Pleasures Of The Farber

Joseph Wiseman demon­strates the “palms up” ges­ture for Kirk Douglas and William Bendix in William Wyler’s Detective Story, 1951; Michael Strong, behind Wiseman, is clearly impressed. 

One thing that read­ers new to Manny Farber ought to under­stand right off the bat: you are more likely to dis­agree with him more than any oth­er film crit­ic you will come to respect and love. “A…cavalry film that is like an end­less frontier-day pageant, [title tem­por­ar­ily redac­ted] has the dis­com­bob­u­lated effect of a Western dreamt by a kid snooz­ing at an Esso sta­tion in Linden, New Jersey.” Said cav­alry film also has a “men­tally retarded qual­ity” and fea­tures, among oth­er non-savory fig­ures, “a scream­ing little Bowery Boy in braids who’s only bear­able in the last shot when the cam­era just shows his legs hanging limply from a lynch­ing tree.” Ouch. The film in ques­tion is, as it hap­pens, Saint John Ford’s 1961 Two Rode Together, one of his prob­lem­at­ic but still revered late pic­tures, and one that this cor­res­pond­ent still regard with affec­tion. Farber’s assess­ment no doubt pleases his fel­low Ford scep­tic James Wolcott, one of the many luminar­ies who provide back-cover blurbs for the gar­gan­tu­an new Library of America col­lec­tion Farber On Film: The Complete Film Writing Of Manny Farber. But I doubt it finds much favor with fel­low blurber Martin Scorsese. Who actu­ally had to lie down for a lot worse, as the Farber new­bie will see once he or she gets to an essay co-written with Patricia Patterson entitled “The Power And The Gory” late in the book. Farber’s take­down was of course writ­ten well before Ford’s work was deemed canon­ic­al, but feisty would-be crit­ics who want to draw atten­tion to them­selves by cock­ing a snoot at vari­ous and sun­dry putat­ive clas­sics can draw an object les­son from such Farber vit­ri­ol in any event: that is, if you can­’t actu­ally con­coct a sup­port­able argu­ment, you should at least try to make up for it with some enter­tain­ing writing. 

“Battle or no battle, that the movies are an art is a fact.” No one since Vachel Lindsay was as pre­pared and qual­i­fied to argue this pos­i­tion than Farber was, and Farber wrote the above sen­tence in a 1944 essay called “The Happiness Boys.” If you’re inclined to mine through this col­lec­tion piece­meal, it’s a good place to start. But on every page there’s some vivid remind­er that cri­ti­cism is, pace Jeff Jarvis and the whole “every­one’s a crit­ic” crowd, more than just opinion-mongering; that it is a prac­tice and a dis­cip­line, and that those facts don’t have to inhib­it it from also being a lot of rauc­ous fun. And the above-mentioned object les­sons almost nev­er stop.

For instance,from his review of Wyler’s Detective Story, this great wad of chewy ver­biage that also demon­strates the advant­age a culturally-engaged New-York based film crit­ic could wield over his less plugged-in peers: “Among this traffic is a string of recent Broadway exiles: Lee Grant as a man-hungry shoplift­er with a sinu­ously unfem­in­ine wiggle, a par­rot­like head, and some oth­er not quite hil­ari­ous tricks, which she moiders with her East Side dia­lect; Joseph Wiseman, a degen­er­ate cat-burglar who sweeps into the famil­i­ar Jewish palms-up ges­ture as no man ever did before—yet he seems to have genu­ine pool-hall cyn­icism and chilling scorn for the ‘artists’ with whom he is work­ing; Michael Strong, Wiseman’s dumb crony, who crosses the affect­a­tions of a slack-jawed delin­quent with those of a hep cat, doing this with glib exag­ger­a­tion that makes act­or seem more con­fused than char­ac­ter.” One won­ders, today, how many con­tem­por­ary admirers of, say, Michael Shannon have seen even an iota of his stage work, and could bring their know­ledge of it to bear on any char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of his movie performances.