Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (4 page)

Awake in the Dark constitutes a record of a major critic's sensibility and a precious history of our film culture over the last forty years. It is destined to sit on your shelf alongside Agee, Farber, and their very few peers.

David Bordwell

I began my work as a film critic in 1967, although one of the pieces in this book goes back to my days on the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois. I had not thought to be a film critic, and indeed had few firm career plans apart from vague notions that I might someday be a political columnist or a professor of English. I came up to Chicago in September 1966 as a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, which was kind enough to accept me although I did not have my MA from the University of Illinois; I had fulfilled all of the requirements except the foreign language, which they assured me I could take care of during the first year. It was not that I could not learn French, but that I would not: I resisted memorizing and repeating, and there was something stubborn and unyielding in my refusal that had its origins, I suspect, in the tear-stained multiplication tables over which I was drilled in grade school. To read, to listen, to watch, and to learn came easily to me, but to memorize was a loathsome enterprise. I never did get a decent grade in French.

I had done some freelance book reviewing for the Chicago Daily News, and applied for a job there. Herman Kogan, the arts editor, forwarded my letter to James Hoge, city editor of the Chicago SunTimes, who took me out to lunch with Ken Towers, his assistant. After a chicken sandwich at Riccardo's I was hired as a feature writer on the paper's Sunday supplement.

Today students are on a "career path" beginning almost in grade school, but I must truthfully say my only object in attending college was to take literature classes because they were fun. I read books and talked and wrote about them, and got grades that let me continue to do that; I would have happily remained an undergraduate forever. To be hired by the SunTimes after applying to the Daily News was the first of several accidents, or strokes of good luck, that would form my future; when young people ask for career advice, I tell them there is no such thing, only the autobiography of the person they are asking, whose career was likely fashioned as much by chance as design.

Chicago in 1966 was caught up in the era of the war in Vietnam, the Beatles, hippies, flower power, psychedelic art, and always the movies. Philip Larkin assures us,

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first l.p.

And the movies began for my generation at about the same time or a little earlier. The two were not unrelated. The great turning point was the French New Wave. In Champaign-Urbana I haunted the Art Theater, watching the films of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, the Angry Young Men and the spontaneities of John Cassavetes. Some of my curiosity was driven by sexual desire; I saw in foreign films what Hollywood never dealt with. What I also saw was a world far outside my own. In the movies as well as in the books I was reading (the Beats as much as the Russians and the Victorians) was a range of life that filled me with uneasy hungers. I wanted to go to California. I wanted to go to England, to France. I wanted to go somewhere.

In 1962 I bought a $325 charter flight to Europe and saw La Dolce Vita again in a theater on Piccadilly Circus and The Third Man on a rainy day in a smoky revival house on the Left Bank of Paris. In high school I had seen a re-release of Citizen Kane at the Art Theater, and by the act of watching it I learned that films were made by directors and had a style. Before then I thought they were about stars and told a story. On campus at the film societies, I saw Akira Kurosawa and Sergei Eisenstein, and was no less awed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the Marx Brothers, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Billy Wilder.

The Daily Illini had a film critic, a graduate student named Ron Szoke. I became editor of the paper in my senior year and had endless conversations with him, during which I felt that I had a very great deal to learn about film. After the Sunday night screenings of international films at the Auditorium, we would all stream down the quadrangle to the basement of the Illini Union, where a professor named Gunther Marx would fascinate us with his readings of Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais. Last Year at Marienbad, he explained, was a working out of the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss. I did not know a thing about Claude Levi-Strauss, but was fascinated by this information, and repeated it wisely for years, all about the Lover, the Loved One, and the Authority Figure. Gunther Marx's son would grow up to be Frederick Marx, one of the makers of Hoop Dreams.

What I knew about film criticism, I knew from Ron Szoke and from the monthly columns of Dwight Macdonald in Esquire. He wrote about the movies in a way I had not experienced before, informally, angrily, with digressions and asides and the notion that sometimes they were saying something other than what they seemed to be saying.

There were no film classes at Illinois in those years. The Campus Film Society was run by Daniel Curley, a novelist, short story writer, and professor of English, whom I adopted as my mentor, signing up for every class he taught, even the writing workshop at which Larry Woiwode read his work and the rest of us simply sat there and stared at him in envy. Curley loved the movies in a personal way, and a word from him sent me to any film he mentioned. In 1965 I was returning through London after a year at the University of Cape Town, and he was there with his family on a sabbatical. We went to the Academy Cinema to see Shakespeare Wallah, and took the walk that later became our book The Perfect London Walk.

In my new job at the Sun-Times I wrote about bottled water, hero priests, snake charmers, fortune tellers, and the filming of Camelot. That was my first visit to a movie location. Josh Logan spent most of a day trying to make a lake on the back lot at Warner Brothers look green. On Monday nights, when Second City was dark, they showed underground films in the theater, and I reviewed them for the paper. I wrote obituaries of Walt Disney and Jayne Mansfield, and a memory of the children's matinees of my youth, when the coming of spring was announced by the arrival at the Princess Theater of Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man, an official representative of the Duncan Yo-Yo Company. He held a yo-yo contest on the theater stage. Winner got the Schwinn.

Robert Zonka, who was named the paper's feature editor the same day I was hired, became one of the best friends of a lifetime. One day in March 1967 he called me into a conference room, told me that Eleanor Keen, the paper's movie critic, was retiring, and that I was the new critic. I walked away in elation and disbelief, yet hardly suspected that this day would set the course for the rest of my life. How long could you be a movie critic, anyway? I had copies of Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies, Arthur Knight's The Liveliest Art, and Andrew Sarris's Interviews with Film Directors, and I read them cover to cover and plunged into the business of reviewing movies.

