because I had no success looking online.
The most powerful and influential critics that you’ve most likely never heard of worked for Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. They were perceptive writers, but they were working, in effect, for the theater owners, giving them hard-nosed, brutally honest advice about what would and would not work for the box office. When it comes to hard money decisions, Hollywood is an unsentimental town.
But it seems they do like to have some fun. Every episode of The Critic had that disclaimer at the end, “Celebrity voices are impersonated. No celebrities were harmed in the filming of this episode” but in fact they often got the actual celebrities to do the voices. In the “Oscars” episode I posted on page 1, Gene Shalit, Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert, and Rex Reed all did their own voices.
The main reason why Catholic ratings faded was the introduction of the MPAA’s own ratings system. Much of it was copied from the British and other Commonwealth countries’ similar systems. The UK’s Certificate X became our X Rating. It was started in the late Sixties as a reaction to racier content, an attempt to stave off a negative public reaction that might have re-ignited calls for state or federal censorship.
It basically succeeded at what it aimed to do.
Trivia note: the category PG (Parental Guidance) was originally GP (General Patronage). In truth, a lot of Hollywood films from the “clean old days” that we conservatives celebrate would have been rated PG, not G. The vast majority of Hollywood movies in the past 50 years have been either PG or R.
G, intended as the “family” rating, became completely identified with small children. The X rating has largely been shunned by mainstream studios. Intended for controversial but non-porno films like Midnight Cowboy or A Clockwork Orange, it cuts into a film’s box office.
Variety had a story years ago called “Hollywood: R Kind of Place”.
And then came NC-17.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of movies that were R-rated at first, have more recently been changed to PG. Or PG-13.
Yep. Because when all your data points fall between 60 and 80, you stop using a graph scaled at 0-100. In Hollywood’s case, most successful films fall between PG and R, so finer gradations were introduced. This is reasonable.
GP fell firmly in the era of my local neighborhood, second-run theater attendance, so I definitely remember it. But it is so forgotten by most, that it can make you wonder if you’re remembering reality, or a Mandela effect.
Theaters were expected to be the enforcers, and in defense of their own local reputations, most sort-of, kind-of, did the job. SoCons think they shirked the job out of box office greed. Not really, although few businesses are all that assiduous about turning away income. The issue was staffing; movie theaters employed teenage ushers, and as few and as poorly paid as they could manage. They weren’t cops.
Mind you, if a couple of ten year olds tried to buy tickets to Saw II, they were probably turned down. The extreme cases were easy. But what about, say, Saturday Night Fever or Grease? In theory, if you were 16 in 1977 or ’78, you couldn’t see either one unless a parent brought you. In practice, it happened plenty of times.