Critic's Goodbye

After ten months as an emergency cinema critic for the New Yorker, waspy, wispy Wolcott Gibbs explained to readers of the Saturday Review of Literature why he will never again try to review movies:

"The cinema resists rational criticism almost as firmly as a six-day bicycle race, or perhaps love. . . . The common level of intelligence in the world is presumably that of the normal adolescent. . . . Ninety percent of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless and dull that it is preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum."

There are a few exceptions: ". . . documentaries, which have . . . only very limited opportunities to distort life; frank melodramas, which have nothing to do with life . . . and the occasional pictures, one or two a year at most, which defiantly photograph some recognizable fragment of our common experience and generally lose a good deal of money."

As for movie audiences, they believe that "anything is physically and materially possible, including perfect happiness. . . . [They are] a race of people who operate intellectually on the level of the New York Daily News, morally on that of Dayton, Tennessee, and politically and economically in a total vacuum."

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