"I Would Toss Myself Aside": Confessions of a Catholic Film Critic

Richard Alleva

I AM a film critic for a Catholic magazine, Commonweal, written and published by the laity. This has allowed my love of movies both to flourish and to become articulate. Thinking about my job has induced a curious fantasy. Suppose a time machine could whisk the sixteen-year-old Richard Alleva out of 1964 and off to a well-stocked library of 1998. That rabid movie buff, eager to learn the state of his beloved art, would begin riffling through current issues of the New Republic in search of Stanley Kauffmann reviews (and would find that gray eminence still there and as eloquent as ever), would seek in vain the now defunct left-wing journal the New Leader in pursuit of John Simon, only to find him still applying the acid test in the pages of the right-wing National Review, and would be dumbfounded by the absence of Pauline Kael, now retired and babysitting her grandchildren in Massachusetts.

What would the teenager-I-was do if he came across a pile of Commonweal magazines? I know all too well. He would toss them aside. Not out of disrespect for Catholicism, for he was (and, more anemically, still is) a Catholic. Not out of disrespect for Catholic writing in general or Commonweal in particular. After all, that sixteen-year-old did read Chesterton and other Catholic writers, and, yes, he did read, with sporadic interest, Commonweal, among other Catholic magazines. But to read the movie columns in a Catholic magazine? No! He had read a few once, but—nevermore! He wouldn't even bother to look at whose name was on the by-line. If any movie critic was writing in any Catholic magazine, ipso facto he must be a bore.

Yes, I would toss myself aside. To make you understand exactly why, I have to talk about the birth of my love for movies.

Infatuations are born in the most banal places. My infatuation with movies began in a barber shop in my home town, Waterbury, Connecticut. This was no unisex hair boutique but just a neighborhood place that didn't schedule its clientele; you went in, took a seat and when your turn came round, you got in the chair. As a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, I had to go for my monthly shearing on Saturdays when the shop was always full. And, due to various circumstances, I always showed up between eleven and one, when the place was most busy, and I would have to wait for a couple of hours. I was already a great reader, yet—and I haven't got any explanation for this except that kids are weird—I never brought a book, not even a comic book, to while away the waiting, so I had to read the magazines that the barbers had stacked on a long table. And, amidst the issues of the Police Gazette and Sports Illustrated (the clientele was mainly male) I found Esquire.

This was the Esquire of Harold Hayes's editorship. Never really a pin-up magazine like Playboy, Esquire had its reputation as a guide to the male sophisticate further upgraded by Hayes's hiring of classy talents such as Capote, Talese, Mailer, Baldwin, Plimpton. The regular critical columnists were Dorothy Parker, Malcolm Muggeridge and, fatefully for me, Dwight Macdonald on movies.

Macdonald, a Trotskyite turned anarchist, one of the founders of the Partisan Review, editor of Politics, friend of Dorothy Day and big-brother-in-spirit to James Agee, had pretty much abandoned his political commentary for the creation of the best cultural criticism ever written by an American. His articles (collected in Against the American Grain), defining and excoriating our ersatz approaches to life and art, are as pertinent today as they were in the fifties. Yet Macdonald never let sociological generalization come between him and the unique life of each movie or book he focused on.

I don't remember what made me pick up that issue of Esquire, but it certainly wasn't Dwight Macdonald. Maybe Yvette Mimeux in a bikini was on the cover. In any case, when I saw the column titled Film, I began reading and stayed with it and carried it into the barber's chair.

For I had the same interest in movies that virtually all Americans in the twentieth century have had and which only now is being usurped by video games and the Internet. I went to them in the same spirit of pop consumption with which I read comic strips and watched TV. Movies were available. They were fun. They constituted the official American idleness. And, unlike TV or radio, they were a night out. What struck me as weird as I read Macdonald's piece was that here was an obviously intelligent man taking an obviously intelligent pleasure in what was supposed to be sheer distraction.

I knew what aesthetic discrimination was (though I wouldn't have called it that) because I had seen book reviews in the Saturday Review of Literature to which my mother subscribed. But the idea of distinguishing good movies from bad ones and offering specific reasons why—well, this was something new.

