The Forgotten Film Criticism of Vernon Young

Many years ago, as an English undergraduate with interests in literature and film, I noticed that most critical writing in the humanities was a blend of jargonized pseudo-profundities and misdirected social agendas. This kind of “criticism” had been de rigueur in the academy for decades. I soon realized that even in the public sphere, in that fabled meeting place between the Man of Letters and the Common Reader, criticism was in danger of degenerating into little more than celebrity chit chat, fanboy panegyrics, product promotion, or, perhaps worst of all, activist outrage. It seemed to me that the decline of critical standards was most evident in the domain of film criticism, where two thumbs up or down, a tomato deemed rotten or fresh, and total box-office returns had become the measure of a movie’s success or failure. Where was one to turn for the real thing?

Searching for literary criticism of the first rank, I had turned to the past: Dr. Johnson and William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold and Paul Elmer More, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell—despite their vast differences, they all struck me as principled critics who wrote seriously and lovingly about literary art. I took the same approach to film criticism, and I found myself drawn to a variety of penetrating viewers, including James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, and the neglected Charles Thomas Samuels (also a brilliant critic of Henry James’s fiction). But it was an accidental discovery, made one day while I was digging through a box of free books in the English department hallway, that made the most lasting impression on me. I yanked from the box a tattered hardback titled Vernon Young on Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art. Who was this Vernon Young? Why hadn’t I heard of him? Why hadn’t anyone else, for that matter? Surely his was one of the most eloquent and original voices ever to comment on the art of cinema. I was enraptured. On every page a cultivated mind, possessing true sensibility and style, was before me in full glory.          

Only the bare minimum is known about Young’s personal life. Born in London in 1912, Young came to the United States in 1924 and became a naturalized citizen in 1936. Completing a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, he did some graduate work at Harvard. He went on to travel widely throughout America during the 1940s and 1950s before moving to Italy for two years. Young finally settled in Stockholm, an experience which helped him develop his thinking on Swedish cinema. We also know that he tried his hand at novels, worked in radio and theater as a director, and acted in the movies, appearing in a couple obscure films during the late 1950s. Married and divorced three times and having fathered no children, Young, according to Bert Cardullo, “died almost alone [in 1986], without family and with few friends.” As dispiriting as this sounds, we ought to take heart in the singular voice we read on the published page. Young’s out-of-print books—especially On Film (1972) and The Film Criticism of Vernon Young (1990), the two collections from which all of Young’s quotations in this essay are drawn—are magnificent contributions to film criticism and Anglo-American critical tradition as a whole. Young’s work shows us what film writing of permanent value looks like. Rarely has a critic and his criticism so urgently called for rediscovery and, one hopes, republication. 

Young was a critic in the best sense, the old sense: he tried to evoke the quiddity of each work he encountered, basing his principles of judgment on a lifelong immersion in Western high culture. From the European art-film explosion of the ’50s and ’60s to the ascendancy of the American New Wave in the ’70s, Young wrote on film for the Hudson Review and other publications. It was a time when cinema dominated cultural conversation; Andrew Sarris, Richard Schickel, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, John Simon, and Stanley Kauffmann were just some of the critics involved. Young never attained their stature in film circles, though his criticism rivals Simon’s and Kauffmann’s—and quite surpasses the others’—in erudition, perception, and originality of expression.

He was, viewed from one angle, a critical rugged individualist. But in spite of his strong personal style, his convictions and his crotchets, Young respected the communal and collaborative nature of the critic’s vocation: “A critic, however footloose, however unimpeded by editorial tyranny, local prejudice, or fashions whipped up at film festivals by influential journalists, is a member of a community somewhere, or, fragmented, everywhere. He is a man talking to other men; else he is a voice in the wind.” All serious criticism is a cultural conversation, a complementary and potentially cooperative exchange of perspectives, even when animated by robust (and sometimes cutting) disagreement. T. S. Eliot, in “The Function of Criticism,” knew that the critic “should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks—tares to which we are all subject—and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible in the common pursuit of true judgment.” The individualistic and opinionated Young never disavowed the wisdom of the common pursuit.            

