After the Tall Timber (37 page)

An early surprise was the number of utterly deadly films that came out, tolerable to sit through, nearly impossible to discuss. I enjoyed reviewing the spiritedly awful ones,
The Power, Dr. Faustus, Survival 1967, Broken Wings
, and I kept returning compulsively to the ones I liked. But a news event of comparable insignificance to, say,
The Impossible Years
, would receive no coverage in the
Times
at all. I felt we should simply mention that such a movie had opened, and let it go at that, or perhaps, as somebody suggested, appraise in some very practical consumer way the movie’s proper price: first half hour worth fifty cents; second hour, minus four dollars; net loss in going, three-fifty plus baby sitter. Another solution was to try to broaden the context a little, move as far and as fast away from consumer service inventories as possible and, except for the plot (it is very difficult to discuss a film at all without telling what it is “about” in the narrative sense), skip performance, direction, choreography, and so on, unless they
meant
something—and try to go on to details or tangents that did. I tried that sometimes.

For some reason, “the industry” was continually upset. This was puzzling. In all of 1968, Hollywood produced scarcely any movies of any value, scarcely anything that moved people, captured their fantasy lives, made them laugh, or even diverted them a little. It seemed to have lost even the knack of making artful trash. “The industry,” as compared to other characteristically American industries, was bewildered, inefficient, antiquated, also not much in touch with art. (I suspect, with all the talk of audiences under twenty-five, children are beginning to lose the movie-going habit entirely.) But I was certainly not costing them any money. People, including me, will apparently still go to movies no matter what. Although I am now convinced that the old movie factory is going to lose its audience and become a mere feeder for unindustrialized countries and television, while the movie audience fragments, becomes more particularized, and attends only the films of artists in control of their work, I did not think so then. I rather liked the industry. It was not enough. The producer of a creaky leviathan wanted not only his own millions but François Truffaut’s reviews. The third-generation, imagination-depleted moguls wanted to be treated like auteurs.

There began to be constant rumors that I was fired or had quit, that the industry had applied pressure. The pressure rumors were silly. The
Times
might be besieged, unhappy at moments, conciliating, but certainly unpressurable. They seemed rather glad about controversy. They did not give a damn about the industry. I got a memo from Abe Rosenthal once, asking me to use the words “very” and “boring” less often. Arthur Gelb once or twice reminded me that readers see reviews before and not after films. Members of the bull pen, another editing hurdle, whose function I never did quite understand, often loathed what I was doing. But the major editors were unfailingly steadying. There were lots of cheery memos, and after the twelfth week, a call from Mr. Gelb to say that the trial period was over and it was all right. I guess we all knew I wasn’t going to do it for a hundred years. As for the early quitting rumors, they probably had to do with a certain cycle of misery—particularly at low points, like a piece on Music, or the Death piece, which I never did get quite right—when the articles themselves were so bad I got desperate. At other times, there were cycles of fun.

There was once a full-page ad in the
Times
not liking the reviews, and
Variety
used to point out as factual errors things that often were and occasionally were not factual errors I had made. Strom Thurmond once denounced the
Times
in Congress for my review of
The Green Berets
, which he read into
The Congressional Record
, along with Clive Barnes’s review of
Hair
(I was a liberal Republican, I think, when Senator Thurmond was still a Southern Democrat). But the only direct contacts I had with the industry (since the
Times
said I could avoid contact with public-relations people if I liked) were two, one over
Star!
one over
Funny Girl
. The
Funny Girl
episode was a drink, at which the producer complained—about the distinction of his film, about the execrable quality of the
Times
review. I made as many sympathetic noises as I could. In a while, a box arrived, containing a gilded broccoli. I had written that William Wyler’s attitude toward Barbra Streisand in
Funny Girl
seemed to be simultaneously patronizing and grandstanding, as if he were firing off a gilded broccoli. I was touched by the gift, although (since I had twice postponed this apparently unavoidable interview) it was a few days old and rather smelled. I laughed. Then the producer, apparently quite seriously, asked me why I had implied that Miss Streisand was a whore. Nothing had been further from my mind, and I asked him wherever he had gotten that idea. “You called her a broccoli,” he said. I said that whoredom and broccoli were truly not associated in my mind. He said they were in his and, as though there could be no doubt whatever about this, in the reader’s. It seemed to me the interview was not going well and I asked him, out of courtesy really, whether I might keep the gift. “On one condition,” he said. I asked what the condition was. He asked why I didn’t trust him. I said I did, but that it would be nice to know what the condition was. We discussed this a while. Finally, he said the condition was a kiss. It seemed unsporting to say no, and I said all right. It turned out the kiss had to be right there, at Sardi’s, in the drinking hour. I said that the
Times
kissing a producer at Sardi’s might be bad form. He lost all interest in the matter after that. Normally a private anecdote, except that it would have been so clearly public had it gone the other way.

