Author, author!: Richard Corliss’s ‘Talking Pictures’

With old Hollywood coming into view again, thanks to the extremely corny Feud miniseries (Robert Aldrich fans, take arms!) and the recent Oscars (which contained a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em old film clips), I’ve been thinking of the study of classic Hollywood films. The other occurrences that brought out these thoughts were the recent deaths of Richard Schickel and TCM host Robert Osborne. Since I have nothing special to offer in the way of tribute to those gents, I will move back to a writer whose work I’ve wanted to return to for some months now, Richard Corliss. I intended this piece to appear on his birthday (March 6), but it will appear instead near the anniversary of his passing (April 23, 2015).

In the Deceased Artiste piece I wrote about “RC” (as I was acquainted with him — I felt awkward calling him “Richard” in our correspondence) I noted that he wrote with particular elan and touching fellowship about his critic-friends when they died. I thought about the fine tributes I’m sure he would’ve written for Osborne and his old colleague Schickel and realized it was high time to return to Corliss’s writing.

He published only four books, and all but the last are out of print. The longest and most significant is his first, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (1974), which now stands as the only “collection” of his reviews (unless his best Film Comment and TIME pieces are ever put together between covers). It was his first “grand statement,” a defense of the Hollywood scripter that reacted as a kind of corrective to his teacher and friend Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema. As such, it’s an unusual book — to fully get what Corliss is doing you’re best served having at least read some of Sarris’s book, which was in itself a grand statement, in which Sarris ranked Hollywood directors from “Pantheon” masters to “Less Than Meets the Eye.”

Sarris was the foremost American proponent of the Cahiers du Cinema’s “politique des auteurs,” but he was quick to admit that that approach to film history did have its problems. Foremost among them were the Hollywood productions that were perfect films, but not particularly because of the director (Casablanca being the best example). He also included a chapter called “Bring on the Clowns!” in which he admitted that the great American film comedians who never received directorial credit on their films were still the “auteurs” of said works — when you see a film starring Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Mae West, or the Marx Brothers in their prime, it doesn’t matter who directed it, the film’s “life force” (and co-scripter) is the starring comedian.

A film critic who had tastes that ranged far and wide culturally, Corliss decided to extrapolate on this particular theme by discussing the screenwriters whose work was so consistently excellent that they outshone those who directed their work. The book was written over a three and a half year span and includes rewrites of some of his pieces for magazines and other publications. He discusses 100 films written by 35 carefully selected scripters.

It’s a curious book to read in this era when media surrounds us everywhere, but then so are all the serious film books written in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Talking Pictures also comes from the time when people other than academics would read serious film books. The filmgoing culture that took mainstream, and more particularly old and foreign, films seriously was at its height from the Fifties through the Seventies (the election of a B-movie actor curiously did a lot to kill off cinema appreciation in America). Reading these books one gets the sense of shared enthusiasm — from the best-selling books of Pauline Kael to erudite fare like Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meanings in Cinema.

RC meets "rock-teur" Chuck Berry

We’re talking about a time when film criticism mattered, and books like Talking Pictures existed as a tool for arguments among buffs — these days that role is filled by “listicle” items on the Internet that spotlight the “funniest movies ever” or “10 action movies you must see before you die.”

Corliss’s notion of reworking the auteur theory to shine the light on writers rather than directors thus fit perfectly with the times. Sarris himself admitted that there were other “auteurs” who were responsible for many films, and Corliss got quite a boon by having the Old Man himself write the foreword to Talking Pictures, acknowledging and praising Corliss’s attempt to shift the attention of film buffs with this book.

Lubitsch directs Garbo and Melvyn
Douglas

The book seems to be an interim step to the discussion of multiple auteurs on certain films. Corliss states this outright in the introduction: “You could call Citizen Kane either the culmination of Herman Mankiewicz's dreams or the beginning of Orson Welles' nightmares, but it would be silly to ignore either man's contribution. Who is the auteur of Ninotchka: Ernst Lubitsch, or the Charles Brackett-Billy Wilder-Walter Reisch team, or Greta Garbo? Obviously, all of them. I've tried in this book to make a case for the screenwriter without libeling either the director or the actor.” [Penguin edition, 1975, p. xxviii] 

Talking Pictures is thus an argument against the director-as-auteur, but not the auteur theory per se. In the intro, the terms are defined this way:
“William Wyler was absolutely right to hold the director responsible for ‘a picture's quality’ — just as a conductor is responsible for the composer's symphony, or a contractor for the architect's plans. But he must also be responsible to something: the screenplay. With it, he can do one of three things: ruin it, shoot it, or improve it.” [p. 20]

Picking the scripter as the prime shaper of a movie seems like a sound decision until one actually factors in a few other items that aren’t usually the case with a director. The first, most important, is the profusion of scripters who worked on films during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Many of the movies from that era would have a person listed who concocted the storyline, then another set of writers who wrote the initial draft of the script, and then a final set, usually a duo, who “signed” the film as the main scripters.

In line with that, while it’s possible that an editor (or a heavy-handed producer of the Harvey Weinstein sort) could shift around a director’s work, it’s far more common that a scripter would toil on a film and then see his/her work completely scrapped by the next “set of hands.” Thus, in Talking Pictures, Corliss often has to play detective to attribute a given film to a given scripter. In some cases, he decides on discussing certain films as the work of certain lesser-remembered scripters (Charles Brackett, for instance), rather than their famous collaborators (Billy Wilder, in Brackett’s case).

The most striking thing about the book is that Corliss wrote it when he was a “young turk” in the film-crit biz, and thus he was not afraid to take swipes at certain revered figures. Thus, the man who in later years was considered quite a kind critic in his work for TIME (even when panning something, Richard could be uncommonly polite about slamming a talented person who had turned out a wretched movie) was quite ready in the early Seventies to dissect and tear down many movie classics.

I went on a spree a few years ago and wound up watching every film directed by Howard Hawks (not counting the missing silents, obviously, and the ones he was fired from or left). Thus I was surprised that one of the scripters responsible for some of Hawks' best works gets appraised/trashed by Corliss in Talking Pictures. The writer in question is Jules Furthman, whose screenplays during a four-and-a-half decade career, included The Docks of New York, Morocco, The Shanghai Express, and Blonde Venus (all Sternberg); Mutiny on the Bounty, Nightmare Alley; To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Only Angels Have Wings, and Rio Bravo (the last quartet directed by Hawks; the final two being among the top tier of Golden Age films).

With that kind of pedigree you'd think Furthman might be in the first rank. He's actually in the third rank, and Corliss sums up his feelings about Furthman's writing this way:

“The problem is that there's not much difference between best and worst Furthman. He is always competent, often compromising, rarely compelling, and never incomparable. In general, Furthman exemplifies the kind of screenwriter whose filmographic whole is greater than the sum of his particular contributions to it, whose best work was done as the 'employee' of a directing or performing personality stronger than his own, and whose career deserves to be resurrected but not adored.” [p. 270]

So, in effect, the book is most interesting when Corliss takes on a contrarian position and trashes a writer whose films were pretty sublime (or was it Sternberg and Hawks who made those films sublime? Back to square one…). What RC makes clear at many points in the book is that he did read many of the screenplays in question, so he was also aware of many of the weaknesses inherent in Furthman's writing.

Jules Furthman

The odd thing, given the titles in question, is that the films cited above are indeed quite, quite good — so to say that Furthman was nothing better than a craftsman ends up becoming praise for his co-scripters (including Faulkner on The Big Sleep), or an argument that either Sternberg and Hawks were alchemists, making gold out of dross, OR the studio system just turned out some heavy-duty classics amid the programmers and routine vehicle pictures.

One last point of contention (mine, not Richard's): While Sarris arranged his book in “descending order” from his “pantheon” of great directors to “Subjects for Further Research.” Corliss on the other hand outlines his various strata in the book's introduction, and then groups the scripters thematically in the book proper so we don't start off or end up with the cream of the crop. The four categories he chose, incidentally, were “Parthenon” (not Pantheon!), Erechtheion, Propylaea, and “Outside the Walls.”

Last notes about the book itself: It closes out on a small group of scripters who had had great successes in the Sixties and Seventies. The positive write-ups here include his section on Carnal Knowledge and his entry for Robert Benton and David Newman. In the process of writing up the latter team, he reviews a script that was never made into a movie, “Hubba-Hubba.”

Newman and Benton

This is quite a ballsy move, and even more striking than the fact that Sarris included projects in pre-production in the filmographies in his book (for years, I've wondered why he put “Napoloeon” in Kubrick's listing, given that the film hadn't even begun shooting). What I came to realize on second reading of Talking Pictures is that Corliss might have even suspected that “Hubba-Hubba” was dead in the water, and yet he “reviewed” it in order to have an example of an unfilmed script.

He does mention in his rather lengthy entry (five pages, the same amount of space devoted to The Searchers) that the script features “three or four sequences that audiences will long remember — if they ever get to see them.” I could, of course, be completely wrong on this, given the fact that he also takes care to mention three projects written by Benton and Newman that were about to be filmed (one of them, he notes, should start filming by the time the book is published). None of the three ever saw the light of day….

The reason I'm doing this re-appraisal and resurrection of the book, though, is that it belongs to that period of time when movies really did matter to a greater number of people — given the present-day argument that “[A current excellent TV show] is just like cinema… in fact, it's our era's version of literature!” means that too many reviewers don't really like cinema all that much. (Very good TV is nothing to be sneezed at, but it is indeed just that — excellent TV. Not cinema, not literature, but very good television.)

In his best writing, Corliss went about this task as a critic in a very serious fashion. He also, like the good logic-based liberal he was, was very much open to debate. Books like The American Cinema and Talking Pictures were indeed intended to start arguments, but healthy arguments based on a real knowledge of the subject — rather than today's online “listicles” that declare certain things “worthy” of inclusion, with all else in the category being not even worth contemplation.  (When you're making up a list of “films to see before you die,” you've already hit the rock-bottom Cliff Notes level of critical appraisal.)

Before I discuss the individuals whom Corliss clearly loved and hated, I should point to an instance in the book where he acknowledges that his opinions were open to debate:

“A truly dogmatic critic can talk himself into liking — or, at the very least, making a sophisticated case for — just about any film that appeals to his prejudices. So, although I continue to affirm my resistance to any formal theory that claims the screenwriter as an auteur, any reader deserves to be skeptical when I simply state that the pair of writer-director films, Darling Lili and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, can be recommended as more meaningful, more personal, and even, to the disinterested viewer, more satisfying than the offerings of our two Pantheon residents.” [p. 157]

I will discuss Corliss's dislikes before his likes, since he was always at his best when rhapsodizing about something he loved, and that is the best note to close on. I also do this because I tend to disagree with a few of his evaluations in this category, so I will be conducting a one-sided argument, which can only be answered by then giving Richard the final word, in the form of his praise for the writers whose work he truly did love.

Tammy and the Bachelor

His young turk attitude allows him at points to be brutally frank about some much-beloved Hollywood personalities. A personal favorite of mine is his tangential diss of two very exuberant blonde performers. While discussing Norman Krasna, he takes time to single out “those paragons of pointless energy, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee.”

He goes on, in a somewhat caddish but (let’s be honest) uncannily accurate mode: “Both actresses were too tough to make it as Audrey Hepburns and too angular to be Marilyn Monroes; wide-eyed aggression would have to do. If that was enough to keep their careers afloat longer than their talents deserved, it also helped sink their movies. Debbie rarely transmitted a feeling of joy in her work; it was all work, reworking, and overworking.” [pp. 71-72]

Had he lived to see Reynolds’ departure, I'm sure he would've written a beautiful obit for her, studio-contracted object that she was, but in the Seventies he let it all hang out. Thus, we come to the places where he tears apart some of mine own faves. First, Frank Tashlin, who, he says found in the severe limitations of his leads (Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Jack Carson, Lucille Ball) “exactly that quality of lumpy, proletarian inflexibility that would express his own view of comedy as submission to pain, and not — as the greatest silent comedy artists demonstrated — its sublime, effortless transcendence.” [p. 77]

Jerry and Frank Tashlin

I know that Richard was not a fan of Jerry Lewis at all. He also had a major problem with Tashlin, a director whom I feel was the single best “rangler” of Jerry, to the extent that his movies actually make Jerry rather charming (something Jerry was unable to achieve the times he directed himself). Richard's take? “It may be too much to ask that Tashlin's films also provoke the joy, the delight, the spontaneous laughter of great screen comedy. So I will not ask. I will simply say: they are not funny.” [p. 89]

One of the biggest turnabouts in Andrew Sarris's writing was that he openly condemned Billy Wilder in The American Cinema, placing him in the “Less Than Meets the Eye” category, but later realized Wilder was one of the greats whom he had been completely wrong about. I'm not certain what Richard's later take on Wilder was, but here he shares Sarris's Sixties contempt for the master-scripter [my phrase, not Corliss's] by expressing his loathing of the darker-than-dark A Foreign Affair (1948) as a “vile” film.