As a man of exacting standards, Young was often frustrated with the cinematic expertise he saw lavished on undeserving films, but he held out hope for the medium’s artistic promise. Young believed that film, no less than literature and the other arts, had the power to instruct and delight, to help us transcend our limitations by enlarging our small shares of consciousness and experience. Cinema, he wrote, “brings us not simply a world we never made but worlds we would not otherwise glimpse. It compensates us for all those lovely dawns we slept away, the sycamore trees under which we never awakened, the rivers we never crossed, the fugitive friendships that never ripened, the Southwest canyons or Bavarian churches we never reached.” He was aware of film as a comprehensive art, a form borrowing from and, to a large extent, dependent on other forms. For Young, the film critic had even more of an obligation to be, as Eliot remarked of the ideal literary critic, very intelligent. He understood that knowledge of movies alone is never enough to think and write well about such a dynamically mixed art.

Young likewise understood, and was at pains to persuade his readers and fellow critics, that there are things only movies can do, the visual and aural rhythms intrinsic to the motion picture: “The synthesis which we call a motion picture is finally something quite different from the media which combine to supply its elements.” Young is everywhere alert to the fundamentally cinematic aspects of the form. Take his keen assessment of D. W. Griffith’s use of montage in Intolerance (1916): “Intolerance moved, with energy, suppleness, and variety astonishing for its time; it moved by way of coordinated, counterpointed, and juxtaposed images to a polymorphous finale in which the several motifs were consummated in weird but conclusive wedlock.” Or consider his apprehension of Akira Kurosawa’s visual virtuosity in The Hidden Fortress (1958): “[Kurosawa] cuts brilliantly from latitudinal compositions to those aligned diagonally, uses depth of field and . . . concentrates one’s obedient eye no less on two or three figures within engulfing space than on a compactly seething mass in the torch-lighted gloom of the earthworks prison.” Or note the lyrical yet precise way he describes the compositions in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960): “[T]he moments hang, the passages of an hour are gravid with expectation; waves of emotion crest but never break; each image threatens to disclose a monstrous withheld truth or to discharge an act of violence forever hinted at but always suppressed—heat lightning without thunder.” Antonioni’s films, Young concludes, “have invaded the domain of painting with no loss of cinematic character.”   

Yet Young was not fooled by technical bravura for its own sake, any more than he was by provocative subject matter undisciplined by artistry. If he judged a film as unworthy, he was sure to raise a fuss; his prose become a lethal combination of refined wit and old-fashioned horse sense. Blessed—or perhaps cursed—with the truth-telling penchant of a born critic, he never minced words:

Early, I learned to be undiplomatic on principle. To be a critic is to be prepared to say no to anyone. When, for the first time, an exhibitor fixes you with gimlet eye as you leave the screening room and asks, with a soft threat in his voice, ‘Well, what did you think of the movie?’—this is the moment that determines how well you are going to live with yourself henceforth. You must answer him, if this is your opinion, ‘I think it was trash!’

While many critics of the time sacrificed their judgment on the altars of apotheosized filmmakers, Young desecrated some of the era’s most sacred icons.

That darling of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, was one among many to fail the Youngian acid test. Here is our critic’s rebuke of Godardian “technique:”

When in doubt, commit every solecism formerly eliminated by trial and error in film-making; fix the camera immovably while two characters talk interminably; flout anticipation by cutting within a scene or from a scene at the least judicious moment; disdain amenities of lighting and any thought of balancing textures or sound levels of diverse episodes; choose the least esthetic of optional compositions, as well as the roughest of your ‘takes’—and drain every gag unmercifully. This patently destructive principle reveals the desperation of a barren yet egocentric movie-maker as surely as action painting, pop art, and happenings have reflected creative bankruptcy in those fields, together with the same reflexive contempt for an audience foolish enough to insist on a structure of meaning.

This is stern, unfashionable—and absolutely right. Young places Godard’s films in the company of “action painting, pop art, and happenings,” exposing the fraudulence of them all in one fell swoop. Godard’s formal anarchy, his flouting of the decencies of cinematic order, helped advance a glib and immature conception of creativity that has since established itself as dogma in many of the arts. Young never followed the critical herd in praising the latest fashions. As he wrote elsewhere, “The ill-concealed desire to stop our mouths and neutralize our discrimination is a common symptom of insecurity; self-confidence never attempts moral blackmail.”     

