From The Dreaming Swimmer (1992), one of Clive James’s classic essay collections:
The best Hitchcock film was directed by someone else. Charade would not be as good as it is if Hitchcock had not developed the genre it epitomises, but Hitchcock could never have created a film so meticulous, plausible, sensitive, light-footed and funny.
Whaaaa? We saw Charade recently, and it was . . . really bad. I mean, sure, I’ve seen worse movies, and the acting was fine for what it was, but, no, I didn’t think it was “meticulous,” “plausible,” “sensitive,” “light-footed,” or “funny.” I’d describe it more as a movie constructed to have these attributes without ever actually achieving them.
So then this makes me wonder: What was Clive James thinking? And, more generally, how to react when someone you admire has different tastes than you?
Admittedly, this is not a major issue, what with the world going down in flams around us. Also, there’s an easy answer, which is simply that tastes differ!
But it’s not so simple.
Yes, tastes differ, but one reason I enjoy reading Clive James is that he has interesting tastes, and he explores his tastes. He’s not a cultural arbiter spitting out an In and Out list at the end of each year; rather, he’s an essayist using taste as a medium for the exploration of ideas.
As I wrote a couple years ago, I read Clive James because he’s entertaining and has interesting things to say, and this leads me to be interested in what he has to say, if you know what I mean.
So my reaction to James’s praise of Charade is not so empty. Unfortunately he’s not around to answer my question, and I haven’t seen anything else he’s written about that movie, nor have I read anything by him that would give me insight into this particular take of his.
It’s also relevant to this discussion that we’re talking about a minor difference in taste regarding a somewhat obscure movie—this is not an ideological dispute along the lines of, “I like Ezra Pound’s poems but I can’t handle him being a Nazi” or “Eric Hobsbawm was supposed to be a good historian but he was also a Communist.”
This can be generalized to when you have to get a group to agree on a policy of what is considered good taste. For instance, am the founder of a start-up. Till two years ago, there was no dress policy. Why? There was no need to have one. Then, as the company has expanded, we’ve expanded the hiring from just applied mathematicians, software engineers, etc., to many other “non-technical” (a term common in Silicon Valley) roles, which are unnecessary at a small company but somewhat necessary at a larger company. The result, women come to work looking as if they’re going to work out. A few employees only wore pajamas. One woman wore spandex shorts to highlight her collection of piercings.
So, a dress policy was necessary. This started a brawl about what is considered appropriate to wear to the office. So, to relate to the point of this post, people who were around my age (significantly older than the median age at the company) were okay with women wearing spandex shorts to work. Young women, who I thought I had very little in common with, were horrified that this could be considered appropriate dress for work.
This went on for months. No one could agree and I, the founder, didn’t want to make a dress policy that offended even one person. The result was that we agreed on a vague policy of broad ideas. For instance, you can’t wear a skirt short enough to see underwear if you touch your toes (very short skirts were very common). You can’t wear what you wear to go to sleep. You can’t wear see-through clothing, etc.
““I like Ezra Pound’s poems but I can’t handle him being a Nazi” or “Eric Hobsbawm was supposed to be a good historian but he was also a Communist.” ”
Interesting. I think the Third Reich developed the jet engine and the precursor of the ICBM, but that didn’t stop the US from adopting and exploiting both. Nor was the USSR abashed about adopting atomic weapons even though they were created by filthy Kapitalists. And despite the fact that, apparently, the Hermit Kingdom teaches it’s children that Americans will eat them, it hasn’t shied away from whatever American technology it manage to get its hands on. Why is literature different?
Anon:
The difference is that literature is individual and personal. If I want to fly to a faraway city, I’ll take a jet plane–that’s the way to do it. The U.S. and other countries want atomic weapons as defense and deterrence. Even if you don’t enjoy the plane or enjoy the bombs, they do their function. In contrast, literature is a personal choice, and it can be hard for some people to enjoy or get much out of a work of literature if its author is problematic enough. That’s just the way it is; it can be hard to ignore the source of a work of art in the same way that it can be hard to taste a food if it is accompanied by a bad smell. As for historians, it seems fair enough to say that Hobsbawm had strengths as a historian but we can still question the historical judgment of someone who was a lifelong communist.
