French Karl - Notes from the Dream House: Selected Film Reviews 1963-2013

After Philip Frenchs funeral in November 2015, the mourners came back for drinks at his house. A couple of younger film critics asked, a little nervously, if they might visit his cinema which theyd heard talk about. It was worth seeing. Theres a large screen, which descends with a buzz at the touch of a button in front of the windows, cutting out the daylight. The walls and the ceiling are painted a matt dark blue, the ceiling lights create a starlight effect, and there are old-fashioned lamps on either side of the screen. The walls are lined with shelves of videos, DVDs and Blurays. The videos are relics of a near-defunct technology, but Philip was reluctant to dispose of them. Many were otherwise unobtainable rarities taped at strange times of the night from obscure broadcasts.

Of course, most of Philips movie-watching took place in Soho viewing theatres. He tended to use his home cinema for checking details or to revisit old movies he had first seen as a child at matinees in Liverpool, as a schoolboy in Bristol, in troop screenings in the Canal Zone, at Oxford, or in long-closed or long-demolished cinemas like the Academy on Oxford Street, the Tolmer in Camden, or the Astoria in Finsbury Park.

He wrote his reviews in a back room of his house crammed with movie reference books and also, oddly enough, a large collection of poetry. In the 1960s his working desk accommodated a portable Olivetti typewriter, an ashtray, a packet of cigarettes, and, as often as not, a gin and tonic. For the French family the early articles in this book will always be seen through a blue haze of smoke accompanied by the clacking of two-finger typing. By the early seventies, the gin and tonic had gone. By the mid-seventies the cigarettes had gone as well. And by the late-ish 1980s the Olivetti had, finally, joined them. But Philip was never entirely comfortable in the world of the Amstrad 8256, the MacBook and the Internet Movie Database. For him, journalism should be something in the style of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. And what need of the IMDb when you have Philip Frenchs brain?

He wrote his first film reviews as an Oxford undergraduate in 1953. He filed his final one a DVD re-issue of The Ladykillers on the evening of Monday 26 October 2015, the day before he died. From 1959, his day job was producing radio programmes at the BBC, but during the 1960s and 1970s he regularly reviewed films, mostly for the Times and the Observer. He was more than once offered the job of Observer film critic, but the BBC management frowned on extra-curricular employment. Finally, in 1978, they relented, and he wrote for the Observer regularly until his eightieth birthday in summer 2013.

As Observer film critic, Philip reviewed the weekly releases as well as screenings of films on TV and, in later years, video and then DVD re-issues. He also wrote obituaries, thematic articles, book reviews and interviews. His writings for the Observer during this period amounted to well over three million words. His reviews from the previous couple of decades come to another few hundred thousand. So the selection in this book about 120,000 words represents a small fraction of his output.

What to include? What to leave out? We could easily have compiled an anthology entirely of his essays on westerns to accompany his 1974 book on the genre. There is no such thing as an uninteresting western, was one of his dicta, and there was certainly never a Philip French review of a western that wasnt engaged, and few that were not combative. He felt a particular pleasure (one might almost say duty) in defending maligned, commercially challenged westerns like Heavens Gate or, more recently, the Gore Verbinski-Johnny Depp version of The Lone Ranger. His reviews of the movies of Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, the Coen brothers, Walter Hill, John Boorman, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and many others are like extended works of reflection, dialogues with both his own past views and the filmmakers developing careers. Only some of this can be suggested in an anthology of this scope.

Could there be room for some of his exchanges with his readers, not always amicable? He began his review of Richard Lesters 1979 movie Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, by lamenting the term prequel that was used to describe it, concluding, Hopefully only those not disinterested in language will be offended. A schoolteacher wrote to point out that while correcting someone elses poor English, Philip had made two mistakes himself, and the teacher was using this in his class as an example of illiteracy. Philip wrote back: Not to worry. You can use it in your class but as an example of misunderstood irony.

Philip had made a tentative start at preparing an anthology of his reviews and had thought of organising the material thematically. Reluctantly we decided against this. It is our view that this book shows Philip developing as a critic. The thirty-something writer of the earlier articles was very different, we feel more polemical perhaps) from the Philip French of the 2000s, with a thirty-year relationship with his readers and almost a lifetime of films, not to mention the decades of voracious reading and theatre-going and absorption in the visual arts.

This is not a potted history of the cinema. It is not an anthology of masterpieces. There are masterpieces reviewed here, but also minor films. We tried to choose films that covered the range of Philips interests and the scope of his life. Faced with the choice between two equally good reviews, we chose the more important film. But each review we picked struck us as in some way revealing, enticing, entertaining in itself.

This is not a systematic account of the cinema. But even so we hope that a particular idea of the movies emerges from these pages, and also the idea of a man. Robert Warshow, an American critic Philip much admired, once wrote: A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man. The reader of these reviews will come to know and recognise a man who grew up in provincial England, served in the army, studied at Oxford and in the United States, married a Swedish woman, had three sons, and spent his working life mainly at the BBC and the Observer. He was an old-fashioned liberal, a Labour supporter in the Clement Attlee/Nye Bevan tradition, a critical friend of America and an opponent of totalitarianism in all its forms. Among many other things and, we hope, many other pleasures this collection may serve as the memoir Philip French never quite got around to writing.

Kersti, Karl, Patrick and Sean French