Also in the “hated it!” category, interestingly enough, is Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948), which is now commonly agreed upon as a masterpiece of both film noir and urban drama. Corliss finds it to be a triter creation by Polonsky, summing it up this way: “Like Odets and Fuchs, Polonsky was at his movie best when he thought he was selling out. When he was left on his own (as in Force of Evil and Willie Boy), the themes turned pedagogical, the images verged on the ponderous, the dialogue often surrendered epigrammatic cheekiness for muted soliloquies and voluptuous self-contempt.” [p. 136]

Corliss embraced some of the greatest visions of the Sixties maverick period. He wrote a review in 1968 praising the mostly-loathed Richard Lester downer Petulia (which is now thought of as a masterpiece, natch). His enthusiasm for the modernist filmmaking of that period did not, however, extend to Robert Altman's biggest hit, M*A*S*H (1970), which he hated. 

His summation in his entry here on the film's screenwriter, Ring Lardner Jr. (who won an Oscar for his script, which had been greatly changed by Altman in the filming), was that its “characterizations lack the depth and consistency we demand when looking for a movie that's more than very funny. As with The Graduate, its tone is too distinct and erratic (The Hardy Boys one moment, Satan's Sadists the next) to fit it easily into a genre. And as with The Graduate, most critics tended to review a film they wanted to see instead of the film in front of them.” [p. 344] I disagree, but am thoroughly amused that RC got an Al Adamson reference into his pan.

The most intriguing thing about the final section of Talking Pictures is that Corliss chose to tackle the new Hollywood by singling out a group of screenwriters who sadly did not “rise” any further in the Seventies (unless you want to count Robert Benton, who became a successful director after splitting with his scripting partner Robert Newman). This chapter includes a thorough trashing of Funhouse hero Terry Southern, whom Corliss finds to be facile and none too witty (mine own feelings are in this piece).

The thing that hits one reading Talking Pictures from this later point in time is that there were scripters who became “superstars” in the years after the book came out. They usually became directors (like Paul Schrader), although some didn't (the enormously successful, and then utterly forgotten, Joe Eszterhas). In our correspondence he threw out a few names of people that he would've put into an updated version of the book, like Dustin Lance Black. While Woody Allen is another key name — since his films are mostly script and the visuals are really the creation of whoever is the cinematographer on that particular film — one of the most successful scripters-turned-directors was of course Francis Ford Coppola.

Moving on from those who were trashed to those who were treasured, we reach a film that is celebrated in Talking Pictures in two entries (the ones for Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer). Corliss states flat out that “His Girl Friday is Hawks's best comedy, and quite possibly his best film.” [p. 318]

This, the “most anarchic newspaper comedy of all time,” inspires Corliss to one of his best insights about the films of Golden Age Hollywood. He reflects on what movie viewers prize: “Though Walter bullies, lies to, and spills things on Bruce, the film convinces us that Walter and Hildy were made for each other, if only because angelic boredom is a greater movie sin than stylish corruption.” [ibid]

One of the most interesting comparisons occurs when he's talking about Singin' in the Rain in his entry on Comden and Green. He notes that that perfect musical “suggests, without a wasted shot or twist of the plot, the same end of a sublime, ridiculous movie era that Billy Wilder painted, with broader, more delirious strokes, in Sunset Boulevard. The difference in tone is due as much to the two films' fidelity to their own themes as to the fact that Hagen is Singin' in the Rain's comic villainess, and not its tragic heroine." [p. 199]

Trumbo

Perhaps the most unusual note in the book is struck when RC praises Dalton Trumbo’s correspondence (which was released in book form as Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo in 1970) above his screenplays. He explains it this way: “A long look at the non-movie ephemera of Trumbo, Hecht, Harry Brown, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and others convinces me that half the screenwriters in Hollywood poured their talent into witty letters, fierce memos, and funny stories once they realized their scripts would not be filmed as they were written.

“Of the self-destructive Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht wrote: ‘I knew that no one as witty and spontaneous as Herman would ever put himself on paper. A man whose genius is on tap like free beer seldom makes literature out of it.’ The art of conversation is not only a dying art, it is one that dies anew as the embers of a witty evening's memory turn to the dust of gossip.

“Mankiewicz ‘put himself on paper’ for the movies just once — when he wrote Citizen Kane. Trumbo's own genius was clandestine, conspiratorial, circulated only to special friends and formidable enemies. His screenplays deserve the oblivion most of them have already received; but his letters will live, for the true record of the man is there — in those florid, cantankerous, incandescent salvos.” [p. 262]

Ben Hecht's first Oscar
winner, dir. by Sternberg

There are conflicted feelings in entries about certain screenwriters. The Big Daddy of ‘Em All, Ben Hecht, is thus a target for Corliss’s bouquets, and slings and arrows. Hecht was indeed a sort of “industry” among scripters — his name was so famous that he frequently seems to have been only briefly involved with the films that wound up bearing his name as a scripter. Thus, while one has to be of two minds about such a ubiquitous figure (see, for example, Hecht’s credit on the Zsa Zsa sci-fi masterwork of high camp, Queen of Outer Space), it’s impossible to escape how Hecht got into the enviable position of being a “franchise” rather than just a writer.

