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'You Ain't Heard Nothin Yet' by Andrew Sarris

Sarris' History of Movies in Invaluable, Maddening

Sunday, July 26, 1998

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

	You Ain't Heard Nothin Yet By Andrew Sarris Oxford $35.00

The precise date when American movies became cinema, thus qualifying them as subjects worthy of academic study, is unknown, but it was sometime around 1968.

That was the year Andrew Sarris published his "The American Cinema. For the first time, in America at least, the most banal products of Hollywood's Golden Age of assembly line pictures were treated as art.

The French had been doing it for years. Denied American films during World War II, after the war they flocked to see the U.S. films of the late 1930s and early '40s, steeping themselves in the breezy, confident style of Hollywood, from the musical to the private-eye picture.

Writing in the pages of Cahiers du Cinma, first Andr'e Bazin, then Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard, chiefly sung the praises of the U.S. directors. Their god was Orson Welles, of course. When the magazine in the early 1950s named "Citizen Kane" the greatest movie of all time, it created a sort of mystical aura to the film which endures to this day, as evidenced by its No. 1 slot on the American Film Institute's "best list."

For 29 years, Sarris reviewed movies for the Village Voice, where he developed his auteur theory for categorizing films. In his system, the director or author was the prime force behind a movie, from its physical appearance to its storyline. In "The American Cinema," Sarris established his pantheon of greats, then subcategories for lesser directors.

His somewhat arbitrary approach turned off a lot of readers and even drove rival critic Pauline Kael to write a lengthy attack on Sarris by recklessly (I think) trying to prove that that writer Herman Mankiewicz, not Welles, was Kane's true creator.

Now nearing the end of his long career seeing and writing about American films, Sarris has compiled his idiosyncratic "history" of sound films, starting in 1927 with "The Jazz Singer." Hence, the title of his book, which is subtitled "The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927-1949."

Why 1949? Sarris would only say that his editor suggested he cut the book off there. I suspect that given no limits, this all-time fan of Hollywood would be still writing about the thousands of movies he's seen, and amazingly, remembered.

He's loosened up a bit since "The American Cinema," trying here to give his impressions of the whole American film scene. Sarris devotes chapters to the various studios, to film genres and to actors as well as his beloved directors.

But, the auteurs retain the upper hand, as Sarris devotes nearly 250 pages to names most of us have forgotten - King Vidor, Preston Sturges, Frank Borzage and John Stahl - as well as the more familiar such as Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and John Ford.

The book is rambling, garrulous and at times maddening in Sarris tunnel- vision view of the movies. For this critic, the world simply vanishes once the film starts. The impact of politics, economics, social currents and history is almost meaningless to Sarris, who takes little account of those influences when discussing a film.

But, as history of U.S. movies, this book is invaluable to those of us who treasure the images of another country, the America of the past. Reading Sarris shows us why the cinema holds such a sway over us. With his likes and dislikes, some major, others petty, Sarris demonstrates just how personally films affect us individually and as a country.