Manny Farber in Tehran

This is a piece I originally wrote for the newsletter of The Library of America, and reportedly published last winter, though they have not sent me a copy yet. The reason was my posting of Manny Farber articles, long before they decide to publish his film writings (Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber). When somebody from The Library contacted me and was curious, or somehow amazed, about how I did those Farber posts on my blog, then it was my turn to become surprised by this fact that not long before starting to work on publishing the book, she has not been acquainted with the name in New York City! Well, in that case I must say if there is passion, it doesn’t matter that you are in New York or Mashhad, because it just calls you by your name.

In my early teens (early 1990s) there was only two film journal in Iran, one a yellow magazine and mostly about Iranian commercial films and the other, Film Monthly a more serious publication with a certain approach toward Iranian art films and western cinema. When I get interested in their magazine, I went back to their previous issues from 1980s (they had started publishing Film shortly after the revolution) and there was numerous translations of famous journalistic argument between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael (from 1960s of course). I think first time I heard Manny Farber’s name there, but I’m not so sure. Anyway, I knew the man’s name, but there was no sampling of his writings. I had only a brief survey of his critical approaches and his ideas about how a movie should be! It’s funny that auteur theory became a very popular in the 1980s Iran because simply in the 1970s everyone was too busy with the revolution to notice these things! And Film Monthly did a great job in bringing up some names and among them Farber.

His name was somewhere in the back of my mind till not long after my first encounter with Film Monthly I became a contributor at the age of 19 (in 2000). I believe I was one of the few people who started to explore American movies in a more Academic manner and not in the nostalgic love-letter kind of writings that was very common among the critics who had lost their magic lanterns during revolution (in those days screening foreign films became obsolete and all cine clubs were closed down).

There was a small library of foreign language book (mainly English) in Film Monthly office that became my Mecca. Whenever I was in Tehran (I’m living in northeast of Iran) I’ve spent a great deal of time in that library. All materials were from pre-revolution nevertheless there was lot of thing to read: all the past issues of Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cahier du Cinema, Sight and Sound, etc. And by the way there was a ragged copy of For Now#9 edited by Donald Phelps from late 1960s and there comes my real introduction to the world of Farber. And when from last May I began to post Farber’s writing on my blog I used the very same source.

My Budd

At the time of Farber’s passing I wrote a long piece (“a critic in the shadow”) about him in Film Monthly and I used it as a pretext to attack the disastrous state of film criticism in Iran. I focused on Farber’s stubbornness, his complicated mind, abstruse language and that kind of professional dignity that every critic needs. I emphasized on the way he praises American films of the golden age and the way he talks about them to remind to my colleagues how a great treasure is hidden in the past. In addition, underscoring Farber’s retirement from criticism was a basis for this argument that every critic needs a break. Talking about my colleagues, the speed of work doesn’t give a chance to make a balance between experiences of life and art. Long pauses make us to reconstruct our thoughts and ideas about the medium that we are dealing with, the medium that is changing every day. This part was my reaction to film critics of my generation which are practically everywhere, they are in daily newspaper, journals, radio, TV and web. Too busy with being around in all events just for the sake of being in. As I observe, even there is no time for watching films that used to be a critics main task! The response to that Farber piece was enormous and despite the obscurity of his name among film goers and film readers, most people were very excited about the passages of Farber work that I had translated for the occasion.

Howard Hawks II

In Iran there are uncountable film journals (when last winter an American friend was visiting Iran he was amazed by the variety of these magazine – a daily newspaper dedicated to cinema, like variety, “Film and Psychology”, “Film and social studies”, an special publication for film scripts that prints a classic and a contemporary screenplay each month, a kind of Iranian version of “cinematographer” and many more) And these journals are filled with Farsi translated reviews from American film critics (Roger Ebert, James Berardinelli, J. Hoberman, Peter Travis, Michael Wilmington and Jonathan Rosenbaum). One can verify the influence of these critics (especially those with a more popular taste like Ebert) on Iranian younger film reviewers. In this case my return to Farber was an attempt to evoke that lost seriousness and depth that was evident even in Farber’s short reviews.

--E. K.

Finally Farber

Finally “Farber on film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber”, (edited by Robert Polito) was published by The Library of America, including all his film writings (he had general writings on art and painting, too) for The Nation, The New Leader, New Republic, Cavalier, etc.

Manny Farber, whom Jonathan Rosenbaum calls him "the greatest by far of all American film critics", was also a painter, teacher and carpenter. He was born in Douglas, Arizona, February 20, 1917 and died last year at the age of 91. He taught art classes in Washington, D.C. and California. Joined the New Republic as film and art critic, replacing film critic Otis Ferguson. Stayed at the New Republic until 1946, later (1949) joining The Nation, when his friend and long-time colleague, James Agee, departed for Hollywood. Also worked for Time for several months of 1949. Left The Nation in 1954; then, in 1957, went over to The New Leader, staying on until 1959. Wrote for Cavalier in 1966. Has contributed various essays and interviews to Art News; Commentary (which printed perhaps his most famous article, Underground Films); Commonweal; The American Mercury; Prospectus and Film Comment.
In 1970 Praeger published a larger collection of his film criticism, Negative Space. He married to another painter and occasionally film critic, Patricia Patterson, in 1976. Farber wrote his last piece in 1977 and then went into a long retirement.

I’ve posted nearly 11 Manny Farber articles from 1940s to 1960s (including a part of his famous “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”) in this blog. My main aim was filling the gap between the new generation of film readers and Farber’s works, that were completely absent from the public scene. Now that the book has been appeared it doesn’t seem necessary to continue posting his writings. I think now is the time to focus on another underrated film critic with a gigantic knowledge of art of filmmaking, Raymond Durgnat, whose writings are catastrophically unavailable on the web or in print.