Or as RC puts it, “Hecht did offer a backhanded defense of the craft he loved and the restrictions he loathed. ‘It is as difficult to make a toilet seat as a castle window,’ he wrote in 1962, ‘even if the view is a bit different.’ During his long tenure in Hollywood, Ben Hecht made both. But at his best, he could make a porcelain privy glisten like stained glass on a sunny day.” [p. 24]

Corliss rhapsodizes about some less famous films as well, including scripter Norman Krasna’s Hands Across the Table (1935). Sure it’s a film directed by Lubitsch, but Richard raises the ante against Sarris by giving the screenwriters “authorship” of the film in this book. Of Hands, he notes (curiously praising Lubitsch more than Krasna) it “was Ernst Lubitsch's first film as Paramount's production chief. For once, the School of Lubitsch — which was attended, consciously or not, by most of Hollywood's best romantic-comedy writers and directors — produced a work eminently worthy of its master.” [p. 67]

Letter From an Unknown Woman

At times he contextualizes the book’s whole concept by attributing the films to both their director and their scripters. In a case like the sublime Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), this makes perfect sense. “Letter…, both as an exquisite set of reverberations from [Howard] Koch's best early films and as a virtual master plan for the later, more famous Ophuls pictures, is a most convincing case for multiple authorship. Not only is Letter crucial to the careers of both writer and director, but it is also the perfect conjunction of these powerful proponents of film romance.

“Ophuls' woman-in-love theme achieves perhaps its most beautiful expression here; but the film reveals at least as many Kochian obsessions, most significantly the letter as a transmitter of intonations of love and intimations of death — a memento mori that can cleanse the receiver even as it kills the sender.” [p. 116]

And, while today’s cinephile reader might be surprised at the number of well-regarded scripters who come in for a beautifully worded drubbing in Talking Pictures, at other points the obvious talent of the masters is recognized and becomes the subject of lyrical prose.

Sullivan's Travels

Speaking of Preston Sturges and his superb use of character actors, Corliss notes (in this instance, apropos of Sullivan’s Travels): “No writer or director was more generous to these gifted spear carriers than was Sturges as writer-director, but then no writer or director was as dependent on them to propel his picture. He used them as a chorus to carry his hero, kicking and screaming, away to the burial ground.

"They were raffish, cynical small-timers in themselves, but when unified in opposition to the hero — which is what Sturges always did with them — they forgot their differences and banded into a powerful force for intimidation. Individually, they were bull throwers; collectively, they were a bulldozer. And it took the Sturgean hero a full ninety minutes to free himself, however tentatively, from their grasp.” [p. 45]

The modern (read: post-studio system) screenplay that comes in for the most praise in the book’s last chapter is Jules Feiffer’s script for Carnal Knowledge (1971). Corliss is unabashed in his praise of the script (and the film). One wishes there had been a Feiffer script that was in the same league after ’71 — I will steadfastly defend two-thirds of Altman’s Popeye (1980), but Resnais’ I Want to Go Home (1989) is a major disappointment, despite the references in the film to master cartoonists Will Eisner and Lee Falk.

When analyzing Carnal Knowledge, Corliss does a fine job of contextualizing the many media that Feiffer was working in at the turn of the Seventies: “Those who say Feiffer's vision is simplistic because he is a cartoonist are wrong; it is simple because he is a moralist. That vision is a creation unique in its comic pessimism. It is also remarkably consistent, which may explain why Little Murders, conceived as a novel, succeeded as a play — and why Carnal Knowledge, conceived as a play, stands as the most personal and perceptive film to emerge from the new breed of screenwriters.” [p. 366]

Like The American Cinema, Talking Pictures was sadly never updated and thus is forever frozen in amber at the beginning of the Seventies. It can be easily found in the usual places where secondhand books dwell and remains a remarkably well-written cause for arguments among movie buffs who care about and love old Hollywood. (It made perfect that the last institution to embrace Corliss was the stalwart destination for all of us smitten with old movies, Turner Classic Movies.)

Richard had other loves in the world of cinema — and many in the other arts, from theater and literature to music, erotica, and comic books — which I hope to chronicle in future blog entries. His writing was filled with enthusiasm for the things that he loved, and while Talking Pictures reveals an earlier, surprisingly acerbic Corliss, his best reviews and theme pieces (a lot of them done for the Internet in this century) deserve to be read in the decades to come. Any publishers (or academic presses) up for a collection of RC’s best and most eclectic writing?
*****

And since the man himself enjoyed diversions, tangents, and connecting the dots with trivia, I have to note that while I wrote this piece over the last several weeks I kept hearing this song in my head.

What He Left Us: Deceased Artiste Richard Corliss

I never felt comfortable calling him Richard. Even after we'd corresponded for a few years, even after I'd met him in person, I preferred to cheat in my e-mail salutations and start off simply with “Hi.” This, mind you, was my problem, not his. “RC,” – as he signed his e-mails, and as I came to think of him – was an uncommonly kind gent, one of the single friendliest movie experts I've ever known.

He knew what he loved about cinema and pop culture in general (more on that in the second part of this piece), but he kept his mind open about the things he wasn't as fond of or had never heard of (he remained as curious at 71 as I'm sure he had been at 15). What permeated his writing, both public and private, was an enthusiasm for culture that was thoroughly infectious. He loved sharing his obsessions and if he discovered that you were already attuned to his wavelength, he reached out and said hi.

Which is exactly how I first made his acquaintance. In the mid-Nineties, a publicist for a distributor of Hong Kong features told me that “Richard Corliss from Time magazine” had told her that my show Media Funhouse was covering HK cinema – many of us were utterly obsessed by it in that period – and I should be put on her list.

A few years later, in 2000, I received a phone call from Time office asking if I could supply images from my show to accompany a piece Corliss had written about it. I was delighted to read the review, since he had focused on the range of material I covered (from “high” to “low”), and he found time to convey the joys of the mighty Nelson de la Rosa.

I wrote to him to thank him and ask if I could take him out to lunch (this review having been a major boon for the show, both then and now). He said he had a policy of not meeting the people he wrote about – a policy he later thankfully broke – but what happened after that was that we became e-mail correspondents.

