Richard Schickel (left) and Andrew Sarris.
(Photo: Robert Hale)

At 72, Andrew Sarris is one of the few great film critics. He is not the author of the auteur theory, but he was its great American champion, which made him the critic with whom every other critic, everyone seriously interested in the movies, had to come to terms. He is the subject of a new book, Citizen Sarris, edited by Emanuel Levy, which consists of tributes and analysis of his work by fellow critics and filmmakers.

Last December the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the DGA jointly sponsored a celebration of Sarris's work with screenings of two films chosen by him (The Shop Around the Corner and Shoot the Piano Player). (see related story) He was interviewed on stage by Richard Schickel after the first screening and he and his wife, Molly Haskell, were interviewed after the second by Curtis Hanson. Audience response on both occasions was particularly warm - an acknowledgement not so much to Sarris's theories, but of the obvious passion for the medium which shines through everything he has written over almost 50 years. Prior to his LACMA appearances, he and Schickel met for an informal, wide-ranging discussion. Following are highlights of their conversation.

Schickel: You began writing movie reviews in the mid-1950s, which was not a particularly good time for the movies or for movie reviewing. How did you get started?

Sarris: I started in 1955. I had just gotten out of the Army and was taking some courses at Teacher's College at Columbia University. I had no intention of becoming a film critic. But I took one of the first film courses, given by Roger Tilton. Jonas Mekas [the avant-garde filmmaker and theorist] came to class one day and said, 'I need somebody to do some editing.' He had a new magazine called Film Culture. So I said, 'I'll do it.' No money in it, but in return I said I'd like to review a movie. He said, 'sure.' So the first movie I reviewed was The Country Girl. I wrote a real pan and I learned something from reading it. It looked so brutal. It looked like an act of homicide.

At that time after class I used to go to this coffee shop with two guys - Bill Jacobson and Eugene Archer [later a New York Times reviewer] and we'd tear everything apart. I used that conversational form in that first review and seeing it in cold print I realized for the first time how powerful print is and to see the difference between what you say in a coffee house and what you say [in a publication].

Still, one review does not a critic make.

The meeting that changed my life happened in Brooklyn. I was working as a technical officer for the Census. I was walking down the street and bumped into Mekas again. He was doing some editing on his film, Guns of the Trees. He said, "I need someone to replace me for a couple of weeks. I'm in this new throwaway paper, The Village Voice. I said, 'Sure, sure, I'd be glad to do it.' I'm a Depression baby and if somebody says, 'Next summer I want you to mow the lawn for 50 cents an hour,' I wouldn't say yes right away, but I wouldn't say no, either. I'd say, 'I'll call you back.'

Jonas wasn't a real movie reviewer. He was a philosopher, a diarist. So he talked about movies ... in a very weird way. But Jerry Tallmer was the editor, and he liked his way-outness. So I walk in off the street Š he doesn't know me from Adam, and I have my first Voice review - a very Cahiers du Cinema review of Psycho. That got a tremendous amount of hostile mail. The Voice had all these readers - little old ladies who lived on the West Side, guys who had fought in the Spanish Civil War - and this seemed so regressive, to them, to say that Hitchcock was a great artist. But the people at the Voice were impressed that I aroused so much hostile comment, so I did a few more pieces for them.

But then you took a break, which seems to me crucial in defining your critical position.

My brother died in a sky-diving accident and that changed my life in another way. I was four years older than he was and he never had the luck to live those extra four years, so I decided to go to Europe. I went to the Cannes Film Festival - didn't write a word there. I went to Paris - didn't write a word from there. I had real writer's block all the time I was there. But I met a lot of the nouvelle vague people. I saw Shoot the Piano Player. I saw Godard's Une Femme est une Femme. And I saw the uncut version of [Max Ophuls's] Lola Montes. Also, I began seeing a lot of American movies through French eyes.

And auteurism? I know it was in the air in Paris then, but I imagine a lot of Americans might have passed through without sniffing it out.

It was running into Andre Bazin [the great French film critic]. He wrote an anti-auteur article in Cahiers. That's actually what I was writing about in my famous piece that Pauline Kael and everyone else jumped on. It was a very tentative article - really just a meditation on Bazin's position, his objections to auteurism and so on.

