Word: farbers
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...mining town of Douglas, Ariz., just above the Mexican border, Emanuel Farber was born on Feb. 20, 1917, youngest of a store owner's three sons. "I had two brothers who were fiendishly good at almost everything they approached," he recalled in the Art in America interview, "and they were fiendishly competitive." Both of his elder siblings became psychiatrists; one, Leslie, was a distinguished author. "And I had a father who was equally competitive." Farber, Sr., originally from Vilna, Lithuania, had studied to be a rabbi, and schmoozing must have been in the syllabus. "I picked up the congenial element...
...acting, foreboding people." Six years later, considering the posthumous collection Agee on Film, Manny was less generous. The essay, "Nearer My Agee to Thee," alternates salutes and bitch-slaps so rapidly it seems simultaneously a military tribute and a Three Stooges routine. But that's par for a Farber piece. As Polito notes, he "sustains strings of divergent, perhaps irreconcilable adjectives such that praise can seem inseparable from censure - Touch of Evil, he writes, is 'basically the best movie of Welles's cruddy middle peak period...
...What about Manny's Time writing? Since the magazine's entire archive is available on TIME.com, the Farber columns should be easy to find. But Time critics did not get bylines until the Vietnam years, so you can't just put "Farber" in the Search panel and call up his stories. You must delve into the bound volumes of the magazine in 1949 and 1950, where, for each review, the author's name is written in the margin. Thanks to the yeoman work of Arts maven Amy Goehner and ace librarian Bill Hooper, we have a firmer handle on Manny...
...worth. (A quick list of nine others, without overthinking it, but just going by the gut feeling of folks whose writing makes me jealous: Ferguson, Agee, Robert Warshow, Sarris, Kael, Richard T. Jameson, J. Hoberman - the best weekly film critic today, and the one who drank deepest at the Farber font - and, of the new guys, Ed Gonzalez, and honorary adoptive American, David Thomson...
...himself, but he never demeaned the writing to which he brought so much passion and pain. "Criticism is very important, and difficult," he said in the Ollman interview. "I can't think of a better thing for a person to do." Surely no one did it better than Manny Farber...