The following is a record of Andrew Sarrisās responses to questions from the audience following his lecture at the University of Washington in March 1987. We thank Robert Horton, who recorded the event, transcribed it, and offered it to filmcomment.com. (Read the first part here.)
Iām intrigued by the fact that youāre comparing Welles and Hitchcock. Would you comment on the way in which those two influenced each other?
Yeah, well, you know, itās a very tantalizing question, because there was almost no communication between the two of them, no social thing. I think they influenced each other much more than either wanted to admit. You might say that Journey Into Fear influenced North by Northwest, perhaps, although North by Northwest was largely a remake of The 39 Steps: Hitchcock had been working in that picaresque form long before Welles got into movies. However, Welles was aware of many of the same literary influences and many of the same cinematic influences. I mean, they both knew the work of Murnau. Welles went deeper into German Expressionism.
Mark Shivas of Movie once said that Welles shows extraordinary people in ordinary situations, and Hitchcock shows ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I think Welles is the great exhibitionist of the cinema and that Hitchcock is the great voyeur. I think Welles is the romantic adventurer, Hitchcock is the armchair adventurer. Welles is much more directly sexual and he is very knowingly misogynistic. Hitchcock is very asexual but quite exotically misogynistic. I think theyāre a tremendous study in contrasts, but they both deal with the darker side of life.
Welles tells a storyāI think he told it on a talk show one timeāabout when he was a child in Chicago. He was a very unruly child-prodigy type, he didnāt want to eat his spinach and so forth, and he had either a piano teacher or a tutor or someone in his room, and his mother was in the other room. And so to show his displeasure, little Orson went out the window, and grasped the ledge with his hand. It was in such a way that he could actually clamber up, but he seemed to be in danger of falling and it was eight or ten stories up, so that would have been it. And of course the tutor or teacher or whatever was terrified and ran into the other room and said. āYour son is hanging by his hand from the ledge.ā And Welles said he could rememberāand whether this story is true or not, either way it doesnāt matter because the stories you make up are just as significant as the ones that are realāWelles could remember his motherās voice saying very calmly, āIf Orson wants to come up, heāll come up. If he wants to stay there, heāll stay there.ā She made no move. So Orson clambered up, and he said that he never knew whether she had instant sangfroid because she realized that if she got too hysterical it might make him nervous and cause him to fall; or whether really deep down she didnāt give a damn if he fell or not.
That sense of doubt… I think that kind of doubt would lead you, throughout your life, to be a little emotionally evasive. Whereas I think Hitchcock confronted his demons rather directly. And I think thatās where I give him the edge. Also I think Hitchcock worked better within the system, and accepted the limitations of the system. He was often confronted with miscast people, with projects that didnāt go the way he wanted and he just went ahead and did them. And everything evened out after a while. Whereas with Welles, when he ran into obstacles, the whole thing collapsed, everything ended. I think they both influenced each other, but I donāt think Hitchcock had anything to learn from Welles about technique, and Welles didnāt have anything to learn from Hitchcock about the darker side of life. I think the problem with Welles was that he didnāt play any games with the audience. Citizen Kane and Ambersons are two of the most despairing films ever made in America. And he was really running against the grain of the time: it was not a time for that kind of pessimism. You know, today heād be hailed, heād be making horror movies in his brilliant way and everybodyād say, āAh, thatās what life is like.ā But people were much more optimistic in those days. Those were the heady days of the war, people getting out of the Depression, America being very proud of itself and that kind of thing. Today, you know, thereās no such thing as being too pessimistic.
I think what Welles discovered, and always understood, was that it was possible to be too clever for movies. That he was perhaps too knowledgeable. And that people much less knowledgeable could make great movies. And this paradox, I think, tantalized him and baffled him. Because he applied too much cerebral energy toward it. I donāt know. I know he made two great films, and I think Ambersons is one of the greatest films Iāve ever seen, and nothing is quite like it. Because for once he probes very deep into his own feelings, whereas I think that for most of his life he was evasive.
If you were on a desert island and you had to pick out 10 films from any country, and you had all the equipment that you needed to show them, what 10 films would you take?
Well, the way I always answer that question is, Iād never go to a desert island. And if I did go to a desert island, the last thing Iād think about would be picking 10 films, and if I did pick 10 films and looked at those 10 films over and over again for 50-60 years, I think I would get to hate them. So I donāt like to answer those questions, because they enforce the view that there are some things that tower far above everything else.
