If critics get a bad rap in popular culture, movie critics get the worst rap of all. As someone who’s been toiling in the field since my Dartmouth days, I know the drill. We’re snobs. We prefer four-hour Romanian political documentaries to the kind of movies people actually watch. We all look like Anton Ego in Ratatouille.

None of this is true. The best movie critics—the ones who can engage equally with low entertainment and high art and who have the body of knowledge and writing skills to put both into context for the reader—are generally not ogres. 

Of the tribe, a few, like Pauline Kael, remain renowned and influential decades after they’ve left the scene. One—the late Roger Ebert—is a household name. But most are aware that their bylines will not long survive them, even in the rare cases they deserve to.

One of those cases is Vincent Canby. For three decades—from 1969 to 1993, the headiest years of the New Hollywood resurgence—Canby was the chief movie critic for The New York Times, reviewing 160 films a year and “seeing another 60 just to keep up on things,” he told The Valley News in 1982. He was self-effacing, witty, erudite. He was among the first to champion films by Woody Allen, Jane Campion, Mike Leigh, James Ivory, and many others, and he shone a spotlight that resulted in healthy careers for all of them. Spike Lee was so grateful for Canby’s early support that he tried to buy the critic’s writing desk after Canby died in 2000 at age 76. Simply put, for 30 years no film reviewer at a daily paper was more influential or important than Canby.

Today, he’s virtually forgotten. Kael’s New Yorker reviews are available in paperback, and Ebert’s body of work can be found on his namesake website, where young critics continue to carry on his mission. But to find a Canby review, you must go spelunking in the Times’ online archives as a subscriber, and that’s a shame. “[Vincent] had a kind of easy, effortless style that seduced you with its wit and common sense,” wrote The Village Voice’s equally legendary Andrew Sarris after Canby died. “I don’t think he set out to be a dominant film critic; he didn’t have an ideology or an ax to grind. But he was the best writer of us all, I think.”

A courteous Midwesterner who didn’t call attention to himself, Canby—like most dyed-in-the-wool Manhattanites—blew in from somewhere else and made the city his home. His praise and scorn, measured out in dry, playful, and informed weekly doses, set the filmgoing agenda for at least two generations of cineastes in New York and far beyond.

How much did young Vincent Canby love the movies? Growing up in Barrington, Illinois, population 3,000, he and a fellow 10-year-old were banished from the local cinema for firing cap pistols during a Ken Maynard Western. Told they couldn’t return for six months, the two sneaked in under “disguise,” wearing cowboy hats or aviator helmets. “From the start, I was interested in how [movies] were made and who made them,” he said decades later.

Canby came from solid stock—one grandfather was president of the Chicago Board of Trade and the other was Clarence Darrow’s law partner. His childhood was marked by tragedy when his older brother, after a fight with their volatile father, shot himself to death in front of Vincent. His parents divorced not long after that, and the boy was shipped to the Christchurch School in Virginia. The initially petrified 14-year-old graduated four years later as editor of the campus newspaper and yearbook.

Canby arrived at Dartmouth in the fall of 1941. “As a 17-year-old student from a Virginia prep school, I wasn’t too prepared,” he told The Dartmouth in a 1994 interview, “and, boy, did it show up.” He  found his footing, though, and wrote for the Jack-O-Lantern and a weekly publication called the Dartmouth Log, and he haunted the Thalberg Memorial Screenplay collection in Baker Library, a gift of film producer Walter Wanger, class of 1915, and still one of the most important collections of early Hollywood scripts in existence. 

Canby majored in English literature. “I had one course which I’ll never forgive the College for offering,” he said. “It was one in which we spent the entire semester studying Hamlet. We went over three lines a day. As a result, I cannot sit through or even walk under a marquee with Hamlet on it.”

There was nothing like a film studies department at the College in the mid-1940s. English professor W. Benfield Pressy taught a screenwriting course (Wanger had paid him to study the form in Hollywood), but Canby didn’t take it. For all intents and purposes, Hanover had become an armed forces training camp in 1943, and Canby, as part of the Navy V-12 program, soon interrupted his studies to sail to the South Pacific as an ensign on a 325-foot tank landing ship. He participated in landings in the Philippines, saw kamikaze attacks on other ships, and joined U.S. occupation forces in Japan. By the time Canby was mustered out, he was the captain of his ship at the ripe age of 22. He re-enrolled at Dartmouth and got his degree in 1947.

“That recess in the middle was good for me,” he said years later. “I knew much more clearly what I was all about.” Following graduation, he paid off his loans and moved to Paris, where he worked for 20th Century-Fox, reading plays and novels submitted for production.

The road from there to the Times was long but not too winding: After starting his journalism career in Chicago, Canby began his love affair with New York City in 1950, covering entertainment news for eight years at The Motion Picture Herald and then jumping to Variety as a film and theater reporter from 1959 to 1965, when the Times took him on as a reporter for its new “Culture” department. It wasn’t long before he made the leap to full-time reviewing.

