Populist at the Movies

A visitor to O'Rourke's pub in Chicago's Old Town had no trouble recognizing most of the poster-size photographs on the walls: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw. But whose was the mildly cherubic visage staring out of the sixth photo? "Oh," said the barkeep without elaboration, "that's Roger . . . you know, Roger Ebert."

For those who don't know--a classification that nowadays excludes most of the population of Chicago--Roger Ebert is the young (27), brash film critic of the city's sprightly tabloid, the Sun-Times. Ebert's chatty, erudite reviews --abetted after hours at O'Rourke's by a repertory of trade union songs, trivia recollections and Irish anecdotes, boisterously rendered at a drop of Tullamore Dew--have elevated him to what Saturday Review Film Critic and Friend Arthur Knight calls "a cultural resource of the community."

Different Yardstick. The phrase fits. Ebert is a community critic; he is not, as he disdainfully phrases it, "an emissary from some outside theory of taste." He prefers "movies" to "films," and laments the fact that the "Princess Theater" in Urbana, Ill., has been renamed "The Cinema." The comforts of critics' screenings are not for him; he favors the "democracy in the dark" afforded by a packed theater where he finds himself happily ensconced as often as ten times a week.

Ebert's detractors accuse him of liking second-rate films more than he should. Nonsense, he says. "You can take any film and criticize it for what it is not. But I believe each movie has to be judged on the level of its own ambitions. If you try to apply the same yardstick to the new Godard and the new John Wayne [two of his alltime heroes], you're probably missing the point of both films."

By those criteria, he judged tick . . . tick . . . tick, a movie about a black man who gets elected sheriff of a Southern town, superior to Putney Swope, a raucous but innovative film about a black man who takes over a white ad agency. "I know that is heresy," he wrote. "I know Putney Swope is the currently fashionable put-down of the Establishment. I know . . . but just the same, you should have been there in the Roosevelt Theater Saturday night. There wasn't an empty seat. The audience accepted tick . . . tick . . . tick with joy, laughter and applause. And the laughter was affirmative; not that whining, angry, cruel laughter you hear during Putney Swope."

Such unabashed populism pervades many of Ebert's columns. He has castigated horror films for sending seven-year-olds into nervous tears and deplored an "obscenely brutal" hunting film presented as "family" entertainment. But Ebert can also defend the balletic, bloody violence in The Wild Bunch on the grounds that, like a child's mock shootout, it is "no more real than dozens of gunfights I have already survived in the company of Rex Allen, Hopalong Cassidy and John Wayne." Nor is he prudish when it comes to a well-turned dash of decolletage. "If there's anything drearier than a dirty movie with a false moral tacked onto it," he wrote of 491, "it's the false moral without the dirty movie."

Freelance Profiles. In fact, it was a letter he sent in praise of "the King of the Skin Flicks," Director Russ Meyer (Vixen), that eventually launched Ebert on a second, parallel career--as a screenwriter. Meyer answered the letter, the two got together, and Ebert was invited to collaborate on the screenplay of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a film that picks up where its namesake left off --and never looks back. "It's a camp sexploitation horror musical that ends with a quadruple ritual murder and a triple wedding," Ebert modestly explains. The writing was completed in six weeks, the shooting in ten, and the film is slated for a June debut.

Ebert is not waiting. In addition to an average of five reviews a week (distributed to more than 100 other newspapers) plus a Sunday "think piece," he does freelance profiles for the New York Times (Robert Mitchum, Gillo Pontecorvo, Lee Marvin, Groucho Marx) and Esquire (Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas and, upcoming, Lee Marvin revisited). The secret of his movie mania? Reading between the lines of one recent review provides a clue. "There once was a time," he wrote, "when movies were real. By that I mean they absorbed you so completely that you ceased to exist as an individual and literally became the hero of the movie you were watching. But that age passes when you're perhaps ten." For most reviewers, it does. Apparently not for Ebert.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.