Manny Farber on Third Man

This is a primary example of how Farber’s views, and mainly his language, became harassing. Here, regardless of the cinematic structure, he only retell some picked out scenes with derision. I suppose we could call it Mr. Hyde side of Farber and a fellow like me -- impelled by Bazinian’s humanist and graceful views -- never will be able to sympathize with this rich but arrogant critique . And of course there is the usual problem of an impressionistic approach to the film criticism (what does he mean when he says Reed is a “soft director”?) that could end up in a transcending state or on the contrary, in a detour. But thank God, most Farber's works belong to the first territory; exulting pieces with the most unique views I ever seen from an American film critic.

The most depressing movie irony is that American longhairs -- raised on the non-literary naturalism of Tom Mix, Fairbanks and movies like ''Public Enemy", along with the revolutionary Griffith, Sennett, Keaton -- continue to coddle and encourage European directors in their burnt-out sentimentality and esthetic cowardice. Carol Reed's "The Third Man" (the short happy life of Orson Welles, who, having killed or crazed half of Vienna by black-marketing diluted penicillin, evades the police by playing dead) is one import in which the virtuosity is tied in with a spectacular control and verve. Its intricate, precocious use of space, perspective, types of acting (stylized, distorted, understated, emotionalized) and random, seemingly irrelevant subject matter, enlarges and deepens both the impression of a marred city and a sweet, amoral villain (Welles) who seems most like a nearly satiated baby at the breast. But it bears the usual foreign trademarks (pretentious camera, motorless design, self-conscious involvement with balloon hawker, porter, belly dancer, tramp) over-elaborated to the point of being a monsterpiece. It uses such tiresome symbol-images as a door which swings with an irritating rhythm as though it had a will of its own; a tilted camera that leaves you feeling you have seen the film from a foetal position; fiendish composing in Vuillard's spotty style, so that the screen crawls with patterns, textures, hulking shapes, a figure becoming less important than the moving ladder of shadow passing over it.

The Third Man’s murky, familiar mood springs chiefly from Graham Greene's script, which proves again that he is an uncinematic snob who has robbed the early Hitchcock of everything but his genius. Living off tension maneuvers which Hitchcock wore out, Greene crosses each event with one bothersome nonentity (A crisco-hipped porter, schmoo-faced child) tossed in without insight, so that the script crawls with annoying bugs. While a moony, honest American (Joe Cotten), unearths facts of Welles's death, Greene is up to his old trick of showing a city's lonely strays blown about the terrain by vague, evil forces. Greene's famous low sociology always suggests a square's condescension and ignorance. He sets Cotten up for quaint laughs by characterizing him as a pulp-writer, having the educated snipe at him in unlikely fashion ("I never knew there were snake-charmers in Texas") and the uneducated drool over him; every allusion to Cotten's Westerns, from their titles to their format, proves that no one behind the movie ever read one. Greene's story, a string of odd-sized talky scenes with no flow within or between them, is like a wheelless freight train.


But Reed manages to turn the last half of this tired script into a moving experience of a three-dimensional world in which life is sad, running simply from habit, and ready to be swept away by street cleaners. In Reed's early films (“The Stars Look Down", "Three on a Weekend") sordid domesticity was scored in a pokey, warm, unbiased way; in the daylight scenes of "Third Man", his paterfamilias touch with actors is tied to a new depersonalizing use of space that leaves his characters rattling loose like solitary, dismal nuts and bolts in vaulting landscapes . A beautiful finale -- Welles's girl Valli, returning from his burial down a Hobbema avenue of stark trees -- picks up the gray, forlorn dignity of a cold scene and doubles the effect by geometrically pinpointing the figure and moving her almost mechanically through space and finally into and around the camera. Reed has picked up a new toy-soldier treatment of conversations, where the juxtapositions and movements are articulated like watch-cogs, each figure isolated and contrastingly manipulated till the movie adds up to a fractured, nervous vista of alienation in which people move disparately, constantly circling, turning away, and going off into their own lost world. But the movie's almost antique, enervated tone comes from endless distance shots with poetically caught atmosphere and terrain, glimpses of languid, lachrymose people sweeping or combing their hair, and that limp Reed manner with actors, which makes you feel you could push a finger straight through a head, and a sweater or a hat has as much warmth and curiosity as the person wearing it.


Always a soft director, Reed turns to chickenfat on night scenes, where his love of metallically shining cobble stones, lamps that can hit a face at eighty paces, and the mysterious glow at every corner turns the city into a stage-set that even John Ford would have trouble out-glamorizing. For instance, endless shots of Cotten and Welles sliding baseball­fashion in rubbled wastelands that look like Mt. Everest touched up by an M.G.M. art director. Both are seen only momentarily in these wastes because it is obvious no human could make the descent without supplies. Reed is seldom convinced that anything artistic is being said unless the scene looks like a hock-shop. Scenes are engulfed in teddy bears, old photographs, pills; a character isn't considered unless he is pin-pointed in a panorama of baroque masonry, seen bird fashion through bridge struts or rat fashion through table legs; like most current art movies Reed's are glued to majestic stairways.

Reed and Welles in the tunnel

The movie's verve comes from the abstract use of a jangling zither and from squ irting Orson Welles into the plot piece-meal a tricky, facetious eye-dropper. The charm, documentary skill, and playful cunning that fashioned this character make his Morse code appearances almost as exciting visually as each new make-believe by Rembrandt in his self­portraits. The cunning is in those glimpses -- somewhat too small shoes, a distant figure who is a bit too hard and resilient: a balloon man, not Welles but flamboyant enough to suggest his glycerine theatricality in other films -- that seem so Wellesian, tell so much about him, yet just miss being Welles. Through camera tricks and through a non-mobile part custom-built for this actor (whose flabby body and love of the over-polished effect make any flow in his performance seem a product of the bloodiest rehearsing), Welles achieves in brief, wonderful moments the illusion of being somebody besides Welles. Two of these -- some face-making in a doorway, a slick speech about the Borgias that ends with a flossy exit -- rate with entertaining; bits like Paul Kelly's in "Crossfire" and the time Bob Hope tried to hide behind a man taking a shower in a glass cubicle.