I will be eternally grateful for RC's continual plugging of the show and this blog in his writings, but (and I really do mean this), I was even happier about our e-mail exchanges. The fact that he would supply me with more info about something I'd covered on the show, correct me on a small point, or just make a connection between that item and something else in popular culture, was a delight.

Being a research junkie myself, I could sense in his writing how much he loved to “connect the dots” between cultural phenomena, as well as just being able to rhapsodize about something he clearly loved but was probably not going to be able to write about for Time (as the years went by, he continued to be one of the magazine's major film critics, but unfortunately wrote less and less about his other cultural passions).

Some of the pieces of the puzzle came together for me when I read in Richard T. Jameson's tribute to him that RC was plagued by insomnia (most likely the way he found the Funhouse). Our informational and fanboy e-mails usually had very extreme time stamps – I wrote to him very late at night and then received replies that were written in the very early morning hours. E-mail may have none of the personal touch of the handwritten letters of yore, but there is something more personal and intimate about the notes written at the beginning and end of the day.

At the end of 2012 my hard drive blew up and I lost a decade's worth of e-mail, including all of the notes from Corliss received during that time. (I thought I was backing up e-mail in addition to documents; in the blink of an eye, I found out I was wrong.) I notice that in one of the e-mails I do have from him (post late-2012) he notes that he, too, lost something over the years – “a database [of information about Hong Kong movies] I compiled over about seven years in my HK mania period. That 60,000-line list was lost, alas, when TIME changed from Quark to WoodWing.” (Damn!)

RC with some director-mogul type.

Thus, I don't have the bulk of our correspondence with him, but am left with the memories of what we gabbed about to each other in print: I shared certain pieces of “news” (usually deaths or appearances of local cartoon exhibits) and he passed on obits as well, while also sending other bits of news.

He told me in person that the only Funhouse episodes he wound up fast-forwarding through were my Jerry Lewis tributes (but he did note that I knew my subject well), but he was very good about sending me weird articles about Jerry that he had come across. He also would reflect on a topic I tossed to him, and supply anecdotes, odd trivia, and, occasionally, his own memories of having encountered the item for the first time.

At points he would let me know about non-review items he'd just published online: “At TIME.com, I keep jumping into the quicksand of ridiculous projects, like seeing and rating every available version of LES MISÉRABLES or spending too much time defending Patti Page against obit writers who never forgave her for 'Doggie in the Window.'”

We shared a fascination for the well-intentioned but poorly run Air American Radio. Corliss championed Rachel Maddow from the beginning (it was obvious to all who listened that Al Franken didn't care about what he was doing, Janeane Garofalo was a walking timebomb of crazed emotion, and Randi Rhodes was extremely knowledgeable but also a very hard listen).

Richard – it's too late now, but I think I can now bring myself to refer to him by his first name – championed Rachel early on, saying she had “a natural radio personality: sensible, charming, with an easy-going commitment and flashes of impish wit.” He followed her through all of her Air America incarnations. (I dropped off the train when she was on at 5:00 a.m. for one stinkin' hour, but even during that very lean period he listened regularly.)

He was very happy when she wound up being the only person to emerge as a “star” from the AAR fiasco. His overjoyed piece on her new primetime show is here. To my knowledge Rachel hasn't acknowledged the passing of one of her earliest champions in the press, although she was so pleased by his initial write-up that he and his lovely wife Mary attended a party thrown by Rachel and her partner in the West Village.

Richard was thus a valuable cheerleader, and he was great at conveying his unbridled enthusiasm. Around 2009, I became utterly obsessed with the work of an amazing crop of British humorists (standups, actor/writers, TV producers) and began to show their work a LOT on the Funhouse TV show. I had a feeling I might be driving away some of my regular viewers who were more attuned to my presentations of European filmmakers and vintage American film and TV.

Richard tapped into my enthusiasm and wrote, thanking me for my on-air “101s” about the work of Stewart Lee and Armando Iannucci, among others (those were the two whose work he particularly cottoned to). He passed on notes about his fascination with Jerry Springer: the Opera, the controversial musical cowritten by Lee that was decried as sacrilegious and has been rarely staged in the U.S. (He had seen it in London.) He encouraged me to dig even deeper into this well of recent British comedy by, again, supplying anecdotes, compliments, and info, in a discursive, wonderful-to-read fashion.

He also dropped lines after my “Easter blasphemy” episodes, wherein I show Christian kitsch to acknowledge my status as an ex-Catholic (very ex-). His take on the one that aired just a few weeks back was that it was as another “great/dreadful” episode. (That was intended and taken as a compliment; the show contained a bushel of new Xtian kitsch I'd discovered at Honest Ed's, as well as an amazingly sentimental/corny/bizarre film with an Xtian message called The Drum Beats Twice.)

At one point in e-mail he began enumerating the ways in which the new Superman movie portrayed Soup as a Christ figure – he concluded the recitation with this remark: “Funny, those refrigerator-magnets of memory from a Catholic-school education....”

I finally met Richard in late 2011 when he and Mary invited me to a gathering they had celebrating a book published by the brilliant film historian David Thomson. He was exactly as amiable, generous, and friendly in person as he had been in e-mail (Mary is a delight as well). I inquired about his movie collection and was shown walls of beautifully crafted shelves (on wheels so as to “disappear” into the wall) containing DVDs and probably a few thousand VHS tapes.

We spoke about our former infatuation with HK cinema (which petered out for most of us in the late 1990s after Hong Kong became a “special administrative region” – read: colony – of mainland China). He also showed me a shelf of tapes that contained episodes of the Funhouse (my work was shelved below his Disney VHS collection – he loved animation deeply – and above “miscellaneous auteurs”).

The last time I contacted him, the wellspring of his generosity flowed again. I had begun to write a piece on the comic novelist Max Shulman – something Richard and I had talked about back in late 2013 (the finished piece appears below). He had started research for a piece on Shulman that I believe would've dovetailed with the release of the complete Many Loves of Dobie Gillis DVD box set.

I wrote to him asking if I could use quotes from e-mails he'd written me back in '13 (with citation). He gave his blessing and sent along his notes for the Shulman profile piece he never wrote – profile pieces were indeed the kind of thing he did brilliantly, so more's the pity this particular one got swept away. He mentioned that he was considering resurrecting the piece in 2019, on the occasion of Shulman's centennial, “but who plans that far ahead?”

