University of Virginia Library

Letters To The Editor

Cinema Deserves Better Treatment

CD film "criticism" (I use
the word with hesitation) has
reached a new low in Carolyn
Lewis' February 5 review of
Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah
Johnson. In prose that is at
best pedestrian and at worst
incoherent, Miss Lewis has
assembled a mass of
misconceptions, factual errors
and heinous grammatical
crimes in a genuine insult to
the medium.

She writes of Bear Claws as
"an old mountain man who
hunts the "Grizzly" (played
marvelously by Will Geer)";
Mr. Geer must be a talented
actor indeed to take on the
role of a bear. She talks of
"societal morays" – morays are
marine eels and are not to be
confused with mores.

She says Jeremiah
"off-handedly inquires of a
soldier if the Spanish-American
War is over, and if so who had
won"; ignoring her dubious
juggling of tenses for the
moment, doesn't she realize
that Jeremiah asked about the
Mexican War of 1848 and not
the Spanish-American war of
1898? She credits Pollack with
dialogue written by John
Milius and reproaches him for
ignoring questions of
conservation and
encroachment upon Indian
territory which in fact are
totally irrelevant to the film's
specific thematic concerns with
human isolation and the
genesis of legends.

Such gross blunders would
be forgivable, perhaps, had the
reviewer written about the
film. As is typical of CD film
journalism, however, there is a
brief discussion of acting style,
a plot summary and a thematic
wrap up; little space is wasted
on the director's techniques of
shot composition, camera
movement and editing.

To judge by the standards of
her review, if Miss Lewis were
to be presented with a painting
of an historical event and asked
to analyze it as art, she would
spend all her time in a
discussion of the subject
matter and waste no wordage
upon the artist's techniques of
composition line and color.
Certainly a medium as
interesting and powerful as the
cinema deserves better
treatment.