had spies wherever movies were made); Sarris mystagogically led them into the arcana of the auteurist cult.
On the other side from the populists were the eggheads. Dwight Macdonald pronounced from Olympian heights, scattering bolts of skewering lightning or sun rays of glittering praise, all backed up by his grounding in literature, politics, and history. Stanley Kauffmann, with a good background in theater and fiction, wrote with gentlemanly sobriety not devoid of wry humor. As for me—well, readers of NR already know. Crudely oversimplified, the populists preferred American genre movies; the eggheads, foreign art films.
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