In the meantime he attached his “raw notes” for the piece that he never wrote. I wound up not making use of them in my writing – the quotes from his e-mails offering a capsule “summing-up” of Shulman were more valuable, so I went with those, citing him as the source for the quotes. The very act of him sending his notes on again defined him for me – *no* writer sends another writer his/her notes unless they are close friends, or the one who has done the research has been assured that he/she will get a nice credit on the finished piece (or cash in hand).

The fact that he sent them on to help me write the piece was an offhanded gesture that I don't think he thought about in much depth, but, again, demonstrated his selflessness and generosity. He thought it might be fun to see me pay tribute to Shulman, and so he sent on the fruit of his labor to make that happen. Believe me when I say that doesn't happen a lot in the world of film reviewing.
*****

Richard and I corresponded a lot about celebrity deaths. He enjoyed my “Deceased Artiste” tributes and I absolutely loved his obituaries on time.com. I consider several of his obits to be definitive, sprinkled as they were with anecdotes, effortless puns (he loved a good – or in fact bad – pun), and historical context for the work of the person being profiled. (Perhaps that was the secret right there – his obits read as post-mortem profiles, not as “let us now mourn this wonderful performer...” eulogies; they were introductions as much as farewells.)

RC and Mary Corliss

Corliss the writer wasn't just a great wordsmith, he was an excellent (and quite dedicated) researcher. His obits for celebrities dealt with their public image, but he always delighted in illuminating the more obscure corners of their careers and connecting the dots between their work and that of their contemporaries (or successors).

Because of his own expertise in the craft of paying tribute to “the passing parade” and his very sudden passing, I find it very difficult to write anything like a linear Deceased Artiste tribute for him – thus this lopsided collection of very fond memories. It's a helluva lot easier to say goodbye to someone you never knew in person.

Richard overcame that obstacle beautifully in his heartfelt tributes to his friends Andrew Sarris and Roger Ebert, and his critical hero, Manny Farber. I was always impressed by his obits, so when confronted by the dilemma of how to pay tribute to him, I was brought back to his sunny (the word he used to describe Max Shulman) summations of the lives and careers of his fellow critics.

Of the three, Ebert was the most famous and yet the least significant writer (my opinion, not that of Corliss). The two remained friends for decades, even though Richard had earlier written an extremely eloquent piece lamenting the dumbing-down of film criticism, which he partially attributed to the Siskel & Ebert method of rating movies as if they were Roman emperors passing judgment on gladiators. (I already expressed my opinion about the twinkle-twins of Film Crit Lite here).

R. Schickel, K. Turan, R. Ebert, R. Corliss

Interestingly, in his obit Richard acknowledged Ebert's skill at “branding” himself: “He could not have achieved this ceaseless prodigality if he did not also have an enlightened capitalist’s organizational mastery of his midsize empire of journalism and movie love. You don’t build a career like his — actually, there was no career like his — without optimism, discipline and a sharp business sense. He made millions and earned every penny.”

He noted that their friendship began when Corliss put Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on his 10 best list – this when he was writing for The National Review. (I was always surprised that the very liberal Richard had worked for that pub early in his career.) Back to him praising BVD in print: “As amused as he was amazed by the citation, Roger would frequently refer to it, if only to raise doubts in the minds of listeners about my own critical acuity.”

The strangest note in the obit is struck when Richard reveals that the only time he and Mary ever met Roger in Manhattan (where they lived for their nearly half-century of marriage) was “a night in the late ’70s when the three of us went to the sex club Plato’s Retreat, as observers only, tiptoeing on a boardwalk in the middle of the room as women and their hairy mates in socks took their pleasures.”

An image out of a Jerzy Kosinski novel to be sure (Jerzy used to go there to scope out the action as an observer), but quite wholesome compared to the story Russ Meyer delighted in telling, wherein Ebert was sitting poolside and flapping his feet like like a seal as a comely lass went down on him (that image will not leave my head – Russ, we didn't need to know that....).

Corliss' goodbye to Andrew Sarris (seen at right with unidentified Brit) was as tied up with the critic's art as much as his life. Sarris was clearly an “elder” figure to him (there was 16 years between the two gentlemen); he referred to the man he knew as Andy as “the Galileo of film critics.” Given the space to summarize what Sarris had taught us about film, Richard pretty much summed his own philosophy (since this was, of course, his wording anyways): “the Voice... gave him a weekly pulpit to promote his view that the director was the author of a film and, more important, that cinema was a form of aesthetic expression as rich as life and much more beautiful.”

The most interesting reflection he makes on Sarris' work is about his “gerontophilia.” At first Richard doubted Sarris' premise (formulated when he himself *wasn't* an old duffer) that “advancing age can stoke genius, and a high hack can grow, not decline, into an auteur. But now I am touched by the sentiment. It pointed to his respect for the old moviemakers whom he had rescued from anonymity. As Disraeli said, and Andy loved to repeat, 'In the long run, we are all dead.' That is true. It is also true that, thanks to Sarris, some directors and films will never die. He was the prime reviver of our ragged, treasured art.”

The third and final Corliss obit I will spotlight here is one he wrote for a figure who seemed to truly daunt him, Manny Farber. Farber is well-regarded by film critics and students, but is unknown to most moviegoers (unless they go “deep” into the well of brilliant writing about film). That piece by Corliss ends up being about his admiration for Farber's work, his admiration for Farber himself, and, ultimately, Richard's own love of research.

He was fond of summing up the figures in his profiles physically. (If called upon to do so about Richard, I would have to say he had the serene countenance of a wise old polar bear – with striking black eyebrows.) While Sarris was a “panda man,” his description of Farber dips into B-movie mythology: “his receding hairline gave him a forehead as high as Jeff Morrow the Metalunan's in This Island Earth, and inside this gigantic braincase all manner of creatures crawled, gnawed and sang.”

