Richard Schickel
is one of the leading film critics in the U.S. He used to review
films for LIFE Magazine and now reviews them for TIME Magazine. He has
written several books on film and, although he rarely appears on television,
he has also written many documentaries on cinema. He can be a very stimulating
writer---I myself have enjoyed many of his movie documentaries. But he
also has the critic's disease, which I like to call "superioritis".
He is the author of that notorious biography "The Disney Version", which
purports to be an objective assessment of the great producer's films and
career, but is in fact a sort of attempted expose of him as nothing but
a crass, commercializing phony masquerading as a great film artist. (I
don't like everything Disney did, either, but give him credit where it's
due-he WAS a giant in film.) Schickel is so aware of the way his biography
may be taken that he even ingenously says that his book isn't intended
as an expose. (One of his most outrageous statements in it is his evaluation
of the "audio-animatronic"---I hope that's right-- Abraham Lincoln, which
was premiered at the 1965 New York World's Fair and has since become a
major Disneyland attraction. It is very lifelike and recites excerpts
from Lincoln's speeches. Schickel actually states that Disney's apparent
wish to have the public admire this is an implicit command for the public
to worship graven images in violation of the Ten Commandments! I am not
making this up! )
He also tends to dismiss some excellent films
in a smug,facile way - even classics like "The Quiet Man",which he considers
condescending to the Irish, or "The Lion In Winter", which he apparently
had a hard time coming to grips with because although the sets and costumes
were dinstinctly medieval, the language, rather than sounding like "A Man
For All Seasons",
sounds very modern. According to him, a
play set in the Middle Ages with modern-sounding dialogue can only be pulled
off onstage,where the scenery is obviously fake and no one really believes
they're seeing a 12th century castle, as they do when they see the film!
But his most pretentious, irritating fault is
his tendency to switch writing styles - and to do this for long stretches.
One minute he's your typical cutesy, flippant, smartass critic; the next
(especially when he's trying to impress the "significance" of a film on
the reader) he adopts an analytical, professorial, artsy, pseudopoetic
style.
Albert Sanchez-Moreno
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