The worlds of film, popular culture, and news media were radically changing in the late 1960s, and the old guard was falling behind. Bosley Crowther, the (continued on page 76)
longtime Times film critic and a man as stuffy as his name, was so appalled by 1967’s counterculture hit Bonnie and Clyde that he panned it not once but twice. Within months, Crowther was gently backbenched for a younger generation of reviewers, Canby among them. Two years later, Canby became chief film critic, a position he held for the next quarter of a century.

It was the heyday of the glamorous movie reviewer: Kael holding court at The New Yorker with rhetorical six guns blazing, Sarris arguing for the auteur theory at the Voice, Stanley Kauffmann waxing impenetrably profound at The New Republic, and Rex Reed lobbing bitchy bons mots from various publications. As perhaps the critic with the most power on a day-to-day basis, Canby was genially colorless in person—and a model of balance, insight, and wit on the page. Always smart, never mean. 

Reviewing Midnight Cowboy in 1969, he wrote “Dustin Hoffman (his first movie performance since The Graduate), as Ratso Rizzo, is something found under an old door in a vacant lot. With his hair matted back, his ears sticking out and his runty walk, Hoffman looks like a sly, defeated rat and talks with a voice that might have been created by Mel Blanc for a despondent Bugs Bunny. Jon Voight is equally fine as Joe Buck, a tall, handsome young man whose open face somehow manages to register the fuzziest of conflicting emotions within a very dim mind.”

 Thirteen years later, reviewing Steven Spielberg’s latest, Canby wrote, “E.T. is as contemporary as laser-beam technology, but it’s full of the timeless longings expressed in children’s literature of all eras. [The filmmakers] have taken the tale of Dorothy and her frantic search for the unreliable Wizard of Oz and turned it around, to tell it from the point of view of the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodman. Dorothy has become E.T., Kansas is outer space, and Oz is a modern, middle-class real-estate development in California.”

When Canby had to deliver a bad review, he did so without malice but with a bracing, sometimes cauterizing honesty. Of the long-forgotten 1980 film Falling in Love Again, he wrote, “The producers hired good people, but they prove only that silk purses are not easily fabricated. Elliott Gould and Susannah York, who receives part of the credit for the witless screenplay, star as the married couple….Michelle Pfeiffer, a beautiful young blond woman, is somewhat more appealing as the teen-age Susannah York.…Falling in Love Again, which has been rated PG, contains some rude words, but none rude enough.”

Canby’s most notorious pan actually helped bring down a movie studio. In 1980, the critic ended his blistering review of director Michael Cimino’s follow-up to The Deer Hunter with these words: “Heaven’s Gate is something quite rare in movies these days—an unqualified disaster.” Other critics followed suit and audiences stayed away, ultimately spelling the end of United Artists and the free rein given to young “visionary” filmmakers.

During his reign at the Times, Canby led a discreetly literate life. He lived on the Upper West Side and counted among his friends the writers William Styron—a friend from Christchurch days—Christopher Hitchens, playwright Horton Foote, and Jessica Mitford of the infamous Mitford sisters. A younger cousin, a dancer named Ridgely Trufant, accompanied him to movies and shows and remembers him as a class act who’d “invite me to dinner and cook me a perfect cheese soufflé—he had the grandest manners of anyone I knew.” Among the personal effects she inherited after Canby’s passing are condolence letters from filmmakers and friends—and a class of 1945 freshman beanie.

Canby never married but was romantically involved for many years with Penelope Gilliatt, Kael’s film-reviewing colleague and nemesis at The New Yorker and a woman noted as much for causing scenes as for her glittering wit and acerbic prose. Canby, by contrast, kept a low profile. “He didn’t care that much about success in any conventional form,” says Janet Maslin, Canby’s fellow film critic at the Times. “He lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment for all the time I knew him. He had money, but it was just a miracle to get him to buy a new jacket. If you look at pictures of him, he’s always wearing the same thing.”

Maslin continues: “In the days before home computers, we had to write all the Friday reviews on Wednesday. So [Vincent and I] would start in the morning and we would get jacked up on M&Ms and Diet Coke, whatever it took. And we’d be in the cafeteria at midnight finishing all that Friday stuff.

“He didn’t have director friends, really. He was pretty careful about that. He and Woody [Allen] had a correspondence. Vince wrote great letters and he appreciated a good one. And when Woody had a stinker, Vincent had an incredible sixth sense for giving those to me [to review]. He could just see them a mile away.”

Unlike some of his peers, Canby avoided self-publicity, and after his death, friend and Variety editor Peter Bart recalled the way the critic proofread his own reviews to remove lines that could be quoted by a movie studio: “To see his name in quote ads was contrary to his own sense of dignity.” He loved to champion young directors such as Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and Wayne Wang, and he introduced Times readers to a world of international filmmakers, from
Germany’s Rainer Maria Fassbinder to France’s François Truffaut. When he was done writing reviews, he retreated to his apartment to write his own books and plays. Canby published two novels during his lifetime. They received middling reviews.