I feel the world of film is a contextual world where everything gainsāthe greatness of it lies with how everything connects with everything else, not with how everything is separate. I wanted to get away from the isolated great workāāOh, this is the classic work and everything else is awful.ā Some things are better than others, but to understand, for instance, whatās good about Citizen Kane, you have to understand a lot of things. You have to understand Van Nest Polglaseās polished, lacquered sets for the Astaire-Rogers movies. You have to understand Gregg Tolandās tendencies as a cinematographer, you have to understand Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You have to understand a great many things. Xanadu is really the castle, itās a dream, an RKO dream. Not a Metro dream or a Fox dream. You have to understand these things, theyāre all connected. And therefore the desert island sort of defeats the purpose. In fact, I donāt think I couldāwell, nowadays with cassettes and so forthāif somebody could fly a plane and get me a fresh supply of things, then maybe . . .
But, to answer your question in a less exclusive senseāat one time, in my pre-Cahiers period, my pre-auteurist period, I used to say that the three greatest films of all time were Odd Man Out, Citizen Kane, and Sullivanās Travels. And none of them make my 10 best list today. Nowadays, I would say, the greatest films I know are Max OphĆ¼lsā Madame de…, Kenji Mizoguchiās Ugetsu, and Jean Renoirās Rules of the Game. If I were to be pressed. Followed very closely by Vertigo, The Searchers, and The Magnificent Ambersons. Those would be my six. And then, I guess Iād have to put Chaplin and KeatonāI donāt know what Iād pick, maybe Steamboat Bill, Jr. or Seven Chances, and for Chaplin either The Great Dictator or Modern Times. And then, I donāt know, maybe something by SternbergāMoroccoāand maybe something by LubitschāThe Shop Around the Cornerāwho knows? And then we could just go on and on. I could make another 10. The top three are pretty solid right now. In a few years, ask me again. But donāt ever put me on a desert island. I want to stay where I can see a lot of movies, new and old, and think about them.
Can you preview for us what youāre going to write about Max OphĆ¼ls?
What Iām going to write is how his was the art of the exile, the art of the person who fled Germany, went to France, fled France, came to America, went back, was always on the move, and always developing this unique cinematic form, and yet projecting some of the most profound evocations of a dying romanticismāthe most beautiful expressions of itāin his last eight films, I think.
Marcel OphĆ¼ls, his son, with whom Iām currently feuding a little bit, told me a fascinating and very unflattering story about his father. When Max OphĆ¼ls fled Franceāhe was really on the Gestapoās list because heād done radio broadcasts back to Germany attacking Hitlerāhe fled to Switzerland first, and there he was befriended by Louis Jouvet. I donāt know how many of you know that name, heās one of the greatest of all French actors, a sort of deadpan actorāsomebody once called him a serious Buster Keaton. Tremendous authority, and a massive figure in French theater. And he befriended OphĆ¼ls and they were working together on a film. OphĆ¼ls was directing him in a film of one of the MoliĆØre plays, I canāt remember which one [Ed. note: The School for Wives]. It was supposed to be done onstage as a spectacle and then from backstageākind of a Pirandellian thing, a sort of experimental film. And in the course of their associationāand OphĆ¼ls owed everything to JouvetāOphĆ¼ls fell in love, or had an affair, with the great love of Jouvetās life. And Jouvet never got over it. And when the affair with OphĆ¼ls ended, the woman went off to Argentina with someone else, and Jouvet never saw her again and he never recovered, his heart was broken. And when OphĆ¼ls returned to France from Hollywood after the war, there was a tremendous hostility to him. But the point that Marcel OphĆ¼ls was makingāand this, I think, is applied with great rigor in OphĆ¼lsās filmsāwas that with everything OphĆ¼ls owed to Jouvet, he could not resist his erotic emotion. It was a kind of Stendhalian situation, it was all or nothing.
You know, people talk about Platoon being a great war film. A great war film is Madame de…. The battle of love, the Stendhalian battle of love. That is the ultimate kind of battle, and thatās where you stake your life on the outcome, and thatās the feeling I get from OphĆ¼ls. Thatās what Iām going to try to convey, express, and demonstrate, in the films, in the life, and in the art. I suppose, finally, at a certain level, all criticism becomes a form of autobiography, and the directors I love are people who somehow express something or shape something that I felt, I suppose, stirring within me. And thatās all any of us can do. Thatās why itās so difficult, thatās why itās so silly to try and argue about the individual films, or what gets you and what doesnāt. We all feel something. Renoir said: āPeople are not moved by logic but by magic.ā
I was wonderingāI had heard that you were going to update The American Cinema.
