Word: hitchcock
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...value of small things in boxes; his writing championed the cramped brilliance of little men in tight spots - in the B movies he loved and, through his writing, helped raise from forgotten to fashionable, from gargoyles to saints. At the same time he sniped at critics' darlings like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") Above all, he urged the moviegoer's attention away from plot and social message and toward the vital energy occurring, as W.H. Auden wrote of Brueghel's Icarus, "Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with...
...Manny's art-view was clear enough. "To put Hitchcock up or down isn't the point," he wrote in the essay "Clutter" in the late '60s; "the point is sticking to the material as it is, rather than drooling over behind-the-camera feats of engineering." Anyway, it was impossible to mistake his authorial personality - or, rather, his restless mind and outsize intelligence. When I knew Manny, his receding hairline gave him a forehead as high as Jeff Morrow the Metalunan's in This Island Earth, and inside this gigantic braincase all manner of creatures crawled, gnawed and sang...
...Manny very favorably reviewed In the Street, a furtive documentary shot in Harlem by Agee, Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt: "Every Hollywood Hitchcock-type director should study this picture if he wants to see really stealthy, queer-looking, odd-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...
...mining town of Douglas, Ariz., he played football at Berkeley, then went East and upended movie criticism. Writing for the New Republic, the Nation, Time, Cavalier and a host of art and film journals, Farber elevated the reps of blue collar directors while snipering critics' darlings like Hitchcock and Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") He sold these advanced ideas through the startling sprung rhythm of his prose, packing an essay's worth of insights into a parenthetical aside, leaving the alert reader exhausted and grateful...
...movies that didn't make it to my neighborhood. The drive-ins had closed down and there wasn't the direct-to-video market yet, so there wasn't much of a home for movies like that. I also remember getting a lot of Hitchcock with my parents and discovering Robert Altman, which was huge for me. Watching McCabe and Mrs. Miller for the first time - when I thought I knew what a Western was - totally redefined the genre...