Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Read online

  ALSO BY RICHARD SCHICKEL

  The Stars (1962)

  The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (1968)

  Second Sight: Notes on Some Movies, 1965–1970 (1972)

  Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter (1974)

  His Picture in the Papers: A Speculation on Celebrity in America Based on the Life of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (1974)

  The Men Who Made the Movies (1975)

  Another I, Another You: A Novel (1978)

  Cary Grant: A Celebration (1983)

  D. W. Griffith: An American Life (1984)

  Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America (1985)

  James Cagney: A Celebration (1985)

  Schickel on Film: Encounters—Critical and Personal—with Movie Immortals (1989)

  Brando: A Life in Our Times (1991)

  Double Indemnity (1992)

  Clint Eastwood: A Biography (1996)

  Matinee Idylls: Reflections on the Movies (1999)

  Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip: Movies, Memory and World War II (2003)

  Woody Allen: A Life in Film (2004)

  Elia Kazan: A Biography (2005)

  The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian (editor) (2006)

  Film on Paper: The Inner Life of Movies (2008)

  Conversations with Scorsese (2011)

  Steven Spielberg: A Retrospective (2012)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Richard Schickel

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schickel, Richard.

  Keepers : the greatest films-and personal favorites-of a moviegoing lifetime / Richard Schickel. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-375-42459-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-101-87471-4 (ebook)

  1. Motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—Evaluation. I. Title.

  PN1993.5.U6S35 2015

  791.430973—dc23

  2014034997

  eBook ISBN 9781101874714

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Richard Schickel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: Notes Toward the Definition of an Obsession

  Chapter 2: Speaking of Silence

  Chapter 3: Exceptions

  Chapter 4: Ironies

  Chapter 5: The System

  Chapter 6: Men With Movie Cameras

  Chapter 7: A Studio’s Way

  Chapter 8: “The Son of a Gun Is Nothing but a Tailor”

  Chapter 9: A Touch of Lubitsch

  Chapter 10: Two Cheers for mr. Muckle

  Chapter 11: Shrieks, Freaks, Geeks

  Chapter 12: What’s Funny About That?

  Chapter 13: Greatness

  Chapter 14: Ornaments of the Age

  Chapter 15: “Up This Hero Goes”

  Chapter 16: Getting Serious

  Chapter 17: Masterpieces

  Chapter 18: Don’t You Know There’s a War on?

  Chapter 19: Children of Paradise

  Chapter 20: Crime Waves

  Chapter 21: Why We Fight

  Chapter 22: Muse of Fire

  Chapter 23: Here’s Looking at You, Kid

  Chapter 24: The Best Years

  Chapter 25: Fasten Your Seat Belts

  Chapter 26: Don’t Unfasten Those Seat Belts Yet

  Chapter 27: Mixed Baggage

  Chapter 28: To Live

  Chapter 29: Bergman—at Last

  Chapter 30: The Criminal Life

  Chapter 31: Clint

  Chapter 32: Belle de Jour

  Chapter 33: The Apu Trilogy

  Chapter 34: Fellini

  Chapter 35: Strange Loves

  Chapter 36: Getting Started, or, I Thought You’d Never Ask

  Chapter 37: The Wrath of God—or Is It His Silence?

  Chapter 38: Marty

  Chapter 39: Earning It, or, Spielberg’s Way

  Chapter 40: Clint Again

  Chapter 41: Tarnished Gold

  Chapter 42: Kubrick Again

  Chapter 43: The Force Is With Us

  Chapter 44: Losing It

  Chapter 45: “No Animals Were Harmed…”

  Chapter 46: We’ve Got to End Somewhere

  Chapter 47: That Wonderful Year—1987

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  1

  Notes Toward the Definition of an Obsession

  Some months ago, when I started to think about actually writing this book, as opposed to hemming and hawing as one generally does when a book is in the offing, I wondered how many movies I had actually seen in the course of the seventy-seven years since I saw my first film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1938.

  This was something more than an idle inquiry. I wanted to establish some kind of authority. As a result of my preferences in entertainment and, ultimately, my choice of profession, I had seen in the course of a lifetime a great many more films than all but a handful of people—mostly professional reviewers—had seen. But how many did that amount to? That was a question I had never addressed. “A whole bunch,” I am wont to say when people ask, which they quite often do; it is a slightly exotic way of making a living, and people seem idly curious about it.

  It’s obvious that I’ve seen more than most people, for besides being a movie addict—a fairly common condition, usually more or less cheerfully abandoned when family and work interrupt the addiction—I became, more or less accidentally, a professional moviegoer. I began reviewing films in 1965. (I have done so, with only one significant hiatus, ever since.) By that time I had written a couple of books on them (and have written many more), and around 1968 I started making documentaries about them, an activity I pursued until quite recently. Throughout these years, I have continued my habit of slipping into movie theaters or screening rooms without having any professional rationale for so doing; I just like to be there in the dark watching something—almost anything, if the truth be known. In this habit—I don’t know if it is amiable or a mild, chronic illness—I have been indulged by wives, girlfriends, just plain friends and children. Of course, a lot of the time I’m alone, unashamedly killing an evening, no questions asked.

