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.

An excuse to pull out my favorite John Ford quote

It's not often you have to correct Roger Ebert on film history, but his recent retrospective on the Grapes of Wrath opens with a statement that definitely needs correcting:

John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath" is a left-wing parable, directed by a right-wing American director, about how a sharecropper's son, a barroom brawler, is converted into a union organizer.

It's true that Ford became more identified with the GOP in the late Forties (calling himself a 'Maine Republican') and turned sharply to the right in the mid-Sixties (around the time he turned seventy), but up until that sharp turn he had been a progressive (even afterwards his favorite presidents were FDR and JFK) and he was an ardent FDR man when he made Grapes of Wrath in 1940. He held to these basic principles even when they entailed significant professional risk in the Fifties.

From Wikipedia:

Ford's attitude to McCarthyism in Hollywood is expressed by a story told by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. A faction of the Directors Guild of America led by Cecil B. DeMille had tried to make it mandatory for every member to sign a loyalty oath. A whispering campaign was being conducted against Mankiewicz, then President of the Guild, alleging he had communist sympathies. At a crucial meeting of the Guild, DeMille's faction spoke for four hours until Ford spoke against DeMille and proposed a vote of confidence in Mankiewicz, which was passed. His words were recorded by a court stenographer:

"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns. I don't think there's anyone in this room who knows more about what the American public wants than Cecil B. DeMille — and he certainly knows how to give it to them.... [looking at DeMille] But I don't like you, C.B. I don't like what you stand for and I don't like what you've been saying here tonight."^[77]

Waiting for Superman... to get bored and drop you like a bad habit

From Roger Ebert's review of Waiting for Superman:

We have met five of these students, heard from them and their parents, and hope they'll win. The cameras hold on their faces as numbers are drawn or names are called. The odds against them are 20 to 1. Lucky students leap in joy. The other 19 of the 20 will return to their neighborhood schools, which more or less guarantees they will be part of a 50 percent dropout rate. The key thing to keep in mind is that underprivileged, inner-city kids at magnet schools such as Kipp L.A. Prep or the Harlem Success Academy will do better academically than well-off suburban kids with fancy high school campuses, athletic programs, swimming pools, closed-circuit TV and lush landscaping. [emphasis added]

Probably the most comprehensive study of the KIPP program was done by SRI, which looked at KIPP schools in the Bay Area. Here's one of their findings (again, emphasis added):

As researchers analyzed the student achievement data and KIPP’s approach, they also identified challenges facing Bay Area KIPP schools, including high student attrition rates, teacher turnover, and low state and local funding. For example, 60 percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools in 2003-04 left before completing eighth grade.

More that any other player in the charter school movement, KIPP has relied on the cheese effect to generate its results. It's a profitable and highly praised business model built entirely of the backs of discarded students.