THE SUBURBS OF CRITICISM

...The story remains as tearful and artificial as ever, but the Puccini score seems to gain a greater lyric economy...

...Giuseppe Campora sings Pink-erton to Nicola Filacuridi's performance...

...Movie audiences, for their part, have the problem of approaching movie criticism as if for an exchange of views, not primarily as a service to help them make occasional selections of what to see—and especially not as a source of ready-made comments to be used as ammunition in counter-battery clamors among the determinedly courant...

...The mass audience responds to movie advertising as it does to blurbs for toothpaste, cosmetics, refrigerators, and all the myriad products which are manufactured to be sold and advertised to be needed...

...By contrast, it is the heroic man of action, incarnating the virtues of mediocrity, and suspicious of the powers of the intellect, who effects the rescue of the heroine just before everything blows up...

...Moreover, the concern with boys who naturally tend to brutal homicide under strain and disappointment requires acceptance of obvious paranoia as a merely misguided motivation...

...But it is an error to define the parlous state of film criticism only in terms of ticket sales...

...The trouble, we may suspect, arises from a notion that entertainment is insignificant...

...The film is the result of an international collaboration, being sung in the original Italian, with voices matched to Japanese and Italian actors...

...Criticism is essentially a discipline of rhetoric, of persuasion...

...In fact, "the present low state of criticism of the movies" stems directly from an even lower level of concern on the part of the audience with the quality and meaning of what it sees...

...The difficulties of bringing opera to the screen are enormous, chiefly because of essential differences in conceptions of time...

...Conversely, too, he might have cautioned against the false paradise of conscientious agreement...

...The significance of Reis-man's disappointment with film criticism in theory and of the exhibitor's dubiety about its effects in practice lies in the exposure of the shallow depths of understanding of what films signify, and of what they do to us, individually and together...

...But the invisible force that destroyed the first expedition is still loose on the planet, evading all of Pidgeon's superior scien-, tific intelligence...

...The poor films, however, persist in prosperity, supported by the mass audience which rarely depends upon what critics have to say for more than corroboration of its attitudes...

...Some people, as Arthur Mayer has remarked, will do anything to encourage better films except buy tickets...

...But, with greater significance for the encouragement of quality, there are also lists of films which ought to have been seen, by people avowedly interested in filmic worth, and weren't, because those very people simply didn't go to the movies—despite strong critical encouragement...

...No matter how much people may use critical opinions as guides, critical judgment may not refer to commercial success or failure for proof of its validity...

...A familiar figure, in direct descent from the hallowed "mad scientist" character, is the man of superior intelligence whose very brilliance is destructive...

...For an understanding of a world dominated by popular attitudes—tyrannized, in fact, by "the revolt of the masses"—it should be obvious that the popular arts may be the most significant of all...

...The exhibitors may be forgiven their cyncism about the importance of serious criticism, even for the "mature" audience, so long as its primary effect seems to be the information of notions at third or fourth remove from any experience in the theatres...

...The screen adaptation by Carmine Gallone, who directed, is generally skillful...

...The pessimism about human nature, then, is tempered by romance, just as the potential destructiveness of man's works is sentimentally countered by the ingenious marvels which are shown...

...The Jerusalem of intelligent participation in the film experience, in fact, may be built only in "suburbs of dissent," where critics and audiences eternally disagree, as those who see for themselves eternally must...

...We may wonder whether this is cinematic realism, or perpetuation of what have become conventions of "problem" films...

...The girl and the robot are saved just in time, before the old scientist's agonized suicide leads to the destruction of the planet...

...The person becomes the creature of forces working upon him which originated in himself...

...This relation of the problems of scientific investigation of the impact of the screen upon behavior with the quality of aesthetic analysis suggests what is at stake-—not the cultivation of greater influence upon the selection of films to be seen, although theoretically this could in turn influence the quality of films that are made, if its ideal of power were realized...

...There is, however, the same dubious equation of causes and justification—as well as a similar savor of shock and violence for their own sake...

...In particular, we find a constant preoccupation with the inherent limitations of man's power to use knowledge constructively...

...On the stage, a singer may expatiate upon an instant's feelings without impeding the total movement, which is essentially musical...

...One more group of slum youth stereotypes is presented, out of the long tradition since Dead End, and there is by now standard portrayal of helpless and puzzled parents, somewhat reminiscent of Rebel Without A Cause...

...A happy ending, true...

...Orietta Moscucci sings Butterfly, played by Kaoru Yachigua...

...This pays heed above all to what someone has said, and then to what someone else has said about what the first person said, and so on and on, opinions about opinions, ideas about ideas, in the manner of the civilized conversations over cocktails in which only book reviews, and reviews of reviews, are discussed, to endless insignificance...

...He might have added that the critic's job, therefore, may be to feel guilty about what is done in the audience's name—even as the audience itself may disregard his agonized analyses, or use them to make change in the market place...

...The astonishing domination of the American theatre by the handful of New York newspaper critics can illustrate the extreme of what can happen when criticism directly affects the box office...

...The locale here is the streets, and the protagonist of decency is a social worker, rather than a teacher...

...A leading reason for its success may be the visual beauty of the production, filling the eye with impeccably composed scenes in color, while the music goes forward...

