Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber ed. by Robert Polito (review)

Pauline Kael accurately described Manny Farber as a critic who looked at the “film frame as if it were a painter’s canvas” (xxxiii). What made Farber unique, apart from his also being a painter, was his ability to make words his palette, choosing them carefully to conjure up as accurate an image as possible. To Farber, a film had the properties of language. He found the pace of William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) “monosyllabic” (73), in its measured inexorability as the action moved slowly toward tragedy. In reviewing Sam Wood’s Pride of the Yankees (1942), Farber was struck by the “talented plainness” (22) of Teresa Wright--a strange juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated words which, in combination, suggest an actor whose ordinariness belies her artistry. Such a phrase causes the reader to stop and reflect in the same way that “dapple-drawn-dawn Falcon” in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover” forces a slowdown, so that the imagination can print out the picture the poet has painted. When Farber calls Pier Angeli in Fred Zinnemann’s Teresa (1951) a “sparrow version of Ingrid Bergman”(347) he packs so much into the metaphor that you have to parse “sparrow” and “Ingrid Bergman,” using many more words than Farber did in what ranks as the most pithily accurate description of the waif-like Angeli, who always looked as dispiaced as Karin, the Lithuanian refugee Bergman played in Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950).

Farber was unpredictable. He could give you the essence of a film without mentioning the director or even the cast, as he did in his review of the 1952 reissue of Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943), in which he focuses only on the film text, noting how characters like the killer are introduced and then dropped, leaving you no other choice but to stop playing detective and give yourself over to the film with its omniscient camera offering enough visual detail to make words unnecessary, notably when a young girl is returning home amid ominous sounds, fleeing something unseen that leaves its mark in the blood that seeps under the door of her home.

Farber also had his blind spots. He was dismissive of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), not so much because of the violence--which disturbed New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, whose review showed him totally out of touch with mainstream cinema--but because of Faye Dunaway’s “vanilla charm” (389), which does not allow for “deep projection of character.” Farber was wrong. Her Bonnie Parker may well be a bored adolescent eager for thrills, but both she and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) have character arcs that culminate in betrayal and death, leaving the pair more sinned against than sinning.

Farber explained what he expected of film in an early review. He admired Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) for being “very unlike Hollywoood” (52) and more like the film’s setting, Santa Clara, California. Shadow of a Doubt does not have a soundstage look and replicates real life in its examination of “the details of ordinary activity.” Farber is arguing for a filmic version of verisimilitude—not just the semblance of reality, but so close an approximation of it that the film seems incontrovertibly real—a tall order and one that not even The Master always achieved. (Psycho comes close.)

In his richly detailed Introduction, Robert Polito repeats Farber’s distinction between white elephant art and termite art—the former, arty, self-conscious, and brimming with significance; the latter, burrowing into life with a go-for-broke attitude and creating something that inspires the same reaction that Aristotle described in the Poetics when one comes face to face with a true work of art: “Yes, that’s it.” Some of Farber’s favorite termites were Sam Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann, Robert Altman, and the producer Val Lewton, who was...