The no-doubt-aging fans of the once legendary film criticism tag-team duo of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert have been done a solid by Matt Singer’s excellent study of their partnership, Opposable Thumbs, though I must say that the very best thing about Matt’s book is that inspired me to read Roger Ebert’s remarkable memoir, Life Itself, which has to be one of the most engaging autobiographies I have ever read—the first half, especially, a stunning montage of delights, the past recaptured, without all the, you know, long sentences!
But first things first, and Matt’s book deserves to be first, because he put me on the scent. Matt sets the scene excellently, depicting two literature lovin’ native Chicagoans (more or less) who might have expected to spend their lives lookin’ tweedy while sucking on pipes, sipping sherry, and contemplating Yeats. Yet both “found themselves” in the two-fisted world of the Chicagoland newspaper biz, for the Tribune and Sun-Times, respectively, back in the days of Mayor Daley—the real Mayor Daley—when men were men and Chicago was still Chicago. “Chance” made them both movie critics as well, and thus blood rivals, and then partnered rivals, neither particularly happy about the arrangement, but finding that their “passion”, not to mention their compulsive one-upmanship—entirely “natural” rather than rancorous or forced—was, well, box office! And they went on to make millions and become stars themselves! Hooray for, you know, Hollywood!
Both men, as Matt makes clear, were natural born winners. From their adolescence, or even earlier, they were always ahead of the rest, and had a remarkable gift for impressing their superiors, wherever they met them—both, for example, being offered the sweet job of watching movies for a living precisely at the time when film criticism—and American films—were going big time—the late 1960s, making their planned academic careers fade in a matter of a few years.
One of the many charming vignettes in Ebert’s autobiography is his description of his introduction to old-fashioned, “hot metal” journalism at the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois, from 1960 to 1964, where he served as editor in his senior year, “the best job I ever had.” The Daily Illini was a serious newspaper, a daily with at least 12 pages in each issue. Stories were typed into an old-fashioned Linotype machine, which converted them into lead type. Editing was done with a chisel. Ironically—or, well, not—it was the demise of hot metal journalism that ultimately led the way to both Ebert and Siskel’s careers.
In 1962, the New York City Newspaper Guild went on strike against the city’s papers, seeking both higher wages and a guarantee against the introduction of automated printing, which would have brought the old Linotype days to an end. The strike would last 114 days and prompted a wide-ranging number of “work arounds”, including movie reviews on local television by a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, Judith Crist. Crist was young (relatively), attractive, and intelligent. She had always wanted to review films, but the Tribune had never given her the chance. A producer on the Today show saw her and put her on national TV. Suddenly, the unknown Crist was huge. When the strike ended, Crist naturally became the Herald Tribune’s film critic.
The Herald-Tribune was the voice of Wall Street Republicanism in New York, rapidly losing ground to the more authoritative New York Times on the left and the more hard-nosed Wall Street Journal on the right. The Tribune sought to get to the left culturally of the Times, and Crist started taking deliberate pot shots at the bloated turkeys that Hollywood was still cranking out as a way to generate “controversy”, though her talent for invective was limited, to say the least. A “classic” Crist put-down was the following, applied to the hugely popular The Sound of Music: “The movie is for the 5-to-7 set and their mommies who think their kids aren’t up to the stinging sophistication and biting wit of ‘Mary Poppins’”—a “put-down” that, to my mind, comes up a bit short itself on both “stinging sophistication” and “biting wit”.
Yeah, Oscar Wilde it wasn’t, but to speak that way of Hollywood’s cash cow queen in 1965 was intense. Singer quotes Ebert as saying that the splash Crist made “led to every paper in the country saying, ‘Hey, we ought to get a real movie critic.’ When I got my job in ’67, that was still part of the fallout from Crist.” Interestingly, Ebert doesn’t say that in his own book. In fact, he never mentions Crist.1
Singer does an excellent job of telling how the pieces of what eventually became “Siskel & Ebert” came together—how their act originated on local public television, how the formula was shuffled to become a weekly in 1978 for PBS, how they took it to syndication in 1982, and how they finally took the jump to the big time in 1986, working for Disney and cashing in to the tune of $1 million a year (almost $3 million today). Even more remarkable, they enjoyed the almost unique privilege of routinely trashing all of Hollywood’s “great stars” in prime time and got well paid for doing so—something that made them the envy, of all the late-night talk show hosts who had (of course) to make nice to all their big shot guests, and were happy to engage in a little passive-aggressive “revenge” by featuring Gene and Rog heavily on their shows.