Reed's nervous, hesitant film is actually held together by the wires of its exhilarating Zither, which sounds like a trio and hits one's consciousness like a cloudburst of sewing needles. Raining aggressive notes around the characters, it chastises them for being so inactive and fragmentary, and gives the story the unity and movement it lacks.

--Manny Farber (April 1, 1950 I The Nation)

A Hyperbolic Attack on Ordinary American Existence

In A Place in the Sun - the latest and glummest remake of An American Tragedy - there is enough gimmicky, pretentious footage to keep one's eyes glued to the screen while one's common sense and muscles beg for respite. For all its flash, occasional power, and streaks of frighteningly natural acting, this extra-earnest Paramount production is one long, slow, hyperbolic attack on ordinary American existence – an attack whose renewal in one recent film after another is obviously part of Hollywood's strategy to jerk its audience back from the ingenuous attractions of television.

We are given, for instance, the oh-so-languid rich; the pious, magisterial M.D.; billboards that out-Petty Petty; distant sirens playing a counterpoint of doom to ordinary phone calls; the beefy, hysterically shrill D.A.; a thick undergrowth of portable radios everywhere the camera goes; juke-box joints sprawling with drunks. And I am getting very tired of stock shot 32-B, which feeds us the myth that all the windows in depressed urban areas face out on huge, blinking neon symbols of wealth and achievement.

The script by Harry Joe Brown is remarkably faithful to the plot of Dreiser's bleak novel: the complicated love life of a not quite bright social climber (Montgomery Clift) puts him finally in the electric chair. But Brown's dialogue is so stylish and unalive ("You seem so strange, so deep, so far away") that it appears to drift out of the walls and furniture rather than the twisted, jittery, or guppy-like mouths of Clift and his two ladies -- Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. An even more troubling factor is Brown's determination to modernize a tale that is hopelessly geared to an outdated morality and a vanished social set-up. (An American Tragedy, published in 1925, was based on the Chester Gillette case of 1906. By its contortionist avoidance of the verboten subject of abortion - or less drastic alternatives - and its black-white demarcation of the worlds of luxury and drudgery, this "modern" version cuts the ground from under its own feet).

But Producer-Director George Stevens turned Brown's arty, static nonsense into something almost as visually interesting and emotionally complex as Sunset Boulevard or The Asphalt Jungle – one more key example of Hollywood's recent desperate commitment to misanthropic expression via elegant, controlled, mismated power effects. Ordinarily a soft-hearted poetic realist, Stevens is particularly good at getting natural performances out of his actors and at putting across the gauzy, sentimental gestalt of a popular song, a kiss, an important dance, a ritualized seduction. Here he has blown such elements larger than life -- building them into slow, parabolic choreographies of action and camera movement in which you are more dazzled by the incredible control and purposefulness than repulsed by the schmaltz of the whole thing. The Clift-Taylor kiss – repeated in three double exposures – is a huge, intimate, extended business that practically hammers an erotic nail into your skull. It is preceded by Taylor's curious Tin Pan Alley line: “Tell Mama – tell Mama all.”

Stevens squeezes so much of their "real" personalities out of his actors that the screen is congested with discordances. Most of the honors go to Miss Winters, who at long last gets to show that she can do a Mildred -- just like Bette Davis; but a far more complex one-man show is that of the non-aging late adolescent, Montgomery Clift. To some spectators his performance expresses the entire catalogue of Greenwich Village effeminacy -­ slim, disdainful, active shoulders; the withdrawals, silent hatreds, petty aversions; the aloof, offhand voice strained to the breaking point. To others he is a sensitive personification of all those who knock themselves out against the brick wall of success. Clift can stare at a Packard convertible or slump down on his spine with fatigue and by supply not acting make you aware of every dejected, mumbling success-seeker on a big city street. Finally, for the more he is a childish charade on all the fashionably tough, capable outcasts who clutter up "hard­boiled" fiction: cigarette dangling from mouth, billiard cue carelessly angled behind his back, Clift makes a four-cushion shot look preposterously phony.

The exploitation of a talent like this goes far to prove that ace directors no longer make movies as much as tight­knit, multi-faceted Freud-Marx epics which hold attention but discourage understanding in a way that justifies Winchell's name for their makers – "cine-magicians".

--Manny Farber (April, 1951 / The Nation)

John Huston, Eisenstein Of the Bogart Thriller

Hollywood's fair-haired boy, to the critics, is director John Huston; in terms of falling into the Hollywood mold, Huston is a smooth blend of iconoclast and sheep. If you look closely at his films, what appears to be a familiar story, face, grouping of actors, or tempo has in each case an obscure, outrageous, double-crossing unfamiliarity that is the product of an Eisenstein-­lubricated brain. Huston has a personal reputation as a bad-boy, a homely one (called "Double-Ugly" by friends, "monster" by enemies), who has been in every known trade, rugged or sedentary: Mexican army cavalryman, editor of the first pictorial weekly, expatriate painter, hobo, hunter, Greenwich Village actor, amateur lightweight champ of California. His films, which should be rich with this extraordinary experience, are rich with cut-and-dried homilies; expecting a mobile and desperate style, you find stasis manipulated with the surehandedness of a Raffles.

Though Huston deals with the gangster, detective, adventure thriller that the average fan knows like the palm of his hand, he is Message-Mad, and mixes a savage story with puddin' head righteousness. His characters are humorless and troubled and quite reasonably so, since Huston, like a Puritan judge, is forever calling on them to prove that they can soak up punishment, carry through harrowing tasks, withstand the ugliest taunts. Huston is a crazy man with death: he pockmarks a story with gratuitous deaths, fast deaths, and noisy ones, and in idle moments, has his characters play parlor games with gats. Though his movies are persistently concerned with grim interpersonal relationships viewed from an ethic-happy plane, half of each audience takes them for comedies. The directing underlines a single vice or virtue of each character so that his one-track actions become either boring or funny; it expands and slows figures until they are like oxen driven with a big moralistic whip.

