It was once common for compendia of film criticism to be carefully compiled into massive codices. I remember this era well (being its victim), the bookshelves of my apartment weighted down with yearly update volumes, bindings contorted over the burden of a thousand overthumbed pages.
The first and best such codex was Leslie Halliwell’s Film Guide. You probably don’t know Halliwell; he died in 1989, a devotee of “old Hollywood” who never got on board with the 70’s.
From his essay The Decline & Fall of the Movie (read it all):
The film is no longer an art, or even a craft: after a brief ‘swinging’ period it became an exploitation industry designed to take quick money from suckers, led by maverick Ken Russells rather than conscientious Irving Thalbergs, to plaudits from irresponsible critics whenever some totally untalented new director ‘does his thing’. There is no justification except box office for films like The Exorcist or Mandingo, none except self-indulgence for a $12 million coffee-table film like Barry Lyndon, while the popularity even in sophisticated circles of shoddy pornography like Deep Throat and Death Weekend should stand as an awful warning to the leaders of our society that a vivid young art form has overreached itself and is well and truly on the verge of disaster. It is all very well to say in defence of such films that large numbers of people flock to see them: so they did once bear-baiting and public executions and witch hunts, but the human race long ago prided itself on having passed that stage.
I don’t agree with much of what Halliwell says, even here, but he has a standard, which he takes great pains to let us in on by encapsulating his reviews into short single paragraphs, allowing more films to be judged and compared to one another in a single volume.
More importantly, he is the only film critic I am aware of who tortures value out of the 4-star rating system.
In shiftless modernity there are essentially two ratings for films: 3-4 stars meaning good, 1-2 stars meaning bad. The abyss between 2 and 3 stars which protects good from bad is vast. Once judged a 2-star film, what does it matter if we remove another star or two? Do I want to watch a film marginally less bad than another bad film? I suppose the jump from 3-4 stars is more meaningful: the difference between good entertainment and art? Or so it should be. For most critics, a 4th star is granted for ideological reasons to otherwise unwatchable crap like Roma. Only 3-star films are good.
Halliwell, in favorable comparison, is so frugal in praise that even a single star is a sign of accomplishment.
0 stars
Most films are bad and not worthy of your time. Other reviewers would agonize over whether it’s 2, 1, or 0 stars bad, but Halliwell saves his mental resources for discriminating between levels of good. As example, his entire 0-star review of 1978’s Convoy:
A virtually plotless anthology of wanton destruction. Too noisy to sleep through.
1-star *
An entertaining film of little consequence, popcorn movie, at least your ass will be comfortable. Otherwise, a humbling admission by the critic that others universally disagree with him. Here Halliwell grudgingly gives The Exorcist 1 star:
Spectacularly ludicrous mishmash with uncomfortable attention to physical detail and no talent for narrative or verisimilitude. Its sensational aspects, combined with a sudden worldwide need for the supernatural, assured its enormous commercial success.
Extraction is a good modern kinetic action film worthy of being watched and therefore of one (non-grudging) star. Whereas its forebear, John Wick, would get 2 stars for stylistic innovation, and its forebear, Hard Boiled, gets 3 stars for allowing us to witness the consummation of a beautiful marriage between kung-fu genre fare and Western cop buddy movies.
2-star **
A film which stands above its peers, breaks a genre mold, innovates in some way, while failing in some other notable way. For example, Halliwell rated Apocalypse Now 2-stars for its interesting parallels to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and vivid cinematography, though finding it pretentious, with particular scorn directed at Marlon Brando’s mumbling performance. Where other reviewers seethe at only having 4 stars to give!
Not a lot of movies make it to this lofty plateau.
3-star ***
A film which falls short of masterpiece-level plot-theme integration but which executes perfectly on a limited vision or innovates new techniques of storytelling. 1955’s The Night of the Hunter is a great example of a 3-star Halliwell film:
Weird, manic fantasy in which evil finally comes to grief against the forces of sweetness and light. Although the narrative does not flow smoothly there are splendid imaginative moments, and no other film has ever quite achieved its texture
Again, the shiftless modern critic has no gauge by which to tell Night of the Hunter apart from Apocalypse Now.