At the screening of
Star!
, in the first act, I went to the ladies’ room and was sick. No fault of the film’s. Flu. Back in the screening room, not wanting to step over many feet, I took up a different seat, near the aisle. A
Times
reviewer, out of fairness, is never supposed to walk out of anything, but when I started to be sick again, I decided it was ridiculous to stay. I particularly waited until after the intermission, so that when the house lights went on, and then off again, I would still be clearly in my seat (one of the myths of the
Times
film reviewer’s power is that if the
Times
looks unhappy at something, the other reviewers will hate it). I waited a half hour more, and then tiptoed out. I saw the rest of the film at the last preview. A terrific fuss ensued. The PR man from Fox, finding himself at the end without the
Times
’s elbow to grasp or fanny to pat, called and asked for an explanation. I explained. Suddenly, a deluge of letters from Darryl Zanuck to the
Times
. I had left, for no reason, before the intermission. Therefore my review was short and, he felt, unkind. Mr. Daniel patiently replied. Mr. Zanuck wrote again. It went like that. Outrage. Patience. That was all.

The people I did hear from a lot were readers—about six letters a day. “Our reader,” particularly as conceived by the culture editor, was a hypothetical, highly serious person, hanging from a subway strap, who had never read a book or seen a movie, used an obscenity or slept with anyone, but who was desperately anxious that every character, however minor, involved in any way with the making of a film should be identified by some parenthetical reference to his prior work. I began to throw in such identifications maniacally for a while, referring to winners of the Silver Arena at Pula or supporting roles in films like
Three
, but nobody seemed to find that funny except me, and so I stopped. “Our readers” came up a lot, particularly in truisms about good writing being simple writing and so forth, until one day I said, rather mildly I thought, that I didn’t give a damn about our reader, and the crisis passed. Speaking of damns and who gave them, there was always a little compulsion—shared by most writers for family publications I think—to sneak a little obscenity into the
Times
. Once, in reviewing
The Killing of Sister George
, I tried to say that it had some good Anglo-Saxon expletives ending in “off” and meaning “go away.” An editor who was always fair in these matters did make me give up the “ending in off.” It was some similar, though awful compulsion, I think, that made me put in some really grotesque errors in matters I knew perfectly well: type in an extra name, for example, in just copying the letters off a credit sheet, or write of the moments when the earth moved in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
. It was like planting mines for oneself when one is feeling guilty about expressing so many opinions about everything.

The readers I guess I was writing for, and whom I presumed I had been hired for, were people fairly like myself, or specific friends I had had somewhere along the way. It varied a bit, depending on whom I had seen or lately read. I don’t think it is possible to write for people completely unlike yourself. I tried not to be completely negative, except about films I considered reprehensibly rotten, and the readers I heard from were often kind—although certainly not always. After the
Green Berets
review, among highly imaginatively obscene or physically threatening mail, there was an anonymous soul who sent me each week, addressed to Red Renata Adler, his losing tickets from Aqueduct. After several pieces attacking the Left, there were similar letters from the other side. And of course, there were always highly intelligent critical letters as well—and eleven humorous ones after the San Luis Rey debacle. I tried to answer all of them, although, being fairly messy with bills and papers, I lost a few. There was naturally some crazy mail, which I tried to answer seriously too. Just once, at a low time, I used the senatorial gambit for writing to weird vituperative constituents: “Dear Sir, I think I ought to inform you that some preliterate lunatic has been writing me letters and signing your name.” Inevitably, I chose the wrong case. I got an immediate reply. The reader answered that, though he had perhaps been a bit harsh, he was certainly no lunatic, and he hoped that I bore him no ill will. The nicest mail was from people who wrote as though they thought I was having a hard time.

