Sadly, Richard Schickel — the film critic, documentarian and author of dozens of books — passed away over Presidents’ Day weekend. From 1965 to 2010, he served as a critic for Life and Time magazines, highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly of American and world cinema for massive audiences. While he also possessed a keen eye and a sharp wit, Schickel’s most important quality is that owned by most great writers: a solid core of empathy and understanding.
Trust me: The only way you can write about cinema every week for five decades — covering all manner of dross in the hopes of discovering a little bit of gold here and there — is to be heavy with empathy. It takes a certain kind of hopefulness, a special kind of willingness to find the good in everyone and everything to subject oneself to the horrors of the multiplex on a regular basis.
“For a grand total of, shall we say, 22,590 movies, or about 294 of them a year,” Schickel wrote in his latest book, “Keepers,” when trying to tote up the number of flicks he’d seen in his lifetime. “Which means that two out of every three days, for a long time now, I have been at the movies.” Not a bad gig, except when it is, and it sometimes very much is. Lousy audiences and lousier movies can combine to bring a guy down if you do it for long enough.
“Keepers” was an odd sort of book, something like a retrospective on Schickel’s movie-going career. I wrote in a review that I’d much rather have access to an archive of Schickel’s original Time writings — a big, beautiful Library of America-style collection gathering his on-the-ground, at-the-moment takes on movies that he loved or hated then as opposed to how he feels about the established greats now.
Alas, it’s unlikely to happen; collections of criticism don’t really move units, and Schickel was never an aggressive theoretician nor did he have the punchiest prose in the world. He was smart and savvy but workmanlike, and workmen, Roger Ebert excepted, rarely get their due.
To get a sense of Schickel’s empathy — his way of looking through a problem or a position to see the whole of a person or a work — one is better off perusing his book-length efforts. There are many options to choose from; my personal favorite is his magnificent biography of Elia Kazan. Written by Schickel after he produced a short documentary on Kazan’s life and work for the 1999 Academy Awards, at which Kazan was, somewhat controversially, given a lifetime achievement award, the book does a marvelous job of reconstructing, and rehabilitating, the life of one of America’s great artists.
Kazan, the brilliant director of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (on stage and screen) and “On the Waterfront,” among other films and plays, had fallen into disfavor with Hollywood for “naming names” in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite taking up just a chapter in the 500-page book, Kazan’s testimony echoes through every page; Schickel, no right-wing loon, was disgusted by the way Kazan’s behavior had been characterized over the years, dismissing the black-and-white morality tale peddled by his enemies as “a typical Stalinist tactic — seize the high, easy-to-understand moral ground, then try to crush nuanced opposition to that position through simplifying sloganeering.”
Traveling through Kazan’s career, we see his brief dalliance with the Communist Party and then the reason he split with Stalin’s American cohort: They were, fundamentally, anti-art. A leader of the Group Theatre, a collective of socially conscientious playwrights and actors, Kazan was instructed by Communist higher-ups that “the Group’s three-person directorate should be removed and it should become more of an actor’s cooperative, devoting itself to more overtly propagandistic pieces.” When he hesitated, an out-of-town organizer “accused Kazan of a ‘foreman’s’ mentality, by which he meant that he was an intermediary, pretending a certain solidarity with the workers, but actually representing management’s views.”
Kazan resigned from the party shortly thereafter. The year was 1935. By the time he testified, in 1952, most of the people he named were already known to the committee, having been named previously. Some had already died. More importantly, though, Kazan had rejected the Stalinist worldview. This is where Schickel’s empathy shines through most fully and does its greatest work.
“We need to do what few do: examine the alternative reality Kazan embraced. We need to see the world not as a Communist did, aiming to mobilize sentimental (and often infantile) liberal sentiment, but as a principled anti-Stalinist might. We may begin with Communism’s insistence on the right to secrecy, on some imagined First Amendment guarantee that you need not openly state your membership in a political or quasi-political organization,” Schickel writes.
Given Kazan’s own experience with cells attempting to subvert the efforts of his theater, we can assume he had some understanding of, and appreciation for, the way secrecy was being used to subvert America itself.
Schickel’s book is great, a much-needed corrective to the idea that all those who testified were callow hacks trying to save their own skin. Hollywood will never film a paean to Kazan, as it has (repeatedly) with, say, Dalton Trumbo; it loves its Ten martyrs too dearly. Fortunately, Schickel has done the heavy lifting for us. He shall be missed.