Young certainly does not “stop his mouth” in “Long Voyage Home with John Ford,” one of the most boldly heterodox pieces of film criticism I know. It will prove a painful read for Ford fans (and I count myself among them), but it demands reflection. Young challenges the opinion of Ford as a visual genius, arguing that the director, like most commercial filmmakers of the time, “maintained the picture-frame or stage-set composition.” In Young’s view, Ford “neither introduced nor developed a vitally differentiating style,” directing his most esteemed pictures “when the major experiments in creative movie-making had long been consolidated.” Although the essay is finally unpersuasive—it is too critical of things Ford gets right and not critical enough of what he gets wrong (like the insufferable slapstick that maims so many of his films)—several of Young’s criticisms are justified.

It is not Ford’s cinematographic sensibility alone that Young questions; it is the easy sentimentality of his storytelling: “Ford has never tackled subject matter that would disturb your maiden aunt.” Sparing only My Darling Clementine (1946)—a movie that “showed Ford at his visual best and suggested a latent charm he has nowhere else freely expressed”—Young proceeds mercilessly, denouncing what he sees as the schmaltzy and stale content of some of the director’s most beloved films. The Long Voyage Home (1940) “survives as a curiosity of misbegotten earnestness, heavy-handed and sentimental”; The Informer (1935) suffers from an “essential vulgarity of treatment” and Victor McLaglen’s “clumsy overacting”; The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is a “perfectly safe” and “glossy” version of Steinbeck’s bleakly naturalistic novel. “No one of these films,” Young asserts, “radically challenged an artistic or commercial status quo.”

He goes on to summarize, not entirely unjustly, what he sees as Ford’s shortcomings as an artist:

[Ford] has never voluntarily chosen a milieu in which it was feasible to depict a complex motivation or subtle aspiration, or where it was pardonable to question a socially unified shibboleth. The church, the family, the troop, and the forecastle are his emblems. Cowpokes, western cavalry, deckhands, and ‘Okies’ may well represent his democratic affinities; also they suit his psychological limitations, his flair for tribal allegiances, and his allergy to the ironic. . . . In the last analysis, where the close observer of popular film art should resent being stranded, Ford’s world is mindless, inartistic, and calculatedly false to cultural realities.

But Young ignores—or, worse, fails to see—the “complex motivations,” “subtle aspirations,” and shattering ironies of The Searchers (1956). He never mentions the rich suggestiveness Ford establishes through his compositional arrangements, such as we detect in the marvelous doorway shots bookending the film. Another problem is that Young does not examine The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a film in which Ford ironically undermines his usual approach to the Western, leaving the audience with a disillusioned vision of a vanishing frontier. To be sure, Young could not include a discussion of Liberty Valance in the original 1957 essay. Yet the writings in On Film were republished in the early ’70s, which should have given the author time to revise the piece or add footnotes about the director’s later works. Nevertheless, the essay is a valiant attempt to deflate some of the inflated rhetoric surrounding Ford’s achievement.

Young was much more than a consummate naysayer. If he hated the ugly and the false, he also loved the beautiful and the true. His powers of discernment were arguably at their height when evaluating international cinema. Consider the following, impeccably articulated, insights. Young declares Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) a “film exceptional for the quality of its rhythmic structure,” for the musical “urgency of the zither,” and for the “unreal reality of war-stripped Vienna,” attributes which “give the whole film a percussive fluency, like a plausibly scripted nightmare.” He lauds Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953) and La Strada (1954), the latter of which is “metaphysically astounding; longitudes of implication extend as awesomely as the ocean, on the strand of which it begins and ends.” Concerning Ingmar Bergman—about whom he would later pen some of his most scathing criticism—Young writes reverently of Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), noting the director’s “hellish understanding of what goes on, psychically, between male and female,” while recognizing in the scene of the clown’s humiliation “[o]ne of the most creative passages in film since the great Russian experiments of the twenties.” Forbidden Games (1952), René Clément’s masterwork, is carefully judged “the most extraordinary blend of tragedy and ferocious comedy ever achieved in the history of film-making.” And Alf Sjöberg’s adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1951) is a film whose “sophistication is equaled by its cinematic lucidity: it is incontestably visual—a sensuous masterpiece—while essentially cerebral.”