In a way, I guess I was. What I wanted to do with the job was to try, as a just-under-thirty person then, of fairly contemporary experience, to review films in earnest (or in fun, depending on the film) with a bit more tension and energy than the traditional paper way. I was trying to shorten and tighten the daily pieces from what they had been before, and expand the range sometimes. In particular, I wanted drastically to change the redundancy of the Sunday articles. (It seemed absurd to rephrase every Sunday the reviews I had done on weekday afternoons.) None of this quite worked out. One continual problem was control. I was forever trying to do in a line something that should have been a piece, and making a piece out of what might have amounted to a line, and frazzling tone. I never seemed able to get it right. There was a special complication with what I can only call the easy victories. That is, I have a personal suspicion of critical writing that comes easily, of felicitous accidents. In criticism, I think there ought to be evidence of time taken, trouble ironed out, of a kind of American Gothic zeal for suffering. It makes the doing of criticism have some risks of its own and it seems more fair. Yet what would happen is that the dashed-off pieces, the unearned lines almost always worked out best. It was like being told, as people often are, that a shoddy piece of work is the best thing they have ever done. It leaves one somehow off-stride with fate. And often, I did wind up recapping in Sunday pieces, either because it was late Monday night and I did not have a thought in my head, or to go back to films and try to get the proportion right, or because repetitions somehow became inadvertent rest stops in my mind.

Some of the nicest times were when events in the outside world were allowed to impinge—the strikes in Paris and Cannes, the Evelyn Waugh disturbances in Venice, meeting the Czech directors, their doubts in the spring, their absolute despair in France and Italy in summer, meeting artists in those weeks, following them about and doing criticism of some films that mattered a bit. The little dramas of solid
Times
reporting came up then too: having to cross borders in hired cars to phone stories for deadlines during strikes; barricades; and, when I knew I couldn’t possibly face another Sunday piece, Cuba—where, though it turned out the international desk had been banned for a year, the culture desk was not. It was in travelling too that I discovered that, in newspaper terms, the culture copy desks had been treating me, when I was at home, with their own version of restraint. A story of marathon private strike meetings in Paris, on which the desk really got its chance, was rewritten top to bottom, with mistakes. The Cuba pieces presented problems of their own. Since regular
Times
reporters were still banned, the stories got treated a little as though they were news (the first piece, for instance, appeared on the front page), and it was a kind of writing I was only trying to learn about. But politics at other times (in a year when notoriety and power, media performance and political act, were becoming confused from Washington to Columbia) seemed to occur in writing about movies anyway.

In time, in just struggling with the pace and form, I think there began to be a kind of continuity—not the continuity exactly of criticism or prose, but a record of what movies come out in the course of a year, what movies there actually
are
, and what it can be like for somebody to go to nearly all of them. With all the truisms about the glamour and vitality of the medium, reviewing it daily turned into a kind of journal, with spells of anger, friendliness, ideas, just being tired—the movies themselves coming over the hills in swarms, so many of them nearly undistinguishable, some of them really fine. I have cut little except the purest redundancies, and left some of those. I thought I’d like to record the balance of films just about the way it was for one year, from Elke Sommer and Norman Mailer through festivals, George C. Scott, Truffaut and theaters like the Lyric and the Amsterdam. About a film every other day. I guess I believe things now, about film sex, horror, plot, satire, empathy, foreign languages, old prints, criticism, audio-visual aids, inter-generational dirty jokes, cinémathèques, color films, the reviewable quality of TV commercials and so on, that I hadn’t thought about before, but they are in here somewhere without any logic except that of newspaper space and time. I am still taken with a thought about plotless absurdism and its relation to a new value system in which the quality of events is regarded as neither desirable nor undesirable—in which it is desired only that
something
should happen, no matter what. The happening as a value. I think it runs deeply counter to existentialism, and that it is dangerous to life. It occurred to me at the end of my first review of
Faces
—a film which, incidentally, because of schedulings, I reviewed four times. But a year in the dark consisted far more truly of stories and actors, directors and theaters, and seeing them to write really entailed about 160 collisions of one’s own experience with Doris Day’s, Jean-Luc Godard’s, Kahlil Gibran’s or Sidney Poitier’s. And here it is, not an encyclopedia of movie statistics, or selected critical essays, but the whole peculiar year.