Of the critics who have affected my approach to watching and criticizing films, I've always regarded Pauline Kael with awe and her opponent Andrew Sarris with something like scorn. This is in part, I admit, because I more often agree with Kael (Sarris has failed to recognize more important American films in his thirty-year career than any other critic), but also because Kael doesn't apologise for her opinions. She passionately rips into films of all sorts while Sarris writes awkward yet grammatically correct reviews that usually fail to capture what it is he likes or hates about the title in question.

I would be lying, then, if I said I did not approach his You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet unbiased, and reading it has not changed my overall opinion of the man, but I must admit that Sarris' latest collection is a good deal better than I had anticipated. His writing here is more eloquent than it has ever been and if the book is not quite a masterwork, it's certainly superior to his "seminal" work, The American Cinema, which introduced the United States to the French 'auteur theory'. You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet is grounded in cinema's history but never dull. In fact, at its best, it's a lot of fun.

In some ways, ...Nothin' Yet is an antidote to ...Cinema--Sarris is more thoughtful and less brash here, and he even repents for one of ...Cinema's worst blunders: his filing of Billy Wilder under "Less than Meets the Eye". ("I have grossly underrated Billy Wilder, perhaps more so than any other American director"--at long last, redemption!). A couple of passages in the new text are extraordinarily loving and detailed. In a piece about how he and a friend discovered the French's admiration for Howard Hawks, Sarris does an especially nice job detailing the confusion they felt from learning that this poorly considered studio director had a reputation as a real artist in France.

You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet is an admirably ambitious volume; Sarris tackles studios, genres, directors, performers, and 'guilty pleasures,' (a concept that's one of my pet peeves) in one fell swoop, and comes up mostly successful. However, I've just thought of a good example to illustrate the contrasting styles of Kael and Sarris. Kael gave a favorable notice to the reviled 1976 remake of King Kong; she was always happy to say what aspects of a given movie she enjoyed. Guilt implies shame, and Kael would certainly never feel ashamed of how she feels about any film. (I doubt that she regrets having labeled Eyes Wide Shut "a piece of crap".) Calling a performer a 'guilty pleasure,' as Sarris does Mary Astor, is particularly snobbish. And in the "Guilty Pleasures" section, Sarris' "one imagines that" tone wears thin pretty fast. (I found myself yearning for Kael's undoubting "you"s and "we"s.)

The book can be pretty absorbing, but it is undeniably stimulating only to the extent that one is interested in the subject at hand. The real difference between Kael and Sarris is that Kael's off-the-cuff writing is fun to read even if you're not intrigued by the picture in question, or have found that you don't like it, whereas Sarris has always failed to turn me on to something new. Even in top form, he only reaffirms your love of the old with some fresh insight. None of which is to say that he's boring, only that his enthusiasm, unlike Kael's, isn't contagious. I'll even take David Thomson's fanatically devoted and not totally justified pieces on Howard Hawks and Cary Grant in his A Biographical Dictionary of Film over Sarris' more thoughtful ones, because Sarris tries to maintain his distance and not become swept up in the passion he feels.

If the idea of a scholarly, text-book study of the history of a certain period in cinema doesn't get you particularly excited, ...Nothin' Yet isn't going to change things. It just isn't a personal enough study of what has affected this man's current outlook. You get the feeling that Sarris has become at least partially consumed by film itself, leaving only the shell of a man interested in larger things.

I hold major reservations about ...Nothin' Yet, but I do recommend it to those with the patience to let Sarris' judgments slowly emerge. In some of the best pieces found within--on film noir, Hawks, The Marx Brothers, and the B Picture--Sarris demonstrates that his love of cinema runs every bit as deep as Kael's. I've never really doubted that, actually. Too bad he's unwilling to give himself over to the movies so completely. It is important for any film critic to maintain a sense of excitement about what is being made in the current era and not simply lament the changing cinematic climate. Maybe this exhaustive piece of research is the reason why some of Sarris' recent criticism has lacked lustre.

The most consistently enjoyable of ...Nothin' Yet's sections is the one on genres. Sarris, writing about the western and noir, obviously has a feel for mise-en-scène that many other reviewers so sadly lack. (This may account for his preference for Stanley Kubrick's later films--Barry Lyndon and The Shining both landed on his top-ten lists in their respective years). In his finest hour, he exposes the roots of "the Hollywood horror film" as "the misshapen off-spring of German expressionism and Gothic fiction." How can such a brilliant observation be, in esscence, so simple? It's a shame that the genres he has the most feeling for--westerns and horror pictures--are the ones he ultimately spends the least amount of time on; his long take on the musical is a pretty tough read. And yet Sarris can, when he really gets down to it, nail the heart of a genre just as Kael can nail the heart of a movie. "Only in retrospect have I been able to appreciate the deep sadness amounting to a tragic dimension in the less stereotyped ventures in the genre," he writes of westerns, reminding us that in the most beloved of them (Stagecoach, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, McCabe & Mrs. Miller) are infused with an almost universl longing to return to a bygone era.

So, ultimately, I'd say that the book--for its clear-headedness if not its divulgence of Sarris' personality--belongs in every film lover's library. If only it were as intimate--as much about Sarris as it is about movies--as the others I've mentioned, we might really have something. What we get, finally, is an intelligent yet inherently unsatisfying dissection of what Sarris loves--or has loved--over the years in movies. -Max S. Scheinin

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