The Long Lost Art of the Good-Bad Movie

I recently had a chance to see Sidney Lumet's film The Pawnbroker. Surprised to find myself underwhelmed by it, because Lumet would eventually become an excellent filmmaker (Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Prince of the City), I was curious to discover what contemporary film critics had to say about it. Through circuitous links, I managed to find a review that Dwight MacDonald wrote for Esquire. Clearly, MacDonald, author of Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962), was too good a thinker and writer to bother about film. Yet bother he did, from 1960, when you could find playing in New York City on any given week a new film by Truffaut, Fellini, Resnais, Antonioni, or Bergman - at the peak of their powers - until Macdonald detected a chill in the air in 1966, when the effulgence of great films slowed to a trickle and he asked Esquire if he could start a Politics column instead.
Here is how Macdonald opened his review of The Pawnbroker:

FILMS
JUNE 1, 1966 | DWIGHT MACDONALD

The good bad movie is a lively, authentic and, in its modest way, quite respectable product Hollywood used to make in the Thirties and Forties before it succumbed to the ravages of Culture, like a primitive tribe coming into contact with civilization and exchanging its simple folkways for Mother Hubbards, pidgin English and syphilis. Most of the Bogart and Cagney movies come under this head, also a lot of Western, gangster and horrorscience films, plus a long line of “screwball” comedies like Nothing Sacred, Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby and such works of the late Preston Sturges (1898-1959) as Sullivan’s Travels, The Lady Eve, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, The Great McGinty and Mad Wednesday, also known as The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. In 1957 Manny Färber published a celebrated piece in Commentary on what he called “underground films” —not to be confused with a contemporary school that has appropriated the name but whose films are the opposite of those Färber was describing, being both uncommercial and untalented. Färber, as perverse and original a film critic as exists or can be imagined —you can catch his act currently in Cavalier, one of those quondam “girlie” magazines that, following Playboy’s profitable example, is mutating from libido to literature— Färber in his article celebrated such Hollywood directors as Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh, the very titles of whose movies showed what he meant: White Heat, The Crowd Roars, They Drive By Night, The Roaring Twenties. His connoisseurship was so acute that, while he included in his underground pantheon John Ford and William Wellman, he excluded from the strict canon their more ambitious (and most generally admired) efforts, such as The Informer and The Public Enemy. He found them slightly bogus. To his impeccable taste, even Ford’s Stagecoach was infected with the Art—he reserved his enthusiasm for “the pre-Stagecoach Ford.” Anticipating Harold Rosenberg’s “action painting,” Färber wrote of “action directors” whose “dry, economic, life-worn movie style . . . made their observations of the American he-man so rewarding.” Like Rosenberg, he pushed his aesthetic far beyond the limits of what is usually considered art. The non-artist, indeed the anti-artist was his hero: “Hawks and his group are perfect examples of the anonymous artist who is seemingly afraid of the polishing, hypocrisy, bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious art.” They “accept the role of hack” and work best “with material that is hopelessly worn-out and childish.” There’s something in this idea, especially as applied to the 1930-1950 Hollywood, so long as it is not pushed too far. Like most ideas, however, it was pushed too far, first by the Cahiers du Cinéma group in Paris—independently of Färber, as far as I know—and then by their Anglo-American epigones who, after the most delicate calibrations on the politique des auteurs yardstick, concluded that Hitchcock’s The Birds and Preminger’s The Cardinal were masterpieces.

Of late, however, the auteur ideologues seem to be losing heart —what can one do with Mamie after all ?—and the good bad movie is no longer a live issue. The problem today, with Culture booming and exploding everywhere and movies competing with novels and plays as okay subjects for critical exegesis, is rather the bad good movie, the movie with serious intentions and pretentions that turns its back haughtily on the box office in order to make a Meaningful Statement about alienation, social injustice, the mechanization of modern life, the difficulty of communication, the impossibility of love, and other important matters, the movie that is directed up to the hilt, avantgarde-wise, the movie that lays it right on the line for the Browning Societies of our time, the audiences of the “art” movie houses— over six hundred now as against twelve in 1945— and the film clubs that are proliferating in our colleges. I intend no Philistine sneer, or at least not only a Philistine sneer: those grimly bluestocking Browning Societies awakened many a Victorian to the pleasures, and difficulties, of poetry; and our cinematic equivalents today are doing the same for the art of the movies, as well as making it economically possible, the American market being as big and rich as it is, for a dozen or so directors, all foreign, to create an international renaissance of the art. But seriousness is not enough; it needs to be adulterated with skepticism, common sense and even a little humor. Our cinéastes, from ignorance or kultur-snobbism or both, tend to take the intention for the act and to accept as the genuine article such counterfeits, to name a few bad good movies that come to mind, as Mickey One, The Servant, He Who Must Die, Sundays and Cybele, This Sporting Life, The Loved One, La Terra Trema, The Cool World, The Balcony, Hallelujah the Hills!, King and Country and The Trial, plus at least half the films shown at last fall’s Lincoln Center Film Festival and considerably more than half the movies that Jean-Luc Godard has spawned since Breathless.