Yeah, Iām doing a book now called The American Sound Film, which is a massive, two-volume work. Iām trying to finish the first volume, which is from 1929 to 1949, and then 1950 to the present will be the second volume. But that will be a different kind of film history, it will be organized very differently. And then, with Tom Allen, Iām going to combine The American Cinema with āRevivals in Focus,ā with new categories, new considerations, new alignments, and bring all the new people into the picture. Thatāll be the next project after The American Sound Film, so thatās still a couple of years off. The people Iām admitting to the pantheon now, the new people, are Leo McCarey, Billy Wilder, and Preston Sturges, those are the three. But not Raoul Walsh. I saw Sadie Thompson for the first time, and itās convinced me that heās a little too broad for my taste.
Could you comment on Woody Allen?
Iāve blown hot and cold over the years on Woody Allen, in and out. Sometimes I like things that other people donāt like. I liked Zelig more than most people did, I didnāt like Broadway Danny Rose, I like Radio Days. I love Manhattan and Annie Hall. I donāt miss the old Woody Allen of Bananas and Take the Money and Run that everybody else says they miss. I had very mixed feelings about him at one time: I thought that he was too self-involved, too self-absorbed, there was something too constricted about his vision, his humor. I think he has been broadening, he has been reaching out. I also think heās achieved a minor miracle in retaining his complete independence in todayās market, and keeping at his own pace, his own speed. I think heās perhaps the most talented filmmaker we have right now, the most dependable, the most eagerly awaited.
I think Scorsese has great talent, heās sort of a Jackson Pollock of dramatic explosions. I know Marty very well, Iām very fond of him and I admire him greatly, I think he has enormous talent and an interesting career, and I think he may yet do things. But Iāve never felt that even with his best filmsālike Raging Bull, which I underrated somewhat at the timeāheās never put a whole film together. The individual parts, though, are fantastic, heās great with performers, and so on. I think Coppola has a lot of talent. But I think Allen is the only comic talent we have whoās really dependable in the old Keaton-Chaplin tradition. I think heās up there now, in that category.
I once thought that Mel Brooks would go further and his career took a strange turn. I always thought Brooks was warmer, that he had more of a sense of conviviality and congeniality. I like Brooksās things with Anne Bancroft. I recommend 84 Charing Cross Road, which I think people have underrated. My wife, Molly Haskell, was doing a lecture upstate and she said she couldnāt imagine a Hollywood studio accepting this project: imagine passion based on bibliophilia, you know? And the audience didnāt respond to thatālove of books, who ever heard of anything so strange? But Iāve reached the age where I find that much more passionate than these recent movies Iāve seen about prostitution, like Working Girls. I find them kind of dull and anti-sexual, while I find 84 Charing Cross Road full of passion. It has passion for two things that are very important: one is books, the second is food. And I think those are worthy passions.
If you were to make a film, what would you choose, or what subject would you like to see?
Well, every so often I see a particular kind of bad movie, and I say, āYeah, thatās the kind of movie I would make.ā Something grandiose. I donāt think I have any gift for so-called creative writing or for fiction in that sense; thatās why Iām a critic. I can put things together but I canāt create things. I donāt think the world needs… You know, itās like the old cartoon where somebody is sitting on a couch, a person of a certain age, and the psychiatrist is telling him, āMr. Jones, you have to resign yourself to the fact that youāll never be an angry young man, just a slightly disgruntled middle-aged one.ā My nouvelle vague period is over, Iām too old to do anything [else] . . .
People frequently ask me if I ever wanted to make a movie, and there are two parts to that question: one, if somebody gave me three million or 10 million or 20 million to make a movie, well, Iād make a movie, somehow Iād do it. Give me the money, Iāll do it. I think I could make at least as good a movie as Michael Cimino did. And I wouldnāt be as temperamental. But would I give everything up, gamble everything on making a movie? No, I wouldnāt want to. I saw too many of my friends wind up virtually dead trying to do that. Also, Iāve known people like Peter Bogdanovich, and Iāve watched his topsy-turvy career and life. I knew him very well, I knew him when he was a punk kid. And now heās a punk adult. But with talent, with intelligence.
No, I donāt envy making movies. I basically have always considered myself a writer. Thatās what I do, I write. But one day you wake up and youāve been writing about film for 25 years, so I guess Iām a film critic. Thatās what I am. But Iāve always felt I was a Writer with a capital W, and I feel that film criticism is part of belles lettres, thatās my rationale.
One filmmaker you havenāt mentioned tonight is Frank Capra.
