Wilfrid Sheed nailed Roger Ebert, intentionally or not, in Max Jamison, in which he spoke in passing of a movie critic who was “the kind of man who said, ‘Whatever became of Anna May Wong?’ and meant every word of it. He had the true-blue, twelve-year-old Captain Ranger heart of a veteran film reviewer.”
Ebert, who died yesterday, was at bottom mainly interested in pop culture, something that I suspect is true of most people who write regularly about film, the ultimate mass medium. But he was genuinely responsive to high art as well, and if he was more a reviewer than a critic, he almost always had sensible things to say about the films that he saw. After you read his reviews, you knew pretty much what to expect if you went to see them for yourself, which is no small achievement.
He was, in short, the very best kind of middlebrow, an earnest enthusiast who took his work seriously. Though he never gave me the thrill of illumination that I get from reading Otis Ferguson or David Thomson or (sometimes) Pauline Kael, I rarely failed to profit from seeing what he had to say, and I profited in a diferent way from watching him die by inches in public, carrying himself to the very end with a courage and dignity that were admirable in every way. We should all be so brave when our time comes.
UPDATE: I ran across this quote from Ebert in one of his newspaper obituaries:
No matter what your opinion, every review should give some idea of what the reader would experience in actually seeing the film. In other words, if it is a Pauly Shore comedy, there are people who like them, and they should be able to discover in your review if the new one is down to their usual standard.
He practiced what he preached.
My brother recently sent me a copy of Life published on February 6, 1956, the day that I was born. Nowadays Life, which folded in 1972, is scarcely remembered save by senior citizens, and it was already in terminal decline when I was a boy. In 1956, though, it was still an immensely powerful publication, a tabloid-sized illustrated magazine that ran long, serious articles–it serialized The Old Man and the Sea and Winston Churchill’s war memoirs–but was mainly known for its photographs of the week’s news, which were shot by the likes of Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, and Gordon Parks.
As is so often the case with old magazines, it’s the ads, not the stories, that turn out to be most interesting in retrospect. Some of the products, like Campbell’s Soup, remain familiar to this day. Others are long forgotten. (Does anybody still use Vitalis Hair Tonic?) All, though, are plugged straightforwardly and without a trace of wit, much less irony: “The generous Sun–Some people worship it–all children play in it–and corn soaks up more of it than any other grain. (There’s a whole summer of sun in every kernel.) Then Kellogg’s flavors, flakes and packages it, calls it Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and gives it back to you every morning.)”
Needless to say, Life eventually caught up with Elvis, running a feature in August that took what the editors doubtless regarded as an even-handed view of his burgeoning celebrity: