Legendary film critic Richard Schickel dies
RICHARD SCHICKEL, a film critic for Time magazine whose reviews and essays, books and documentary films combined a straightforward literary style with a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of Hollywood history, died in Los Angeles on Saturday. He was 84.
He had recently suffered a series of strokes, said a daughter, Erika Schickel.
By his count, Schickel was the author of 39 books and, remarkably, the creator of an equal number of documentary films. Most of them were biographies of Hollywood figures, from directors DW Griffith and Woody Allen to the swashbuckling silent-era star Douglas Fairbanks and the transformational mid-century actor Marlon Brando.
Schickel made perhaps his greatest impact as a weekly film critic. He began his career in 1965 at Life magazine, during what he later characterised as a golden age of film-making: Hollywood was experimenting with new subject matter, delving into topics of sex and violence in films such as The Graduate (1967) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and foreign directors such as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa were rivalling their American counterparts in popular attention and critical acclaim.
Whether as a cause or as a consequence, it was also an era in which film critics such as Pauline Kael of The New Yorker and Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice became popular figures in their own right, forceful personalities who duelled in print each week over the merits of the latest Stanley Kubrick picture or the accuracy of the auteur theory of film-making.
Schickel was, if not always a central character in these critical battles, never far out of the fray. At Life and then at Time, a fellow Henry Luce-owned publication that he joined in 1972, he commanded one of the largest print audiences in America, reaching more than 4 million weekly readers each week with reviews that often strayed from popular assessments and critical consensus.
His first major work of film scholarship, the 1968 Walt Disney biography The Disney Version, fit squarely in this category, excoriating Disney films as trite fantasies that pandered to “the subliterates of our society”.
“As capitalism,” he wrote, the Disney film empire “is a work of genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror”. The book divided critics, some of whom considered it overly harsh, but has remained a touch- stone of Disney scholarship, with The Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley praising it in 2003 as “the last word on that particular contribution to American self-delusion and escapism”.
His writing was replete with references to earlier Hollywood films and figures, and was sometimes highly personal. He began Brando, his 1991 biography of the actor, with a “Dear Marlon Brando” letter that apologised for delving into the actor’s private life.
Later in the book, he described the impact of Brando’s performance in The Wild One (1953), as an outlaw biker, this way: “Oh, Lord, it was glorious. We were thrilled down to our toes curling cowardly in our white bucks.”
For every actor or film Schickel praised, there seemed to be at least two he was happy to take down a notch. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), an existential drama starring Death incarnate, “made my teeth ache,” he wrote. Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo (1958) was overrated; the drama of World War II homecoming The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was “undeniably lying and sentimental”.
Richard Warren Schickel was born in Milwaukee on February 10, 1933, and grew up in nearby Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.
His father worked in advertising and his mother was a home-maker.
He studied history at the University of Wisconsin and, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1956, went east to New York.
He became an editor at Look and the art magazine Show, where he reviewed books, before joining Life as a film critic. At Time, he worked for many years with fellow film critic Richard Corliss, who died in 2015. He later joined the online news outlet Truthdig.
Survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Erika Schickel of Los Angeles and Jessica Schickel Vild of Chagrin Falls, Ohio; a stepdaughter, Ali Rubinstein of Los Angeles; and four grandchildren.
In recent years, Schickel expressed dismay at the state of American film-making, lamenting in particular the work and business model of the major film studios.
“We used to have genres in movies,” he said in 2006.
“Now we have franchises deliberately repeating the beats of what has preceded it.”
“What we have is a mix of crud,” he added, “and stuff that aspires to be great statements.” – The Washington Post