He includes a rather startling story to give one a sense of Farber's deep-seated cantankerousness. In 1990, they were both at the Telluride Film Festival, and “after I'd taken some conversational flight at what [Farber] considered too great an altitude or length, he stared dreamily into the middle distance and wondered aloud, 'Do you think that if I broke your jaw they'd have to wire it shut?' ” (So much for impressing your heroes.)

The most interesting thing about this obit, and the reason I'm closing out on it, is because Farber's death caused Richard to reflect on who really were, in his estimation, the best writers on film (or as he phrased it, the critics whose work “makes me jealous”). He offers a list (not a “listicle,” mind you) in the piece that I will reproduce, since it does seem like he had a solid grasp on the cream of the crop.

They were (in what appears to be chronological order) Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Robert Warshow, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Richard T. Jameson, J. Hoberman (whom he cited as a Farber disciple), Ed Gonzalez (one of the “new guys”), and David Thomson.

But that digression into creating a Sarris-ian “pantheon” of film critics isn't all. Richard also recounts his attempts to discover which reviews Farber had written for Time when he was the main film critic for the magazine for a mere five months from 1949 to 1950. The reviews had no bylines, but he discovered that they contained identification in the copies kept in the Time offices. He thus was very excited to find “undiscovered” writings of Farber's (which, he noted to me in an e-mail, he was disappointed to see didn't make it into the book collecting his work).

RC and Margaret O'Brien

He provides a number of film titles and then instructs the interested reader to check them out, if they happen to have a time.com subscription. He had noted to me that he had one, since the Time search engine is impossible to navigate as a non-paying “outsider” – as is easily demonstrated by putting Richard's own name into it and finding generic links to older issues of the mag and not a full list of his many, many reviews and articles available for free.

What is interesting is that, even in a “summation” of an artist's career, Richard was able to turn the assignment into one of discovery. Therefore the only way I could think of to truly honor Richard's memory was to publicly spotlight how much of his art was bound up in his love of research (not just the viewing, but the reading, the consulting of books, the scouring of the Net). He was a master at it, it was part and parcel of his enthusiasm for cinema.

I want to further discuss his writing in the weeks to come, but for now I will simply say that he won't be forgotten. The Funhouse will always be dedicated in a very strong sense to his memory.

My in-depth discussion of Corliss's most important book, Talking Pictures, can be found here.

L’auteurist americain: Deceased Artiste Andrew Sarris (part two)

The American Cinema remains Sarris’ most important statement as a critic, but he did continue to make some very interesting arguments in the Seventies. Of course, he seemed to remain in conflict with the radical brand of modernism that ran through the best work of that decade. I remember that his review of Godard’s Ici et Ailleurs (1976) read as an apology, since Sarris was throwing up his hands and admitting that he found the movie unpleasant because he had too much liberal guilt to ever praise a movie about the Palestinians, no matter how masterfully it had been constructed.


At the time I began to read Sarris’ column in the Voice on a regular basis he was at war with those who enjoyed the work of Brian De Palma (this was around the time of Dressed to Kill and Blow-Out). His writings on Hitchcock were always inspired, but his take on De Palma was that the latter’s films were just such blatant ripoffs of Hitch that you *couldn’t* like them if you were a Hitchcock fan (he actually that in one column — you could NOT like those films if you liked Hitch’s original thrillers). In this regard, Sarris sounded like the teenage guardian of a fan club — “you can’t love the Stones if you’re a Beatlemaniac!!!”

When I was in high school, I was a “junior intern” for the Voice critic Tom Allen. Tom was an odd gentleman, a Catholic Brother who lived in a rectory but also worked for one of the most liberated alternative newspapers in NYC (at that time) as he adhered to extremely conservative politics (I remember being told once by Tom that Al Haig was the only thing standing between us and a Soviet invasion).

Tom's moods were ever-changing — he could be an exceptionally nice gent one minute, and then verbally cut you to the quick for no apparent reason the next. Tom’s major bailwick at the Voice was to keep a very “deep” collection of Sarris’ reviews, which he was editing down for a potential book of capsule reviews, which was never published. The densely worded capsules appeared in a column called “Revivals in Focus.”

While juggling his two "lives," Tom also wrote for the newspaper you see to your right, The Long Island Catholic (I utilize that image since apparently not a single picture of him appears on the Net).  His other central project in the Voice office was to keep a file cabinet’s-worth of folders containing info on American filmmakers — the ones that had sprung up after The American Cinema and the ones that had been left out (mostly B-level directors, but some who had made very notable films; Lloyd Bacon springs to mind). The reason for this file cabinet was the very necessary and work-intensive “update” of the book that Tom assured me was imminent.

I assume that the debilitating illness that Sarris suffered in the early Eighties distracted him from the long-discussed (by Tom, at least) second volume of The American Cinema. His wife, the critic Molly Haskell, wrote a book about Sarris’ illness (Love and Other Infectious Diseases: a Memoir); she also suffered health problems that consumed him at one point.

As the years went by, I would check in bookstores to see if he had done any appreciable update to the book, and — nothing. The only addition to the later paperback version was an article Sarris wrote for the July-August 1977 issue of American Film magazine called “The Auteur Theory Revisited.” It was written to respond to an anti-auteurist article by Gore Vidal that had appeared in the April issue of that magazine, which had touted the contribution of the scripter (an obvious belief for a writer who worked as a screenwriter at various times in his career).

In the ’77 article Sarris maintains that he wishes he could “reformulate the auteur theory with a greater emphasis on the tantalizing mystery of style than on the romantic agony of the artists.” He maintains that he believes a filmmaker’s statements about his/her film made in interviews should be ignored, and only the work should be considered.

I remain fascinated by the fact that Sarris never chose to return to The American Cinema in the 44 years since its publication. If a volume two wasn’t in the cards, at least a cleaned-up, amplified, and revised version of the initial book could’ve been delivered. Since the book has remained in print, and pages from it are in fact available on Google books, it will be odd to see Sarris’ misguided slam of Billy Wilder go down in perpetuity, when all he had to do was write a handful of new entries, augment some of the older ones, and let Allen clean up the rest.

The only information I could find on the Internet that offered any insight as to why Sarris was content to let his best-known book sit forever as it was is, self-confessed errors intact, appears in the heartfelt and extremely touching obituary written by his friend and colleague Richard Corliss (whose work in print is wonderful, but his pieces written exclusively for the time.com website are truly sublime).

