The Way We Were

These are hard times for professional movie critics. The job has gotten far more difficult in the past 15 years, because vastly more movies are being made and released–for example, 150 films received a theatrical release in New York City in 1985, whereas last year there were more than 400. At the same time, newspapers across the country are ridding themselves of in-house critics as a cost-cutting measure and using cheap stringers or wire service copy instead. But perhaps even more sobering, movies just don’t seem to matter as much.

The average working movie critic came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, when film seemed to be the most urgent of art forms. Mark Harris has just written a juicy book called Pictures at a Revolution about the precise moment when the old Hollywood dream machine gave way to the young directors, producers, and writers who wanted to make provocative and challenging films rather than glossy studio pablum–which happened to be the same moment that the new breed of movie critics took over from the fuddy-duddies who sniffed at the medium’s radical possibilities.

Pictures at a Revolution chronicles the making of the five Oscar-nominated films of 1967. One of them was entirely negligible–the elephantine musical version of Doctor Dolittle, which nobody on earth liked but for which the employees of 20th Century Fox dutifully voted on their Academy Award ballots. The other four nominees were far more interesting. Two of them reflected Hollywood’s growing outspokenness on race, with Sidney Poitier the pivotal figure. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Poitier was saintly and without blemish as a Harvard-educated doctor engaged to marry the white daughter of a liberal San Francisco family. In the Heat of the Night featured Poitier as a tough Philadelphia police detective who ends up investigating a murder in a Mississippi town–and who, in one of the great fantasy-fulfillment moments in all of American cinema, answers a demeaning slap across the face from a racist businessman with a slap right back.

In the Heat of the Night would take the Oscar that year, in what was perhaps the first Academy Award balloting in which liberal self-congratulation played a notable role. But it was the final two nominees–The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde–that really marked the transition from the old to the new.

The Graduate offered a remarkable example of how quickly an American movie could become the stuff of legend. Its humor was deadpan, its tone cool, its protagonist depressed. And yet from the moment moviegoers cast eyes on it, The Graduate became a dominating subject in the American cultural conversation. The kicker of a sketch-comedy moment near the film’s beginning–“plastics”–became one of the most famous punchlines in movie history.

What was particularly significant about The Graduate was the sense that director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry had caught lightning in a bottle by capturing their audience’s mood of disgruntled alienation. The movie was the perfect expression of the youth worship that typified the 1960s, with its soulless and corrupt middle-aged bourgeois offering nothing but spiritual death to their soulful and pure kids. Based on a far less interesting novel of the same name, The Graduate was a demonstration of how movies had supplanted novels when it came to offering young cultural consumers a taste of The Way We Live Now.

Bonnie and Clyde proved to be the most influential of the five films, since it was the first mainstream movie with graphic depictions of violence–and since it offered a portrait of the United States in which the authorities were more bloodthirsty and psychotic than the criminals. The leading movie critic for the three decades preceding its release was Bosley Crowther of the New York Times. He hated Bonnie and Clyde for what he thought was its nihilism and ugliness, and wrote several pieces denouncing it. As Harris recounts, Bonnie and Clyde was slow to catch on, in part because of Crowther’s attacks, but catch on it did. The result was that its star and producer, Warren Beatty, became the King of New Hollywood, and Bosley Crowther was cashiered by the New York Times.

Crowther’s place as the dean of American film criticism was soon filled by Pauline Kael, who was hired that same year by the New Yorker in part because of an essay she had published in the New Republic in praise of Bonnie and Clyde. It was Kael who made the most compelling case for the movies as the premier cultural message board–not because they followed in the formal footsteps of plays or novels or paintings, and not because they had a unified author and a unified vision, but because they were exciting and vivid and fresh and entirely new.

Kael was the inspiration for the critics who find themselves on the chopping block today. It is not their fault that the medium’s moment of primacy has long since passed, supplanted in the public imagination by long-form television like The Sopranos and The Wire. Watch The Graduate today and, if you’re like me, you want Sidney Poitier to come out of the pool and slap Dustin Hoffman across the face for being such an ungrateful, petulant white boy. So much for the way we lived, circa 1967.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.