Schickel - Keepers : the greatest films-and personal favorites-of a moviegoing lifetime

S ome months ago, when I started to think about actually writing this book, as opposed to hemming and hawing as one generally does when a book is in the offing, I wondered how many movies I had actually seen in the course of the seventy-seven years since I saw my first film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1938.

This was something more than an idle inquiry. I wanted to establish some kind of authority. As a result of my preferences in entertainment and, ultimately, my choice of profession, I had seen in the course of a lifetime a great many more films than all but a handful of peoplemostly professional reviewershad seen. But how many did that amount to? That was a question I had never addressed. A whole bunch, I am wont to say when people ask, which they quite often do; it is a slightly exotic way of making a living, and people seem idly curious about it.

Its obvious that Ive seen more than most people, for besides being a movie addicta fairly common condition, usually more or less cheerfully abandoned when family and work interrupt the addictionI became, more or less accidentally, a professional moviegoer. I began reviewing films in 1965. (I have done so, with only one significant hiatus, ever since.) By that time I had written a couple of books on them (and have written many more), and around 1968 I started making documentaries about them, an activity I pursued until quite recently. Throughout these years, I have continued my habit of slipping into movie theaters or screening rooms without having any professional rationale for so doing; I just like to be there in the dark watching somethingalmost anything, if the truth be known. In this habitI dont know if it is amiable or a mild, chronic illnessI have been indulged by wives, girlfriends, just plain friends and children. Of course, a lot of the time Im alone, unashamedly killing an evening, no questions asked.

Here I have to enter a caveat: I am an American critic. I have dutifully, mostly happily, seen thousands of films of foreign origin. They are among the most rewarding moviegoing experiences of my life. But this twig was bent early. I know more about American films, historically and aesthetically, than I do about those from other lands. Ive sought to remedy that defect, of course, and Ive done reasonably well with it. But, yes, I am more comfortable, more authoritative, with American movies. In reading critics from those other countries, in turn, I notice some discomfort when they deal with our films.

Funny thing. When I started reviewing in the 1960s, the movies were a young art. We were less than forty years into the age of the talkies and perhaps sixty years into the age of the feature film. It occurred to mepreposterously, I admitthat you could, if you worked demonically, become a scholar of world cinema, knowing something about movies from everywhere. In fact, I am still playing catch-up with the cinema of many countries. Its like being a perpetual grad student, swotting up what you need to know to write a respectable piece when the occasion becomes pressing, which very often becomes fascinating and instructive work.

Because I turned pro in the mid-sixties, most of my omissions can be partially justified by the demands of wearing too many hats. You cannot write a book or make a television show about the movies without seeing films anewno matter how often youve seen the ones you are taking up in these projects. Movies, obviously, do not change substantively, although nowadays, with the rise of directors cuts and specialists pawing through the archives finding new material that had been eliminated before the answer printthe official onewas struck, movies can change more than we thought they could a decade or two ago. I was involved in such a transformative project a few years ago, restoring some forty minutes of Sam Fullers The Big Red Onewhole scenes of which were rescued from a Warner warehouse in Kansas City. I think this version of the film is way better than what was circulating beforeit has now the weight of a heartfelt epic; it is not just another war picture. And it honors the intentions of its very honorable director. Anyway, we won some prizes for our work and the good opinion of moviegoing mankind. But I noticed this: People who had been content with the short version were not as enthusiastic about our cut. It was nice and all that, but the bastard version was perfectly okay with them. Finished films, even when everyone knows they could be better, exert a powerful inertial force on the object at hand.