Great Throughts Treasury

"Intoleranceÿwas intended to be virtuous and uplifting. It turned out to be a great, desperate, innovative, ruinous film -- perhaps the classic example of what later came to be known ascin‚ma maudit."

"In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture ? turning it into Pop art and camp ? had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures ? and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars."

"Is Morgan Freeman America's best actor?"

"Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction."

"It tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off unassertively ? so unassertively that the movie is in danger of being overlooked. (Variety has already dismissed it as something "for a very limited audience.") We're getting to the point where the press assumes that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and warns them off."

"It?s a pure emotional high, and you don't come down when the picture is over. [About Robert Altman's Nashville]"

"It would be very convincing to say that there?s no hope for movies ? that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there?s plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn?t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they?d felt something: they?d been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley?s Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering."

"It seems likely that many of the young who don?t wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don?t have the patience to make art."

"It?s sometimes discouraging to see all of a director?s movies, because there?s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director?s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he?s a hack."

"It's very difficult to be married to somebody and write books. When you're married, you can't read in bed, you can't write at all hours, you can't chase around. I wasted a lot of years being unhappy because I couldn't do the things I wanted to do."

"It's as if Brian de Palma were saying, "What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?""

"It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack."

"I've been told I've influenced some people to become directors. Unfortunately, most of them are lousy."

"Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.'"

"Just about the best Hollywood musical of all time. Brando represented a reaction against the postwar mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early 50's had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster and the outlaw."

"Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate."

"Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials ? which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence r‚sum‚ of the future of American motion pictures."

"Leslie Fiedler once said something like "A critic is an artist or he is nothing." I've always thought of criticism as a branch of writing, and, if you don't honor the readers enough to write your very damned best, you're insulting them and you're insulting the work you're dealing with."

"Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they?re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out."

"Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor ? probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney."

"Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose ? selling ? that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise."

"Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn?t have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures ? and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars."

"One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history ? probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension ? a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream."

"One?s movie-going tastes and habits change ? I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live ? for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we?re tired of."

"Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them."

"Movies make hash of the schoolmarm?s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money ? and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the "artist?s intentions" you?d probably wish you couldn?t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist."

"People who are just getting "seriously interested" in film always ask a critic, "Why don?t you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?" The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn?t very interesting."

"Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts?it's when those who shouldn't, do."

"Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master fun-maker."

"People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he?s corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan we can see that Alan Aldais a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together."

"Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 ? a whole community saying grace ? made me expect the worst."

"Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down."

"The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn't have much to do with art ? the expressive use of techniques ? it probably doesn't have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either."

"The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising."

"The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new."

"Susan Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Paulikne Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated."

"Spielberg is like a boy soprano lilting with joy."

"The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.[regarding movie Dirty Harry]"

"The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: how we came to love them and feel they were ours -- not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. [About Bonnie and Clyde]"

"The movie was popular with people partly because of its right-wing attitude, but they didn't necessarily recognize it as right wing. Certainly most of the press didn't, not when it first came out. I felt it necessary to treat it as a political work because its politics offended me. Eastwood's films are right wing in a way that doesn't get analyzed because they're not explicitly so. I'm amazed at the number of critics who let his attitudes slide right by them. [about Dirty Harry]"

"The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child."

"The conglomerate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned they have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people ? how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no?"

"The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again."

"The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it?s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet ? one doesn?t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn?t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art."

"The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography."

"The small triumph of "The Graduate" was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate ? which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him."

"The unwary Brando was made to look public ass No. 1. It was now open season on Brando."

"There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of if-you-know-so-much-about-the-art-of-the-film-why-don?t-you-make-movies. You don?t have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good."

"The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes."

"There is no way to estimate the full effect of Vietnam and Watergate on popular culture, but earlier films were predicated on an implied system of values, which is gone now, except in the corrupt, vigilante form of aÿDirty Harryÿor aÿWalking Tall. Almost all the current hits are jokes on the past, and especially on old films, a mixture of nostalgia and parody, laid on with a trowel... Nobody understands what contemporary heroes or heroines should be, or how they relate to each other, and it's safer not to risk the box-office embarrassment of seriousness."