Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Films By John Simon
Clarkson N. Potter, 466 pp., $17.95 Film critics tend to be as good as the movies they review, a loathsome but hardly surprising state of affairs; when you live on garbage, after all, you get to be a connoisseur of the stuff. Thus, Pauline Kael can soil the pages of The New Yorker with fervent praise of Dressed to Kill and still not get laughed out of town; thus, a widely used academic text on film can call Andrew Sarris “the most influential of the American critics” while tactfully neglecting to mention that he’s also an unreliable, popcorn-headed reductionist who dotes on junk movies; and thus, John Simon, one of maybe a half-dozen true critics in the history of the medium, can be regularly dismissed as a misanthropic crank, no doubt by the sort of reader whose idea of a really dependable movie reviewer is, say, Rex Reed.
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