In the piece I chance upon, Macdonald was considering some classics which had just been re-released: Gone With the Wind, which I'd seen, and two I hadn't, The Public Enemy and The Birth of a Nation. He explained why Gone With the Wind, for all its romanticism about the dear, dead antebellum South, was an adult movie. The tension between Ashley's conventional Southern chivalry, which Scarlett revered and told herself to love, and Rhett Butler's pragmatism, which both disgusted and attracted her because it was just like her own pragmatism and animal vitality, was what made the film something more than a soap opera like one of those Joan Crawford movies I despised. The contradiction between what people wanted and what they told themselves they wanted, psychological complexity in short, was what made a movie adult, and I sensed this was so even at the age of thirteen. But I hadn't been able to formulate my feelings until Dwight Macdonald did it for me. (This might be the chief delight of reading criticism: not being told something you didn't know, but being told something you sensed but couldn't say.)

Then he moved on to The Public Enemy and explained the difference between gangster movies that wallowed in violence and a subtle gangster movie like this Jimmy Cagney masterpiece. The very idea of a subtle gangster movie startled, almost disturbed me. My snobbery about the genre (too much like the covers of the Police Gazette) was checkmated by the concrete example the critic gave: the killing of a stool pigeon not shown but indicated by an off-screen report and—this was the master stroke—since the victim had been desperately playing the piano to distract and placate his executioners, we heard the tune he'd been playing suddenly go wildly discordant, then the crash of keys as the dead man's face slammed down. We didn't see the violence but instead a distillation of it, and the distillation was more pungent than the literal sight. It's a familiar enough device now but, at the age of thirteen, the idea that Less Is More was a revelation.

Finally, Macdonald took a look at what is pretty much the first major movie ever made, The Birth of a Nation. Actually all he did was analyze one shot which the movie's title calls "The Mulatto's Mad Proposal." D.W.Griffith's racist horror at the idea of a black man proposing marriage to a white girl saturates the shot but, as dreadful as it is, the racism also fills the screen with a sort of malevolently mythic horror. Macdonald's point was not to expose the racism—for a progressive like Macdonald it was laughably self-evident—but to show how the racism resulted in a luridly exciting shot that could be studied as if it were a nineteenth-century Victorian print (so many intense emotions, vibrant and repugnant, in a single composition!). That's basically what movies were, this critic was saying: images, single or edited in a sequence, that had to be read.

That was the decisive revelation for me. All my life I had been told by teachers that reading was greater than moviegoing because you had to work at reading, had to decipher the words, turn them into images in your mind, had to work at understanding what the author had to say, and it was the work of reading that consecrated that activity and made literature a greater art form than film, which was scarcely art at all, since movies just flowed in front of your eyes and did all your imagining for you.

But here was Macdonald telling me that the viewer who merely let images flow before his eyes simply wasn't watching the movie at all but submitting himself to a zombie-like condition. To truly watch a movie was to read it, i.e. to see all that was put before you and to question yourself about what was shown.

There were, it seemed, many questions to be asked. How was the action framed and where were the characters placed? Why in the foreground? Why in the background? Why did the camera look over the shoulder of one character rather than over the shoulder of the character being looked at? Why was another character kept off-screen while speaking? Why was the camera moving in a given shot but kept still in another? Why was music used at one moment and not another? Why was one scene told with rapid cutting while another consisted of one shot held for five minutes?

I learned that film could be seen as a sort of conglomerate art. It had musical rhythms, novelistic storytelling, theatrical acting (modified for the camera), the composition and color of painting, political and metaphysical ideas made concrete and dramatic. And the very thing that made film not just a junction of all the other arts but a distinct art form in itself—editing—also made each truly good movie impossible to absorb at one viewing. Editing made the movie flow before you and enchant you, but it also made the film flow away from you and escape you. At any rate, movies ceased to be for me an easy activity that you indulged in instead of doing something worthwhile, like reading. In fact, movies for me became the most difficult reading of them all. Without ceasing to be fun.