In 1993, Canby moved over to the theater desk of the Times, feeling he had little more to say about the movies. He never really retired, and when cancer took him in 2000, he was working on his next book. “I think that’s why he was so mad about dying,” says Trufant, “because he had a novel left in him.”

A quarter century after his passing, Canby is unknown to young film fanatics of the 21st century. The movies and movie criticism are the province of YouTube reviewers and Letterboxd pundits. Everyone’s a critic thanks to the internet, but few can do it with the grace and taste and depth of knowledge that Canby wielded with unparalleled ease. “The perfect review,” he said in 1982, “is one that evokes the experience you had as you were watching it—for this you need to be a good writer—and integrates this with analysis of the film. I think, too, that you’ve got to write for your own satisfaction and not worry about pleasing or offending a particular audience. You’ve got to be as honest as possible about your own reactions. Also, you should, as far as possible, avoid the role of entertainer, which is what the tendency is today, I’m afraid.”

On that last point, he failed to heed his own advice. A Canby review was and remains absolutely entertaining—the show of a glittering mind considering all the possibilities. A letter to Ridgely Trufant from a devoted reader after the critic’s death speaks for just about everyone who read the Times during the golden days: “Strange as it may sound, I enjoyed a Canby review of a bad film more than seeing a good film.”                 

“All the Literary Grace of a Mile-Long Comic Strip Without Pictures”
Excerpts from some of Canby’s notable movie reviews

The Detective (1968)
“In adapting Roderick Thorp’s 600-page novel, which had all the literary grace of a mile-long comic strip without pictures, Abby Mann, the screenwriter, has…left intact the ironic Thorp message (“It’s no worse to be a murderer in our society than a homosexual”), which appears in the corner of the movie like a very small pearl in an artificially irritated oyster….Mr. Sinatra, whose toupee must be the best that money can buy, has the waxy, blank look of a movie star as he moves through grimly authentic big city settings.”

The Last Picture Show (1971)
“The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel by McMurtry and Bogdanovich, never mistakes its purpose, which is to define the quality of life in a small American town through stories and characters that recall any number of other films and novels but that have here been rediscovered without the exploitation of Peyton Place, without the horror of Kings Row, and with remarkably little sentimentality.”

The Godfather (1972) 
“The Godfather is…the gangster melodrama come of age, truly sorrowful and truly exciting, without the false piety of the films that flourished forty years ago, scaring the delighted hell out of us while cautioning that crime doesn’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) pay. It still doesn’t, but the punishments suffered by the members of the Corleone family aren’t limited to sudden ambushes on street corners or to the more elaborately choreographed assassinations on thruways. They also include lifelong sentences of ostracism in terrible bourgeois confinement, of money and power but of not much more glory than can be obtained by the ability to purchase expensive bedroom suites, the kind that include everything from the rug on the floor to the pictures on the wall with, perhaps, a horrible satin bedspread thrown in.”

Day for Night (1973)
“Day for Night is Truffaut’s fondest, most compassionate film, and although it is packed with references to films and film people…it’s not a particularly inside movie. That is, it has great fun showing us how movies are made, how rain and snow are manufactured, how animals are directed (or not), how acts of God can affect a script, but its major concerns are people working at a profession they love, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. The movie people are different from you and me, Truffaut seems to say, but only in the intensity of their passions and in constantly having to differentiate between reality and its various reflections.”

Annie Hall (1977)
“As Annie Hall, Miss Keaton emerges as Woody Allen’s Liv Ullman. His camera finds beauty and emotional resources that somehow escape the notice of other directors. Her Annie Hall is a marvelous nut, a talented singer (which Woody demonstrates in a nightclub sequence that has the effect of a love scene), generous, shy, insecure and so uncertain about sex that she needs a stick of marijuana before going to bed.”

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
“Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which opens today at the Cinema 1, succeeds in sending up not only movies like The Greatest Story Ever Told and King of Kings, but also a lot of the false piety attached to the source material. It is the foulest-spoken biblical epic ever made, as well as the best-humored—a nonstop orgy of assaults, not on anyone’s virtue, but on the funny bone.”

Heaven’s Gate (1980)
“Heaven’s Gate fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.”

Do the Right Thing (1989)
“In all of the earnest, solemn, humorless discussions about the social and political implications of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, an essential fact tends to be overlooked: it is one terrific movie. From the sinuous and joshing solo dance sequence, which begins the fable on the dawn of the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section, until the mournful fadeout 24 hours later, Do the Right Thing is living, breathing, riveting proof of the arrival of an abundantly gifted new talent.”   

Ty Burr writes frequently for DAM. He reviews movies for The Washington Post and writes a movie newsletter at tyburrswatchlist.com.