CRITICS TAKE BEATING FOR UNPOPULAR VIEWS.

Byline: Terry Lawson Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

The publicity release trumpeting the publication of an upcoming book certainly didn't try to sugarcoat it. ``The Critics Were Wrong'' was the headline, a catchy phrase that turned out to be the book's title as well.

Naturally, that earned the attention of this critic, who, like all movie reviewers, is informed he is wrong at least three or four times a day, by everyone from irate readers, to whom he listens politely; to his bosses, to whom he listens attentively; to his stepdaughter, who thought ``The Craft'' was a pretty cool movie, thanks.

Still, I wanted to see what specifically the critics were wrong about, so I requested a copy of ``The Critics Were Wrong,'' which is subtitled ``Misguided Movie Reviews and Film Criticism Gone Awry.'' It was written by Ardis Sillick and Michael McCormick, a librarian and a bona fide college graduate, respectively. As it turns out, the authors don't try to make a case against critics; they just feed their words back to them and see if they choke.

``A monomaniacal, crabbed, limited work,'' said New York magazine's David Denby of Martin Scorsese's ``Raging Bull,'' which in more than one poll was chosen as the best film of the 1980s. New Yorker critic John McCarten is quoted calling Alfred Hitchcock's ``Rear Window'' ``... a movie that stands absolutely still.'' The New York Times' esteemed Vincent Canby called ``The Godfather Part II,'' which happens to be my favorite post-'70s movie, ``a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from leftover parts.''

Admittedly, those are embarrassing quotes, and while I haven't asked him, I would wager that Canby, one of the nicest and smartest movie critics ever, might have since changed his mind. As for McCarten, his idea of motion must be very extreme if he thinks ``Rear Window'' stands still. As for Denby's take on ``Raging Bull,'' a film which was even more roundly despised by his mentor Pauline Kael, I sort of agree with him. It is crabbed and limited, but I don't think that keeps it from being a great movie.

In any case, ``The Critics Were Wrong'' doesn't try to prove them wrong: It just performs a computer library search for unpopular opinions and then reprints them, an exercise similar to those Monday morning football columns that point out all the stupid things network broadcasters said the day before. Besides, because criticism is opinion, it can't truly be wrong. If the authors were bold, they might have called this book ``The Critics Were Stupid.''

Nevertheless, critics routinely make errors in judgment, and I am sure I am not the only movie writer who flipped furiously through ``The Critics Were Wrong'' to see if any of my more blatant miscalls were included. Thankfully, all my years of toiling in semi-obscurity had their reward. My paper, the Detroit Free Press, however, is indeed represented. In a review of ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' the critic of the day rather bluntly dismissed it as ``no good.''

I wouldn't go that far, but I will own up to being disappointed by ``Close Encounters,'' which, at the time, did not seem nearly as fully formed or intensely dramatic as Steven Spielberg's earlier ``Jaws.'' And in retrospect, we see it lacked the childlike sense of awe the director was to eventually evoke so easily in ``E.T.''

Moreover, a lot of the critics held up to ridicule in ``The Critics Were Wrong'' seem to me to be utterly on target. Rex Reed may have been ungentlemanly in referring to Elizabeth Taylor in the wretched ``Secret Ceremony'' as ``a parody of herself ... a fat, sloppy screaming banshee,'' but he wasn't wrong. And I have no quarrel with the three critics who tell emperor Francis Coppola he has no clothes in their reviews of ``Apocalypse Now.'' One of them, Frank Rich (then in the employ of Time magazine) perfectly pegs it as an ``incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat.'' That is not only well-said, it is, in its way, complimentary.

That's because Coppola obviously was attempting something brave and bold with that film, something he didn't achieve, but something that deserves recognition, commentary and examination - in a word, criticism. ``Apocalypse Now'' also received larders of undeserved acclaim, but nowhere in ``The Critics Were Wrong'' do we read examples of the wild overpraising that is far more prevalent in film criticism than any other kind.

There are very, very few book critics who would dare argue that someone like Barbara Cartland is a writer of any real substance or vision, yet movies that will be completely forgotten by year's end are routinely labeled ``classic'' and ``masterpiece'' by film critics. Years ago, I once asked another critic to justify his claim that buying a child a ticket to ``Superman'' would be ``the best Christmas present ever.'' Clearly, this was someone who had never received a shiny new sled.

So yes, the critics are wrong, and they are wrong a lot, but regurgitating their assessments of movies that went on to become popular or even critical favorites to pillory them doesn't prove it. If that's the intention, the writers should have dug up all those ridiculously worshipful reviews of Oliver Stone's ``Born on the Fourth of July,'' which now looks completely overacted and phony, or any of Woody Allen's allegedly serious, certainly ponderous, dramas. I ought to know. I wrote some of those myself.