Movie-goers in search

Movie-goers in search of truly critical reviews usually find such a quest a long day's journey into night. Daily newspapers generally have all the dispassionate objectivity of the ads in the adjoining columns. Magazine critics are hampered by lack of space. Film magazines generally seem more intent on proving their superiority to Hollywood than on developing more mature patrons. One wishes, if not for more "positive" criticism (which so easily slips into blurbdom), then for coherent principles that illuminate the art in the better movies as well as explain its absence in the worst ones.

Two essays on the movies in recent paperback anthologies provide such sorely needed perspective: Pauline Kael assails "Movies, the Desperate Art" in Modern Writing #3 (Berkley Books) and Sidney A. Diamond appraises the difficulties of "Creating for the Screen" in New World Writing #10 (New American Library). Both have the virtues of the general essay (as opposed to the ad hoc fare of column criticism); each has the further asset of familiar, specific examples to support the general principles laid down.

Diamond's approach is historical, technical, anatomical (but not forbidding as some film aesthetics is); Kael's is sociological. "Creating for the Screen" presents the basic grammar of the film and explains clearly the artistic importance of the many people in the credits other than the blatantly ballyhooed actors.

Diamond also analyzes the movie's special qualities as an art, distinguishing it from related forms like the stage play. Miss Kael, again complementing Diamond's article, warns of the rarified nonsense that this esthetic approach sometimes engenders-such as the purists' rationale for the "chase" of cowboy and Keystone fame. Where Diamond outlines an ideal aesthetic for movies, Miss Kael explains why they so often fall short of their great potential.

Movies are spectacular because size sells; broadminded "critics" pander to a false conception of democracy; significant experimentation is short-circuited by both box office and the security-ridden fans fixated on early Chaplin and Rene Clair. Worst of all, the pressures of well-intentioned groups have calcified the image of minority members as heroes and of marriage as romance. The two essays provide the teacher and intelligent student with an excellent introduction to the movie both as art form and popular culture.