Such Sweet Sorrow.

Near the end of his book It's Only a Movie!: Films and Critics in American Culture, Raymond J. Haberski Jr. writes (forgive me for quoting at length):

While both [Andrew] Sarris and [Pauline] Kael have out-shone [sic] Simon in historical longevity and influence, all three fell victim to the same plight: irrelevance. Simon's intention . . . was to justify film criticism as a craft that was respectable because filmmaking itself was an art and moviegoers should, in an educated society, be informed critics of that art. Yet what both Sarris and Kael understood, and Simon did not, was that movie criticism was a traditional craft in constant conflict with a disreputable art. The appeal of critics like Sarris and Kael came from their enjoyment of playing with that conflict and speaking to audiences who wanted something between scholarly criticism and synoptic reviews.

Many of the best writers on movies . . . have understood that as mass art, movies exist between the worlds of entertainment and art. Once the perception of them slides farther toward the world of art-and to the margins of scholarly discourse-the pleasure of reading about movies vanishes for large audiences. People clearly were interested in the transition that movies were undergoing during the 1960s. However, once the suspense ended, movies became the province of either entertainment or art. The mystique of movies as a rebellious art-the most vital art of the day-vanished, and with it fell the power critics had to move people and use discussions of movies as a protest against the critical traditions of the past. The transition of the movies into art has, ironically, meant the defeat of the forces that fought hard to get them there. Ultimately, the prestige was in the fight rather than the victory.

There is something to this, but less than meets the eye-we are not even told which camp won that Pyrrhic victory. The movies, as such, are not a homogenous something that can be nudged either toward entertainment or toward art, depending on a critic's perception of it. Nor is it because some criticism treats them as art that "the pleasure of reading about movies vanishes for large audiences." Large audiences have never bothered with criticism beyond the synopses and ratings in the local papers. When Pauline Kael wrote briefly for the slicks, she soon alienated readers and editors (she dared mock The Sound of Music), and was duly sacked.

The reasons so-called serious film criticism enjoyed a short heyday during part of the Sixties and Seventies have nothing to do with an alleged "transition" during the Sixties. Then as now, there were movies of all kinds: art-house films, revivals, retrospectives in special venues, and a vast supply of schlock, mostly from Hollywood. And film meant different things to different people.

What did happen in the late Sixties and early Seventies was that colleges instituted film courses and, eventually, degrees in film studies. This meant that students, either because of course assignments or out of rebellion against them, sought out criticism more stimulating than that of the daily papers. So the opportunity was there for a vivid critic in a lively magazine to make his or her mark.

And it was not only college students who looked for more from movies than they usually got. Some older viewers, who had been through World War II and gone to college on the GI Bill, were dissatisfied with the cultural blandness of the 1950s. For them, perceptive criticism could point the way to what to see, as well as analyze, interpret, and judiciously evaluate it. And it could make short shrift of the trash.

There had, of course, been real film critics before-James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Robert Warshow, among others-but they were isolated voices. Now things changed. Andrew Sarris had spent a year in Paris, doing research at the Cinematheque Francaise, where he fell under the supercuratorial spell of Henri Langlois, who preserved and revered everything that was ever put on film. Sarris also witnessed Francois Truffaut's inauguration of the revolutionary "politique des auteurs" in an article in Cahiers du Cinema. Style was declared more important than content, and the director was the true auteur (author) of a movie, even-indeed, especially-in Hollywood, where if he was good he was able to subvert the studio-imposed cliches with subtle, masterly touches, imprinting what might have been a routine genre film (western, thriller, gangster melodrama) with his irrepressible originality.

Sarris then brought back to America what became known as the auteur theory, climaxing in his 1968 book The American Cinema, wherein he showed that he had seen virtually every American movie and a passel of others, and rated them all. His success infuriated the other chief popular-or populist-critic, Pauline Kael, who launched a famous screed on auteurism, to which Sarris riposted as best he could.

Sarris and Kael actually had much in common. They both adored "movie movies," i.e., popular entertainments; they both devoured film in inordinate quantities; they both, at the expense of much else, lived in and through movies; they both promoted favorite obscure directors, though not the same ones. And they both had charismatic styles, largely autobiographical. Kael proclaimed that movies were like sex-good sex or bad sex-and extolled what turned her on. Sarris admitted that what drew him to film was "Girls, girls, girls!" But whereas she read like an uninhibited campus bull session, bubbling with impudent wit, his style was more baroque, full of unleashed alliteration and esoteric insider stuff. Pauline took readers into her confidence with raunchy gossip (she had spies wherever movies were made); Sarris mystagogically led them into the arcana of the auteurist cult.

On the other side from the populists were the eggheads. Dwight Macdonald pronounced from Olympian heights, scattering bolts of skewering lightning or sun rays of glittering praise, all backed up by his grounding in literature, politics, and history. Stanley Kauffmann, with a good background in theater and fiction, wrote with gentlemanly sobriety not devoid of wry humor. As for me-well, readers of NR already know. Crudely oversimplified, the populists preferred American genre movies; the eggheads, foreign art films.

Haberski is right in claiming that lusty infighting among these critics, through both antithetical opinions and personal scoffing (in which the pre-New Yorker Kael led the way), made for a charged climate in which readers never knew whether to reach for an umbrella or the suntan lotion. What helped critics was prime exposure. Sarris wrote for the Village Voice, then the premier organ of the counterculture; Kael for The New Yorker, then the apogee of uptown chic or pseudo-chic. Kauffmann's bully pulpit was The New Republic, then arguably the most esteemed political journal; Macdonald thundered from Esquire, then the favorite men's magazine.

Whether the platforms made the critics or vice versa is immaterial; what mattered were strong and conflicting personalities unimpeded by political correctness, collegial solidarity, Grub Street gimcrackery, or editorial timidity. Why, even the New York Times was willing to display side by side Sarris and Simon having at each other. Film criticism was news, not a TV show with raising or lowering of two (or is it ten?) thumbs. The most sparkling account of battles past is Wilfrid Sheed's essay, "Kael vs. Sarris vs. Simon," originating significantly in the Times Book Review, and reprinted in Sheed's collection The Good Word & Other Words.

My hope in this farewell column is that somehow-despite television, the Internet, and the flood of bland journalism-the old critical prowess can be revived. There was gallantry in that chivalric jousting, even if the knights were frequently errant.