Keepers: The Greatest Films—and Personal Favorites—of a Moviegoing Lifetime by Richard Schickel (review)

Richard Schickel happily labels his preoccupation with movies an “obsession.” He calculates that since adolescence he has watched at least two movies a week, “a grand total of, shall we say, 22,950 movies, or about 294 of them a year.” He has made a career of his pleasure. Since 1965 he has been a critic, for Time magazine for 45 years, now at the blog Truthdig.com. His 37 books range from biographies of directors, including a definitive life of D. W. Griffith, and actors, including James Cagney and Gary Cooper; an analysis of Double Indemnity; and industry histories, notably The Disney Version. (His dissection of America’s prurient fascination with celebrity, Intimate Strangers, published in 1985, seems uncannily prophetic today.) Particularly valuable has been his work as a documentarian; many of his 20 films about directors remain indispensable. In all of his work, Schickel melds his vast knowledge with the wonderment he felt as a five-year-old seeing his first movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His synthesis of erudition and delight benefits both students of cinema and people who just like going to the movies.

The pleasure of movie-watching animates Keepers, a sort of autobiography of films seen and an informal history of the medium, focused mostly on Hollywood. With so much to cover, Schickel delivers his assessments with memorable concision. Casablanca is “the perfect bad movie”; Sweet Smell of Success is “a cruel masterpiece”; Busby Berkeley “could be parodied, but he could not be equaled.” He resurrects unjustly neglected masterpieces, like Carl Dreyer’s excruciatingly exquisite The Passion of Joan of Arc, and calls attentions to lesser-known but worthy films, like Griffith’s Isn’t Life Wonderful. Anyone bored with special effects will applaud his opinion that F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu remains “the greatest of the Dracula movies.” He can lead you to look anew at over-familiar films; for example, bemoaning that “critics are always chasing various forms of big think” in Federico Fellini’s work, he suggests that the real subject of 8½ is show business. He bemoans that Meet Me in St. Louis does not get proper respect as “one of the truly great musicals”; furthermore, he suggests that it contains Judy Garland’s “best work ever.” And on that score: for all her undisputed fascination, one must agree that Greta Garbo starred in only one great movie, Ninotchka.

Schickel is equally incisive in puncturing overinflated reputations. Gone With the Wind he calls “a faux epic.” Both High Noon and Shane seem “too stiffened with the desire to rise above their station.” The Seventh Seal is “pretentious twaddle”; All the King’s Men is “better than the novel it is based on.” The early Soviet silents, like Battleship Potemkin, retain their historical importance—“they were vitally important when we were young and soaking up knowledge”—but “I don’t particularly want to see those movies again … they are a slog.” Anyone (like me) who has wondered why The Best Years of Our Lives and Rules of the Game receive such reverent admiration now has an ally.

Such critical aperçus, though as irresistible as salted peanuts, are, alas, ultimately just as unsatisfying; they stimulate the appetite without sating it. Much as Schickel wants to stir discussion—“You are supposed to argue with me,” he writes; “We should agree to disagree”—his quick hitters fail to uphold his side of the bargain. Although admirably firm in his opinions without being opinionated, Schickel does not consistently back them up.

This is most evident in his considerations of directors. For example: his judgment that Orson Welles was “a great talker about movies, but only rarely a great maker of them” might win grudging assent from the director’s most fervent partisan. To continue that he is a “two-movie talent” is worth debating, but are those two films Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons? A better case can...