I watched Siskel & Ebert frequently over the years, though not “religiously”, and I didn’t care for their Oscar specials, when they dressed up in tuxes and lectured the “Academy” on its many sins, because, frankly, who gives a damn who wins an Oscar? The only way a pretend Oscar party is better than the real thing is that it’s shorter. Still, I must surely count myself a fan, for I enjoy watching the reruns now available on YouTube. Hell, I’ve even read two books about them!
Both Ebert and Siskel were remarkably literate men, with an immense appetite for “performance”, frequently attending live theater and “even” opera, in addition to viewing at least one film a day. They were devoted to the “international cinema” and constantly endorsed foreign films that surely 90 percent of their audience never bothered to see—in fact, could not see, because the films probably never played anywhere except New York and LA. The two had a great technical knowledge of film, often enjoying long discussions with famous directors, who proudly discussed their films in great detail, explaining every shot, every transition, every nuance. And with all that background, all that experience, it’s remarkable to me how rarely their critical judgment departed from the common herd.
They often liked terrible films. They adored the early “Dirty Harry” films of Clint Eastwood, drenched as they were in misogyny, racism, and homophobia—not to mention a phallocentric gun worship that swelled as grotesquely over time (one can unkindly imagine) as Clint’s own phallus descended. Eastwood strides through these films like a Catholic schoolboy who has just learned the Virgin Mary sleeps around—his lip permanently curled in an expression of infinite contempt, contempt for a world consisting entirely of wimps, sluts, and punks. If only he could just kill them all, every one of them, instead of just the punks!2
It's not surprising that both men were totally in the tank for all of the “great” gangster films of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, none of which I liked at all—all of them gratifying our all too human fantasies of brutal selfishness and “revenge”, something I’ve complained about on several occasions. They even liked Natural Born Killers, a repulsive blood bath that I did not see, Roger “explaining” that the film shows how the “media” glorifies violence. You know, Roger, movies are part of the “media” too, and this film most definitely glorifies violence, displaying the two “killers” as the only ones with the guts to express the homicidal “rage” that everyone else in America feels but represses—the phonies!
Worst of all—and this really is awful—both men fell over themselves with delight over Oliver Stone’s JFK, both making the most irritating claim imaginable, that whether the film was, you know, accurate or not, is completely irrelevant! The notion that accuracy of a film making such wild and false claims about one of the most tragic events in American history is somehow “beside the point”—that “aesthetic truth” trumps reality, particularly in this occasion—is something I find deeply offensive—a sophomoric, artsy-fartsy pose that is really alien to them both—most of the time.
The strengths and weaknesses of Gene and Rog are well depicted in the entertaining episode featured above, in which they talk about the films that inspired them to become film critics. Roger glows with delight as he discusses one of his favorite films—for me perhaps the most over-praised film of all time— Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris, a film almost as famous, I would say, for Pauline Kael’s hysterically over the top review—“Brando and Bertolucci have reinvented an art form!”—as for its own presumed merit, which, to my mind, is nil.
I deeply disliked the film even before I knew the unattractive though hardly unexpected backstory—that Maria Schneider felt sexually abused by Brando and Bertolucci when she was forced to participate in a rape scene that wasn’t in the script. The film was lazily manipulative from the get-go—Brando’s character given an all-purpose “tragic” past (his wife has committed suicide), while Schneider wanders around in a comically theatrical “waif” outfit. Brando improvises terrible dialogue—asked about his education, for example, he says he “attended the University of the Congo, where I majored in whale fucking”—which is what you get when you ask an actor to improvise. The second half of the film is simply stolen from Godard’s famous Breathless (À bout de souffle). Worst of all, Bertolucci writes himself into the film as a passionate young director who has a passionate affair with Schneider, a bit entirely tangential to the rest of the film! A director can get no lazier!
Okay, I guess I’ve been on a bit of a rant here, revealing my disappointments rather than my appreciation. What’s good about Gene n’ Rog? Lots of things, most particularly their constant high and good spirits, their constant fascination/competition with one another—“I’m amazed that you liked that film!” “I’m amazed that you didn’t like that film!” Gene is definitely the “needler” of the two— “The most competitive person I ever met,” Roger called him4—but Roger, though he often is the one who has to say “Okay, moving on”, manages enough winners to keep Gene at bay most of the time. The clip shown above ends with the two proudly shaking hands on their delighted discovery that both strongly disliked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Siskel claiming that his negative review of the film almost cost him his job.
