![]() ![]() The work of directors such as Wilder has, through repeated TV screenings, gained in critical reputation. What are we to make of all this? Mark Cousins' final, most damning judgment on The Apartment was that "it's better on TV. He outines characters on paper - in dialogue, setting and situation - rather than in revealed behaviour." Quite apart from Wilder's "contempt for women" and "dislike of people", he considers him second rate because "Wilder was always a collaborator, a man who loved lines and stories more than pictures. It isn't a very visual film." Thomson makes the same point even more feelingly. ![]() His reasoning is that: "The Apartment is too much screenplay, too much soundtrack, not enough image track. His introduction to the published screenplay of The Apartment (probably, to my mind, Wilder's single greatest movie) waxes lyrical about the film before suddenly asserting that "the great, timeless, moving humanism of the picture. (Sarris later recanted, admitting that he had underrated Wilder grievously.)Įven the excellent Mark Cousins, a self-confessed devotee of the director, could not quite will himself to wholehearted admiration. (It was left to France's other main film magazine, Positif, to redress the balance.) Then Andrew Sarris famously drew up his league table of great film directors and consigned Wilder to the "Less Than Meets the Eye" category. It began with Cahiers du Cinéma back in the 1950s, when Bazin and Truffaut started to make an unprecedented critical song and dance about Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al, while resolutely ignoring Wilder. But over the years, I've grown more and more frustrated by the way the true high priests of film criticism won't admit Wilder to their pantheon. ![]() Well, perhaps it's an overreaction on my part. ![]()
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