IT’S ONLY A MOVIE: Films and Critics in American Culture.

By Raymond J. Haberski, Jr. Univ. Press of Kentucky. 264 pp. $27.50

Ain’t the past quaint. One of the charms of It’s Only a Movie is the opportunity to experience again this poignant if banal truism. Erik Barnouw’s excellent three-volume history of broadcasting lives in my memory chiefly as the place where I first read General David Sarnoff’s pious assurance that network broadcasting was too important an undertaking to be turned over to "hucksters."

Similarly, Haberski’s survey of a century of film critics is enlivened by the goofy pleasure of discovering that Hugo Münsterberg, a pioneer thinker about the psychology of moviegoing, fretted in 1916 over the "trivializing influence of a steady contact with things which are not worth knowing." (As I write this, MTV turns 20.) One can also savor this nugget of auteur theory from writer Ferydoun Hoveyda in 1960: "The specificity of a cinematographic work lies in the form rather than in its content, in the miseen-scène and not in the scenario or dialogue." On behalf of the Writers’ Guild, grateful appreciation.

Haberski, a history professor at Marian College in Indianapolis, tells the story of American movies from the vantage point of the critics—at first the amateur and then the professional observers of the craft. It’s a Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern angle on how the industry struggled to elbow aside jazz and have itself recognized as America’s only true art form. We move from the 1920s Chicago Motion Picture Commission hearings on film censorship to the rhetorical arena, where, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris sparred over whether movies were Cinema. We revisit an era when the repeated viewing of the same movie was an act of scholarly love by film-besotted nerds, not just some teenage obsessive-compulsive behavior.

There’s also a remarkable chapter on Theodore Dreiser’s attempt to force Paramount to make a faithful adaptation of An American Tragedy (1925), and on the semifarcical lawsuit he filed when, oddly enough, the studio decided to go another way. Although the Dreiser story doesn’t have much to do with criticism (he did enlist a "jury" of critics to watch Paramount’s version and deride it for the edification of the judge), it can provide hours of pleasure in pondering which is funnier, artistic pretension or rag-trade philistinism.

The story Haberski tells has, in current Hollywood parlance, a good arc: Art critics despise movies, art critics begin to appreciate movies, art critics love movies to death, the concept of art disappears, and the critics become irrelevant. Become irrelevant? The author keeps hinting that the decline in the salience of criticism is lamentable, as if film criticism has something of value to offer. Unfortunately, he never quite gets around to making the case that it does, whether by educating the public (early critics believed in elevating the taste of the masses—there’s that quaintness again) or by exhorting the industry to follow its better angels (if you believe in that premise, I have some Internet stock I’d like to sell you).

I’ve been in and around the movie industry since I was seven years old, and I’ve yet to hear any practitioner discuss reviews or critics except in the context of whether they hurt or helped business. In an age when Spielberg and Lucas have redefined motion pictures as increasingly expensive recapitulations of childhood media experiences, the only reason movie critics don’t feel totally superfluous is that the God of Media, in His infinite wisdom, invented television critics.

—Harry Shearer