Money -- its possession, influence, manufacture, lack-- is a star performer in Huston's moral fables and gilds his technique; his irony toward and preoccupation with money indicate a director who is a little bitter at being so rich -- the two brief appearances Huston makes in his own films are quite appropriately as a bank teller and a rich, absent-minded American handing out gold pieces to a recurring panhandler. His movies will please a Russian audience: half the characters (Americans) are money-mad, directly enriching themselves by counterfeiting, prospecting, blackmail, panhandling.

His style is so tony it should embarrass his threadbare subjects. The texture of a Panama hat is emphasized to the point where you feel Huston is trying to stamp its price tag on your retina. He creates a splendiferous effect out of the tiniest details -- each hair of an eyelid -- and the tunnel dug in a week by six proletarian heroes is the size of the Holland Tunnel.

Huston's technique differs on many counts from classic Hollywood practice, which from Sennett to Wellman has visualized stories by means of the unbroken action sequence, in which the primary image is the fluid landscape shot where terrain and individual are blended together and the whole effect is scenic rather than portraiture. Huston's art is stage presentation, based on oral expression and static composition: the scenery is curiously deadened, and the individual has an exaggerated vitality.

His characters do everything the hard way -- the mastication of a gum-chewing gangster resembles the leg-motion in bicycling. In the traditional film life is viewed from a comfortable vantage point, one that is so unobtrusive that the audience is seldom conscious of the fact a camera had anything to do with what is shown. In Huston's you are constantly aware of a vitaminized photographer. Huston breaks up a film into a hundred disparate midget films: a character with a pin head in one incident is shown megacephalic in another; the first shot of a brawl shows a modest Tampico saloon, the second expands the saloon into a skating rink.

The Huston trademark consists of two unorthodox practices -- the statically designed image (objects and figures locked into various pyramid designs) and the mobile handling of close three­figured shots. The Eisenstein of the Bogart thriller, he rigidly delimits the subject matter that goes into a frame, by chiaroscuro or by grouping his figures within the square of the screen so that there is hardly room for an actor to move an arm: given a small group in close quarters, around a bar, bonfire, table, he will hang on to the event for dear life and show you peculiarities of posture, expression, and anatomy that only the actor's doctor should know. The arty, competent Huston would probably seem to an old rough-and-ready silent film director like a boy who graduated from Oxford at the age of eight, and painted the Sistine Chapel during his lunch hours.

Aside from its spectacular evidences of his ability to condense events and characterization, the one persistent virtue of Huston's newest and worst movie, ''We Were Strangers" is Jennifer Jones, who wears a constant frown as though she had just swallowed John Garfield. Garfield acts as though he'd just been swallowed.

--  Manny Farber (June 4, 1949, The Nation)

Manny Farber on Val Lewton

The death of Val (Vladimir) Lewton, Hollywood's top producer of B movies, occurred during the final voting on the year's outstanding film contributors. The proximity of these two events underlines the significant fact that Lewton's horror productions (Death Ship, The Body Snatchers, Isle of the Dead), which always conveyed a very visual, unorthodox artistry, were never recognized as "Oscar" worthy. On the other hand, in acclaiming people like Ferrer, Mankiewicz, and Holliday, the industry has indicated its esteem for bombshells who disorganize the proceedings on the screen with their flamboyant eccentricities and relegate the camera to the role of passive bit player.

Lewton always seemed a weirdly misplaced figure in Hollywood. He specialized in gentle, scholarly well-wrought productions that were as modest in their effects as his estimate of himself. Said he: “Years ago I wrote novels for a living, and when RKO was looking for a horror producer, someone told them I had written horrible novels. They misunderstood the word horrible for horror and I got the job." Having taken on the production of low-cost thrillers (budgeted under $500,000) about pretty girls who turn into man-eating cats or believe in zombies, Lewton started proving his odd idea, for a celluloid entertainer, that "a picture can never be too good for the public." This notion did not spring from a desire to turn out original, non­commercial films, for Lewton never possessed that kind of brilliance or ambition; it came instead from a pretty reasonable understanding of his own limitations. Unlike the majority of Hollywood craftsmen, he was so bad at supplying the kind of "punch" familiar to American films that the little mayhem he did manage was crude, poorly motivated, and as incredible as the Music Hall make-up on his Indians in Apache Drums -- the last and least of his works. He also seemed to have a psychological fear of creating expensive effects, so that his stock in trade became the imparting of much of the story through such low-cost suggestions as frightening shadows. His talents were those of a mild bibliophile whose idea of "good" cinema had too much to do with using quotes from Shakespeare or Donne, bridging scenes with a rare folk song, capturing climate with a description of a West Indian dish, and in the pensive sequences making sure a bit player wore a period mouth instead of a modern lipsticky one. Lewton's efforts not infrequently suggested a minor approximation of "Jane Eyre".

The critics who called Lewton the "Sultan of shudders" and "Chillmaster" missed the deliberate quality of his insipidly normal characters, who reminded one of the actors used in small-town movie ads for the local grocery or shoe store. Lewton and his script-writers collaborated on sincere, adult pulp stories which gave sound bits of knowledge on subjects like zoanthropia or early English asylums while steering almost clear of formula horror.