Thus was born an irredeemable movie buff and thus began many trips to the Lincoln Theater in New Haven to see the films of Truffaut, Fellini, Antonioni, Goddard, Varda, Kurosawa, Malle, John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson, and Tony Richardson. And to be a movie buff, at least in those days, was to be a reader of certain film critics because, though American films weren't yet sparked by the exciting innovations of the Europeans, the excitement was already there in American movie criticism. To read Pauline Kael on Goddard, Stanley Kauffmann on Antonioni, and John Simon on Bergman, was to be made to feel that you were present at the creation of art that would sooner or later (surely sooner) take on classic status. As different as they were from one another and as much as they quarreled with each another, the best critics all had one thing in common: they got at the meanings of their favorite works by thoughtfully examining their surfaces. When Kael wanted to convey the amusing perversity of Joseph Losey's Accident, she told us that the sunlight in that film "is terrible, it's rotten, because it makes the characters feel sexy. Joseph Losey uses sexual desperation and the beauty of Oxford in summertime to make our flesh crawl." Kauffmann made the reader see the originality of Antonioni's Red Desert by carefully describing how the colors of that movie portrayed the heroine's state of mind in a way that no other color photography had ever done. "Caress the details," Vladimer Nabokov urged his Cornell students when he unveiled the wonders of literature to them. The best American film criticism of the sixties did precisely that, and it fed the flames lit for me by Dwight Macdonald.

This, at long last, brings me to the reason why the adolescent I was scarcely ever bothered with the film criticism in Catholic magazines. I did read some reviews at first in the Sign, the Catholic Transcript, Catholic World, and others, but soon stopped. Why? I was sympathetic to the effort to get at the spiritual core of a film, but I think I also sensed that the essence of art can't be reached by skipping over its materiality, its sensuous surface. In any good or great movie, a camera pan, a dolly forward, a splash of color, the expression on an actor's face or the intonation in his or her voice, an apt line of dialogue, are never decorative, but reveal something about the inner lives of characters and, of course, the inner life of the filmmaker. I never received a taste of this excitement from Catholic critics.

Instead, the reader would get a plot summary and superficial comments along the lines of "well paced," "beautifully acted," concluding with a thumbs up or thumbs down. (It's the sort of thing Elizabeth Hardwick complained of in the New York Times Book Review—"the flat praise and the faint dissension".) I sometimes wondered why such reviewers had to see the films before writing such stuff. Why couldn't they simply obtain plot summaries from the film companies and proceed from there? For often it appeared as if their judgments were strictly verdicts on the moral decency or indecency of the plot. Hitchcock's 1957 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much was well received in the Catholic press (a father searches for his kidnapped son—good family values!) while Psycho was abominated (Janet Leigh in her bra and short slip plus slashings in the shower—horrors!). You would never have guessed that The Man was a pretty stodgy piece of moviemaking while Psycho was Hitchcock at his innovative best, a movie that forever changed the way directors of chillers handled plot and characterization.

As the sixties proceeded, Catholic critics and academics often latched on to certain films to explore or exemplify theological matters, but always the same films: La Strada, La Dolce Vita, and—always, always—The Seventh Seal. I respect these movies but, as written about in the Catholic press, they weren't so much works of art as just so much symbolic ore to be mined for the sake of theological nuggets. But the real being of any good movie resides in the way it moves in time. You can talk all you want about the monster fish on the beach at the close of La Dolce Vita, but you get closer to the temperament, yes, even the essence, of that movie when you notice how the camera hovers, seemingly hypnotized, near the face of Anita Ekbert as, with rock music blasting away, she dances herself into a sort of kinetic stupor. You feel that if a camera could pant, then Fellini's camera would pant as it tries to position itself on the neck of the amazonian film star, and this enthrallment of the camera by so much flesh and heat has more to do with the much noted ambivalence of La Dolce Vita than any symbolic fish.

By concentrating only on those elements that lend themselves most obviously to religion-related discussion and by neglecting the expressive surface of a film, a critic can actually blind himself to the filmmaker's vision and whatever spiritual qualities that vision might posses.

But let us say that a critic writing for a Catholic periodical does respond to the sensuous surface of a film. What then? Is he doing anything for his audience that the reader couldn't get from an agnostic critic writing for, say, the New Yorker or the New Republic? I'm afraid the answer is no, or at least not insofar as purely aesthetic analysis goes. However, his religious upbringing (or instruction, if he's a convert) should strengthen his criticism in at least two ways.

