Customer Reviews

Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

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Sunday August 27's NY Times review, while positive, seemed somewhat cold - here's another review that might help!
***
July 23, 2006


A master craftsman by Richard Schickel, film critic for Time and the author of many books, including "Elia Kazan: A Biography" and "The Essential Chaplin."


TO write seriously about topics - movies, jazz, popular fiction - that many people regard as peripheral or totally irrelevant to their lives is among the least gratifying of occupations. That's particularly true now, when the pendulum seems to be permanently stuck at the burbling end of the spectrum, where the bloggers - history-free and sensibility-deprived - weekly blurb the latest Hollywood effulgence and are rewarded by seeing their opinions bannered atop movie display
ads in type sizes elsewhere reserved for the outbreak of wars and the demise of presidents.

Even in the dwindling realm where critics still attempt to make fine distinctions, there are problems, mostly of tone. For my sins, I enjoy the wise-guy riffs of Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, but I have to admit that his manner is not well-suited to the middle range, where many of the movies that are most interesting to write about uneasily reside. At the spectrum's other end is Stanley Cavell - the professor Irwin Corey of film studies - who has never met a movie he cannot obfuscate with a viscous prose style that reaches ever higher levels of unintended risibility. Where, I've often wondered, is a critic who wears his erudition lightly, writes with an impeccable combination of verve and sobriety and, above all, makes you see (and hear) the objects of his ruminations? Is it possible to find such a critic whose medium is prose (always slow-footed in comparison, say, to a Bryan Singer movie) and topics evanescent: a perfect cut between scenes in a movie, for example, or a four-bar melodic fragment in an arrangement of Gil
Evans' song "La Nevada."

I think I've finally found my man. His name is Gary Giddins, and he has, of course, long been known as a premier jazz critic (even by tin-eared me). I took to reading him on that subject purely for the pleasure of his company, long before I actually met him. (Full disclosure: We enjoy a pleasantly collegial relationship, tempered by the fact that we live at opposite ends of the continent.) He has previously written occasionally about the movies but in recent years has started regularly reviewing DVDs for the New York Sun while contemplating larger cinematic topics for other publications. These pieces are mainly about the "classics" - a kiss-of-death word - but they bring him into a world I know at least a little about, and they
offer a vitality of insight that's inspiring. You read Giddins and you start adding to your Netflix queue.

DVDs represent a technology that is a boon (in image quality) and a nuisance - they are often stupidly manufactured, technically speaking, and are still too fussy to handle without damaging. But they are vital to Giddins' critical practice, for he is a master of the rewind and pause buttons, which give him the ability to move back and forth, studying his material and making up his mind at leisure. (Actually, of course, the remote is available to all of us, but few of us have Giddins' passionate thumb.)

The results of his devotion are immediately apparent in the first two sections of "Natural Selection" (to be published early next month), one consisting of long essays on great comedians, the other of pieces about older movies and their stars and directors. The first thing you notice is the casual comfort with which Giddins introduces lofty critical references into his considerations of humble popular culture. He smoothly eases Henri Bergson and Ralph Waldo Emerson into his superb
essay on Jack Benny, for instance. But he also introduces us, via a quotation from Larry Adler, the harmonica player who toured with Benny, to a radical conception of what Benny was actually up to: Adler said the comedian "not only epitomized Jewish storytelling and intonation, but showed everyone else how to do it." The high-low range of Giddins'references never fails to stir me to envy and despair.

I don't mean to imply that Giddins is more reliant on his research than he is on his own questing eye. Here he is on Charlie Chaplin: "There is a difference between sentimentality, which is almost always crass and phony, and pathos, the comedian's acknowledgment of tragedy. Chaplin has ruined numerous comedians who wanted his tears but didn't possess
his equilibrium.... Movies always try to manipulate our emotions. We are pleased to admit that a filmmaker can make us laugh or keep us in suspense, but we are reluctant to credit one who makes us cry. Yet the latter effect requires as much precision and perhaps even more taste."

This bold and provocative generalization is, typically, contained in a very close reading of "City Lights," in which Giddins carefully demonstrates the balance Chaplin maintains between hilarity and a sadness that always stops short of the bathetic. He also gives this care to the DVD extras, which he holds to high standards, and this treatment is an extension of his greatest critical virtue, his patience. He will get a movie right even if it is 60 years old and probably unknown to most of his readers.

Take, for example, his piece on the nine nonhorrific horror films that Val Lewton produced at RKO during World War II. From the start, they were praised for the subtle way they suggested the unspeakable without showing it, but only Giddins has the sense to observe that "Lewton's films, like certain books, ought to be experienced in childhoods that they can be returned to later in life, the indelible moments now cast amid subtler evocations and themes." And he alone, of the critics I've read on the filmmaker, notices that these pictures reverse the genre's previous stress on masculine issues and "are keyed to mother-daughter disorders, sisterhood crises, sexual assertion and repression,lesbianism, romance, loneliness, vulnerability and suicide."

