“For the past half century and more, it has been generally taken for granted that the director of a film is to be considered its ‘author,’ the individual who is primarily responsible for the film’s total effect, even when the weight of factual evidence pertaining to a specific film clearly indicates otherwise. Yet it remains unusual for the average American filmgoer to be able to name the directors of more than a handful of his favorite movies, and prior to the Fifties, when the ‘auteur theory’ became fashionable, it was far less common. For years, the only Hollywood directors widely known by name were those who, like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, also starred in the films they directed–and a mostly forgotten man named Cecil B. DeMille…”

“By now, the sounds and rhythms of the blues are so ubiquitous that they seem almost to be embedded in the musical DNA of the human race–in part because their origins have long been shrouded in what can only be described as romantic myth. Even when scholars with musical training write about the emergence of the blues, the results can be starry-eyed and frankly sentimental…”

“Who deserves to be considered America’s most significant classical composer? Concertgoers of a certain age will doubtless choose Aaron Copland or George Gershwin, the creators of the first distinctively American-sounding styles of classical composition, while more contemporary listeners are more likely to cite Philip Glass or John Adams, who made minimalism the dominant classical-music idiom of the postwar era. But if ‘significant’ is taken to mean ‘influential,’ then a strong, if seemingly paradoxical, case can be made for a composer who, for all the undeniable influence he has exerted on American music, failed to write even one work that has made its way into the repertoires of any well-known orchestra, opera company, chamber group, singer, or instrumentalist…”

“American artists have grown conspicuously uncomfortable in recent years about portraying the American Dream as anything other than a snare and a delusion, and they are still less likely to look to their own lives for proof that it is both real and desirable. Hence it is both surprising and revealing that the best-loved of all theatrical memoirs–and indeed, one of the best American memoirs of the twentieth century–should be a book by a man who not only lived the dream but also believed devoutly in its essential truth…”

“The battles in which Mamet’s characters are engaged, as one of them remarks in American Buffalo, the most archetypical (and artful) of his portraits of American life, are zero-sum games in which only one player can win: “It’s kickass or kissass, Don, and I’d be lying if I told you any different.” When these plays were new, this caused them to be read by liberal critics as indictments of the American dream in all its hideous falseness. But the plays themselves are not nearly so explicit…”

“The gap in quality between The Glass Menagerie and such later Tennessee Williams plays as Suddenly Last Summer and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is so wide that it is tempting to suppose in retrospect that his first success might have been overrated as well. But to see a revival of The Glass Menagerie is to be reminded anew that it is, indeed, as good as its reputation, one of a handful of American plays that can stand up to direct comparison with the permanent masterpieces of European theater…”

“Judging by the richness and intensity of Mitchum’s best screen performances, Charles Laughton could well have been right when he speculated that the star of The Night of the Hunter might have been worthy of the great classical stage roles. But in Hollywood, serious art is only made by ruthlessly single-minded men who are prepared to go to the wall rather than submit to the pressures of a collaborative process of creation that is founded on compromise–and Robert Mitchum, for all his considerable gifts, was never that kind of man…”

“Anyone who goes to the theater or to classical-music performances has long been accustomed to sitting among a sea of bald and gray heads. Even such technologically up-to-date enterprises as the closed-circuit opera telecasts transmitted from New York’s Metropolitan Opera House to movie theaters across America draw crowds consisting mainly of senior citizens. A sobering report issued in November has put statistical flesh on the bones of the anecdotal evidence of a looming disaster for the arts in the United States…”