...The ordinary reviewer, then, becomes something like a quality control inspector at the end of a production line...

...What opinions may be expressed therein are at best "service" judgments as to whether audiences will enjoy this movie or that, and rarely refer to coherent or systematic standards of taste, filmic quality, or cultural significance...

...It may be disconcerting, but it is healthily humiliating for a critic to discover how little effect his judgments are actually having upon theatre attendance...

...Reporting the estimates of theatre operators throughout the country in November 1954, the survey concluded that critics' opinions have an appreciable effect on the box office only erratically, and then principally in cases of "art" films—a generic term comprising serious or unusual foreign films, documentaries, and others outside the regular commercial categories of the industry...

...Anna Maria Canali sings Suzuki, acted by Michiko Tanaka...

...its method is analysis, and its highest function is the enrichment of the interior conversation...

...Only Ferdinando Lidonni both sings and acts, as Sharpless...

...These are usually shown in small theatres catering to limited audiences...

...This version of the Puccini work is perhaps the most successful achievement of opera in film—although it is still slow-moving as film per se...

...Forbidden Planet...

...A French photographer, Claude Renoir, reproduces the graphic richness of the Japanese camera style...

...Reginald Rose's version of his television play about young proto-criminals in a city slum attempts an indictment of "society" and "the environment" in the manner of The Blackboard jungle...

...On the screen, long arias appear impossibly static, even with frequent cutting from long shots to close-ups...

...The images of the screen, in this case, envelop the thoughts and feelings of the people whose desires gave them birth...

...David Reisman suspects that ". . . the difficulties in qualitative analysis of the effects of films are not unconnected with the present low state of criticism of the movies as an art form...

...The Suburbs of Criticism By MARTIN S. DWORKIN THE most recent comprehensive survey of the influence of film criticism on movie audiences was run a couple of years ago, by the show business trade paper Variety...

...ing, as Socrates maintained, is that it really isn't lived at all...

...In one scene, the potential killer, John Cassavetes, expresses to the social worker, James Whitmore, a philosophy of adolescents in constant warfare against order and decency, picturing society as inspired only by fear of the young mobs...

...The great mass audience, the exhibitors said, judging from admission sales, pays little attention to film reviews, much less to serious criticism...

...This technological marvel, behaving like an ambulatory juke box, is the perfect servant, able to speak 187 languages, manufacture food, shelter, and clothing—and even has a "conscience" built in, which actuates a cybernetic breakdown if ordered to perform harmful acts...

...but a pessimistic moral, with Freudian overtones, out of the popular mythos about the dangers of too much brains...

...Those who enjoy paradoxes may be especially struck by what is implied for the relationship of critics and audiences...

...Of the hundreds of new films shown each year, long lists may be cited of those which were lacerated by the critics, yet drew multitudes to the theatres...

...It takes the triumphantly ordinary talents of the captain of the rescuing space cadets, Leslie Nielsen, to discover that the monster is actually Pidgeon's unconscious mind, drawing inexhaustible power from the 7800 levels of Krell reactors...

...The reason the uncriticized life is not worth livFILMS BRIEFLY Crime in the Streets...

...The search party from Earth that lands on the remote planet "Altaire 4," finds only two survivors of an earlier expedition, Walter Pidgeon and his daughter Anne Francis, living among the perfectly preserved technological marvels of a superior people, the "Krells," who disappeared 2000 centuries before man originated...

...The standards of the critic of films, as those of critics of any other aspect of culture, ought to provide leadership, to be sure—but not in the sense of the celebratedly typical revolutionary demagogue, who races after the mobs to find out where they are going, in order to lead them...

...One film director has written that "a true critic is the conscience of the audience...

...In this film, the latter are especially wonderful, thanks to those usually unsung originators of fantastic realism: the special effects men...

...But the sophisticated, discriminating moviegoers who consider critical opinions published in prestigious magazines before attending the current off-trail films in the "art houses" —and then so often don't go—may take small comfort from their vaunted independence of judgment...

...The critics have to work as if their readers will see everything on the screen anyway (an impossibility even for the critics): as if, in effect, they are truly literate in the medium, rather than merely well informed about what imputed experts have said concerning what they have not seen themselves...

...a prologue setting the scene and a running narration make the opera easier to follow than on the stage...

...Is Miss Bosom's latest scientifically-mixed, vacuum-sealed, fancy-packaged effort guaranteed as advertised...

...Madame Butterfly...

...If the film intends to present this view as mistaken, it actually makes propaganda for its truth...

...There is a certain deliberate imitation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with a hitherto unkissed Ariel —and a fantastic Caliban: a robot named "Robby...

...For all its air of playful fantasy, the science fiction genre is one of the most significant of all, in which popular attitudes concerning the most profound problems are symbolically represented...

...Insofar as the public is guided by brand names in its selection of what to patronize, it is entitled, we may suppose, to the traditionally "impartial" analysis by "independent laboratories" as to the wholesome uniformity of movie products...

...A great deal of film reviewing in magazines and newspapers, of course, is little more than an extension of the publicity and advertising apparatus of the movies...

...At their worst, they are not opinions at all, but mere summaries of plots, eked out by paraphrases of publicity hand-outs...