I waited to read Corliss’ take on Sarris until I had this piece completed, and then was interested to learn that Corliss surmises that Sarris eventually looked on the book as “a creature of its time” that was corrected and overwritten by his later articles.

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To put it in the purest metaphorical light, Sarris remains a sort of a father figure for American film reviewers of a certain age. Like Hitchcock, you have to study his work, acknowledge his presence, and then decide if you’re going to use his approach, or fashion a new one of your own. I don’t know if he was ever asked about his criticism being art of a kind, but when he was at his best he wove words in a wondrous way (oh no, I’m surrendering to Sarrisian alliteration!).

Interestingly, one of the nicer tributes to Sarris, on the TCM Movie Morlocks blog cemented the notion that his most influential writing occurred solely in the Sixties — although I *really* love his statement about Aldrich’s women’s wrestling picture All the Marbles (the National Theater wasn’t that bad — but maybe I just like gutter trash). Like many artists, Sarris did his seminal work early on — he remained a brilliant writer, but how many worlds can you change in one career? (One would be sufficient for most of us.)

As noted above, I disagree with a number of Sarris’ stances, but he was the guy who wrote one of the “guidebooks” for writing American film criticism, and, as much as they are/were entertaining, Sarris was always leagues smarter than TV-friendly movie experts like Siskel and Ebert, and that man on the couch, Robert Osborne.

Although I confess that I didn’t keep up at all with what Sarris was writing for The New York Observer in recent years, he has remained a touchstone on the Funhouse TV show and in this blog. I find that I use various expressions of his in my writing and on the show, including “a subject for further research,” the “Mount Everest of modern cinema” comment he made about Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the gangly but incisive “comedy/ha-ha vs. comedy/not tragedy.”

In researching this tribute, I rediscovered that one of the phrases I have always thought was Sarris’ (because I first read it in The American Cinema) is a terrifically pithy analysis he attributes in the book to British film critic Mark Shivas (who edited the magazine Movie and later became a producer of great telefilms for BBC): “Welles is concerned with the ordinary feelings of extraordinary people and Hitchcock with the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people.” (A remarkable insight that makes you start thinking about which category your own favorite artists fall into.)

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Since I like to close my DA tributes with clips of the person profiled, I turn once again to the hub of all Net activity, YouTube. The representation of Sarris on that site is sparse but fascinating. First, there are pieces of computer animation like this one that seem to want to make his feud with Kael more exciting (and make him a sexist villain) for a younger generation that probably has no idea who either of them are. (And does anyone have any idea what this piece of stupidity is about, besides inebriation?) 

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I only know of one gentleman who ever “played” Sarris: John Candy, in a sketch on one of the earlier seasons of the sublime SCTV. Candy isn’t doing much of an impression here (and they’ve got Sarris hating Gone With the Wind, which was one of his all-time faves), but I guess since Candy was the burliest guy in the cast, and so he got to portray Sarris.

As always with SCTV, the fact that they were even doing a sketch where each member of the ensemble played a noted film critic makes the sketch fascinating as a one-off. (This was the first of two swipes they took at Kael; the second one is even more mind-boggling — her evaluation “Midnight Cowboy, Part 2” on “Monster Chiller Horror Theater.”)

Here is footage of Sarris talking with J. Hoberman and Dennis Lim after a screening of Bresson’s perfect Au Hasard Balthazar. (Again, Bresson was pretty modernist and minimalist, so Sarris was not a massive fan of his work.) By this point in late 2006, Sarris had decided that his three favorite films were Rules of the Games, Ugetsu, and The Earrings of Madame de…. For his part Hoberman mentions being inspired by listening to Sarris’ radio show on WBAI:

There is one very good one-on-one video interview with Sarris. Shot recently, with Sarris seeming to be in somewhat shaky condition (but still brilliant), he states outright that he had abandoned the notion of a pantheon and that his taste had opened up.

When asked to cite a newer filmmaker, he spotlights Funhouse favorite Wong Kar-Wai, which proves he had come very far, since WKW’s heroes are the very filmmakers Sarris had so much trouble processing in the Sixties. Also interesting: his account of writing a screenplay for the film Justine that was never used.

Like all reviewers, Sarris was always at his best when being brutal or writing a reverie. One of the subjects he returned to time and again was Vivien Leigh. She isn’t one of my obsessions, but I thought it would be nice to include one of the many fan-generated video montages to her to close out this piece.

The only one of the literally hundreds of wildly dense capsules that appeared in the Sarris/Allen “Revivals in Focus” column that I can remember found Sarris noting that he’d seen That Hamilton Woman over and over again as a young man, smitten as he was with Ms. Leigh. (I didn’t get it then, I still don’t, but I respected the fixation.)

Oddly, there are tributes to Leigh that are scored to Nat King Cole, Allison Crowse, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Sarah MacLachlan doing the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” the wonderful Belle and Sebastian, and even Eighties fave “Take on Me” (!). I decided to go with this demure and quite nice item scored to classical music:

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Sarris’ passing brings on a major bout of nostalgia for the days when trend-setting movie critics wrote about films that were destined to be around for a long time to come. These days, with the exception of some wonderful paeans delivered by the likes of Scorsese and Wenders, younger film fans are swayed mostly by the recommendations of filmmakers like Tarantino, who tout genre films that are often superb, but are more often flashy and memorable but devoid of brains or heart.

In The American Cinema Sarris remarked that the auteur critic “risks the resentment of the reader by constantly judging the present in terms of the past. The auteur critic must overcome this resentment by relating the past to the present in the most meaningful way possible.”

His next sentence noted that “fortunately, readers are becoming more… knowledgeable about the past with each passing year.” That is certainly not the case these days, when b&w films are considered a niche affair available on only one cable channel and, though many amazing films are available on DVD, most folks are checking out whatever’s most easily available on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu or…

I’ll close with one last statement of Sarris’ that ranks among the many single-sentence declarations of his that will ring true forever. Trashing Fred Zinnemann, he said, “In cinema, as in all art, only those who risk the ridiculous have a real shot at the sublime.”