PARTISAN REVIEW
III
forced intimacy.) It's easy to play this game, discovering chance links
between highly disparate films; and even if the links are not accidental,
identifying them should be only the first step in evaluating the achieve–
ments of the individual films . Sarris admiringly quotes Truffaut's
aphorism (lifted from Giraudoux), "There are no works; there are only
authors." We could do with less exaltation of authors, and more rigor–
ous, detailed criticism of the works themselves.
Although the auteurists claim to be more sensitive to the visual
side of films than more " bookish" highbrow critics, it is ironic that
Sarris himself is at his feeblest when he attempts to describe or evoke
the visual style of a film. Amusingly,
Confessions of a Cultist
demon–
strates that Sarris is excellent on literary adaptations like
In Cold Blood,
Goodbye, Columbus,
or
Laughter in the Dark,
carefully comparing the
film to its source ; he is very good discussing the social implica:tions and
confusions of many Hollywood "problem films" ; he can be very percep–
tive in flashes - when the requirements of the
auteur
theory are mo–
mentarily allowed to relax ; and he writes moving tributes to films (like
Boudu Saved from Drowning)
that appeal to his romanticism; but he
is at a total loss when trying to analyze the visual qualities of the me–
dium. "Preminger's
mise-en-scene
in
Bunny Lake Is Missing
is the most
brilliant I have seen all year," Sarris writes, but you read on in vain
trying to discover
why.
Mooning over John Ford's
Seven Women,
Sarris
concludes, "The fake Metro set and sky, and the arbitrariness of the
plot, are the materials of one of the cinema's greatest poets" - and the
glaring contradiction is left unexplained. When he does attempt a con–
crete description of camera work or cutting, the result is often gibberish,
as in this sphynxlike statement about
W hatever Happened to Baby
Ja ne?:
"In a situation fraught with the peril of cross-cutting, Aldrich
falls back on the natural planes of the action - Bette [Davis] standing,
Joan [Crawford] sitting, Bette downstairs and outside, Joan upstairs and
inside. The diagonals are derived from the plot and decor."
Sarris's true prejudices can be seen in his defense of
Gertrud:
"It
is time the aestheticians of illiterate images realized tha:t Carl Dreyer's
Gertrud
is the picture of the year because people sit and talk on a
couch, and there is no greater spectacle in the cinema than a man and
a woman talking away their share of eternity together." Quite a curious
statement from an advocate of visual style and "mystical
mise-en-scene."
Sarris, like the "bookish" film critics he often attacks, is more com–
fortablediscussing dialogue, story, and characters than he is with the
formal elements of cinema, which can enrich and transform the "lit–
erary" themes. Perhaps that is why he prefers the tired narrative films