The Curse of the Cat People, for instance, was simply for the over-conscientious parent of a problem child. The film is about a child (Ann Carter) who worries or antagonizes the people around her with her daydreaming; the more they caution and reprimand, the more she withdraws to the people of her fantasies for "friends". When she finds an old photograph of her father's deceased, psychopathic first wife (Simone Simon, the cat woman of an earlier film), she sees her as one of her imagined playmates; the father fears his daughter has become mentally ill and is under a curse. His insistence that she stop daydreaming brings about the climax, and the film's conclusion is that he should have more trust and faith in his daughter and her visions. Innocuous plots such as these were fashioned with peculiar ingredients that gave them an air of genteel sensitivity and enchantment; there was the dry documenting of a bookworm, an almost delicate distrust of excitement, economical camera and sound effects, as well as fairy-tale titles and machinations. The chilling factor carne from the perverse process of injecting tepid thrills with an eyedropper into a respectable story, a technique Lewton and his favorite script-writer, Donald Henderson Clarke, picked up during long careers of writing sex shockers for drugstore book racks. While skittering daintily away from concrete evidences of cat women or brutality, they would concentrate with the fascination of a voyeur on unimportant bric-a-brac reflections, domestic animals, so that the camera would take on the faintly unhealthy eye of a fetishist. The morbidity carne from the obsessive preoccupation with which writers and cameramen brought out the voluptuous reality of things like a dangerously swinging ship's hook, which was inconspicuously knocking men overboard like tenpins.

The Body Snatchers

Lewton's most accomplished maneuver was making the audience think much more about his material than it warranted. Some of his devices were the usual ones of hiding leading information, having his people murdered offstage, or cutting into a murderous moment in a gloomy barn with a shot of a horse whinnying. He, however, hid much more of his story than any other film-maker, and forced his crew to create drama almost abstractly with symbolic sounds, textures, and the like that made the audience hyper-conscious of sensitive craftsmanship. He imperiled his characters in situations that didn't call for outsized melodrama and permitted the use of a journalistic camera -- for example, a sailor trying to make himself heard over the din of a heavy chain that is burying him inside a ship's locker. He would use a spray-shot technique that usually consisted of oozing suggestive shadows across a wall, or watching the heroine's terror on a lonely walk, and then add a homey wind-up of the cat woman trying to clean her conscience in a bathtub decorated with cat paws. This shorthand method allowed Lewton to ditch the laughable aspects of improbable events and give the remaining bits of material the strange authenticity of a daguerrotype.

Val Lewton with Boris Karloff on the set of Bedlam

Unfortunately, his directors (he discovered Robson and Wise in the cutting department) become so delirious about scenic camera work that they used little imagination on the acting. But the sterile performances were partly due to Lewton's unexciting idea that characters should always be sweet, "like the people who go to the movies" -- a notion that slightly improved such veteran creeps as Karloff, but stopped the more talented actors (Kent Smith, Daniell) dead in their tracks. Lewton's distinction always came from his sense of the soundly constructed novel; his $200,000 jobs are so skillfully engineered in pace, action, atmosphere that they have lost none of the haunting effect they had when released years ago.

--Manny Farber (April 14, 1951 / The Nation)

Manny Farber on The Devil Strikes at Night

In The Devil Strikes at Night, Robert Siodmak (The Killers) is working at second speed on an unglossed Vuillard-plain image of a women-strangler whose fifty or more murders cast a dreadful spot on the inferiority of Aryan police. Most of Siodmak's comment on Hitler's Reich is a dated recall of Hitchcock-Reed thrillers, plus an even sadder use of West German "politics" (as in The Young Lions, The Enemy Below) which shows the Reichland overrun with anti-Nazis and infected with a murderous disaffection for war. However, it is almost worth the admission price to follow the portrait of a hummingly normal looney, which starts on the infantile "science" level of M and becomes a more interesting picture of violence, played suicidally as far into gentleness as credibility allows.

Using a wonderful roughened stone (Mario Adorf) as the shambling killer and shifting between a curious lack of technique and gymnastic inventiveness out of the old experimental film kettle, this ghoulish portrait accomplishes a feat that is rare in current mixed-goodies films. Where Dassin's international potpourri, He who Must Die, has a helpless discomfort about its Potemkin mimicry, as though he were trying to change a diaper in midstream, Siodmak's best moments, flexibly relaxed or tight, seem comfortably inventive. In the movie's peak scene, the village idiot (always on the hunt for food, always eating) wanders into a pick-up meal with a spinsterish Jewess, and the movie settles down, as though forever, as idiocy meets hopeless loneliness in a drifting conversation played as silently as any Vuillard painting of inverted domesticity.

--Manny Farber (March 9, 1959 / The New Leader)

Manny Farber on Manon (1949)

"Manon" is a hard-boiled version of Prevost's bedridden novelette, with a creaking, improbable script job waylaying director [Henri] Georges Clouzot. Manon Lescaut (Cecile Aubry) is now a baby-faced siren, her incredibly faithful lover is a maquis fighter, and their unswerving passion -- shared with any willing and wealthy fat man -- lights the way from Paris black markets to the sands of Palestine. The cold, frank Clouzot (“The Raven", "Jenny Lamour") is a perverse craftsman who casts incongruous creatures (half-pint Aubry) and contrives unnecessary obstacles.


On a jammed train where there is no room for moving-picture apparatus and crowds are unwieldy, he threads his heroine through every aisle for a masterful analysis of life on the level of canned sardines. In an abandoned farmhouse with no constricting conditions for the director, the impassioned teen-agers neck in the dark, search the rooms with a flashlight that digs the past out of the worn-out decor. Clouzot's best talent is for clawing behind camouflages with a candid camera. He achieves the lonely, unglamorous feeling of a junky movie theater by working only in the basement and manager's office. His detailed pictures of a high-class bordello, a frenzied jive cave, a dress salon, unearth the provocative nuances of its people -- usually from the waist down. ''Manon'' is halted and conventionalized by its hack plotting enlivened by its ludicrous pornography, and is, otherwise, a painful study of Parisians at their peculiar worst.

--Manny Farber (January 13, 1951, The Nation)

Manny Farber Picks Top 1951 Films

Termite art wins in the list of the best films produced in 1951, as Manny Farber assembles such list. Ignoring prestigious studio A-films and focusing on the underdog (Feist, Walsh, early Wise) and the poular genres such as western, Sci-Fi and  horror, it is a triumph of the personal taste over the officially endorsed and brought-to-mainstream cinema of the producers and big companies.