I guess you’re making a statement about the value of art (literature) vs technology. The value of art is so small that it costs nothing to ignore art that has even a remote connection to something we find distasteful. The value of technology is so large that we wouldn’t think of it them up because the inventor had some behaviors or beliefs we don’t like. I mean I dobut you’re going to reject medical treatment based on genetics because James Watson participated in the discovery of the structure of DNA, even though you’ve indicated disapproval of his behavior. The potential value of those treatments is very high. OTOH, even if he wrote the greatest work of fiction ever, you could ignore it without cost to yourself, becasue even the greatest work of fiction has almost no unique value. It can be replaced by any other work fo fiction.
That’s interesting. I wasn’t thinking of it that way at first but that’s how it shakes out.
Another example would be that some people don’t like some behaviors practiced by George Washington, so they can easily dispose of any art of or about him with no personal cost. But most of them probably would not want to dispose of the “social technology” – the system of economy and government – that he played such an outsized roll in creating.
Anon:
Just to be clear, I personally have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy to read books written by people who’ve done things I find distasteful. I appreciate the poetry of Ezra Pound and might well appreciate the history books of Eric Hobsbawm, even though I strongly disagree with their political views. In my post I was just pointing to the fact that some people do find it difficult to get around such things.
“In my post I was just pointing to the fact that some people do find it difficult to get around such things.”
Sure. But I do think it’s interesting that people – presumably myself as well – find it harder to get around what they percieve as a negative association with a product when the product has little value to them and they can easily do without it. OTOH, they’ll readily ignore the negative association when the product provides them with enough value.
You could possibly construe that concept to characters in fiction or even history, right? It’s not unheard of to have a character that has flaws that repel us but ultimately wins us over with some other character trait – that is, eventually we find they have character traits that provide us with some sense of value.
Getting back to your previous thread perhaps that’s another way to look at what stories, in whatever format, are “believable”: the stories that provide us a sense of value are more believable. In LOTR the characters are lovable and the heros win. There is value in believing that lovable characters will win the day against evil.
Anon: I don’t see why it has to be “readily ignore.” And I say this as someone who largely ignores all negative associations — in art or in technology or in government. I’m pretty much a “whatever works” guy, the sole exception coming when I know I am indirectly funding something I find noxious. Even there — it’s a cost-benefit calculation. In those cases (rare for me, common for many) it always seems to me that there is a cost to consumption (reading, owning a Tesla, voting for some party) that could, at least in principle, overcome the personal value of consumption. Both the direct consumption value and the negative associations are denominated in Andrew’s least-favorite concept: personal utility.
A simple example: the founder of Chik-Fil-A donates to causes that do not align with many people’s. Each individual has to decide how tasty and substitutable Chik-Fil-A is in their diet versus how much they want to deprive the founding family of funds, either for symbolic or some actual quantitative reasons. It doesn’t mean anyone is “ignoring” the negative association if they choose to eat Chik-Fil-A…. it just means that the negative association isn’t large enough to change their minds.
That’s funny about Charade. I saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s a few years ago because of the hype.
The only takeaways were: the main character was a sociopath who’s supposedly likable because she’s cute, and as an actor, Mickey Rooney was no Meryl Streep. I didn’t get it. Still don’t get it.
If Clive James saw Charade when it came out as a twenty-something (still in Australia?), then the glamour of Hollywood and the old-world charm of Paris probably affected him somewhat differently to someone in late middle-age watching it 60 years after it was released. Maybe that’s enough to rationalise the difference?
Something like that has to be case. Or more generally, the strengths and flaws were as obvious back then as now, but what changes is the mix of flaws the audience is willing to overlook.
Otherwise the popularity of some of these classics is inexplicable.
Very true. As a personal example I rewatched, or tried to rewatch, Ghostbusters recently, but couldn’t really get over the fact that Bill Murray’s character is an aggressive sex pest (and that this is apparently humour). I imagine that’s something that the audiences of the 80s were accustomed to however.
I have to disagree on that example. Our era is defined by a weird combination in regards to sex. On the one hand the most extreme perversions and kinks have been normalized, applauded, and celebrated. But on the other hand, an extreme form of Neo-victorianism has taken over, especially in the workplace or university, which makes even recognition that sex exists a severe crime requiring societal banishment.
