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Prompted by the death of Gore Vidal, which was subject of this column two weeks prior, I finally picked up a copy of Screening History last week, the author’s sole work built around—I cannot say devoted exclusively to, given the free range of his raconteur’s voice—the subject of moving pictures.
Maybe a dozen times before in as many different used bookstores I had picked up and put down this this scanty 96-page tome with its slightly ridiculous jacket image in which Mr. Vidal, half turned around in his movie theater seat, affixes the viewer with a wry gaze, an image from the 1989 film of Billy the Kid starring Val Kilmer visible over his shoulder.
The image was selected because Vidal had written the Kilmer film’s screenplay, although, were they publishing two years later, Harvard University Press might have selected a still from 1994 Joe Pesci vehicle With Honors, in which Vidal played one of the university’s own scholar-squirrels, Professor Pitkannan. The Billy of ’89 was, incidentally, not Vidal’s first crack at the material; some 30 years prior he’d written the teleplay which eventually became Arthur Penn’s feature debut The Left-Handed Gun, a film that Vidal disowned. I’d say he’s justified in this—if ever there was a case of a movie being paralyzed by fussy blocking minutia and convulsive actorly affect (by Vidal’s old friend Paul Newman), this is it.
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Screening History originated as one of the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures on the History of American Civilization that are delivered every two years at Harvard by a notable personage. Vidal’s address, sandwiched between those by Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) and Eugene D. Genovese (The Southern Tradition), was given in 1992 when the author was 66 or, as he puts it within, “in the spring time of my senescence,” with two decades to live but mortality already very much on his mind: “As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit,” the address begins “it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.”
Screening History sets down in prose, for the first time, biographical details that would be fruitfully expanded in Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest. It consists of three parts, the first of which is a recollection of Vidal’s early infatuation with the movies as viewed from Washington D.C.’s picturehouses. The second, “Fire Over England,” is an analysis of the Anglophiliac Hollywood of the ‘30s, which old isolationist Vidal interprets as a P.R. barrage by Brit émigrés and UK propagandists—including Alexander Korda and script punch-up man Winston Churchill—for the purposes of whipping up American sympathies for the cause of “gallant-little-England.”
Although glossing over the supreme importance of the Western, Vidal’s point is that, in the main, American history was not screened in his youth: “…a whole generation of us film watchers had defended the frontiers of the Raj and charged with the Light Brigade at Balaklava. We served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.” Noted exceptions are two films of 1939, Gone With the Wind (of which Molly Haskell, corroborating Vidal’s point, writes that Leslie Howard “was the ‘It’ gentleman of the rampant Anglophilia of which Hollywood was both addict and supplier”) and Young Mr. Lincoln, discussed in the third section of Screening History, “Lincoln.”
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“I am not a devotee of the director John Ford,” Vidal writes of Young Mr. Lincoln, “but he and his cameraman achieved a moment at the picture’s end which still demonstrates that the right picture can be equal, almost, to the right word.” That Vidal is not a devotee of Ford’s is quite evident, for he mentions Samuel Mudd in the previous paragraph without ever mentioning Ford’s beautiful fraud of American history, The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), an exoneration of Warner Baxter’s Mudd on trumped-up evidence, nor does he mention Ford’s beautiful examination of fraudulent American history, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
That “almost” in “the right picture can be equal, almost, to the right word” is telling, as is the implication that the subservient “picture” must ever be scrambling uphill in hopes of attaining the heights of the lofty “word.” (“I am a creature of the written word,” Vidal’s lecture concludes, “and I only go to the movies for fun.”)
Making an uneasy truce between picture and word is, of course, the ever-devaluated duty of the film critic—a vocation in which one is much called-upon to justify one’s existence. This is apparently the case regardless of the media one specializes in; I was this week directed to a “Riff” in the New York Times Magazine, “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who are Actually Critical” by bookchat scribbler Dwight Garner, which is an admirable entry in the dreary-if-apparently-necessary genre of remedial “making the case for criticism” pieces. (Incidentally, here is Vidal, in Screening History, on the Times: “a reckless paper when dealing with those who question its values.”)
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If nothing else, Garner’s piece drew my attention to a decade-old, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be critics” howler from Dave Eggers. It is a safe bet that anyone who so much as suggests that criticism isn’t necessary or vital, and that our comprehension of art or the world is not broadened immensely by acquaintance with William Hazlett and Van Wyck Brooks and Otis Ferguson and Robert Hughes (R.I.P.), is probably a blowhard and an idiot. Recently while riding the subway I read the sentence, “The overvaluation of love is the beginning of the end of love; the overvaluation of art is the beginning of the end of art” in Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination and was so overwhelmed that I almost felt compelled to sit down on the floor. Only time will tell if this outlives Eggers’ screenplay to Away We Go, in which he named his protagonist “Burt Farlander.”
I do not, I should note, foster any delusions about my own place in the critical hierarchy, which is as an impoverished and debased relation to this noble family. The vast majority of what I do is fast-turnaround deadline criticism that, being a purportedly heterosexual American male and thus incapable of not habitually filtering my experience of the infinitely variegated world through simplistic sports metaphors, I am fond of comparing to a basketball buzzer-beater: Without the luxury of selecting your shot, you just get the rock and heave it up and hope for the best.
Speaking of which, maybe my most pleasurable movie moment of the week came when viewing High Time, a Bing Crosby vehicle of 1960 that was “helmed” by Mr. Blake Edwards, and stars Ba-Bing as a Class of ’29 high school grad enrolling as a 51-year old freshman at Pinehurst University. His dorm-mates include Richard Beymer (Twin Peaks’ Jerry Horne), Patrick Adiarte, and heartthrob of the moment Fabian, playing a southerner with a fluctuating accent and an alleged innate ability to master whatever sport he picks up. In one scene set during a basketball game, perfectly cross-cut between bleachers and court, Bing haltingly propositions French professor Nicole Maurey while the star of Don Siegel’s Hound-Dog Man hustles to make up a scoreboard deficit, and is repeatedly shown in medium close-up chucking the ball like it’s a shot put. With that kind of release the ball is obviously destined to bound off the backboard, yet when we cut to the hoop, there it is at the end of a perfect rainbow arc, shushing through the net. The magic of that sublime liar, the cinema! And with such simple pleasures, we muddle through.
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.