Let Stevens or Kazan win their Oscars; The Nation's Emanuel -- a life-size drip-celluloid statue of Kirk Douglas, ranting and disintegrating in the vengeful throes of death–goes to the man or men responsible for each of the following unheralded productions of 1951.

Little Big Horn. A low budget western, produced by Lippert, starring John Ireland and Lloyd Bridges. This tough-minded, unconventional, persuasive look-in on a Seventh Cavalry patrol riding inexorably through hostile territory to warn Custer about the trap Sitting Bull had set for him, was almost as good in its unpolished handling of the regular-army soldier as James Jones's big novel. For once, the men appear as individuals, rather than types -grousing, ornery, uprooted, complicated individuals, riding off to glory against their will and better judgment; working together as a team (for all their individualism) in a genuinely loose, efficient, unfriendly American style. The only naturalistic photography of the year; perhaps the best acting of the year in Ireland's graceful, somber portrait of a warmhearted but completely disillusioned lieutenant, who mayor may not have philandered with his captain's wife.

Fixed Bayonets. Sam Fuller's jagged, suspenseful, off-beat variant of the Mauldin cartoon, expanded into a full-length Korean battle movie without benefit of the usual newsreel clips. Funny, morbid -- the best war film since "Bataan". I wouldn't mind seeing it seven times.

His Kind of Woman. Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense, exploiting the expressive dead-pans of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, a young man and a young woman who would probably enjoy doing in real life what they have to do here for RKO. Vincent Price superb in his one right role – that of a ham actor thrown suddenly into a situation calling for high melodramatic courage. Russell's petulant, toneless rendition of "Five Little Miles From San Berdoo" is high art of a sort.

The Thing. Howard Hawks's science-fiction quickie; fast, crisp, and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atom age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that cry for human blood as human babies cry for milk); Kenneth Tobey's fine unpolished performance as a nice, clean, lecherous American air-force officer; well-cast story, as raw and ferocious as Hawks's "Scarface", about a battle of wits near the North Pole between a screaming banshee of a vegetable and an air-force crew that jabbers away as sharply and sporadically as Jimmy Cagney moves.

The Prowler. A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, strictly out of James M. Cain, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who, finding the attentions of her disc-jockey husband beginning to pall, takes up with an amoral rookie cop (nicely hammed up by Van Heflin). Sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne'er-do-well, the potentially explosive boredom of the childless, uneducated, well-to-do housewife with too much time on her hands.

The People Against O'Hara. An adroit, scholarly example of sound story-telling that every Message Boy should be made to study as an example of how good you can get when you neither slant nor over-simplify. Also highly enjoyable for its concern about a "static" subject -- the legal profession as such -- and the complete authority with which it handles soft-pedalled insights into things like the structure and routine of law offices; the politics of conviviality between cops, D.A. ‘s, judges, attorneys; the influence of bar associations; the solemn manner of memorializing the wrench caused by the death of a colleague; the painful ''homework'' of committing to memory the endless ramifications of your case, as well as the words you are going to feed the jury in the morning.

The Day the Earth Stood Still. Science-fiction again, this time, with ideals; a buoyant, imaginative filtering around in Washington, D.C., upon the arrival of a high-minded interplanetary federalist from Mars, or somewhere; matter-of-fact statements about white-collar shabby gentility in boarding-houses, offices and the like; imaginative interpretation of a rocket ship and its robot crew; good fun, for a minute, when the visitor turns off all the electricity in the world; Pat Neal good, as usual, as a young mother who believes in progressive education.

The Man Who Cheated Himself. A lightweight, O'Henry type story about a cop who hoists himself on his own petard; heavyweight acting by Jane Wyatt and Lee J. Cobb; as a consequence the only film this year to take a moderate, morally fair stand on moderately suave and immoral Americans, aged about forty. An effortlessly paced story, impressionistically coated with San Francisco's oatmeal-gray atmosphere; at the end, it wanders into an abandoned fort or prison and shows Hitchcock and Carol Reed how to sidestep hokum in a corny architectural monstrosity. Cobb packs more psychological truths about joyless American promiscuity into one ironic stare, one drag on a Cigarette, or one uninterested kiss than all the Mankiewicz heroes put together.

Background to Danger. Touch, perceptive commercial job glorifying the P-men (Post-Office sleuths), set in an authentically desolate wasteland around Gary, Indiana, crawling with pessimistic mail-robbers who act as though they'd seen too many movies like "Asphalt Jungle". Tight plotting, good casting, and sinuously droopy acting by Jan Sterling, as an easily-had broad who only really gets excited about -- and understands –waxed bop. Interesting for such sidelights as the semi-demihemi quaver of romantic attachment between the head P-man and a beautiful nun.

And, for want of further space, six-inch Emanuels to the following also-rans: "The Tall Target", "Against the Gun", "No Highway in the Sky", ''Happiest Days of Your Life", ''Rawhide'', Skelton's "Excuse My Dust", "The Enforcer", "Force of Arms", "The Wooden Horse", "Night Into Morning", ''Payment of Demand", "Cry Danger", and an anima ted cartoon - the name escapes me - about a crass, earnest herky-jerky dog that knocks its brains out trying to win a job in a Pisa pizza joint.

--Manny Farber (January 5, 1952, The Nation)

From White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art

Most of the feckless, listless quality of today's art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gem-like inertia of an old-densely-wrought European masterpiece.