In my very first review I was already jaded, observing of Galia, an obscure French film, that it "opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave." My pose in those days was one of superiority to the movies, although j ust when I had the exact angle of condescension calculated, a movie would open that disarmed my defenses and left me ecstatic and joyful. Two movies in those first years were crucial to me: Bonnie and Clyde, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I called both of them masterpieces when the critical tides were running against them, and about 2001 I was not only right but early, writing my review after a Los Angeles preview during which Rock Hudson walked out of the Pantages Theatre complaining audibly, "Will somebody tell me what the hell this movie is about?" My review appeared the same day as the official world premiere in Washington.

The University of Chicago had a famous film society, Doc Films, whose members seemed to have been born having already seen every movie. I met Doc members like Dave Kehr, Terry Curtis Fox, Charles Flynn. I was asked to lunch one day by Flynn and a high school student from Evanston, Todd McCarthy, later to become Variety's chief critic. They were to edit the famous anthology Kings of the Bs together. Doc Films invited great men like John Ford to the campus, where he saw a print of The Long Voyage Home so chopped and scratched that he could barely bring himself to discuss it. On the North Side, Michael Kutza was in the fourth year of his Chicago Film Festival, and in November 1967 his festival showed I Call First, later retitled Who's That Knocking at My Door, the first film by a young New Yorker named Martin Scorsese. I thought it was a masterpiece.

The Clark Theater in the Loop showed daily double features, twenty three hours a day, seven days a week, and was run by Bruce Trinz and his assistant Jim Agnew. They told me I had to see certain films-not those by Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock, whom I knew about, but those by Phil Karlson, Val Lewton, Rouben Mamoulian, Jean Vigo, and all the others. Through Agnew I met Jay Robert Nash, who was put on this earth as the living embodiment of the Readers' Digest's Most Unforgettable Character. Through them I met Herschell Gordon Lewis, the director of Blood Feast, The Gore Gore Girls, Two Thousand Maniacs, and thirty-four other titles.

In later years when Lewis became a cult figure, I was asked for my memories of him, but I never saw one of his movies or discussed it with him. Instead, in the living room of the boardinghouse in Uptown where Agnew lived with his family, I sat with Agnew, Nash, Lewis, and a film booker and publicist named John West and Lewis's cinematographer, an Iranian named Alex Ameripoor, and we looked at 16 mm movies on a bedsheet hung upon a wall. They felt an urgency to educate me. We saw My Darling Clementine, Bride of Frankenstein, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, with Nash dancing with James Cagney in front of the screen and telling me Cagney's secret was always to stand on tiptoe, so there would seem to be an eagerness about his characters as opposed to the others. When John Ford died, Agnew and Ameripoor and some others from this group drove to Los Angeles and stood at his grave and sang "Shall We Gather at the River" and drove back to Illinois again. Although Herschell Gordon Lewis was notorious as the director of violent and blood-drenched exploitation films, I remember only a thoughtful lover of the movies.

Nash went on to edit The Motion Picture Guide, ten thick volumes of tiny type on big two-columned pages, purporting to contain an entry on every American and most foreign films of any note. This he produced by hiring from the bar stools of O'Rourke's Pub out-of-work journalists and alcoholics with time on their hands, chaining them to primitive early IBM PCs in a townhouse he rented on Sheridan Road, and setting them to grinding out entries at slave wages. So draconian were the working conditions that when the project was completed and he commenced The Encyclopedia of Crime, Jeanette Hori Sullivan, the coowner of O'Rourke's, told him, "Jay, the Encyclopedia of Crime won't be complete unless it contains an entry on The Motion Picture Guide."

These years had amounted to the education of a film critic. When I started teaching a film class at University of Chicago Extension in 1970, it was John West who advised me to use a stop-motion 16 mm projector to conduct shot-by-shot analysis of films. With the class I would spent six to eight hours stopping and starting and discussing dozens of films, and when the approach became more practical with the invention of laser discs and DVDs, I did it at film festivals all over the world. It was a direct and practical way to discuss film style, beginning not with theory but with someone calling out "Stop!" in the dark, and then a freeze-frame and a discussion of a shot, composition, camera movement, editing sequence, dialogue, performance, costume, lighting technique, or something peculiar in the shadows of the screen. I do not know that we evolved any overarching ideas about cinema, but there were times when we felt we had joined the director inside his film; I remember a Hitchcock film when there was the flash of a gunshot, and we looked at the film itself and found that one single frame had been left clear, so that the projector light would bounce from the screen.

In these sessions we learned from Understanding Movies, by professor Louis D. Giannetti, who offered practical insights involving compositional strategies, and, a few years later, from the several books by professors David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, who discussed film style with the greatest insight and penetration, and showed their confidence in their knowledge by writing in clear, elegant English instead of disguising insecurity with academese. Their books were an illustration of a truth that Robert Zonka cited when editing an impenetrable piece of copy: "If you cannot write about it so that anyone who buys the paper has a reasonable chance of understanding it, you don't understand it yourself."

I went to film festivals. At New York in 19671 met Pauline Kael and Werner Herzog and many others, but to meet those two was of lifelong importance. Kael became a close friend whose telephone calls often began with "Roger, honey, no, no, no," before she would explain why I was not only wrong but likely to do harm. Herzog by his example gave me a model for the film artist: fearless, driven by his subjects, indifferent to commercial considerations, trusting his audience to follow him anywhere. In the thirty-eight years since I saw my first Herzog film, after an outpouring of some fifty features and documentaries, he has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.