A Brief Digression on Critics and Cops [by David Lehman]

Why do award committees pin the tail on the horse’s ass? Because award committees combine a universal truth (“everyone’s a critic”) with an old punch line (“the committee in charge of designing a horse came up with a camel”). What is a critic? According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, “the critic is one who knows the way but cannot drive the car.” According to Kierkegaard, the critic resembles a poet as one pea another except that he lacks the anguish in his heart and the music on his lips – that is, everything.

When Annie Get Your Gun opened on May 16, 1946, with Ethel Merman as Annie and one of the most glorious scores ever written for the stage, the critic Ward Morehouse of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that la Merman was “in her best form since Anything Goes” but that “Irving Berlin’s score is not a notable one.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times seemed to concur, characterizing the songs – There’s No Business Like Show Business, They Say It’s Wonderful, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, and the rest – as “routine composing.”  Recall, too, the reviewer who left the theater after a performance of Roberta complaining that Jerome Kern’s score lacked tunes you can whistle. Maybe his mind was elsewhere when the orchestra played Yesterdays, Let’s Begin, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. But for dumbness after the fact, it is hard to top the assessment of Guys and Dolls that appeared in the London Sunday Times in May 1953 (three years after the show’s debut on Broadway). Quoth the critic: the show, “despite its striking, incidental merits,” is “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.”

On the screen, the critic is depicted often enough as a venomous, haughty lout (Clifton Webb in Laura), a conniver (George Sanders in All About Eve) or sometimes a guy who needs a drink because he has to choose between telling the truth and keeping his job (Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane). But in song-and-dance movies with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in them, the critic is transmuted into the figure of the cop who looks on the festive proceedings and glares skeptically (as at the end of Kelly’s performance of the title number in Singing in the Rain) or with amused toleration (as when Fred Astaire, sporting a boater, does his shoeshine number in The Band Wagon). The cop is the reviewer saying, You’re not supposed to be having such a good time. Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Don’t you realize that life is serious and art must be the same? Art has a moral imperative. Literature is a criticism of life. To which line of objection, the best answer is the movement of a dancer, the smile on Gene Kelly’s face as he wraps himself around a streetlamp and lets the rain pour on his face, and the recollection of the late John Simon's typically brutal and wrong-headed attack on that landmark movie, The Godfather

Comments

[Kent Johnson]

David, your dissing of "critics" seems a bit off here. In regards poetry, poets themselves have been known to be critics! Some of the best, of course... I trust you at least make an exception for poet-critics? Though some of whom, in fact, have been total Cops? And that should be noted, probably, too?

[Michael James Theune]

And, of course, every editor for BAP is a critic...

[The Best American Poetry]

Many of the best critics (Eliot, Auden) are poets. If movies are dreams, you are each character -- disapproving cop as well as transgressive dancer. -- DL