  Here I have to enter a caveat: I am an American critic. I have dutifully, mostly happily, seen thousands of films of foreign origin. They are among the most rewarding moviegoing experiences of my life. But this twig was bent early. I know more about American films, historically and aesthetically, than I do about those from other lands. I’ve sought to remedy that defect, of course, and I’ve done reasonably well with it. But, yes, I am more comfortable, more authoritative, with American movies. In reading critics from those other countries, in turn, I notice some discomfort when they deal with our films.

  Funny thing. When I started reviewing in the 1960s, the movies were a young art. We were less than forty years into the age of the “talkies” and perhaps sixty years into the age of the feature film. It occurred to me—preposterously, I admit—that you could, if you worked demonically, become a scholar of world cinema, kno
wing something about movies from everywhere. In fact, I am still playing catch-up with the cinema of many countries. It’s like being a perpetual grad student, swotting up what you need to know to write a respectable piece when the occasion becomes pressing, which very often becomes fascinating and instructive work.

  Because I turned pro in the mid-sixties, most of my omissions can be partially justified by the demands of wearing too many hats. You cannot write a book or make a television show about the movies without seeing films anew—no matter how often you’ve seen the ones you are taking up in these projects. Movies, obviously, do not change substantively, although nowadays, with the rise of directors’ cuts and specialists pawing through the archives finding new material that had been eliminated before the answer print—the “official” one—was struck, movies can change more than we thought they could a decade or two ago. I was involved in such a transformative project a few years ago, restoring some forty minutes of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One—whole scenes of which were rescued from a Warner warehouse in Kansas City. I think this version of the film is way better than what was circulating before—it has now the weight of a heartfelt epic; it is not just another war picture. And it honors the intentions of its very honorable director. Anyway, we won some prizes for our work and the good opinion of moviegoing mankind. But I noticed this: People who had been content with the short version were not as enthusiastic about our cut. It was nice and all that, but the bastard version was perfectly okay with them. Finished films, even when everyone knows they could be better, exert a powerful inertial force on the object at hand.

  I have found that what I guess could be called my gross judgment of a movie does not often change with the passing years. If I liked it once, I’ll probably still like it now—but with an asterisk. You will notice things that make it rise or fall in your estimation, based on your experience and the passing years. And, naturally, you see other films (and read books and articles) that impinge on your feelings for the ones you are reconsidering. So you owe to your readers or viewers—not to mention yourself—a report on the state of your current feelings as you encounter and re-encounter movies in the course of your lifelong engagement with them.

  Rarely, as I’ve said, do you flip from love to hate or vice versa. But changes do occur. It’s logical. You loved My Friend Flicka when you saw it at age ten. If you see it at age sixty-five, you may respect it, but you won’t think it’s a masterpiece (which does not mean you should deprive your grandchildren of the pleasure of seeing this picture when they are the perfect age for it).

  Remarkably, Pauline Kael thought this was not so. She might have seen a film when she was ten years old, and she might be writing about it as a sixty-five-year-old, but that made no difference to her. It was what it was, world without end. She was sometimes wont to say it was like an old fuck—forever frozen in memory’s amber. I don’t think the argument applies to fucking, and I don’t think it applies to movies, either. Memory has a way of playing tricks on us—even Pauline’s, whose recall for films was capacious.

  That discussion is for later. Now it’s time to start counting. That is pretty easy in the early years. There was The Wizard of Oz, naturally, and what I still think is my first viewed masterpiece, Pinocchio, and a whole slew of other Disney titles (Dumbo, Bambi and, God help us, Saludos Amigos). There were other treats as well—birthday party items (my own and others’) and some special events, like The Great Dictator (which my parents thought I should see, although I understood very little of it at the time), and Harmon of Michigan, about the famous football player (Tom, father of the television actor Mark), which I insisted on seeing on a school night, no less. There was no regularity in this—no rhyme or reason, either. But by the time I was nine or ten I was probably going to the movies once every week or two.

  Shortly after that, the movies became a more serious habit. There were two sub-run theaters—as opposed to first-run—within walking distance of my house, and two regular companions who lived on my block and liked the movies as much as I did. Friday nights or Sunday afternoons, Danny Seifert or Kenny Siegesmund and I, or all three of us, trotted off to the movies almost without fail, not much caring what was playing and pretty much liking everything we saw, no genres excluded.