In Ghostbusters, normal guys liking normal girls and flirting with them to get normal ends, comes across as oddly quaint. Wholesome even.
*The Dreaming Swimmer, I assume, not that I’ve read it.
Fixed; thanks.
I have thought idly a few times that ratings of movies might be best represented as a multilevel model (movies nested within people). It would be cool to partition the variance and see what percent of the variance is attributed to movie (more objective features of goodness) vs people (e.g., personal taste).
Surely someone has already thought about or done this, but not so easy to search up.
Sean:
Yes, that’s an item-response model and it’s indeed been done. My only correction to your comment is that movies and people are nonnested factors.
I was thinking about a design like having each person watch multiple movies.
So like, pick 20 movies and each person watches and rates all 20. So movies would sort of be like repeated measures nested within people like with participant ID being level 2, and movie being level 1. So like:
lmer(rating ~ 1 + (1|ParticipantID))
But perhaps my usage of the word is still wrong; terminology is pretty inconsistent in the world of linear mixed models, I find.
Sean:
The simple model would be something like rating ~ (1 | participant_id) + (1 | movie_id), so two non-nested factors. We actually have a simulated-data example of this sort in the forthcoming Bayesian Workflow book.
Andrew, who besides you thinks Charade is “really bad”? I checked some of my go-to reviewers: Jeffrey Anderson (Combustible Celluloid), Derek Winnert (derekwinnert.com), Glenn Erickson (DVD Savant), Dennis Schwartz (Ozus’ World Movie Reviews), myself (I was only twelve when I saw it in the theater, but I can’t claim my critical judgment has improved since). They mostly liked it, some called it excellent. Nobody panned it.
As for your question, about “how to react when someone you admire has different tastes than you,” I assume you will agree that the only reaction is to petulantly call them an ignorant clod with a lot to learn about taste, then go on admiring them on every other subject.
William:
It wasn’t just me. The whole family watched it, and we all thought it was bad! The most relevant comment on this thread perhaps is from Olip above, which is that the movie could’ve seemed to be the height of sophistication when it appeared, but it maybe isn’t so watchable from a modern perspective, especially if you go into it expecting to see something on the level of a top Hitchcock film.
And, yeah, I’m not saying that my family’s taste is better than that of Clive James; it’s just different. Nobody in this thread, myself included, is being “petulant” or calling James “ignorant” or “a clod.” Nor would anyone suggest to “admire James on every other subject.” The point of the above post is that, given that James is often so thoughtful, I wonder what he was thinking in this particular case. If he were around, I could ask him. As it is, I can only speculate.
OK, good point. But with so many other reviewers saying things like, “Charade is a great film, one worth turning around and rewatching right away” (David Blakeslee, Criterion Reflections, 2013), “gleaming gem of a stylish, effortless black comedy thriller” (Derek Winnert, 2014), “excellent” (Glenn Erickson, 2004), “a flawless entertainment that totally whisks us away” (Jeffrey Anderson, undated, but after 2010), and “a smart Hitchcockian thriller based on the brilliant screenplay by Peter Stone” (Dennis Schwartz, 2019), you could ask one of them for clues to why your reaction might differ from Clive James’s. At the least, they might illuminate the “inexplicable.”
Sorry to hit the wrong note with my second paragraph. Around here, “ignorant clod” is a term of affection. I keep forgetting that my family may not be representative.
William:
I checked out the review by Jeffrey Anderson, and . . . wow! I remain baffled. He seems to be talking about a different movie than the one I saw. My best hypothesis here is that one’s view of the movie has to depend a lot on one’s frame of mind when seeing it, kind of like how taste in food can be affected by all sorts of extrinsic factors.
Comparing ‘Charade’ with ‘North by Northwest’ is the same as likening a marshmallow to a diamond.
Alan:
Agreed! That said, I rewatched North by Northwest a couple years ago and I was surprised at how big its plot holes were. Hitchcock’s movies are (rightly) known for their suspense, not for airtight plots.
Perhaps Hitchcock should be seen as even better at humour than suspense.
