Obituary - Richard Grenier, R.I.P.(Brief Article)(Obituary)

Through the most important decade of the 20th century, Richard Grenier was the most important film critic in the world. If that sounds a slightly grudging encomium for a writer of great range and variety, what should be added is that he made film criticism his surfboard for wide-ranging cultural, moral, and political criticism. And surfing against the waves, he nonetheless rode them triumphantly until he landed in 1989 to find that the world had unexpectedly shaken itself awake and agreed with him.

Before his emergence as Commentary's film critic in 1980, however, Grenier had lived the kind of eventful life that writers used to live before the age of NEA grants and writer-in-residence sinecures. He was educated at Harvard and took an engineering degree at the Naval Academy. As a young naval officer he both won a boxing championship and formed a lifelong friendship with Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- two activities that somehow explain each other. He served a long apprenticeship in workaday journalism in Europe, where his wife, Cynthia, was the representative for a Hollywood studio. He was arrested as a Western spy during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Reporting from Paris for the Financial Times, he became for a while the landlord to Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda (in her pre-feminist prime). And then, as people say of those who hone their skills and amass just the right experience over decades, he became an overnight success. It is hard to exaggerate the impact of Grenier's first few reviews for Commentary in 1980. Everybody seemed to be discussing them, recommending them to friends, reading passages from them over the phone through shouts of laughter. Within a short time his reviews were being ...