Last year it was Andrew Sarris (see my post of June 21, 2012); this year it's Roger Ebert. Another significant loss to intelligent film reviewing has occurred.
I confess that when it came to appreciating Ebert, I was a late arrival. For years I was dismissive, mainly because of my first encounter with him in print.
The piece in question was an article, originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, which was reprinted in Reader's Digest, that dependable dispenser of conservative middle-American wisdom. The year was 1967. I was fifteen at the time; Ebert was twenty-four and only just starting his journalistic career. (Apparently it was among the earliest of his by-lined pieces to appear in the paper that would become his permanent professional home.)
The article was not a review, really, but an account of a matinee screening Ebert had attended of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The fellow attendees were mostly kids, aged nine or so, who thought they were going to see a conventional Hollywood horror film of the time. Of course, Romero's Pittsburgh-shot, independently financed, and slyly subversive gorefest (a key initiator of the changing directions in the genre) was anything but. The kids were severely traumatized, according to Ebert, and in my memory, he denounced both the makers of such garbage and the exhibitors who screened it.
Actually, Ebert liked Night of the Living Dead. He didn't say so in this particular article, but neither did he excoriate the movie as trash, as I had recalled. He did have a beef, however, with the theater operators and local authorities who deemed it OK (in the interests of commerce) for kids to see it.* In the closing paragraphs of his piece, he pointedly declared that "censorship is not the answer" but that some reasonable restrictions on who got into the theaters were necessary. (I may be wrong, but I think those final paragraphs were excised from the Reader's Digest reprint.)
In any event, as I aged into my twenties and grew a bit more savvy (and, dare I admit it, snobbish) about movies, the article stuck in my head—wrongly—as evidence of Ebert's conformist, stuffily moralistic, and not particularly sophisticated tastes. And after he became a TV personality offering those famous thumbs up/thumbs down judgments, I put him in the same box with such clueless wonders as Rex Reed and Gene Shalit. That was profoundly unfair. Ebert—though perhaps not the most graceful of prose stylists—was considerably more thoughtful and discerning than I had thought him to be. And as I learned, he was perhaps as devoted a cinephile as any who has ever lived: giving new meaning to the phrase "work ethic," he continued to pound out column after column even as he battled the cancer that took away his jaw and ultimately his life.
I'm pleased to say now that my copies of Ebert's books The Great Movies and Awake in the Dark are becoming increasingly well-thumbed. Pun intended.
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*The MPAA rating system was not in effect at the time.