Although harsh on many Hollywood productions, Young was as good at spotting genuine artistry in American films as he was in the foreign releases. For instance, we find him championing those moody and expressionistic pictures that make up the genre (or mode) we now call film noir. These shadowy melodramas, like Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Double Indemnity (1944), are “precise in detail, fluid in movement, terse in utterance, cynically detached in tone, with a morally resigned ‘that’s-the-way-it-is-ain’t-it-the-truth’ point of view.” Young also embraces John Huston’s early films like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and he notes the reason for their continued popularity: “Early Hustons were compelling—and have remained so to Huston aficionados—because they were melodramas in the American grain, pragmatic with a stylish touch of the macabre.” Orson Welles’s best films—Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), parts of The Stranger (1946), and even much of Othello (1951)—“surprise by a fine excess (to put it mildly); there’s usually a current of energy running through them, a feeling of discovery, sometimes hazily resolved.” Welles, whatever his flaws, has “a preferred subject which provides at least half his films with a perceptible unity: the unheroic titan, sometimes evil, sometimes comic, sometimes just big, who is never as formidable as he sees himself—the pathos of deflation.”

Young discovered many first-rate American films during the ’60s and ’70s, but he did not care for most of the countercultural sensations of the period; instead, he sought out movies that rendered American life without blatant artiness. “The authentic American film,” says Young, “is one in which the writer, to say nothing of the director, has been free to remain totally immune to the Idea—like Huck Finn refusing to be civilized by his aunt—and to concentrate on the anecdote.” When the American filmmaker “labors to extend his reference, when he snubs the unity of his limitations, when he strains to be universal or, less expansively, tries to be ‘relevant’ to whichever camp of social uplift makes him quail, he is sure to contrive an embarrassment.” If this underestimates the artistic reach and grasp of certain American filmmakers, it also sums up a major weakness of not a few others. But as Young admits in another essay, “after sixty years of sub-art, mainly, some American movie-makers today are finally, without special pleading or democratic cant, producing films that speak eloquently of the American environment, its contradictions or its desolation.” 

Young casts light on those American films that work in a grittier, more native idiom. Noel Black’s Pretty Poison (1968) is “excellent in its homespun way,” offering itself as “a modest contribution toward the destruction of a myth—that of American Innocence.” In Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), Young senses a profound existential emptiness in the story of a “man who loves no one and nothing, least of all himself.” John Huston pulls off a late-career success with Fat City (1972), “a kind of American Lower Depths” that “is as perfect as a film can be.” Young also draws our attention to the authenticity and ingenuity of several Westerns and crime films: Will Penny (1968), The French Connection (1971), Bad Company (1972), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), and even Walter Hill’s cult classic The Warriors (1979), “the most inventive film of its kind (the kind that employs the hoodlum as anti-hero) since Bonnie and Clyde.” One may disagree with Young’s more eccentric appraisals, but one envies his ability to make delicate discriminations in even the shabbiest movie.   

Criticism and the arts are in a bad way. The repudiation of traditional forms and subjects, the elevation of politics over aesthetics, the celebration of fatuous fads—these are due in no small measure to cultural elites who deem, without an iota of irony, artistic discriminations “problematic” or “elitist.” Young saw the radical changes coming in the 1960s and stood firm against the idiot wind that began to blow through the groves of academe. Reacting to the murky musings of the new film theorists, Young lamented the decline: “[A] generation of teachers whose job is to instruct the young in clear thinking and exact writing has abdicated from a task that secretly bores it. These men can no longer tell kitsch from the real thing, nor trash from entertainment, and they’re working hard to obliterate the surviving distinctions.” Such educators, according to Young, “have joined their students’ revolt against themselves.” The revolt, as we know all-too well, only accelerated.

Great criticism, wherever we find it, is essential to a proper humanistic education. In an age of cultural confusion and profusion, the film criticism of Vernon Young, old yet ever new, remains a priceless invitation to learning and thinking. Young invites us to contemplate the masterpieces of cinematic art, to take in a panoramic view of cinema’s place in the cultural landscape, to widen our range of reference and allusion, and to delight freely in a well-timed quip or well-turned phrase. Here, then, is a civilized intelligence hard at work and play, an unmistakably individual mind nonetheless devoted to the common pursuit of true judgment.

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