Advanced painting has long been suffering from this burnt out notion of a masterpiece -- breaking away from its imprisoning conditions towards a suicidal improvisation, threatening to move nowhere and everywhere, niggling, omniverous, ambitionless; yet, within the same picture, paying strict obeisance to the canvas edge and, without favoritism, the precious nature of every inch of allowable space. A classic example of this inertia is the Cezanne painting: in his in-doorish works of the woods around Aux de Province, a few spots of tingling, jarring excitement occur where he nibbles away at what he calls his "small sensation", the shifting of a tree trunk, the infinitesimal contests of complementary colors in a light accent on farmhouse wall. The rest of each canvas is a clogging weight-density-structure-polish amalgam associated with self-aggrandizing masterwork. As he moves away from the unique, personal vision that interests him, his painting turns ungiving and puzzling: a matter of balancing curves for his bunched-in composition, laminating the color, working the painting out to the edge. Cezanne ironically left an expose of his dreary finishing work in terrifyingly honest watercolors, an occasional unfinished oil (the pinkish portrait of his wife in sunny, leafed-in patio), where he foregoes everything but his spotting fascination with minute interactions.

The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter, from Motherwell to Andy Warhol. The private voice of Motherwell (the exciting drama in the meeting places between ambivalent shapes, the aromatic sensuality that comes from laying down thin sheets of cold, artfully cliche-ish, hedonistic color) is inevitably ruined by having to spread these small pleasures into great, contained works. Thrown back constantly on unrewarding endeavors (filling vast, egg-like shapes, organizing a ten-foot rectangle with its empty corners suggesting Siberian steppes in the coldest time of the year), Motherwell ends up with appalling amounts of plasterish grandeur, a composition so huge and questionably painted that the delicate, electric contours seem to be crushing the shale-like matter inside. The special delight of each painting tycoon (de Kooning's sabre-like lancing of forms; Warhol's minute embrace with the path of illustrator's pen line and block print tone; James Dine's slog-footed brio, filling a stylized shape from stem to stern with one ungiving color) is usually squandered in pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing a masterpiece. The painting, sculpture, assemblage becomes a yawning production of over-ripe technique shrieking with preciosity fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into a mannerism by the padding, lechery, faking required to combine today's esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art.


Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner on the first half of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture, but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

The most inclusive description of the art is, that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.
Laurel and Hardy, in fact, in some of their most dyspeptic, and funniest movies, like Hog Wild, contributed some fine parody of men who had read every ''How to Succeed" book available; but, when it came to applying their knowledge, reverted instinctively to termite behavior.

--Manny Farber (1962, Film Culture)

Manny Farber on Henry Fonda

There is a dreadful notion in criticism that movies, to be digested by aesthetes, must be turned from small difficult into large assets and liabilities. James Agee, who always paid out tribute like a public address system, is never precise, but his fastidious pricing of a Lauren Bacall gave the reader the secure feeling that Bacall could be banked at the nearest Chaste National.
Henry Fonda, during a recent run-through of his films in New York, doesn't add up as "one hell of an actor" (as Bill Wellman declared in a Cinema magazine interview), but he is interesting for unimportant tics: the fact that he never acts one-on-one with a co-actor.

When Glenn Ford is a boneless, liquid-y blur as a cowboy dancer in The Rounders, Fonda fields Ford's act by doing a Stan Laurel, suggesting an oafish bag of bones in a hick foxtrot. Again in The Lady Eve, Sturges kids this Fonda-ism of opposing his playmates in a scene: Fonda's Hoppsy is a frozen popsicle, a menace of clumsiness while Eric Blore, Eugene Pallette are clever acting dervishes playing scintillating types.

Fonda's defensiveness (he seems to be vouchsafing his emotion and talent to the audience in tiny blips) comes from having a supremely convex body and being too modest to exploit it. Fonda's entry into a scene is that of a man walking backwards, slanting himself away from the public eye. Once in a scene, the heavy jaw freezes, becomes like a concrete abutment, and he affects a clothes hanger stance, no motion in either arm.

A good director must chop Fonda out from his competition: John Ford isolates Fonda for a great night scene in Young Mister Lincoln; communing with himself on a Jew's harp; there is another one in Oxbow Incident where Fonda explodes into a geometrical violence that ends in a beautiful vertical stomping. Left on his own, Fonda gets taller and taller, as he freezes into a stoical Pilgrim, sullenly and prudishly withdrawing while he watches another actor (Lee Tracy in The Best Man) have a ball.

Fonda's man-against-himself act was noticable in his first films during the 30s when his 20-year-old Tom Joad-Slim-Lincoln were aged into wizened, almost gnome-like old folks byan actor who keeps his own grace and talent light as possible in the role. During the 40s, in Daybreak and Ox-Bow, Fonda starts bearing down on the saintly stereotype with which writers strangled him. In a typical perversity, he edges into the bass-playing hero of Wrong Man with unlikable traits: nervousness that is like a fever, self-pity, a crushing guilt that makes him more untrustworthy than the movie's criminal population. Almost any trait can be read into his later work. From Mr. Roberts onwards, the heroic body is made to seem repellently beefy, thickened, and the saintliness of his role as an intelligent naval officer-candidate-president shakes apart at the edges with hauteur, lechery, selfishness.

The peculiar feature of this later Fonda performance, however, is that he defeats himself again by diminishing the hostility and meanness -- so that they fail to make us forget the country boy style in which they are framed.

In his best scenes, Fonda brings together positive and negative, a flickering precision and calculated athleticism mixed in with the mulish withdrawing. Telephoning the Russian premier, desperate over the possibility of an atom war (Fail Safe), Fonda does a kind of needle-threading with nothing. He makes himself felt against an indirectly conveyed wall of pressure, seeping into the scene in stiff delayed archness and jointed phrasing -- a great concrete construction slowly cracking, becoming dislodged. It is one of the weirdest tension builders in film, and most of it is done with a constricted, inside-throat articulation and a robot movement so precise and dignified it is like watching a l7-foot polevaulter get over the bar without wasting a motion or even using a pole.

Before it reaches its two strippers at midway point, The Rounders shows Fonda in urbane-bouyant stride, but even a second-team bit player, Edgar Buchanan, out-fences him during a funny exchange in which Fonda explains the name Howdy. Eugene Pallette (Lady Eve), a buoyant jelly bowl moving skywards as he goes downstairs, is a magical actor and nothing in Fonda's divested vocabulary is equipped to produce that kind of spring water bubbling and freshness.

