Word: warshow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 American, David Thomson...
...ruling cliché in writing about crime bosses - "the gangster as tragic hero" - was coined in 1948 by Robert Warshow, an extremely intelligent cultural critic, whose premature passing in 1955 robbed us of an invaluable voice. Warshow held that the classic movie mobsters (Little Caesar, The Public Enemy) were, in their essence, classic Americans forced by their status as the sons of immigrants to seek success and status outside the law, even though their style and motives were not so very different from the robber barons who found their riches in more respectable industries. The difference between the gangsters...
...been 59 years since Warshow wrote, and it seems to me that studies of the modern criminal have not advanced very much in that time. As evidence we might consider Ridley Scott's American Gangster, which is based on the true story of a drug lord named Frank Lucas, who in the 1970s cornered the Harlem heroin market and thereby made millions upon millions. He is a black man, no less a member of a struggling underclass than his Italian and Irish movie predecessors, and he has a couple of gimmicks that they (who were never drug dealers) didn...
...Warshow observed that the classic gangster dramas punished their protagonists not so much for their unlawful activities, but because they dared to succeed. He implied that we may seemingly worship success in this country, but that we also deplore and envy it - since most of us never attain it. But that was then, and this is now. Our love affair with wealth and fame is now untrammeled by doubts. It is our big good thing, and eventually Crowe's character, like the rest of us, must surrender to its cheerful demands. That makes American Gangster, which is rather leisurely paced...
Once I borrowed a book of essays called The Immediate Experience, by the cultural critic Robert Warshow WHO HE? from an old and learned friend. HE'S LEARNED, SO YOU'RE LEARNED? My friend had so thoroughly marked up the text that his annotations constituted a parallel text of its own, consisting of his annoyances, approvals, elaborations, questions and challenges. SO? [Warshow is famous, you jerk...