American Movie Critics: From the Silents Until Now »

Philip Lopate is the author of Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, The Rug Merchant, Being with Children, and Confessions of Summer. A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, his works have appeared in Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Pushcart Prize annuals, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is Adams Professor of English at Hofstra University.

A provocative and dynamic force in American culture since the early twentieth century, movies have presented several generations of American writers with a new, fascinating, and challenging subject. How writers rose to the challenge, and in the process created an extraordinary body of work-passionate, contentious, restlessly curious-makes for a dazzling and constantly entertaining volume. "I have focused," writes editor Phillip Lopate, "on film criticism as an art in itself-the magnet for strong, elegant, eloquent, enjoyable writing."

American Movie Critics is an anthology of unparalleled scope that charts the rise of movies as art, industry, and mass entertainment. Beginning in the silent era-with poets Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg hailing the new medium and Edmund Wilson paying tribute to Chaplin's Gold Rush-the collection traces the rapid evolution of the medium in an age of tumultuous political and social changes. Here are the great movie critics who forged a forceful vernacular idiom for talking about the new art: Otis Ferguson in the 1930s finding in James Cagney "the dignity of the genuine worn as easily as his skin"; James Agee in the 1940s on American war films and the advent of Italian neo-realism; Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Vincent Canby, and others from what Lopate calls "the golden age of movie criticism" from the 1950s through the '70s, a period when enthusiasms ran high, and arguments over style and content often took on a larger-than-life quality. Here too are the finest film reviewers on the contemporary scene, including Richard Schickel, Roger Ebert, and Manohla Dargis.

Joining the full-time film writers are many distinguished American authors weighing in on a range of cinematic experiences, including Ralph Ellison, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Brendan Gill, and John Ashbery. Together they define an often underappreciated genre of American writing, a tradition filled with the "energy, passion, and analytical juice" that for Lopate mark the best in movie criticism.

Phillip Lopate, editor, is an essayist, novelist, and poet, whose books include Bachelorhood; Against Joie de Vivre; Portrait of My Body; and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. He has edited The Art of the Personal Essay and, for The Library of America, Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. His selected film criticism appeared in Totally Tenderly Tragically, and he currently serves on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival.

The proceeds from the sale of this book will be used to support the mission of The Library of America, a nonprofit organization created in 1979 to preserve America's literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Everyone's a movie critic. To care deeply about film is to succumb to the need to talk, or write, about what the eye has just absorbed from the screen. It's been that way since the poet Vachel Lindsay waxed rhapsodic about "the photoplay of action"; and it has exploded in the past 50 years, as film criticism has earned enough respect to be taken seriously as a profession. Phillip Lopate favors us with this extensive (though not exhaustive) anthology of film criticism, a wide-ranging and often surprising anthology that ranges from the scholarly (Stanley Cavell) to the snarky (Paul Rudnick). Lopate proves an astute and playful shepherd through material including Carl Sandburg on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ("[t]he craziest, wildest, shivery movie that has come wriggling across the silversheet of a cinema house"); Otis Ferguson on Cagney ("nobody's fool and nobody's clever ape frankly vulgar in the best sense"); and Pauline Kael on Kubrick's 2001 ("a monumentally unimaginative movie"). At nearly every turn, you'll find erudite dissections of how particular films play upon our psyche and emotions and why movies, for better or worse, have become our national dialogue. --David Abrams

Introduction

I Pioneers: the silent era and the transition to sound

II Masters and moonlighters: the late 1930s, World War II, and the postwar era

III The golden age of movie criticism: the 1950s through the 70s

IV Reconsiderations and renegade perspectives: the 1980s to the present

Sources and acknowledgments

Index