In other words, Lewton at least briefly feminized horror - and it takes an awful lot of back-and-forthing with your clicker to catch that invaluable point. And that says nothing about Giddins' shrewd references in the same piece to a Jean Rhys novel, a Richard Dix performance and the witty homage to Lewton in "The Bad and the Beautiful." This is typical of Giddins, whether he's doing an ironically tolerant (and manically detailed) history of lip-syncing, devastating a Norman Mailer novel or finding the value (previously unobserved by me) in Steve McQueen's sullen silences.

Indeed, the more I read (and reread) "Natural Selection," the more I thought of Edmund Wilson, when he was reviewing "Classics and Commercials" on a regular basis in the 1940s. A lot of the literature Wilson was obliged to evaluate was no more "important" than the movies and discs Giddins grapples with. But he took the job seriously - people were reading this stuff, which meant that it was having some
sort of possibly permanent effect on their sensibilities, which meant, in turn, that it deserved serious, historical, cross-culturally attentive criticism. The difference between the two writers is that Giddins has a wit that Wilson only rarely mobilized. Considering the "whirring vibrato" of Alanis Morissette's "Let's Do It" on the soundtrack album of the execrable "De-Lovely," he finds "it recalls Alvin the Chipmunk, except that Alvin sang in tune." Now that's de-licious.

Does it matter in the end? Won't a peppy blurb give us all the consumer guidance we require - especially if we're talking old movies and music? I think it does matter, and not only because a good critical essay - featuring an engaging mind fully engaged with significant cultural objects in which it finds useful, surprising resonances - is its own reward. It is also a defense against lazy nostalgia. (There is no other kind.) Most important, smart readings of Garbo's (or Lon Chaney's) masks or the three distinct phases of Billie Holiday's career enrich our understanding of modern movie stardom, modern horror and modern music respectively. We see our culture more clearly because of
the force, intelligence and alertness to overlooked detail that Giddins brings to his readings of a past that remains stubbornly, if sometimes only subliminally, present in our own less acute remembrances.

Gary Giddins' latest anthology of essays and reviews, "Natural Selection", is a thoroughly enthralling read that's both entertaining and intellectually enriching--not only the pieces that cover his main area of expertise, Jazz, for which he is justly renowned; but also for the enticing spectrum of cultural categories he taps, both highbrow and mainstream, with which he is every bit as comfortable and knowledgeable. I was absorbed from the moment I picked it up, first skipping among the pieces that cover subjects of primary interest to me, then branching out into less familiar territory. Both routes were enjoyable and illuminating.

Besides critical analyses and appreciations of luminaries of the Jazz world (Fats Waller, Glenn Miller, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Paul Whiteman, Count Basie, B.B. King, Billie Holiday, et al.),"Natural Selections" encompasses a surprising (though maybe not so surprising if you're familiar with Giddins' equally eclectic "Faces In the Crowd") range of subjects, which includes comics Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny (the lone holdover from "Faces", with updated footnotes), Bob Hope, and Jerry Lewis; Thomas Edison and the Invention of the Movies; directors Fritz Lang, William Wyler, Jean Renoir, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Bresson; animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen; horror films, films noir, Vitaphone and Looney Tunes shorts; actors Brando, Garbo, Lon Chaney (Sr.), Doris Day, and Steve McQueen; films "Children of Paradise", "Nightmare Alley", "La Dolce Vita", "Glory", and "The Big Red One"; folk music archivist Alan Lomax; writers Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Moss Hart, and Robert Christgau; even Sammy Davis Jr. and Bob Dylan are included in the mix, among several others. Mr. Giddins is well versed in each of these subjects, and his usual level of painstaking research is evident in every paragraph, while he displays that rarest of writers' gifts: authoritativeness without arrogance.

While inducing ingestion of fresh, thought-provoking perspectives on some of the artists, films, and writings with which I was already familiar, "Selection" has inspired me to pull down from the shelf a few books, DVDs, and CDs I haven't perused in awhile--and to search out and explore some of those that I never have.

Giddins gives greatness its due in his overviews of consensus geniuses: Ellington, Armstrong, Holiday, Dylan (Mr. G was the only contributor to "Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader" who chose to write about Dylan's singing), Bresson, Brando, and the prophetic Lang (I now desperately want to see his "Spies") among them. He boldly says of Buster Keaton's masterwork, "The General", "As an evocation of American History, it is the equal of Griffith or Ford."

But he also throws us a few curves, proffering a surprising intercession for Jerry Lewis, for example, which he leads off with a possible explanation--by way of Aldous Huxley and Edgar Alan Poe, no less--for the mystifying infatuation the French have with the Nutty Patsy. Giddins argues convincingly for a reassessment of Lewis' films, but Jerry doesn't escape unscathed, as Giddins claims that the comic's ambition to be in a perpetual state of Holden Caulfield is partly responsible for "the infantilization of a culture that produces film stars like Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tobey Maguire..."