“Why is that crop duster dusting where there aren’t any crops.”, The Birds, his droll humour in the TV shows, etc.
Whatever, I never “got” Audrey H., but everything (well, almost: I didn’t like African Queen) Katherine H. did was magic. But the Japanese seem to only know Audrey H. (or at leasrt to be inexplicably fixated on her). Go figure. (Speaking of AQ and Bogart, I didn’t like Bogart’s Sabrina, but I really enjoyed Harrison Ford’s remake. Remakes almost never work, so I was (perhaps overly) impressed.
Movie trivia quiz: what film is the line “Parallax? Let me see. Oh, blonde pasallax.” … “No, brunette paralax.” from? (Hint lovely light French comedy with a truly horrifically bad American remake.)
I’m halfway though the Oxford Univ. Press “Film Noire: A Very Short Introduction”, and it was fun to start, but it’s feeling like a list of films that I haven’t seen (and probably won’t since I need Japanese subtitles) and authors I mostly haven’t read, and I doubt I’ll get back to it. Had it been focused on a smaller number of movies and authors, I’d maybe have liked it better, but the author’s a real fan, to the point that just about anything shot in B&W is “film noire”. Of course, as a B&W fan, anything shot in B&W starts out with a big head start.
>and probably won’t since I need Japanese subtitles
An awful lot of classic BW films are freely available on YouTube with English subtitles (where required).
Hitchcock referred to these as ice box moment, plot holes that hit you later that night when you’re rummaging through the fridge for a midnight snack. NxNW has quite a few.
Mark:
Maybe there’s also a difference between seeing a movie in the theater or on scheduled TV vs. seeing it on video. There could be some way in which plot holes are more noticeable on video because video watching is a more dispassionate experience than watching in the movie theater or even in scheduled TV, where it’s coming past you just once. When I saw North by Northwest on video a couple years ago, I still liked it, but the plot holes seemed to leap out at me in a way that they did not when I watched it on scheduled TV as a kid. In the recent watching, these holes were not “icebox moments” as there was no delay between the plot hole and my noticing it. Now, you could say that was because I’d seen the movie before, but I don’t think that was it.
Regarding Charade, I was surprised to see the reviewer give such a positive review to Matthau’s performance. Matthau shouted his way through Charade as he did in The Bad News Bears and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; I just that style worked much better in those two other movies, which in my opinion are both classics. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is particular impressive in that it was carried entirely by the plot, the cinematography, and the music; there were no interesting characters. Matthau, Shaw, etc., played their parts well, but their characters were zero-dimensional. Again, this is not really a criticism of the movie: just as a great script can be made from great characters with no real plot, in this case it was the reverse, that the plot and direction were so strong that characterization was not needed. I guess the movie would’ve been even better had the script made the characters themselves memorable, but it was just fine as it was.
Also, I was amused to see the French title of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: “Les Pirates du Métro.” That’s about right, actually!
Joseph Sargent was a terribly under-recognized director with a wonderful gift for creating a sense of place. I was always impressed that the same guy could make one of the great NYC pictures with Pelham and capture the Mississippi Delta perhaps better than any other film maker with White Lightning.
A major part of the charm of NxNW for me has always been (as someone who has seen it _at least_ half a dozen times) is the way everything is so precisely paced that, on the one hand there is never a pause where you could to step back and think ‘this makes no sense’, while on the other, it never feels hurried. I have always assumed that that was consciously Hitchcock’s idea.
Normally, two people’s taste will not coincide (or diverge) completely. Picture a Venn diagram: you would expect people with similar preferences to agree on 75%, not 100%. I don’t always agree with all of my own preferences from 1992.
Jonathan:
Indeed. The point is not that Clive James is not in 100% agreement with me; we should’t expect that to be the case! The point is that I’m interested enough in James’s thinking that, in those settings where our opinions diverge by so much, I’d like to understand why.
Charade is a very well reviewed movie (add Maltin to the list 3 1/2 stars. NxNW gets 4) and it got better notices at the time than any Hitchcock film of the decade (Obviously there’s been a big critical reassessment of the Birds and a huge shift on Psycho, not so much with Topaz and Torn Curtain). I’ve always been less of a fan though I like it more than Andrew did.