You know, I used to say that Capra and McCarey were like ham and eggs, they went together. But I now think that McCarey is a little superior to Capra. I think thereās something about Capra, that barefoot anti-intellectualism of his, that corniness, I donāt know… something that finally went very bad. I think heās a very great talent, but I also think he belongs to a certain period and I donāt find him as timeless as other people who I do respond to. And I always think he goes too far. I particularly hold against him You Canāt Take It With You and State of the Union. In both instances, he took rather modest things and blew them out of proportion. I think heās much too much into the Christian humiliation. I think he reached sort of the outer limit of it in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which is pure crucifixion. But then he went beyond that in Meet John Doe, almost to the point of suicide. And I thought that was sort of the end: from that point on something snapped and he couldnāt get back.
Donāt you think thereās a family tree from Psycho to Halloween to the slasher films?
Psycho obviously started it. My first review for The Village Voice in 1960 was Psycho. I walked in off the streets, I reviewed Psycho, and I gave it a Cahiers du cinĆ©ma review. And I got tons of poison pen mail from people who hated it for various reasons. Psycho really opened the floodgates, but it was meant to illuminate something else, to get deeper into something. These [new] things use that as a pretext. There is no attempt at character analysis, thereās no attempt at trying to explain the evil, for example. I mean, not that in Hitchcock itās explained exactly, the explanation is very facile, but there is feeling there. There is not feeling in these things, theyāre all mechanical.
But suddenly, after Psycho, almost anything was possible. When Janet Leigh is killed, the point-of-view character is killed, and then the second point-of-view character is killedāthat shock, I think, may have completely disoriented the whole moral structure of the cinema. Some people say the movies, in a sense, lost their moral bearings with Bonnie and Clyde. Some people think thatās the movie where, suddenly, you were on the wrong side. The evildoers were suddenly not only romanticized, but in a sense the people who opposed their lifestyle were vilified. That was a very determinedly immoral film, in that way.
John Carpenter made what I thinkā
Yeah, I think there was less than meets the eye to Carpenter. I mean, the original Halloween did have a kind of Minnellian fluidity, a lot of very elaborateāit was sort of Meet Me in St. Louis turned upside down. It was the dark side of Meet Me in St. Louis. And it was a really interesting commentary on the anomie and isolation of suburban life, on that space between houses, kind of the American Dream become the American Nightmare: you were suddenly horribly vulnerable in your isolation. The privacy we all want suddenly becomes your tomb. Each of these houses becomes a tomb. It was a sort of interesting statement. But since then, itās just become slash slash cut cut and special effects and so on.
You predict that Platoon will win the Oscar. What film would you give the Oscar to?
Yeah, I predict that Platoon will win. What film would I have given it to? Eric Rohmerās Summer, but I donāt think it would get many votes. Of the films that were nominated, I donāt know, Iād vote for Hannah and Her Sisters over Room With a View. Room With a View would be second, Platoon would be third. I donāt think Platoon is that good, frankly. I think itās very effective, butāI never liked Oliver Stone. I hated Scarface, I hated 8 Million Ways to Die, I hated Midnight Express, I thought all of them were excessively violent, self-indulgent. But in Vietnam and El Salvador he found arenas where he could function, where the violence didnāt seem excessive. And itās a limited point of view, itās not very political. Salvador is more political than Platoon, actually. Platoon is, I think, de-Ramboizing the war, treating the enemy with a little respect, and sort of honoring the Vietnam veterans, the fact that they were up against a tough, wily opponent, not really stabbed in the back but caught in a hopeless situation that made no sense and wasnāt their fault. In that sense I think it has a kind of therapeutic effect. He tried to get it off the ground for 10 years and nobody wanted it. They were putting out things like Top Gun and Rambo.
Have you maintained your initial enthusiasm for The Fly, and did it make your 10 best list?
Yes, it made my 10 best list. I think The Fly is great, and I think Jeff Goldblum should have been nominated for an Oscar: itās a great performance. Incidentally, the subtext thereāthere are a lot of subtextsāis the whole AIDS thing. AIDS and somebody changing in the relationship in a monstrous way, and how you adjust to the change.
Do you have any thoughts or comments on Rear Window?
Oh, I think Rear Window is great. I could talk for hours about Rear Window and all the analyses that have been made of it. Itās a pure statement. I think it exposes a lot of what Hitchcock feels about women, that ambivalence, that hopeless desire that he has: that feeling of watching her being strangled and wanting her to be strangledāboth in that and in Dial āMā for Murderāand yet never loving her, never desiring her as much as when sheās about to be strangled. Thatās very morbid, very twisted, very touching. And I think Stewart is our great American actor, in the rage he has and how he represents this kind of American madness. Heās quite wonderful. I mean that sense of compulsive voyeurism with that implication of impotence. Also, in the foreground you have the talking cinema, and in the background you have the silent cinema.
