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...explanation is his rivalry with Agee. In that 1958 essay - a piece so conflicted it could have been called "Let Us Now Praise/Blame Little/Big Men" - Manny seemed to prefer the Time Agee to the Nation one: "Agee's Time stint added up to a sharp, funny encyclopedia on the film industry in the 1940s. Though he occasionally lapsed into salesmanship through brilliantly subtle swami glamour (Henry V, the Ingrid Bergman cover story), Agee would be wisely remembered for quick biographies and reviews, particularly about such happy garbage as June Haver musicals and an early beatnik satire Salome Where She Danced...
...Germany Year Zero, Pinky, The Heiress, Beyond the Forest, Thieves' Highway, They Live by Night, All the King's Men, Intruder in the Dust, Passport to Pimlico (loved it) and Adam's Rib (hated it). You can locate these and other Manny movie reviews fairly quickly by typing a film's title, in quotes, into the Search box. What you'll also discover is a 32-year-old writer coping with a house style and deadline fatigue, but also fighting to get his say and his way and frequently winning. His advocacy of neo-realism, of storytelling efficiency, of teeming...
...lunch Manny had in 1977 with Film Comment's associate editor Brooks Riley and me, Manny allowed that, yes, he might be thought of as one of the 10 best film critics... Always competitive, and this time underestimating his 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...
...time he was segueing from large abstract paintings to his overview collages. I've seen Manny's paintings, but only as reproduced in a catalogue. And I'm no art historian. So I called upon the expertise of Richard Lacayo, Time's art critic and, not incidentally, a serious film connoisseur. Richard e-mails me that Manny "frequently did these bird's-eye views (I call them table tops) in which the whole canvas is filled with figures, houses, objects, photographs, all seen from above, and frequently (not always) connected by train track that carries your eye all around...
...testify to his originality in film criticism, and to his influence, certainly in the acceptance of the "male action film." Carrie Rickey called him "a man's man, and some of Manny's preference for Hawks and Walsh films over the warmer, daintier ones of, say, George Cukor, may reflect a man's impatience with women's problems and their need to talk about them. You could say his take prefigures today's movies, where women are absent or subservient and guys get to do guy things...