THE AMERICAN CINEMA: Directors and Direction 1929-1969

by Andrew Sarris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 20, 1968

Andrew Sarris is the most dedicated and knowledgeable film critic now writing. Dwight Macdonald and Pauline Kael, for instance, far outrank him in wit and cultural sensibility, but there is no doubt that if anyone wanted the answer to some momentous question about who played what in a Phil Karlson quickie of the Fifties, Sarris would be the one to supply the information. This sort of buffmanship is increasingly becoming the mark of the true cineaste, and an odd business it is. Certainly the format of The American Cinema--a collection of thumbnail sketches of Hollywood directors and their complete filmographies, plus a jam-packed (fifty pages or more) directorial index to most American films which ""should go a long way toward ending the tyranny of randomness plaguing those who spend their time watching movies on television"" (a designation, incidentally, delivered in all seriousness)--is the sort of idea which, until recently, would have been unheard of outside of the trade press. Sarris, of course, is the popularizer on these shores of the famous Cahier de Cinema auteur theory: directors are just as much the authors of their films as Balzac and Dostoevsky are of their novels, and, as with the other arts, the best, or what Sarris calls ""pantheon,"" directors, are those with the most personal style. To the extent that films are ensemble and often quite commercial enterprises, the analogy is faulty, but the auteur theory, nevertheless, in accenting form (aesthetic criteria) over content (sociological/humanist interests) brings to film criticism an erudition and maturity it had fundamentally lacked. Yet it also produces nonsense (Sarris favoring the idiosyncratic emptiness of Sternberg's or Douglas Sirk's pictorial melodramas over, say, George Stevens) and ultimately makes his book a highly questionable survey.

Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION