Recent Obituaries, Classic Films Only

[CBHagman]

8. Film critic Andrew Sarris, 83, proponent of auteur theory.

For many years he was at the Village Voice.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/andrew-sarris-movie-critic-village-voice-helped-popularize-directors-dead-83-article-1.1099384

“Andrew Sarris was a vital figure in teaching America to respond to foreign films as well as American movies,” fellow critic David Thomson said Wednesday. “As writer, teacher, friend and husband he was an essential. History has gone.”

Sarris started with the Voice in 1960 and established himself as a major reviewer in 1962 with the essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory.” Acknowledging the influence of French critics and even previous American writers, Sarris argued for the primacy of directors and called the “ultimate glory” of movies “the tension between a director’s personality and his material.”

He not only helped write the rules, but filled in the names. He was a pioneer of the annual “Top 10” film lists that remain fixtures in the media. In 1968, he published “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968,” what Sarris described as “a collection of facts, a reminder of movies to be resurrected, of genres to be redeemed, of directors to be rediscovered.” Among his favorites: Ford, Hawks, Orson Welles and Fritz Lang. Categorized as “Less Than Meets the Eye”: John Huston, David Lean, Elia Kazan and Fred Zinnemann.


How come it took his obituary for me to find out he was married to Molly Haskell (From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies)?