I use Black Hawk Down as my 3-star reference: it delivered a template for combining heroism with its seeming opposite, naturalism, while studiously avoiding grand thematic concerns (such concerns with minimal application could have earned it that 4th star).
4-star ****
A masterpiece with integrated grand theme, all cylinders firing to make a statement that will resonate through the ages. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory is a beautiful film with a powerful message, one of only 150 films to which Halliwell granted 4 stars:
Incisive melodrama chiefly depicting the corruption and incompetence of the high command; the plight of the soldiers is less interesting. The trench scenes are the most vivid ever made, and the rest is shot in genuine castles, with resultant difficulties of lighting and recording; the overall result is an overpowering piece of cinema.
Halliwell was less concerned with theme than I, willing to grant exceptions to certain perfections of craft, as for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest:
Delightful chase comedy-thriller with a touch of sex, a kind of compendium of its director’s best work, with memories of The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and Foreign Correspondent among others.
I’m happy to throw the master craftsman a bone; if Hitchcock made films literally devoid of theme (and bragged about it), it was to prove a reactionary point to thematically bankrupt Hollywood, stuck on its Marxist note and with little ability to play that note effectively.
Regardless, it’s an elite group of 4-star films in the Halliwell universe and this is how it should be. Whether he’s right that no masterpiece was produced after 1967 is beside the point. He consistently applied his own rigid standard, and when Hollywood veered from it, fuck Hollywood.
There are problems with rigidity. The actors of old were stage performers with deliberately stilted mannerisms. The ability to speak clearly and loudly so a room of people can hear unamplified is not as necessary now as then, and so acting has become more natural despite the horrors of the “method”, which is itself horribly dated: who can watch Dustin Hoffman or Warren Beatty in anything?
Back to my point. Halliwell gives Howard Hughes’ Scarface 4 stars, but Cagney’s performance is over-the-top stagey cringe which doesn’t hold up. De Palma’s “remake”, in which Al Pacino methods himself to more Latino than Latino, is a 4-star masterpiece in my book, but Halliwell predictably loathed it.
“Holding up” is important, as we can hardly judge a film a masterpiece on release. I remember watching Goodfellas in the theatre, drunk on how different and exciting it was, without being able to define why. Scorsese might have been tricking me with killer 70’s tunes kicking in over freeze frames. And maybe he was, but in retrospect it was a seminal film, worth 4 stars for technical reasons alone, while causing me to realize the Godfather is boring enough that maybe it should be a 1-star film instead of 2.
This is to illustrate that while rigid standards based on absolute truths are required in judging art, our understanding of those truths is fallible, seen through a contextual lens that shifts as we grow with each new experience. No matter the care we take in designing our standard, it will be as imprecise and imperfect as we are.
Yet without such imperfect care, art has devolved to ideological screeds and mental masturbation by auteurs who eschew all standards (which might require work to live up to), with critics whose only standard is to be loved or get paid serving as professional apologists for hip NPC filmmakers stamped out by academia.
So, don’t get hung up on the fact that you may not agree with a given review. Consider why you don’t agree and whether your position is defensible. Use Halliwell and others to hone your own thinking into a better standard, a collaboration if you will, between you and all humanity, a never-ending effort to define what makes great art, to encourage its creation, and to condemn those who would destroy or pervert it.
Not quite errata: Halliwell, it turns out, revoked his 4-star rating for Paths of Glory in the final edition of his Film Guide. I was shocked he gave it 4 stars to begin with - he has overly harsh words for Kubrick masterpieces like Clockwork Orange. To see a master craftsman like Kubrick devote his talents to sex and violence must have really rankled Halliwell; he probably felt fooled by Paths of Glory, which is uniquely timeless while still in the context of Hollywood's golden age.
In that same edition Halliwell elevated Dumbo to 4 stars. Guess he loved his grandchildren?