Which were?

A major objection, one that other people have made, was that if you're a certified auteur you can never make a bad movie while a mere metteur en scene can can never make a good movie. And this is clearly not true. But what interested me about auteurists was that they were right so many times about so many things. I mean, they overrated some people, they underrated some people, but they found a coherent way of studying [filmmakers] as artists. And I thought we had to make that jump.

To show you the dividing line in my thinking, when I did a Top Ten list for the Voice in 1958. I had a Stanley Kramer film on the list and I left off both Vertigo and Touch of Evil. That looks ridiculous in terms of what I think today, but I hadn't quite understood the whole idea of subtexts, which the French were very good at and which almost no American reviews really bothered with.

What do you mean by subtext?

Subtext is this: You're looking at any film and there's always something on the surface and there's always something underneath - sometimes very much underneath, sometimes very little. But the subtext - what's underneath - is very difficult to ascertain unless you're aware of the previous works [by the filmmaker]. Auteurism concentrates on the stylistic differences between [filmmakers] - the stylistic and thematic differences [which implicitly state] how they feel about characters.

That seems very reasonable to me. But obviously there are competing critical theories.

The structuralists took over Cahiers du Cinema and I never went along with them. They concentrate on the things films have in common: All American films support the establishment - that kind of thing. I've gone against the sociological school. Film is a great mass medium, but, frankly, I don't think it's the most intellectual medium. I tell my students if you depend on movies to tell you everything you want to know, you're in bad shape.

Pauline Kael's famous attack on you and auteurism [Circles and Squares, Film Quarterly, 1963] was really a defense of traditional "serious" movie-making and the critical values supporting it. The vicious part of the piece was its insistence that auteurism supported a kind of perpetual adolescence - because so many of the directors you praised made genre films of the kind we're supposed to outgrow.

I was making $20 a column and I was a menace to western civilization as we knew it. It got a little objectionable. There were different layers of people attacking me. There were the people who said, 'Aw, you're just full of crap - this is nothing.' And there were people who said, 'Yeah, you have a point, but you stole it all from the French.' So I was either an idiot or a plagiarist. I couldn't win.

Out of controversy came, I guess, the article in Film Culture in which you ranked and categorized the great and not-so-great (largely American) directors. Expanded, that article became what may be the most influential book in modern American film crticism, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929­1968.

Jonas Mekas said, 'Why don't you write something about all the directors you like?' [It] was probably to answer Pauline Kael in a massive rather than a piecemeal way. [But] I wanted to do something else too. A lot of people wrote to me about what this meant to them, because up to that point most of the standard film histories did not deal with the films most of us liked. You know, they put them in footnotes or barely mentioned them or just pushed them aside while they were talking about a few socially significant movies that were part of the canon. So I opened up [the discussion] to genres particularly - to Westerns to film noir, which no film history had dealt with. What consciously or unconsciously I was doing was rewriting, or trying to rewrite, the canon.

You succeeded in that. You also succeeded in making Auteurism the dominant critical theory. Everyone today is consciously (and more often unconsciously) an auteurist - even Pauline Kael.

Oh, very much so. Except when she gets mad at some auteurist who's let her down. One thing I said, and nobody paid any attention to it, least of all Pauline, in my original article was that this is a first step, rather than a last step. There are all kinds of other contributors [to a movie, but] if I hadn't been misrepresented as a fanatic, as an idiot ... then I wouldn't have attracted that much attention and I wouldn't be sitting here. So I'm not complaining.

There's a notion going around that after all these years you've mellowed somewhat. For instance, it's been observed that in recent years you've distinctly upgraded your opinion of directors like Billy Wilder.

Billy Wilder especially. I really blew it on Billy Wilder. Because I always loved Billy Wilder. When Sunset Boulevard came out, I must have seen it 20 times at Radio City Music Hall. But I loved all his movies. And then the French persuaded me that there was something too cynical about Wilder. And that was one of my biggest mistakes. I was misled by the French.

