Dr. Rhythm
It was Manny Farber, some twenty years ago, who informed me that Otis Ferguson was one of the best American film critics he knew of. The volatile brilliance of Farber’s own film criticism, which I had been discovering in the Nation and back issues of the New Republic, was stage center in my attention at the time; I had read some of Ferguson, but my impressions of his writing were very vague: He was primarily the man Farber had replaced, on the New Republic, when Ferguson joined the Merchant Marine in 1941, shortly to die at sea. When Farber’s signal endorsement prompted me back to the Thirties and Forties New Republics, it shortly became clear why I had so scouted Ferguson-whose name, indeed, had melded, for me, with that of
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