And then there were none

Before I let go of November, I have one more duty to perform - saying goodbye to one more of my heroes. The critic John Simon died last Sunday, the 24th, at the age of 94. His obituary was published hard upon in the New York Times. It had been waiting in their obituary files for a long time, when it became clear that Simon wasn't going away expediently. It is a balanced obituary, if not exactly fair, that touches all the bases: Simon's origins, between the wars, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Serbia, his fluency in languages, his education in English public (i.e., private) school, moving to the U.S. in 1941, finishing his itinerant education with a PhD from Harvard in Comparative Literature. When he reviewed the Peter O'Toole remake of James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he wrote with uncharacteristic emotion: 

I must confess that Goodbye, Mr. Chips moved me to tears. But I must also confess that I attended the Leys School in Cambridge, the subject of Hilton's novel, and that I was one of those new boys who at the start of every Michaelmas term tramped up Trumpington Road to have tea with the kindly old retired master who was the model for Chips. So I may not be an unbiased judge.

He was mentored by Jacques Barzun, Dwight Macdonald, and Robert Brustein. On the dust jacket of Simon's 1971 collection Movies Into Film is this blurb from Macdonald: "John Simon is still our best film critic. He's literate, readable and scrupulously toughminded in his judgements."

Quite by accident, Simon was my introduction to contemporary film criticism. (James Agee was the first real film critic I encountered, but he died exactly three years before I was born.) Compared to his colleagues whom I was reading with equal avidity (both of whom - Vernon Young and Stanley Kauffmann - he singled out for praise), he was more exacting, less compromising, and his writing, though grammatically perfect (he frequently savaged other critics for their grammatical and syntactical gaffes), was inelegant and preoccupied with sometimes arcane puns. His fluency in several languages often saw him performing the invaluable - though thankless - task of correcting the dreadful subtitles of the many foreign-language films available on American screens.

I sometimes disagreed with him, but I found him, more often than any other critic I was reading in the '70s and '80s, to be right in his judgements. Whether or not I was right only posterity can prove. With John Simon's passing, what some called the Heroic Age of American film criticism has come to a close.