On Andrew Sarris

The film critic Andrew Sarris died a couple of weeks ago. When I was an undergrad getting my extremely marketable BFA in creative writing, I read a lot of of film critics, such as Sarris and Pauline Kael. Of these, Kael has aged the best, but Sarris still holds up. He was a serious and intelligent critic and though I have problems his approach and what it has led to (spelled out here in some detail), it was well thought-out and often useful.

It should be noted that though Sarris, by popularizing auteur theory, might bear some responsibility for the current practice of assuming that the author of every movie is the director, he never fell into that trap. Sarris's criticism was more sophisticated and sensible than that. Auteurs were, for him, more the exception than the rule and he was quite capable of praising a film like Casablanca while admitting that it broke his critical framework. (Putting him one up on Dwight McDonald who often forced the data to fit the model, but more on that later.)

Directors are the most over and under-rated artists. Over-rated because they get credit for all sorts of things they have little or nothing to do with. Under-rated because most of their actual work goes unnoticed. As Kael puts it on Trash, Art and the Movies:

 I don’t mean to suggest that there is not such a thing as movie technique or that craftsmanship doesn’t contribute to the pleasures of movies, but simply that most audiences, if they enjoy the acting and the “story” or the theme or the funny lines, don’t notice or care about how well or how badly the movie is made, and because they don’t care, a hit makes a director a “genius” and everybody talks about his brilliant technique (i.e., the technique of grabbing an audience).

That's OK for the audience. Unfortunately most critics function on the same level. When Sarris and Kael talked about the direction of a film, they actually meant the direction of the film. This was one of the things that made their exchanges so memorable.

Roger Ebert (a friend of both critics) has an appreciation of Sarris here.

For an example of great direction working with other elements to create a great movie, click here. For great direction in a not-very-good movie, click here.

Hoisted from comments: "Well, they needed someone to listen."

Brian of Ultrasonic Remote writes in to provide some historical context to our previous posts (here and here) about Orson Welles, Herman Mankiewicz and the Vidal/Bogdanovich(/Kael**) cage match:

Bogdanovich is, of course, an unabashed fan of Orson Welles, which is no sin in my book. His fandom has sadly blinded him. How is this for a statistic?

No. of Oscar nominations for Welles - 2
Oscar wins - 1

No. of Oscar nominations for Mankiewicz - 2
Oscar wins - 1

The "talented hack" remark rings hollower when you take into account that the second nomination for Mankiewicz was for "Pride of the Yankees", one of the listed films!

By the way, lest you think that I am swayed solely by numbers of awards (Welles has more), here is a funny sidelight. To perhaps emphasize the perfidy of either organization, it should be noted that two of Orson Welles later nominations were for his work in the movie "Butterfly". It was nominated for a Golden Globe for BEST Supporting Performance by an Actor and for a Razzie for WORST Supporting Performance by an Actor.

The other hole in this theory is numbers. Some sexist might say something along the lines of "Men are better musicians than women". Let's look at that statement on the basis of recorded work. While it is certainly true that there are more male names than female ones on lists made by critics and musicians, it is an unfair argument, because, quite simply, many more men have recorded. The more at-bats one has, the greater possibility of hitting a home run.

If one looks at the sheer amount of material Mankiewicz wrote, he wins handily over Welles. It is the select few that can turn out a prodigious amount of material AND have an overwhelming percentage of it adjudged genius level or thereabouts.

Mankiewicz was hired at a time that movies were the ONLY visual medium around. People loved the new medium, therefore many, many people needed to write and write a lot. In Vaudeville, if you had a successful act, you could tour for years and never change it, because it was live, could not be preserved by the amateurs and due to a circuit of theaters, it could not be centralized. Radio and movies didn't slow Vaudeville, it killed it. Radio killed the visual acts and the verbal ones could do their act a few times at best as guests, but if one of these performers got a series, you HAD to have new material. There were hours in every day and every day needed programming to fill some or all of those hours. One man was hired on radio, because someone missed a gig and a panicky station owner literally stopped him on the street and asked him, "Can you do anything!?", and fortunately, he was a pianist; he was hired permanently not long afterwards. Radio also brought about convenience. The entertainment came to you, right into your home.

Movies added the bonus of seeing as well as hearing celebrities and celebrities-to-be. it too needed to be fed a lot of material. They needed people that could write and write quickly and Mankiewicz fit the bill. Did some who found work skate by with a minimum of talent? Yes. Was some of Mankiewicz's work less than memorable? Yes. However, Mankiewicz's career did something that Welles' could not have done, which is to say that it spanned the era of movies from silents to sound. Any number of people lost their jobs because they might have been able to write title cards, but could not write screenplays. Mankiewicz was a journalist, theater critic, playwright AND a screenwriter and a member of the "Algonquin Round Table".*

Is this the resume' of a talented hack?



*One of the members of the ART was Harpo Marx, one of the few members that not only didn't write, but left school early. When asked why he, a member of a comedy team that many of the members might have considered lowbrow, was a member, he replied, "Well, they needed someone to listen."

** Pauline Kael did start this though she had the good sense to walk away when the conversation got silly.