[mostly unintelligible question about life at The Village Voice)
There was a period when I ran the whole department at the Voice. I even took people in off the streets and had them do columns. Now, Iām not in that position, I donāt edit. Iāve sort of withdrawn a little bit from the department and Iām doing other things, about ten other things. And I prefer the overview, Iām sort of tired of… well, of course, Iām about 200 years old. Shaw said you shouldnāt practice journalism past 40, and Iām well past 40. About 18 years past it. So Iād rather do survey pieces, Iād rather examine things and have time to think about them.
In the old days, the golden age when I first started at the Voice, things were very anarchic and chaoticābefore the Clay Felker and Milton Glaser revolution, and then Rupert Murdoch, and before everything got professional and became like a regular publicationāI used to wait sometimes weeks and weeks and read all the other reviews and think about them before Iād review something myself. Thatās the way I prefer to do it, but itās not feasible. People want snap judgments, and Iām tired of doing snap judgments. I want to see patterns emerging. There are a lot of new things, a lot of old things, and a lot of other things that I want to put together to make new connections, and I want to refine my prose style. So in a sense I operate that way now, but whenever something comes along that really excites me, I just pour everything I have into it. Iād rather do that at this point. Iām tired of writing about why so many things fail. Or why people are not as good as people used to be. I think after a while you get bored doing that. I donāt want to yell at the present, Iād rather let it settle a bit, and deal with it as the past. Itās like the man says in La Ronde, āJāadore le passĆ©.ā I think if you understand the past you have a better sense of what the future will be.
[A question about cult films leads to a reverie about Paris.]
In Paris, they really appreciate you if youāve done something. In New York, you come back from Stockholm, youāve won the Nobel Prize for literature, and you go to a cocktail party and somebody says, āWhat are you doing?ā āWell, I just came back from Stockholm, I was given the Nobel Prize for literature.ā They say, āOh, thatās fineāwhat are you doing next?ā And if youāre not doing something, they walk away to find somebody more interesting. Whereas in Paris, if youāve ever done anything great, youāre great forever.
One of the most moving things Iāve ever heard is the story of when Buster Keatonāwho was completely ignored, neglected, ridiculed, despised, a hopeless has-been, one of the waxworks in Sunset Boulevardāwent to the CinĆ©mathĆØque, and it was jammed to see one of his films. And suddenly everybody yelled āBuster!ā and they rose up as one and they just cheered. And tears began rolling down his cheeks. Here was the great Buster Keaton.
It was the French who discovered him. You know, people ask me, āWho was the greatest director you discovered in the Sixties?ā and I say āBuster Keaton.ā Suddenly all of his films were available. I did a thing for Camera 2 called āThe Metaphysics of Buster Keatonāāhow pretentious can you get? But heās great . . . You know, people thought that all of silent comedy was people throwing custard pies at each other, and then they saw this marvelously adventurous, fantastic artist. One of the great masters of the cinema. One of the great naturals.
There were two naturals, I thinkāKeaton and Hitchcock. I think a lot of other people, like Ford, OphĆ¼ls, Renoir, so on, would have been great at other things. I think Keaton and Hitchcock were made purely for the cinema. When I was in Paris, I used to have arguments about the Kafka-esque qualities of Hitchcock in, say, The Wrong Man, and I meant the dark humor as well as the sinister qualities, the paranoid qualities, the cockroach qualities. And people said, āOh, how can you compare Hitchcock with Kafka or Dostoevsky?ā And I said, āNo, Iām not saying that Hitchcock by himself is as great an artist as Kafka and Dostoevsky. But Hitchcock plus cinema equals Kafka and Dostoevsky. Keaton plus cinema equals Samuel Beckett.ā I mean, the medium itself enhances these two people. I think Keaton would have been a knockabout vaudevillian of some distinction, because he had a fantastic physical coordination and instinct. And Hitchcock I think would have been a graphic artist or designer of some kind. They both probably would have been very good. But with the cinema… The effect that I get from their great films is the effect I get from great dramatic literature, great narrative literature.
You know, I could stay here for hours. I donāt know if Iāve given you any idea of it, but youāve been a wonderful audience, and I hopeāI know you people will go out and proselytize among your neighbors, your Philistinish friends, and get them to support good films, both domestic and foreign, and preach the religion of cinema onward and upward. If that, I will feel less guilty about dragging you out on this night. Thank you very much.