But I think I found the key to him. Billy Wilder was the only major director who lost all of his family in the Holocaust. He never dealt with that directly, but it was always an undertone in his work. And I think that enabled me to come to terms with what people have always dismissed as cynicism.

You know, Pauline said that she never changed her mind about anything, never saw a movie twice. I find that hard to believe. I think we change all the time in our lives. So have I changed? I think when I married Molly [Haskell] I mellowed a little bit. And also time has mellowed me.

My most polemical period was in the early days at the Voice, before they had editors that insisted ... you review films that were opening next week. I used to take my time and I'd read everybody else. And then I'd write these reviews that were largely reactions against everybody else. And I had, really, full-time enemies like Stanley Kauffmann and John Simon and Pauline. But as time went on I felt the need to refine my own judgments, to elaborate on them.

You know, those [Film Culture] pieces were thrown together. I couldn't have done them otherwise because I'm a very lazy person. I could have thought about them and thought about them and they never would have gotten published. They had to be bright and hot. Now I have time to think about these things some more and to sort out where I was most right and most wrong. And I've admitted there were people I've missed. One of the great sorrows of my life is having missed the boat on Debra Winger. I just didn't pick up on the magic, that stuff she had in her eyes that's so important.

I'm not so subtle. I love sex in the movies. The sensuality of the medium is what first hooked me on it

You're getting perilously close to agreeing with Pauline Kael. I mean the best thing about her reviewing is her awareness of the movies' essential eroticism.

Yeah. She had a great influence in opening up doors [when] most of us were pussyfooting around. But she was very hard on beautiful women ... I don't know, it's a very difficult thing to argue.

Isn't talent always the hardest thing to argue? De gustibus and all that?

Yeah. Recently somebody wrote a book about 2001 and they wanted to reprint my review. It was somewhat of a negative review. And I looked at it and I was dissatisfied with it. I didn't really come to grips with 2001. I had just reacted kind of petulently because I found it a little boring. I didn't realize Kubrick was a kind of prophet, indicating how boring space travel was going to be.

He's a little bit like Brecht. He has a brilliant surface, but there's nothing very much underneath. But I think there are moments in Kubrick that are as good as anybody. Full Metal Jacket is by far the best Vietnam movie. And The Shining - "all work and no play" - is the most brilliant dissection of writer's block that I've ever seen. Eyes Wide Shut, I don't like at all. But I don't know - ten years from now, if I'm still around, I may look at it differently.

I get the impression that you'd like a little more time to pass, as it has for Kubrick, before you make any definitive statements about contemporary directors.

If you ask me who the best people today are, I don't know. I don't think I'll know for another five or ten years. It's too hard to tell. We're too much in the middle of things. And we're missing people today just as we missed [them in the past]. You know, I show a movie [in my classes at Columbia] that nobody paid any attention to in the past, because it was by a minor director, but it's a great noir movie, Out of the Past.

It sounds as if you're advocating patience as the beginning of critical wisdom. Or is 'critical wisdom' an oxymoron?

Wisdom is not supposed to be critical. Critics are not supposed to be wise men or women. [But] I'll give you a piece of critical wisdom. I am not nostalgic for the past. I try not to ever let that tone get into my writing, that "My God, where are the great screwball comedies of yesteryear" thing.

Don't you think that you and I are lucky that we are still actively engaged with this business, art, whatever it is and are not forced back into idle nostalgia.

We are eternally hopeful. And I'm eternally grateful to all these people working like ants to bring us all this stuff so I can sit there at my leisure and say, 'Yeah, that's good, that's not good.' What a luxury. And what an unjust thing.

Don't you think that as a critic you always have to remember that it is a contingent enterprise?

Whatever contingent means.

It means that what you think today is very likely going to change tomorrow.

It certainly is. My friend Rex Reed and I [were recently interviewed on television] about being critics. And Rex is going, oh, my God, you don't know how we suffer going to all these screenings and so on. So they turned to me and said, 'How do you feel about being a film critic?' And I said, 'Well, it beats working in a coal mine.' And that's my final word: Between working in a coal mine and being a film critic, I think being a film critic has a lot to be said for it.

Although, of course, a lot of the work in both jobs takes place in the dark.

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