The American cinema: directors and directions, 1929-1968

Andrew Sarris

New York, 1968

Abstract

This work re-appraises American sound cinema from 1929 to 1968, advocating for a focus on directors as personal artists within the industrial Hollywood system. It introduces the “auteur theory” as a framework for film history, categorizing and evaluating directors based on their overall filmographies, rather than isolated works or solely topical themes. The theory posits that a director’s consistent personal vision, or “style,” transcends the constraints of the studio system and genre conventions, serving as the primary artistic signature of a film. The analysis prioritizes directors’ expressive techniques and unique attitudes towards their material over purely sociological interpretations. The scope is limited to narrative, fictional, commercial English-language feature films, offering a comprehensive look at how individual directorial personalities shaped the cinematic landscape. – AI-generated abstract.

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Quotes from this work

The Trial is the most hateful, the most repellent, and the most perverted film Welles ever made.

p. 82

Ford can never become fashionable again for the rigidly ideological critics of the Left. Too many of his characters wear uniforms without any tortuous reasoning why. Even the originally pacifistic What Price Glory is transformed by Ford into a nostalgic celebration of military camaraderie with the once-raucous Charmaine emerging from the dim shadows as an idealization of the Chivalric Code. As a director, Ford developed his craft in the twenties, achieved dramatic force in the thirties, epic sweep in the forties, and symbolic evocation in the fifties. His style has evolved almost miraculously into a double vision of an event in all its vital immediacy and yet also in its ultimate memory image on the horizon of history.

Only the Lindsay Anderson-Gavin Lambert generation of Sequence and Sight and Sound kept Ford’s reputation alive in the period beginning with They Were Expendable in 1945 and ending with The Sun Shines Bright in 1954. The British critics could appreciate Ford for the flowering of his personal style at a time when the rest of the world (this critic included) were overrating Carol Reed and David Lean for the efficient, impersonal technicians that they were. Finally, the New Critics in London and Paris rediscovered Ford after he had been abandoned even by the Sequence-Sight and Sound generation. The last champions of John Ford have now gathered around Seven Women as a beacon of personal cinema. The late Andre Bazin damaged Ford’s reputation with New Critics by describing Ford’s technique as a hangover scenario-dominated focus in thirties.