First, Catholicism has an inherently dramatic vision of life. Unlike certain Protestant sects, Catholicism does not smile upon the notion of doom, to put it mildly. Though circumstances may do their best to damn you, you can resist, and resistance is dramatic. I was taught that grace could be an aid in the struggle, but even grace had to be won by prayer, and prayer itself is a sort of struggle.

I think that the popular, secularist view of Catholicism as a religion that devalues, even demeans life, probably derives from Christianity's vision of life as a struggle, because the struggle itself is perceived as a refusal to enjoy the goodness of life. What's missed by secularists is that the struggle can be heroic, energizing, life-enhancing. (The Protestant Pilgrim's Progress got this right by picturing the search for salvation as a sort of chivalric adventure story, but no one reads Bunyan anymore.) You are the protagonist of your own drama. This view of life makes the Catholic critic of film or drama or fiction look for certain things that the non-Catholic might not so instinctively seek. Who is the protagonist of the film (Who struggles?) What is his or her objective? (What is he or she struggling for?) What is he or she doing to reach the goal? And this leads the critic on the classic Aristotelian hunt for the incitement of the main action—development, climax, and denouement. This classic view of drama must be kept flexible to accommodate the work of innovating artists whose instincts may lead them away from this framework, but it remains a sound bulwark against trendy nonsense. (Let it also be said that the best practitioner of this approach is the New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann, Jewish and agnostic; not incidentally, Kauffmann was the staunchest American champion of Antonioni, whose time-stretching and time-eliding movies stretch the Aristotelian concepts to their limits without shattering them.)

Second, there is the democracy of Catholicism, or rather of Christianity. I'm not talking of political but spiritual and eschatological democracy. Any Christian must acknowledge not only the inherent dignity of other human beings but also their unshunability. This isn't the same thing as tolerance. It's rather a kind of humility before the glory and misery and wonder of life that might make the Catholic critic pause a second before condemning a dramatist or director for constructing a story around a seemingly worthless character. (A serious Catholic doesn't keep the word "worthless" on the tip of his tongue.) You have to take the trip through the drama before you can say whether or not a character is a truthful distillation of some aspect of humanity. A drama is not a cocktail party with guests you may choose to greet or ignore. It's a reflection of the passage through life. And all the elements of moviemaking—camera, cutting, design, dialogue, acting—contribute, or don't contribute, to that journey. To refuse to revel in those aesthetic elements is like taking a train ride with the windows boarded up while wearing a blindfold and earplugs. You may get off at your destination but you don't know how you got there, and therefore, you really haven't had a trip at all.

The Catholic critic always writes out of his or her own Catholicism, not towards what he perceives as the reader's Catholic concerns. He does not bring to film his intellectual passion as a Catholic, or his sense of moral obligation as a Catholic. He does not have to rouse his Catholic conscience every time he sees a movie. He does not stoke up his Catholic sensibility when he enters the theater. He does not say to himself, as the lights go down and the screen lights up: "And now, it's time for the Catholic perspective." Rather, he goes to a movie or to a play or reads a novel or listens to a concert with his entire being, with all the passion that is in him. He watches from the perspective of his entire life. He does not, in fact, experience a work of art as a Catholic but as the human being whose Catholicism is now part of his being...or isn't. The religious sense will not spring to attention on cue as he watches the film but always subtly informs the way he takes it in. If it does not, he is simply the wrong person for the job. The Catholic critics I read as a boy did seem to consciously rouse their Catholic sensibilities; they did put their Catholic outlook on the alert. And that may have been why their criticism seemed to me so uninspiring, so boring. They were writers who had filtered their souls. In effect, they weren't being truly Catholic, or catholic, critics.

The best American film critic was James Agee, who was Episcopalian and who wrote for a completely secular magazine, the Nation. His religious sense was at one with his passionate response to life, and that passion made his criticism still the best film criticism ever written in English. His childhood friend Dwight Macdonald wrote that Agee "was deeply religious, but he had his own kind of religion, one that included irreverence, blasphemy, obscenity, and even Communism (of his own kind)."

Macdonald's description of his friend informs my vision of a serious man and a serious critic.

Visit Richard Alleva as Image Artist of the Month for November 1999

Issue #20 • Summer 1998