Most “touching”, actually, for me is their honest aesthetic enthusiasm—“wonder”, even—when they discuss something they truly love. I most remember this with regard to Siskel. In his review of some adaptation of Dickens, his face glows with the fervor of a true Dickens fan (I am not one)—Mr. Pickwick! Mr. Micawber! The terrible Mr. Murdstone and the wonderful Mr. Dick! All the wonder and delight of childhood somehow “bottled’ and preserved forever!5 Siskel was similarly rapturous in his discussion of Disney’s Snow White—“Not just the kid stuff—we know that’s great—but the stuff for grown ups—when the wicked queen takes the magic potion to disguise herself [transforming into an ugly old crone and thus revealing her “true” nature], or when Snow White runs through the forest to escape and the roots and branches clutch at her!”
Watching their old reviews today is remarkably entertaining—to me, at least—as they banter and maneuver to outperform one another like high-spirited seals frolicking in the sea. At the same time, it is difficult not to feel sorry for them, spending so much of their time watching utterly worthless junk churned out by Hollywood’s “mega stars” like Burt Reynolds. They complain about this endlessly—the line “two hours of my life I’ll never get back” comes up frequently—yet of course they did not quit. No one is going to put you on national television and pay you a million dollars a year to review “the theater”, much less novels, or “art”, or even (shudder) “poetry”! Furthermore, they did have an “honest’ love of Hollywood—which I find a little embarrassing. They even thought John Wayne was a “great star”! Okay, we all have our vices, but that one is particularly ugly. In addition, both men, it appears, had swingin’ sex lives, something that Singer rather prudishly “forgets” to mention (along with Roger’s alcoholism), and being rich and famous never hurts with the ladies.
Both men had to endure sad and painful deaths, Gene dying well before his time of a brain tumor at age 53 in 1999, while Roger suffered terribly for years from cancer of the jaw and thyroid before dying at age 70. Whether or not anyone who didn’t watch the two in their prime will care, those who did should get some real satisfaction—and intriguing social history—from both Opposable Thumbs and Life Itself.
Afterwords—Roger Speaks!
Rarely is a book so well titled as Life Itself, for what we get is, to a remarkable extent, “Life”. While Roger does leave out a few things—such as an apparent affection for prostitutes—a great deal of what he includes has the very solid ring of truth. Was your dad your hero? Here’s Roger describing life with his father, who was the electrician for the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana:
On nights when a fierce thunderstorm would descend, the phone might ring. I would lie awake waiting for my father to say, “Come on, boy, the lights are out.” We would drive in the maroon Plymouth through the darkened streets to the power plant, a looming coal-smelling building that my father would enter with a flashlight and do something. “All right, boy,” he would say. “Stand by the door.” All of the lights on the campus would come back on, and we would drive home, me dozing in the car, although I could tell when we came closer, on Race Street, because the bricks rumbled beneath the wheels.
Roger calls his childhood “idyllic”, and his lengthy account rings true, but he acknowledges that, somehow, there was a serpent beneath that Eden, or at least human beings within it. His father had married his mother when he was 37. What happened before then? Well, he lived in Florida and ran a florist shop. He was an alcoholic as a young man but quit drinking when he married Roger’s mother. Roger knew almost nothing of this until after his father died, at age 58. There were, most likely, hidden stresses in the marriage—Roger’s mother, though not his father, was Catholic, but Roger was an only child. After Roger’s father died, his mother slid into alcoholism, and Roger did too, not quitting until 1979, when he was 37 and had been working with Gene for several years.
Ebert speaks honestly about his alcoholism—less so about his weight, which ballooned alarmingly at times. Two hundred pounds is fat; three hundred is upsetting. He must have hated all the lazy fat jokes that Siskel belabored him with during their appearances on late-night talk shows—a sign, I guess, of just how real their frustration with being saddled with one another was. It is almost laughable that Roger devotes a single chapter to the entire saga of “Siskel & Ebert”, which lasted almost 25 years and made him a hundred times more famous than he would have been as merely the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.6
Okay, this is getting a little dark. What I wanted to talk about is the fun and energy of Life Itself, the delight of getting to know Roger Ebert, the savorer of rare and delicate pleasures. Here he describes the Jamesian joy of being alone in Europe:
I walked out of the Martinez and was made uneasy again by the wind. So I turned inland, away from the Croisette and the beach, and walked up into one of the ordinary commercial streets of Cannes. I cut behind the Carlton, walked past the Hotel Savoy, and before long was at the little fruit and vegetable marketplace, at the other end of town from the big market. I took a table at a cafe, ordered an espresso and a Perrier, and began to sketch.
Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes not even once a year, and focused all my attention inward on a momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible. I would leave no track in this square, except for the few francs I would give to the cafe owner, who would throw them in a dish with hundreds of other coins.
Poor Strether7 couldn’t have put it better. And here is Roger stocking up in London for the very best in toiletries, stopping at
D. R. Harris the chemist, the oldest chemist in London, by appointment to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales. Miss Brown has been there for years, and I have always wanted to ask her for tea. There I buy a pot of their Arlington shaving cream,8 Wilberg’s Pine Bath Essence, Eucryl Freshmint Toothpowder, and a transparent bar of Pears soap.
Roger loved “old London”, which he naturally saw as being destroyed by “progress”, and anyone who can read his account of life in the now no longer existent Eyrie Hotel, built in 1685—the year, Roger notes, that the most unfortunate James II9 took the throne—without wishing that they had been the one feasting on “two fried eggs, a rasher of bacon, four slices of toast in an upright warmer, butter, strawberry jam, a pot of brewed tea, and orange juice”, enjoying the heat of a gas fireplace, reading the Sunday Telegraph and listening to classical music on the Beeb (aka “Radio 3”)—well, sorry, dude, but your soul, if you have one, is sadly devoid of romance. As for the rest of us, well, we’ll be joining Roger in “the largest bathtub I’ve ever seen”, enjoying the best shave of our lives courtesy of Arlington shaving cream, our plump bodies enjoying the warm, scented caress of Wilberg’s Pine Bath Essence. This, indeed, is Life Itself.
1. Neither Singer nor Roger mention the “real” critic of the late sixties/seventies, Pauline Kael. The Herald-Tribune folded in 1966. The paper had created a weekly supplement called, unoriginally, New York, which ultimately became the weekly still bearing that name. Crist was its first film critic, but left after a few years to become, surprisingly (to me), house critic for TV Guide, now forgotten but then the best selling magazine in the country, and, in terms of content, about as far west of the Hudson River as one could get. I suspect that poor Judith was basically run out of town by Pauline. I think she figured there was no way she could match Pauline’s heft, and it was better to take the big bucks and spend the rest of her career catering to Middle America.
2. Clint’s view of “humanity” had little improved by 2015, the year of the release of American Sniper, in which the “hero” explains to his young son that the world consists of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs—that is to say, wimps, punks, and Clint.
3. The one gangster film that I admire (a great deal) is Bonnie and Clude. The film does romanticize them, obviously, but they never “make it big” (though they do have chic wardrobes), and Clyde gets his brother killed, and the final “shoot out” is a slaughter, Bonnie and Clyde gunned down like helpless livestock.
4. Someone who knew Siskel at Yale said Gene was the most competitive person on campus, even worse than Bill and Hillary.
5. I always found Dickens’ characters a bit smaller than life, “cute” and predictable. I read Bleak House, supposedly his “toughest” book, but I just never felt the magic. An easy way to feel the Dickens magic is to watch the “classic” (and it truly is classic) 1935 MGM production of David Copperfield, with W. C. Fields as Mr. Micawber and Olivia Mae Oliver as Aunt Betsy. The film loses a bit of energy when little David grows up, and we have to say goodbye to little Freddie Bartholomew, but well, childhood’s end, and all that.
6. Ebert’s “tribute show” to Siskel was notably dry eyed as well. It seems not too much to say that Roger’s fierce industry after Siskel’s death, scarcely dimmed at all by the repeated tragedies he suffered due to cancer that left him almost helpless, physically deformed and unable to speak, was largely an effort to prove that he didn’t “need” Gene to make it on his own.
7. Lewis Lambert Strether is the hero of Henry James’s’ “late” classic, The Ambassadors. James often refers to him as “poor Strether”, an adjective that he often applied to many of his protagonists, who were, like James, largely onlookers on life, more often jostled by reality than grasping it.
8. “Arlington” refers to the scent, which Roger a bit misleadingly refers to as “flavor”. You can (or could) also get the cream in rose, lavender, lime, hazelwood, and almond.
9. Roger does not remark on James’s misfortunes—perhaps he’s too much of a monarchist to do so. James was so unpopular—he tried to take England Catholic—that he was driven into exile three years later in 1688—an event the English cleverly called the “Glorious Revolution” to cover up the fact that, had James not run away, England would have been invaded, and most likely conquered, by the Dutch “Stadholder” William of Orange, who became William III (the William and Mary guy) after James’s departure.
