Ray Pride

It's a project most critics fail on deadline, and fail worse when given too much time: How can you write about films, leaving the darkness to keep the reader from remaining in their own dark?

"If hardware stores sold a house paint called Gusto, the number one customer would be [Raoul] Walsh: six decades in film using a jabbing, forthright crispness to occasionally vitalize the crudest hack fiction." Ah, Manny Farber.

The plump new paperback anthology, "Movie Nation," surveys the progressive 135-year-old weekly's occasional ventures into placing movies in the context of the greater culture. The magazine and Hollywood, in the words of Stuart Klawans, their critic until just recently, are "Nut cases with complementary manias, bickering their way toward a happy ending."

Maybe. While there are luminaries like "The Manchurian Candidate"'s Richard Condon weighing with a carborundum-exacting critique of violence in U. S. society directly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, much is on the level of a lousy Nelson Algren satire on a few days spent in the company of a provincial producer who didn't recognize his lunk-eared gifts. A 1920 editorial about film censorship is more a demonstration of "plus ca change" than a telling screed, yet it bears the fine headline: "Film Censors And Other Morons." A taste of John Leonard's crackling compound critiques, drags his always-impressive fixation on the myriad marvels of pop culture into a review of "The X-Files" movie. And it is amusing to fall upon an essay by Sergei Eisenstein, wherein he notes, "I approach the making of a motion picture in much the same way as I would the equipment of a poultry farm or the installation of a water system. My point of view is thoroughly utilitarian, rational, materialistic... Down with intuitive creation."

But up with Farber. Flipping through for tasty chunks is a frivolous pursuit, though. I have laid down almost twenty dollars of hard-earned for thirty-two pages with a lot of white space: uncollected Manny Farber. There are a handful of critics worth searching out, and almost all of those who are still writing have been influenced by Farber, whose acute, crackling collection "Negative Space" was reissued in paperback in 1998, his resonant voice once again between soft-covers in all their hard-headed, syncopated glory. Still, there are other articles out there, in crumbling "men's" magazines of the 1960s, and in the crumbling archives of The Nation.

From the Village Voice's J. Hoberman to Variety's Todd McCarthy and New York Times contributor Dave Kehr, you can discern faint echoes of Farber's indelibly smart and supremely stylish lilt. Farber is one of the indispensable prose writers of our time, a great entertainer in his own write, yet deeper concerns than his own words permeate these pages. His essays abound with an appreciation for texture, for the depth or shallowness of cinematic space, for stolen moments, for the wiles of Hollywood's cheese-headed bores. Writing on a wild range of films, Farber does not blink. He remains our best: a curmudgeon, but a painstaking one who concedes that his effects are like the layering and smearing and reworking of layers of paint, that he is "unable to write anything at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting."

Farber began writing about art and film for the New Republic in 1942, and from the start, was an ardent foe of corn and deep-dish psychologizing, seeking out movies that were content to go about "eating their own boundaries." Farber gives uplift to movies high and low, and was an early champion of kino-fist auteur Sam Fuller, among other action directors. Describing Fuller's "no-flab" work, Farber writes, "Though he lacks the stamina and range of Chester Gould or the endlessly creative Fats Waller, Sam Fuller directs and writes an inadvertently charming film that has some of their qualities: lyricism, real iconoclasm, and a comic lack of self-consciousness."

In "Cinema Nation," Farber weighs in on fight films, French films, John Huston -- can the late bloviator take these blows? "He is Message-Mad, and mixes a savage story with puddin'head righteousness. His characters are humorless and troubled and quite reasonabl[y] so, since Huston, like a Puritan judge, is forever calling on them to prove that they can soak up punishment, carry through harrowing tasks, withstand the ugliest taunts.... The directing underlines a single vice or virtue of each character so that his one-track actions become either boring or funny; it expands and slows figures until they are like oxen driven with a big moralistic whip." (Note the placement of the single small word: "big." It's what makes the whip crack.) Or try on Farber's description of how Gloria Swanson is called upon to overact in "Sunset Boulevard": "This dated technique would sink the movie under minutiae if Wilder's inveterate meanness didn't turn every shot into a shocking, mad, controlled chewing of assorted twentieth-century cuds." Or the chewing-up of Hitchcock as the Masticator of Suspense: "[He] has gone farther on fewer brains than any director since Griffith, while cleverly masking his deficiency, and his underlying petty and pointless sadism, with a honey-smooth patina of 'sophistication,' irony, and general glitter."

In Farber's essential omnibus, "Negative Space," Farber says, "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do, and I've always felt that way." Yes -- and if one could say it as witheringly, as wisely and wittily as Manny Farber.

"Cinema Nation: The Best Writing on Film From the Nation. 1913-2000," Edited by Carl Bromley, Nation Books/Thunder's Mouth Press $16.95 paper. (2001-03-08)

Also by Ray Pride

RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
There's a lovely gift of language and love on every page of "The Element of Lavishness," a collection of a forty-year correspondence between New Yorker magazine editor and short story writer William Maxwell and British writer Sylvia Townsend Warner.
(2001-03-01)

MEET JOE BLOW
In "The Mexican," Pitt co-stars as Jerry, a hapless criminal and diffident bag man who must repay one last debt before he can accede to demands that he quit from girlfriend Samantha (Julia Roberts), an always-agitated therapy-speak bitch.
(2001-03-01)

KNOWING DICK
While Jessica Villines' keen, sidelong portrait of Cynthia is chockfull of diverse interviews with the likes of artist Ed Paschke and Camille Paglia defending Cynthia's pursuits, her dentist, Dr. Michael Feinberg, shares the keenest insight. Artists have fixated on features of the human form throughout history; Rodin liked hands, Cynthia Plaster Caster admires rocker's cocks.
(2001-02-22)

CROUCHING PRODUCER, HIDDEN EGO
With its two milestones in one week in mid-February -- surpassing "Life is Beautiful" to become the highest-grossing foreign language film in the U.S., followed a couple days later by ten Oscar nominations -- "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" has outgrown producer-co-writer James Schamus' tag that it's "'Sense and Sensibility' with martial arts."
(2001-02-22)

HANNIBAL THE AMICABLE
(2001-02-08)

WATERY, GRAVE
(2001-02-08)

SLIPPERY SLOPES
(2001-02-01)

SLY CONCEPT
(2001-01-25)

GUY STUFF
(2001-01-18)

CINE-MAGIC!
(2001-01-18)

KIDS IN TULSA
(2001-01-11)

FIGURE IN THE MIRROR
(2001-01-04)

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