When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

300 Pages·2011·1.372 MB·English

by  Dave Kehr

When
Movies
Mattered
Reviews from a Transformative Decade
d a v e k e h r
The University of Chicago Press chicago and london
Dave Kehr moved to the Chicago Tribune after leaving the Chicago
Reader in 1986, and he was its principal fi lm critic until 1992, when
he moved to New York. His work has appeared regularly in Film
Comment, and he is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by Dave Kehr
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 42940- 3 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 42941- 0 (paper)
isbn- 10: 0- 226- 42940-7 (cloth)
isbn- 10: 0- 226- 42941- 5 (paper)
Kehr, Dave.
When movies mattered : reviews from a transformative decade /
Dave Kehr.
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 42940- 3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn- 10: 0- 226- 42940- 7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 42941- 0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn- 10: 0- 226- 42941- 5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—Reviews. I. Title.
PN1995.K395 2011
791.43′75—dc22
2010029462
All the essays reprinted in this book were originally published in the
Chicago Reader except the following: “Hitch’s Riddle,” Film Comment
20, no. 3 (May–June 1984). All other articles © 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977,
1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 by CL Chicago, Inc.
“Hitch’s Riddle” © 1984 the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Reprinted
with permission of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require-
ments of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48- 1992.
contents
Acknowledgments · vii
Introduction · 1
Part 1: The Best
1974: Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir) · 13
1976: Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock) · 16
1977: F for Fake (Orson Welles) · 19
1978: Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick) · 23
1979: 10 (Blake Edwards) · 28
1981: Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme) · 35
1982: The Aviator’s Wife (Eric Rohmer) · 40
1983: Francisca (Manoel de Oliveira) · 44
Part 2: The End of Classical Hollywood
classical hollywood
The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston) · 52
Fedora (Billy Wilder) · 55
Escape From Alcatraz (Don Siegel) · 58
The Human Factor (Otto Preminger) · 61
new hollywood
The Driver (Walter Hill) · 67
Halloween (John Carpenter) · 72
Reds (Warren Beatty) · 75
Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood) · 79
new directions in comedy
Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards) · 85
Risky Business (Paul Brickman) · 91
Lost in America (Albert Brooks) · 95
After Hours (Martin Scorsese) · 100
mavericks and outsiders
Dawn of the Dead (George Romero) · 106
The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller) · 112
Love Streams (John Cassavetes) · 116
Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph) · 122
Part 3: Other Visions
old masters
Blaise Pascal (Roberto Rossellini) · 130
A Piece of Pleasure (Claude Chabrol) · 132
That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel) · 135
Perceval (Eric Rohmer) · 139
godard
Numéro deux · 144
Every Man for Himself · 149
Passion · 154
Detective · 158
new masters
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner) · 163
The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophuls) · 167
Allegro non troppo (Bruno Bozzetto) · 171
The American Friend (Wim Wenders) · 174
Loulou (Maurice Pialat) · 178
Eijanaika (Shohei Imamura) · 182
Coup de torchon (Bertrand Tavernier) · 186
City of Pirates (Raul Ruiz) · 190
Part 4: Revivals and Retrospectives
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi) · 197
The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini) · 201
Born in Germany, Raised in Hollywood: The Film Art of Fritz Lang · 204
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu) · 210
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell) · 214
Othello (Orson Welles) · 219
Crisis, Compulsion, and Creation: Raoul Walsh’s Cinema of the
Individual · 223
A Love That Caresses the Soul: Films by Carl Theodor Dreyer · 228
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse) · 234
Le Silence de la mer and Bob le Flambeur (Jean- Pierre Melville) · 238
The Leopard (Luchino Visconti) · 242
Hitch’s Riddle: On Five Rereleased Films · 247
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone) · 264
French Cancan (Jean Renoir) · 269
Appendix: Top Ten Lists, 1974–86 · 275
Index of Names · 279
Index of Titles · 285
acknowledgments
This collection wouldn’t have been possible without the
patience and dedication of the many fi ne editors I worked
with at the Chicago Reader. I owe a particular debt to Pat
Clinton and Mike Lenehan. My editor at the University of
Chicago Press, Rodney Powell, has been a constant source
of encouragement. And I’ll never be able to repay Martha
Johnston for her eff orts in excavating this material from the
Reader archives. For that, and for the lifetime of friendship
she has off ered me, I gratefully dedicate this book to her.

Introduction
This book brings together a number of movie reviews written a long time
ago and in a cultural context very diff erent from the one we know today.
If these pieces still have any interest, and I hope they do, it’s in large part
because they belong to a precious but transient moment in fi lm criti-
cism—before journalism and academia went their widely diff erent ways
and it was briefl y possible to write about fi lms with serious intent for a
wide, popular audience.
The articles in this collection range from 1974 to 1986, a period that saw
the emergence of both the so-c alled fi lm generation—bred out of campus
fi lm societies and busy commercial art theaters—and the so-c alled alter-
native press, an extension of the underground newspapers of the fl ower
power era into for-p rofi t respectability. Publications like the SoHo Weekly
News, the Los Angeles Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the
paper where I was lucky enough to be hired as the fi rst staff fi lm critic,
the Chicago Reader, discovered a formula that largely liberated them from
the need to tailor editorial content to the narrow interests of a target
audience.
By hooking readers on service features such as extensive event listings
and free classifi ed advertising, these publications could allow themselves
a certain indulgence when it came to the topics (and lengths) of feature
articles and reviews. The Reader could comfortably place a fi fty thousand–
word story about beekeeping on the front page, secure in the knowledge
that readers would pick up the paper in any case in order to look for an
apartment or learn what band was playing at their favorite club. Working
on that principle, it was easy to slip in a two thousand–word review of a
three-h our fi lm by a forgotten Portuguese director (Francisca, 1981) or an
experimental work by an exiled Chilean fi lmmaker (City of Pirates, 1985);
if the readers weren’t interested, they could always turn directly to the
lonelyhearts ads in the back of the paper.
But the true stroke of genius for the alternative press lay in the deci-
sion to give its publications away for free—foregoing a thirty-fi ve-c ent
cover price (most of which would be eaten up by the costs of collection
and accounting) in favor of drawing a large circulation. In eff ect, the al-
ternative publishers were no longer in the business of selling newspapers
to readers, but of selling readers to advertisers.
This was a strategy that worked wonderfully well, at least until it was
adopted by the new generation of Internet entrepreneurs that emerged
in the 90s. Unburdened by the expense of printing and distribution (and