In Praise of Andrew Sarris

            During my sophomore year of college, I signed up for a class on Howard Hawks. I hadn’t cared for Hawks much before—I liked some of his films, but they didn’t strike me as masterpieces (naivety is the basis of youth). Instead I signed up for the class for another reason: Andrew Sarris. For someone who had only minimal exposure to film criticism at the time, there were only a few names I knew (Pauline Kael wasn’t even one of them). 

            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.