Few film critics have been as prolific as Richard Schickel (b. 1933). He reviewed movies for Time from 1965-2010, has published many books, and has made and narrated several documentaries. In Keepers (Knopf, $26.95), he discusses his favorite pictures, directors, and actors. The tone is conversational, discursive, and above all, personal. He is passionate without engaging in polemics. The structure is loosely chronological, but not encyclopedic. Refreshingly, there is nothing about Marilyn Monroe. He often compares his opinions to those of David Thomson and the late Pauline Kael.
Schickel writes, "I believe in popular cinema, probably more than I do in 'art' cinema." He discusses and enjoys both. "Sequences like the lift-off in E.T. are every bit as rare as, say, the conversations (or their lack) in Persona ." It takes courage and candor to compare Steven Spielberg favorably with Ingmar Bergman.
His assessment of director/writer Preston Sturges (1898-1959) is riveting. Sturges flourished briefly in the 1940s, writing and directing comically subversive films like The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and the anarchistic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), "a comedy about a virgin birth, in which Betty Hutton delivers sextuplets." Sturges' fall from grace was rapid and sad.
Schickel's take on film noir is excellent, and he has refreshing insights into Mildred Pierce (1945), Joan Crawford's Oscar-winning comeback movie. He concedes it is as much "a woman's picture" as a noir thriller, but uniquely, it succeeds as both. He admires Michael Curtiz's direction, Crawford's performance, Ann Blyth's monstrous daughter, "the first teenager to be shown as irredeemably awful," Eve Arden's wisecracking, and Jack Carson's sleaziness, although Schickel errs in saying the last plays one of Mildred's lovers. She rejects his advances. "Some part of our American innocence is lost with Mildred Pierce."
His thoughts about directors Spielberg, Clint Eastwood (a friend), Bergman, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Ernest Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, Max Ophuls, Francois Truffaut, Satyajit Ray, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti, Martin Scorcese �" some brief, some in-depth �" are illuminating. He has fresh opinions about the classics, preferring Wyler's Jezebel (1938) to Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939) because the former stars Bette Davis at her most intense. Vivien Leigh's Scarlett is, for him, "too kittenish." Virtually alone among serious critics, he wishes Davis had played Scarlett, because the role "needs her kind of lunacy to work."
He agrees with Thomson that "Cary Grant is the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema." Why? "He could be both attractive and unattractive simultaneously; there is a light side and a dark side to him, but whichever is dominant, the other creeps into view." Alas, he fails to comment on Kael's superb insight about Grant's fear of women �" how, on screen, they chased him. Her essay indicated his being pursued by aggressive actresses, including Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, and Audrey Hepburn, reflected Grant's homosexuality or bisexuality. Does that explain the duality that Thomson and Schickel admire in his work?
He knew Marlon Brando and admires his performances from 1950-54, which range from Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) to Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, to Johnny in The Wild One (1953), to Terry in On the Waterfront (1954). Then came a long period in which he made many films but seldom acted, until he regained his brilliance in The Godfather and The Last Tango in Paris (1972). Surprisingly, Schickel neglects Brando's touching work as the latent homosexual army major married to Elizabeth Taylor (terrific) in John Huston's fine adaptation of Carson McCuller's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1968).
He has long been friends with Eastwood, and that may partially explain his high regard for his work, a sharp contract with Kael's assessment of it. He and Kael, however, admire Visconti, and regard The Leopard (1963) as a masterpiece �" a picture dismissed by Thomson as superficial, more interested in decor and table settings than in passion.
He doesn't provide a list of "Best Pictures." Rather, Schickel mentions those he most likes. Fargo (1996) is his favorite, although he makes no claims that it is the best film ever made or even the best American picture ever made. It's simply "very much [to his] taste." He admires Frances McDormand's Oscar-winning performance and the Coen Brothers' vision. He is enthusiastic about Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982), Jan Troell's The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972).
The final chapter is about "That Wonderful Year, 1987." What makes it so special? It was the year Babette's Feat and Wings of Desire were released. Schickel's enthusiasm for both is a pleasure to read. So is his conclusion. "Where movies are concerned, I'm a lifer. Movies dominate more of our dream space than we care to admit. I expect to be going to a movie the day before I die." Anyone interested in pictures will hope that Schickel will see and write about many more films for many more years before he gets his final wish.