Richard Schickel—the Time critic who has been writing about movies for a living since 1965—estimates in the opening chapter of Keepers that he has seen roughly “22,590 films, or about 294 of them a year. Which means that two out of every three days, for a long time now, I have been at the movies.” Keepers is the distillation of a lifetime of moviegoing knowledge, a collection of must-sees with a few don’t-bothers thrown in to keep things lively. It also serves as a kind of memoir for Schickel, a reminder that he’s known and loved and respected by a good many filmmakers.
Starting with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and winding up with No Country for Old Men (2007), Schickel takes us on a tour of not only critically acclaimed masterworks but also the movies he has a soft spot for personally. He makes the case for all-time classics such as Casablanca (1942), as well as lesser-known fare such as Bette Davis’s Mr. Skeffington (1944), often within the same page. Schickel doesn’t mind ruffling some feathers, going after 1939’s Gone with the Wind (“a faux epic”), The Wizard of Oz (“It wants so desperately to be liked, it pants with its need to be adored”), and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (“Ostensibly a romantic comedy . . . the movie is, to me at least, distinctly unmerry. . . . I take full responsibility for my failure to embrace it”).
A biographer and documentarian concerned with the lives of great directors, Schickel approaches the project with a great deal of respect for those behind the camera. He seems to appreciate the pros more than the virtuosos:
Schickel hopes that his writing will inspire the reader not only to look into some films they otherwise might have missed—he makes an impassioned case for a home video release of the films of Ernst Lubitsch, for instance—but also to push back if they disagree.
In that spirit, then, allow me to suggest, in an entirely civilized way, that Keepers spends a bit too much of its time focused on the films of Schickel’s youth. Roughly three-quarters of the book is spent recounting films that were released before he even started writing about film regularly. One can’t help but feel that the major works of New Hollywood and everything that came after it are given short shrift. This happens, occasionally, with such projects: For instance, David Thomson’s ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008), features just 67 films from the 1990s and 145 from the 1930s.
Of course, it’s possible that the 1930s were objectively twice as great as the 1990s. More likely, though, it is a simple function of time: We’ve had more of it to canonize the studio system classics, less of it to give the same treatment to modern fare. It feels like an unconquerable bug in such collections. Conventional wisdom must be addressed and there’s so much more of it about ye olden days of filmmaking. Consider Schickel’s discussion of The Searchers (1956):
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more succinct statement of the conventional wisdom as it pertains to Ford’s classic western. And that, at least to me, isn’t terribly interesting. Far more intriguing is Schickel’s tossed-off aside about Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966): “I don’t suppose that Blow-Up is all we cracked it up to be at the time. (There’s a review of it in my files that makes my ears burn now.)”
Doesn’t that sound so much more worth reading—the on-the-ground, at-the-scene-of-the-revolution thoughts of a man experiencing something he loves?
This is why I generally get more out of collections of criticism—the Library of America’s Pauline Kael and Manny Farber omnibuses, Stanley Kauffmann’s A World on Film (1966), John Simon’s Reverse Angle (1982), and so on—than I do these after-the-fact retrospectives.
I’d willingly shell out quite a bit of cash for such a collection from Schickel, a lively critic who has written smartly and interestingly for a mass audience: no mean feat. Then again, I spend a fair portion of my workday writing about movies—“a fairly exotic way of making a living,” as Schickel correctly notes. Those less ensconced in the day-in/day-out fights about film will likely have fewer reservations than I did with Keepers.
Sonny Bunch is managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
