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| Philip French |
On the eve of his retirement, voices from the film industry have been queuing up to pay tribute to Philip French, one of the greatest film critics of our time. Heavyweights like Martin Scorsese, David Hare, Danny Boyle and many more have flocked to the pages of the Observer in praise of him. Said Scorsese:
Whenever I read Philip French’s elegant and thoughtful criticism, I felt like I was in the company of someone who not only loved cinema but who felt a sense of responsibility toward it as an art form.
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| I Found it at the Movies |
On Sunday, readers of the Observer asked Philip French their questions. Here’s one from origamiskyscraper:
Do you eat popcorn when you go to see a movie?I have never eaten popcorn in a movie house or anywhere else for many years. I’ve never cared for it. One of the benefits of having diabetes is not to be tempted to eat popcorn. I don’t like the smell of it. I don’t like the sound of it.
One of the greatest disappointments of my life was drinking my first Coca-Cola after the second world war. It was not the drink of the gods and, indeed, is not to be drunk in the gods.Philip French, who has been the Observer's film critic for 50 years, will turn 80 in a few weeks. Carcanet publish two collections of his film criticism, I Found it at the Movies: Confessions of a Cinephile, and Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. Both titles are available in paperback and ebook. As French is retiring, we thought we’d share a short essay from I Found it at the Movies, entitled ‘Film Endings.’ It seemed appropriate.
Film Endings (1997)
The sections on ‘Closing Lines’ and ‘Opening Lines’ in Peter Kemp’s Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations have provoked much comment about how books begin and end. Numerous readers have written letters listing favourite opening lines, and there’s been a Times leader on the subject. But what about the cinema?
Movie openings need to set the scene, establishing time, place and character, and to intrigue. They rarely risk being as abrupt, epigrammatic or surprising as the sentences that kick off novels. Endings are a different matter. Traditionally pictures go for a dying fall, a conventional image to wind up the action, like a clinch between lovers, a lone cowboy riding into the sunset, the characters heading away from the camera or the camera drawing back from them. But good films have memorable final images or lapidary closing lines, and the best have unforgettable moments that sum up the picture’s meaning. Think of Joel McCrea looking up to the mountains as he dies, his lifeless body filling the screen in Ride the High Country; the long take of Alida Valli walking down the cemetery road past Joseph Cotten in The Third Man; the door in the foreground shutting on the unaccommodated John Wayne in The Searchers; the much-imitated freeze and zoom onto Jean-Pierre Léaud as he runs on the beach in Les Quatre cents coups. Or remember endings that have entered the language – ‘After all, tomorrow is another day’, ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’, ‘Well, nobody’s perfect’, ‘Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown’.
Until the 1970s, movies concluded with a simple ‘The End’ – or Fin, Ende, Slut (moviegoers got to recognise the Japanese, Hungarian or Bengali for ‘end’) – usually, though not always, followed by a cast list. Nowadays instead of The End, or in addition to it, there are five minutes or more of credits, listing everyone from stunt persons to caterers. Some moviemakers take up the challenge to keep the audience watching, others just expect them to leave. One strategy is to throw in intriguing pictures or verbal jokes. Halfway through the credits on a comedy from the Airplane! team there appears the line, ‘If you hadn’t sat watching these credits you could be home by now’. Another trick is to string together the outtakes, a device used by Jonathan Demme in Married to the Mob, and copied by Jackie Chan, all of whose recent pictures mingle the credits with footage of stunts going wrong, often involving pain and bloodshed for Chan. Music is a good way to hold our attention. Demme keeps us watching at the end of Something Wild by having the credits roll down the lefthand side, as on the right the alluring Sister Carol sings the title song straight to camera. Nobody left the cinema during the credits of Postcards From the Edge because Meryl Streep reprises her version of ‘Checking out of the Heartbreak Hotel’ (the best part of the movie). The only time the title song of Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (originally written by Bert Kalmar and Hary Ruby for the four Marx Brothers to perform in their 1932 Horse Feathers) is sung is over the final credits. Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary, ingeniously if desperately, attempts to revive our interest in its characters by recapitulating the story using animated dolls.
Certain people (including myself) always sit through the credits in the expectation of picking up some little nugget of information (e.g. that the Rocky Mountain locations for Cliffhanger were actually in the Tyrol). At the end of the French comedy Les Visiteurs, we were rewarded by a mediaeval knight saluting us, and the caption, ‘The producers greet people who read the credits’, but for those who stay to the bitter end of Bean, Rowan Atkinson comes on screen to sneer at the wimps still in the cinema.
from I Found it at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile © Philip French 2011
Philip French, who has been the Observer's film critic for 50 years, will turn 80 in a few weeks. Carcanet publish two collections of his film criticism, I Found it at the Movies: Confessions of a Cinephile, and Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. Both titles are available in paperback and ebook.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
Every week on the blog, we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
This week, we're offering 25% off Philip French's books of film criticism: I Found it at the Movies and Westerns. Just go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the offer code BLOG (case-sensitive).