Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Film

by John Simon

John Simon, The New York film critic, shares his decade long work in the business.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

466 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[manatee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh my God, this man is the most pretentious film critic ever to churn out a review. According to him, he is surrounded by dreck. He hates almost all movies and takes great pains to trash some real classics. He reviewed during the 1970's, a veritable golden age of cinema, when audiences were flocking to such thought provoking character pieces as Cinderella Liberty.
Some movies that Simon hates: The Deer Hunter, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, The Godfather, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Dog Day Afternoon, Raging Bull, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Last Detail and Fat City to name a few.

He is really crochety and uses 10 Dollar words when a simpler word would do much better. For example he insists on using edulcorate constantly. Why can't he just say " improve or sweeten"?

I am planning to finish reading all the reviews just because this book is like a mini vocabulary course. I have filled two pages with definitions of new words. For cinephobes only! I cannot wait to finish so I can throw the book against the wall!

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I generally detested John Simon's reviews in New York magazine, having learned 1) that they were almost always astonishingly vicious and 2) that he would tell you the ending. But for 25 cents I couldn't resist picking up this collection of his pieces on films in the 70's. The result is much as I expected: crisp, insightful writing to be sure as well as bizarre, wildly inappropriate rejoinders (a lengthy discussion of Barbra Streisand's nose; a comparison of Cybill Shepherd to Mussolini). It's interesting that even in the 70's Simon was writing like a grumpy old man, and the result was that, even in the creative heyday of American filmmaking, he didn't seem to like much of what he saw. A couple of critiques are amusing with our 20/20 hindsight - he finds Brando terrible in "The Godfather," for instance, and laments the wasted early promise of Woody Allen on his later films, "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan." But the book also offers some real howlers: Simon seems genuinely convinced that "Star Wars" is a subversive attempt to create a new religion for the day's youth (and I never thought to compare the name "Kenobi" to "cannabis") and is appalled that the audience "in one of our better theaters" found the campfire scene in "Blazing Saddles" uproriously funny. My shelves have a lot of books praising - and sometimes overpraising - the counterculture and later commercial films of the 70's, so it's nice to have a perspective from the other side. While reading, I just wanted to go back in time and reassure Simon that he should enjoy the movies now, because they're only going to get worse.

[O'Neal Sadler · Rating 5 out of 5]

He didn't like very many of what today we regard as "canonical" cinema. He was cold to Deer Hunter; thought "Apocalypse Now" was "the wrong choice" for a Conrad adaption ("Vietnam is too present"); loved Chinatown and yet wasn't impressed with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." It goes on like that for most of the selections. And yet for all of his clear contempt for what many regard as the stand out films of New Hollywood, Mr. Simon was eloquent or succinct, something modern film critics could learn to immolate. He could summarize what he loved--and hated--about a film in less than two pages. He touched on cinematography (hated it in "5 Easy Pieces") and costumes (name drops a few of his favorite costumers throughout).

Ecumenical without being dogmatic, Simon wrote essays like a film critic who took cinema seriously, even if they were not quite his cup of tea (thought "Shaft in Africa" was good; was "meh" about "Alien," but acknowledged horror isn't his bag), he understood that making a movie is not easy and the effort to make a "great" film is challenging enough without someone shooting potshots from the peanut gallery. His arguments were measured critiques of the underlying messages and ideas undergirding a movie. Assuming, of course, these movies ever had a message in the first place; but isn't that the point of a film critic? To explore themes, ideas, and ideologies hidden even from the artists? If yes, then Simon did his job well, and gave us some really insightful observations.

It's for that reason I enjoyed his reviews even if I did not always agree with his conclusions. We could use more critics like Mr. Simon in this world.

[Tom Stamper · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Simon is rarely satisfied with the movie they made. He generally wants them to make a different movie and many times wants them to have different actors. He will give faint praise once in a while like saying the Godfather Part II is superior to the first one because he liked DeNiro in it and hated Brando. He'll torpedo along and then hit something like Chinatown, a movie that he appreciates because he understands the conventions of the genre and how this rises above them. And still he'll have a couple of things he'd like done differently.

His review of Straw Dogs becomes an interesting discussion of movie violence and how it's only commented on when it happens in movies that other critics dislike. A lot of critics disliked Straw Dogs, therefore they gave a lecture on movie violence. Simon will also use Straw Dogs to answer Pauline Kael, whom he more of less agrees with on the film, but there are some minor points he wants to educate her on. Kael is mentioned in several reviews as are other critics named and unnamed. His reviews are as much a conversation with other writers as they are an education for the reader. Regretfully there is no review of Last Tango in Paris, and therefore no rejoinder to Kael’s glowing praise.

If there is a movie you didn’t like or don’t understand, John Simon will get to the belly of why it doesn’t work. He surprisingly never read Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, but he guesses correctly what Chandler was trying to do and how Robert Altman’s take on the book using the sullied Elliott Gould as his Marlowe is humorous but doesn’t work if the movie is going to be more than a spoof. When he says that Altman hasn’t made a good film since MASH, I remember having thought that with each of Altman 70s films. And yet, he praises Altman’s Nashville, a movie I was probably too young to appreciate when I saw it in the early 1990s. Reading the review makes me want to give it another chance during middle age.

Simon encourages the somewhat obscure director, Michael Ritchie, and he hopes to see big things from him, although we now know he didn’t deliver. Simon says Ritchie's Bad News Bears (1976) is a comedown from his earlier work, but then understands and mostly praises the story and the actors. Ritchie is trying to be commercial, and Simon is trying to be harsh and yet you realize Simon had fun despite his reservations. I think he respects Ritchie’s situational realness, something he shares with Altman.

Simon will hate most things you like and some things you love. He thinks Star Wars is slight, but the sequel Empire Strikes Back is nothing but pretension without depth. The idea of basing Apocalypse Now on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is idiotic to Simon although he is impressed with Robert Duvall as the mad Colonel. He is generally impressed with Duvall. He stands out in Godfather and The Great Santini.

A lot of actors he just dislikes. He sees James Caan without talent. He can’t stand to look at Barbara Streisand. Shelly Duvall baffles him. You have to go back 20 years to find a Brando that he likes. When a famous singer is assassinated in a certain film, Simon jokes that he could suggests of a couple of unnamed movies stars would make good targets.

Simon isn't the kind of critic you read to know whether you will enjoy watching the movie yourself. You read Simon because he educates you on the history of movies and literature and even music at times. John Simon was also a theater critic simultaneously to his film writing so he appreciates the actors and writers that work in both genres. If a movie is a play adaptation, Simon will have usually seen it’s Broadway performance and can compare and contrast the material.

This isn’t the genial Roger Ebert that wrote the occasional scathingly humorous review. Simon can be scathing and humorous much more often. If you don’t take it personally when he knocks your favorites, it can be funny and even educational. Reading his reviews alongside his contemporaries Kael, Ebert, and Andrew Sarris is a good way to think of single films in a broader way.

[Daddy Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simon is my second favorite film critic from the golden age (after Pauline Kael). Simon is a great (if a bit harsh_ critic but also a very entertaining writer. I learned a lot of high falutin', intellectual words by reading Simon in my youth.