Much ado about movies.(American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now)(Book review)

American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate (Library of America, 825 pp., $40)

FILM was the master medium of the 20th century. Within a few years of its invention, it had supplanted live theater and the novel as the main way in which most people experienced the art of storytelling, and it retains its cultural dominance to this day (though only if you count TV as a species of filmmaking, which you should). It follows, then, that film criticism should by definition be worth reading. Right? Er, well, sometimes. Most of it is in fact flaming hogwash, though Phillip Lopate has held the nonsense to a minimum in his new collection of American film criticism. It isn't perfect--no anthology is--but American Movie Critics will likely become the standard collection of its kind, for the most part rightly so.

The Hippocratic Oath of anthologists starts off as follows: First, don't be dull. Lopate has steered clear of mere dutifulness, one or two puzzling duds notwithstanding, and he's struck a nice balance between such obligatory-but-deserving inclusions as Manny Farber's "Underground Film" and Robert Warshow's "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" and the out-of-left-field nuggets that lend savor to any anthology worth reading. Who knew that Cecilia Ager, who reviewed movies for Variety and PM in the 1930s and '40s, was so wickedly clever? Or that Vincent Canby's never-before-collected New York Times reviews would hold up so well? As for his decision to include the entries on Cary Grant and Howard Hawks from David Thomson's indispensable New Biographical Dictionary of Film, my only regret is that he didn't throw in Humphrey Bogart while he was at it.

Of course I would have done it all differently, and certain of Lopate's oversights are real disappointments. I was surprised, for instance, to find nothing by Anthony Lane or Joe Morgenstern, and positively staggered by the absence of Charles Thomas Samuels, whose Mastering the Film (1977) remains one of the most penetrating books on film to be produced by an American critic. Nor am I quite satisfied with his selections from the '30s and '40s, which too often run to the obvious. (Had Lopate spent a couple of hours trolling through the eight DVD-ROMs that make up The Complete New Yorker, for instance, he would have discovered that Harold Ross was publishing smart film criticism long before Pauline Kael.) In addition, American Movie Critics contains no index, nor are the essays it reprints accompanied by their original dates of publication, though many--but not all--can be found in the back-of-the-book permissions section. These vexing omissions greatly diminish the usefulness of American Movie Critics to the general reader.

Be that as it may, this is Phillip Lopate's book, not mine or anybody else's, and it's mostly a fine one. Even where I take issue with his priorities, I have no trouble appreciating them, which is all you can ask of an anthologist (except for an index). John Simon, for instance, surely deserves to have been represented by more than two pieces, but had I been the editor of American Movie Critics, I would have made sure to include, as Lopate does, his reviews of The Last Picture Show and Chinatown:

 
   The final question is whether a mystery 
   film, however concerned with moral climate 
   and psychological overtones, can 
   transcend its genre.... These people are 
   much more vulnerable than their genre 
   antecedents, which is what ultimately 
   makes for Chinatown's originality and 
   distinction. Still, the hold of the genre is 
   so strong that, even with sensational plot 
   twists kept at a minimum, there ...