--Manny Farber (October 14, 1965 / Cavalier)

Manny Farber On The Leopard Man

"The Leopard Man", a reissued "B" (1942) showing with the rickety "King Kong", is a nerve-twitching whodunit giving the creepy impression that human beings and "things" are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny. A lot of surrealists like Cocteau have tried for the same supernatural effects, but while their scenes still seem like portraits in motion, Val Lewton's film shows a way to tell a story about people, that isn't dominated by the activity, weight, size, and pace of the human figure. In one segment of the film a small frightened senorita walks beyond the edge of the border town and then back again, while her feelings and imagination keep shifting with the camera into the sagebrush, the darkness of an arroyo, crackling pebbles underfoot, and so on until you see her thick dark blood oozing under the front door of her house. All the psychological effects -- fear and so on –were transferred to within the non-human components of the picture as the girl waited for some non-corporeal manifestation of nature, culture, or history to gobble her up. But more important in terms of movie invention, Lewton's use of multiple focus (characters are dropped or picked up as if by chance, while the movie goes off on odd tracks trying to locate a sound or suspicion) and his lighter-than-air sense of pace created a terrifically plastic camera style. It put the camera eye on a curiously delicate wave length that responds to scenery as quickly as the mind, and gets inside of people instead of reacting only to surface qualities. This film still seems to be one of Hollywood's original gems -- nothing impure in terms of cinema, nothing imitative about its style, and little that misses fire through a lack of craft.

--Manny Farber (September 27, 1952, The Nation)

Manny Farber on Ugly Melodramas

Hollywood has spawned, since 1946, a series of ugly melodramas featuring a cruel aesthetic, desperate craftsmanship, and a pessimistic outlook. These films ("The Set-Up", "Act of Violence", "Asphalt Jungle", and “No Way Out") are revolutionary attempts at turning life inside out to find the specks of horrible oddity that make puzzling, faintly marred kaleidoscopes of a street, face, or gesture. Whatever the cause of these depressing films -- the television menace, the loss of twenty-four million customers since the mid-forties -- it has produced striking changes in film technique. Writers overpack dialogue with hackneyed bitterness, actors perfect a quietly neurotic style, while directors -- by flattening the screen, discarding framed and centered action, and looming the importance of actors -- have made the movie come out and hit the audience with an almost personal savagery. The few recent films unmarked by the new technique ("Born to be Bad") seem naive and obsolete.

The new scripts are tortured by the "big" statement. "All About Eve" (story of the bright lights, dim wits, and dark schemes of Broadway) hardly gets inside theater because the movie is coming out of somebody's mouth. The actors are burdened with impossible dialogue abounding in clichés: ''Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience -- there's theater"; timely words: ''We are the original displaced personalities"; and forced cleverness that turns each stock character into the echo of an eclectic writer. The new trick is to build character and plot with loaded dialogue, using hep talk that has discolored cheap fiction for years. In "The Breaking Point" the environment is a "jungle", the hero a morose skipper ''with only guts to peddle" who decides after a near-fatal gun battle that ; "a man alone hasn't got a chance". His spouse comes, through with "You’re more ma n than anyone I ever knew".

Stories, parading success-seekers through a jackpot of frustration, are unique in that they pick on outcasts with relentless cruelty that decimates the actor as much as the character. As a colored interne moves through the "No Way Out" blizzard of anti-Negro curses, everything about him is aggressively spiked so that a malignant force seems to be hacking at him. When the cruel aestheticians really click on these sadistic epics, foreboding death lurks over every scene. Cameramen dismember the human body, accenting oddities like Darnell's toothpick legs, or Pat Neal's sprawling mouth to make them inanimate; faces are made up to suggest death masks, expanded to an unearthly size, spotlighted in dark, unknown vacuums; metaphorical direction twists a chimp's burial ("Sunset Boulevard") into an uncanny experience by finding a resemblance between monkey and owner. Under the guise of sympathy these brutally efficient artists are sneaky torturers of the defeated or deranged character.


Directors like Wilder and Mankiewicz mechanically recreate the unharnessed energy and surprise of great Silent films with an elegantly controlled use of the inexplicable. In the jitterbugging scene of "Asphalt Jungle" Huston delicately undresses the minds of four characters and gauchely creates a sensuous, writhing screen, though his notion of jive is so odiously surrealistic it recalls Russian propaganda against the United States. The first glimpse of the faded star in "Sunset", using Bonnard's suede touch on Charles Addams's portraiture (a witch surveying her real estate through shutters and dark spectacles) is lightning characterization with a poetic tang. Brando, in "The Men", commands a G.I. troop into battle like a slow, doped traffic coping cars through an intersection, but his affected pantomime electrifies the screen with the hallucinatory terror of an early painting by De Chirico. Movies have seldom if ever been as subtle as these scenes, or as depressing in the use of outrageous element to expedite ambiguous craftsmanship. To understand the motives behind the highly charged, dissonant acting employed today, one has to go back to the time wasting, passive performance of an early "talkie".

No matter how ingenious the actor -- Harlow, Garbo, Lee Tracy – effectiveness and depth were dissipated by the uninterrupted perusal of a character geared to a definite "type" and acted with mannerisms that were always so rhythmically and harmoniously related that the effect was of watching a highly attenuated ballet. Directors today have docked the old notion of unremittingly consistent, river-like performances, and present what amounts to a confusion of "bits", the actor seen only intermittently in garish touches that are highly charged with meaning and character, but not actually melted into one clear recognizable person. Darnell's honestly ugly characterization of a depressed slattern is fed piecemeal into ''No Way Out", which moves her toward and away from malevolence, confuses her "color", and even confounds her body. Her job -- like the recent ones of Nancy Olson, John McIntyre, Hayden -- shouldn't be called a “performance” because it is more like a collage of personality, which varies drastically in every way to create the greatest explosion and "illumination" in each moment.

-- Manny Farber