Even before
I studied cinema, Sarris (who sadly passed away today) already had influenced my cinephile brain without me
even knowing who he was. I was watching films because they were directed by a
certain person. I was making connections between the works of John Ford and
Orson Welles. The way a kid like me watched films was you’d try and watch three
or four by one great director, just so you could have taste. And then you
could figure out the grand statement. Ford was about the changing American
landscape from individualism to society. Kuorsawa’s films explored the
possibility of empathy. And so on and so on.
But Hawks
was tricky. He worked in every genre possible. His films, at least to the
untrained eyes, lacked the visual dynamics that the other canonical Hollywood
directors showed off (actually to think of it, would there be a canon of
Hollywood directors without Sarris?).
If I waited a year, Sarris would teach Hitchcock, a director everyone loves.
But I wanted a challenge; I wanted to see
Hawks the same way Sarris saw him.
On the first day of class, Sarris walked in casually (already 80 at the time), cane in hand, and looked up with a “oh there you are” kind of look at the class of 20. He didn’t care to say much; he really liked Hawks, but apparently the department forced the idea of the class on him. But Hawks was great, so we were going to watch Scarface. In his scrabbly voice, helped by a microphone, he gave the year and the actors and said let’s watch the film.
Scarface was of course a great film, and
easily recognizable as one. Sarris said some words after the class—I honestly
don’t remember them, and then asked for a few comments. We read a couple
pieces, one of them written by Sarris, that talked some of the more common
Hawks themes: professionalism, men within groups, but it was the eye-line level
shot (something Hawks mentioned in interviews) that stuck with me. Here’s a
visual clue, finally!
The next week came Twentieth Century, a screwball comedy I had
never heard of. No more than 15 minutes into the film, I noticed a shot. John
Barrymore, perched way up on high, stared down as Carole Lombard was on stage.
It’s the only shot like that in the film that broke Hawks’s usual eye-level
shots, and it struck me as the shot that perfectly explained Barrymore’s odd
behavior to Lombard, somewhere between love and fatherly protection.
Sarris
never spoke much in the class, not out of disinterest. He would talk about the
time he met Montgomery Clift, or read one of his old reviews of The Big Sleep, but he mainly wanted to
hear from us. I occasionally spoke, and he would usually agree. But what he
did, which I never have had any other film professor do otherwise, is ask if we
liked the film, and what we liked about it. So much of film academia today is
about deconstruction and analysis, that our opinions on whether we thought the
film was good or not didn’t matter. And to say that one of the problems in film
criticism today is whether we liked a film or didn’t like it would be an understatement.
But Sarris used his like/dislikes as a starting point. The great “flaw” of Bringing Up Baby—everyone is a complete
screwball—made for an interesting discussion about the nature of screwball
comedies.
It was only
after the class that I picked up The
American Cinema, and then you got to know Sarris. Sarris wasn’t afraid to
extrapolate EVERYTHING from a single shot. He would explain the entire
psychology of a director, and what they were doing. This is what of course led
to his entire battle with Kael, because he wasn’t willing to let the film stand
on its own. He wanted to draw a map; he liked a shot in High Sierra because it reminded him of something he was in another
Raoul Walsh film, which is something almost every critic does now (just see the supercuts of things that reappear in Wes Anderson’s films).
When I
later took a class on film criticism, so many people seemed to attack Sarris
when he covered him. He messed up on Billy Wilder, he took his theories too far;
everyone preferred the electrifying voice of Kael. Kael took you into the
screening room, Sarris exalted from down on high. Kael wanted to get lost in
the woods; Sarris would examine each tree, and then climb up to the mountain to
view the forest as a whole.
At the end
of that Hawks class, Sarris asked us which Hawks film was our favorite. By
then, I had been converted. Although Sarris’s comments in class were limited,
his original take on the films from years past still held true. And what I
suddenly realized was that Sarris had not taught me how to love Hawks, but
simply let me love Hawks on my own. By the time I wrote my final paper—an examination
of how Hawks’s Red River was actually
a deconstruction of American mythology—I realized I had created my own
psychology of Hawks. I had concluded Hawks’s was interested in the working life
of America, but it the extreme ordinary-ness of our heroes. He was interested
in the psychology of those we place as great men, who never saw themselves as
such. He wanted to take many of our great myths and break them down into simple
American can-doism. My theories are certainly influenced by Sarris’s writing on
men and professionalism, but it is also my
theory. The point wasn't to see Hawks the way Sarris saw him; it was to see him how I saw him.
Perhaps
that was the takeaway from Sarris. Kael rails at the begin of “Circles and
Squares” about how High Sierra was a
shlock film and for Sarris to like it just because he noticed a shot was bullshit.
But for cinema to be anything but a personal experience sounds just as
bullshit. Sarris didn’t make his theories and lists and categories to be the
last message. It was simply the way I keep a list of my favorite films from
very old years that I share with no one. It’s why my favorite films are the
ones that I’ve created my own ideas of the film that are probably wrong but
highly subjective in a way that matters to me. And Andrew Sarris mattered a lot
to me, and all of us, whether we like it or not.
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