He urges a fresh look at the oversimplified and undervalued Doris Day, who "survived more than three generations of leading men, representing three generations of style and/or beefcake; most of them quickly faded while she marched cheerfully onward." The author of the definitive bio of the grossly underrated Bing Crosby, Giddins suggests a reconsideration of "Going My Way", for which Der Bingle won a Best Actor Oscar in 1944. "Bing's performance is astonishing--convincing, appealing, and original", he persuades. (The film's Best Director Oscar winner, Leo McCarey, doesn't fare so well in Giddins' review of his ill-conceived final effort, "Satan Never Sleeps".)

In fact, there are a few less-than-complimentary musings: the Tina Sinatra-produced miniseries on her father receives a deserved drubbing, and "Ancient Evenings", Norman Mailer's "windbreaking novel" is . . . well, you get the idea. There's also a fascinating discussion of lip-synching, covering many of its practitioners, from Al Jolson to Ashlee Simpson.

All of which adds to the colorful tapestry that is this can't-put-it-down kind of book. In his appraisal of Chaplin and Keaton DVD releases, Giddins says of Buster's 46-minute "Sherlock Jr.", "its length is mandated by its content and not the reverse." Though most of the word counts were no doubt predetermined to one degree or another by available magazine or newspaper space, the statement nevertheless applies to each of the separate entities which makes up "Natural Selection"--Giddins eloquently yet efficiently tells us much in amazingly few well-chosen words, and makes it fun to boot.

Whether writing on films, TV, music, books, or comedy, Giddins displays in this volume an impressive perspective and depth of knowledge about his subject matter. Within this compendium, the author gives thoughtful discussion to an array of diverse topics: ranging from Jerry Lewis's artistic standing to an evaluation of a Doris Day DVD collection, to a nostalgic discussion of the Modern Library book series, to the impact (or lack thereof) of the Frank Sinatra TV miniseries produced by the crooner's daughter.

Giddins is proof that a critic/reviewer/essayist can be astute, articulate, amusing, and exceedingly informative.

A great read.

You'd have to be Gary Giddins to find everything in this book of interest, and even money says that Giddins himself probably yawned his way through a couple of this collection's non essential items.

His discussion of Leo McCarey's SATAN NEVER SLEEPS, for example, misses the boat on most counts, and yet even at his least connected Giddins usually manages to insert something of value, and here he goes back to McCarey's sources for a solidly researched piece on Nobel Prizewinner Pearl Buck's connection, or lack of one, with the script of SNS. You keep hoping that Giddins will go on from there and pursue any of the wealth of ideas that this tidbit of info provokes in the reader, and yet he just comes to a halt and types -30- under his last line. Maybe being a high profile journalist for all those years was good for his writing in one sense, but word count trumps everything else in this kind of collection of occasional essays and prose.

The book's worth buying just for Giddins' inspired advocacy of nearly forgotten film legend Jack Benny at the beginning of NATURAL SELECTION, and for his read-through, just before the volume's end, of the 1940s and 50s comic book series CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED. On both of these topics he shines. Partly it's the newness of any cross cultural approach on these subjects, which have rarely been treated with the scholarly and humanist gloss he is noted for, but really it's because he writes out of enthusiasm, perhaps nostalgic affection for the young man who grew to love Benny against all odds, and the little boy who spent his spare time hunting down odd issues of CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED (like Mr. MIDSHIPMAN EASY or THE BLACK TULIP) in Brooklyn comic shops far from his Long Island home. I was a CI rat myself of a later period, when I didn't even know the comics had been discontinued, and whoever was selling them was basically just putting through the equivalent of "remainders," which led to some odd turns of events, like a flood of BLACK TULIPS in one month of 1972, but a veritable drought of issues that were, for Giddins, a dime a dozen almost literally. Giddins puts all this nostalgia for the garish and overstated into a powerful cultural perspective, showing how the canonical "list" format on the back of each issue of CI was part and parcel of a larger list mania perpetrated by middlebrow institutions. Nice work.

Taking nothing away from Gary Giddins' command of the English language or his encyclopedic understanding of the American cultural landscape, this collection of essays on music, books and film is nonetheless marred by some of the worst copy editing I've seen -- by Oxford University Press, of all publishers. In just the first hundred pages, the names of Brendan Behan, Jean Hagen, Henry Daniell, Darryl Zanuck, and Melvyn Douglas are all misspelled. With this many goofs, it's tough to focus on Giddins' insights; after awhile, one's attention is drawn (however unwillingly) down the page to the next name, expecting the worst.

I sincerely hope the hardbound version of Natural Selection sells enough to warrant a paperback edition; maybe by then Giddins and/or his agent will have insisted on better proofing.