  I don’t suppose those two friends kept up this habit later in life, but I did. Let’s say that from the time I became a teenager until the day before yesterday, I have seen at least two movies a week. When I was a kid, my mother, who liked to shop in downtown Milwaukee, would of a summer’s afternoon park me in one of the several first-run downtown theaters, armed with candy and popcorn, while she pursued her bliss. It was—you’ll have to take my word on this—completely safe. Ushers were everywhere. Later, we would meet at my father’s office and go out for hamburgers. I’m not sure I was ever happier than at the movies those days. If you multiply two movies a week by sixty-nine years, you come out at around 7,000 movies in all, as a baseline—a not inconsiderable sum, especially when we are told that the average American of my age nowadays sees only four movies a year in a theater.

  When I went to the University of Wisconsin, I basically doubled my moviegoing. Yes, four of them a week. It was easy. There were four or five movie theaters on State Street and Capitol Square in Madison, and one repaired there regularly for the current releases. The university, which now has a rather distinguished film department, at that time offered no courses in film, practical or theoretical. But a small theater in the student union functioned as an art house on the weekends, playing mostly the latest releases from abroad. (There was not much in the way of American independent films in those days.) I missed very few of those pictures. On Thursday afternoons this theater played classic titles of the past, and it was at these screenings that I saw for the first time Intolerance and Metropolis and Buster Keaton and the Russian and French classics of the twenties and thirties.

  I was making up my own mind about all the films, unguided by the academic scholarship of the era. What we had for authority was Paul Rotha’s latest edition of The Film Till Now, which was considerably better than nothing, though kind of so-so on American cinema. What I had was something like 100 more movies per annum and, in my last year, a founding membership in a film club, which for our enrichment played Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and for our profitability played Ecstasy. Imagine that! Hedy Lamarr, a minor, but an authentic MGM star, jaybird naked in the dappled forests of Czechoslovakia! Movies occasionally are wondrous things.

  And the gift that keeps on giving. After I graduated, I moved to New York, where I went to work for a few years as a staff writer on magazines. I didn’t know many people. I didn’t have a television set. But I lived in Greenwich Village, which was Madison on steroids. That is to say, it had plenty of movie theaters—the Sheridan for second-runs of current releases, the Art (for art), the Waverly (for repertory), the Greenwich for odds and ends. I fed my habit as I had in Madison—a couple hundred movies a year. Five years of college plus five years of—I guess you’d call it bohemia—adds up to another 1,000 movies. So by the time I married, at age twenty-seven—to a woman who shared my moviegoing passion—I was already on track for a lifetime total of 8,000 films, give or take.

  And I was not yet a professional moviegoer. That occurred in 1965, when, at first casually, then not so casually, I began reviewing for Life magazine. I persisted there until it folded, in 1972, then I moved over to Time, where I lasted until 2009. I took some time off and then landed an agreeable job at a website called Truthdig.com. So in my fifty or so years of reviewing, I’ve added 10,000 movies to my total, which works out to 18,000 titles in sum.

  But we are not finished. From 1965 to date, I’ve written thirty-seven books and made the same number of television documentaries, mostly about the movies. I’d guess each of those enterprises has entailed seeing (or re-seeing) around thirty-five films—2,590 of them in all. In addition, I’ve done all sorts of shorter films and articles for a variety of occasions, and it’s probably safe to say I
saw another thousand movies in the course of those activities. And then there were speeches and TV appearances for which I took in even more movies, and there were film festivals, of course—I don’t like them; too many bad movies in a short span of time—which quickly added substantially to the total, probably another thousand or so.

  For a grand total of, shall we say, 22,590 movies, or about 294 of them a year. Which means that two out of every three days, for a long time now, I have been at the movies.

  I suppose you could say that I have overdone it, but I have nearly always had a good time doing what I do. I’m not great at quoting immortal lines from famous films (most critics aren’t; that’s a specialty of amateur enthusiasts) or referring to great scenes at apposite moments. But I think I’ve been able to see movies unblinkered—and in the end, that’s what this book’s about. It contains reflections on a large number of movies that are, by any standard, masterpieces. It is silent about a large number of movies that are significant milestones in the history of the art that I have no interest in seeing ever again, because, quite frankly, they are ponderous, or running on reputations that have not been reexamined in decades, or prisoners of styles that are no longer relevant—to me at least.

  I want to make this point about moviegoing: It includes for me a lot of things that are not, strictly speaking, about going to the movies. The truth, very simply, is that most movies are lousy or, at best, routine. We go to see them, much of the time, in search of something else—the comforting darkness of the theater, the play of light and shadow on the screen, the consolations they offer for some temporary trouble. A lot of the time we don’t give a hoot what’s playing. We are at a public event for private reasons, which we don’t always recognize until later, if at all. It is the occasion, the atmosphere, that we crave. The art of the film has to break through our preoccupations and distractions if it is to somehow seize us. Come to think of it, the amazing thing about movies is how often that happens, not how rarely.