Theater, film critic with a cutting pen
JOHN SIMON | May 12, 1925 - Nov. 24, 2019
John Simon, one of the nation’s most erudite, vitriolic and vilified culture critics, who illuminated and savaged a remarkable range of plays, films, literature and art works and their creators for more than a half-century, died Sunday in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 94.
His death, at Westchester Medical Center, was confirmed by his wife, Patricia Simon.
In an era of vast cultural changes, Mr. Simon marshaled wide learning, insights and acid wit for largely negative reviews and essays that appeared in New York magazine for nearly 37 years until his dismissal in 2005, and in The Hudson Review, The New York Times, Esquire, National Review, The New Leader and other publications.
In a style that danced with literary allusions and arch rhetoric — and composed with pen and ink (he hated computers) — he produced thousands of critiques and a dozen books, mostly anthologies of his own work. While English was not his native language, he also wrote incisive essays on American usage, notably in the 1980 book “Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline.”
Born in Yugoslavia and educated at Harvard, Mr. Simon was an imperious arbiter who, unlike daily press critics, foraged widely over fields of culture and entertainment at will, devouring the Lilliputians with relish. He regarded television as trash and most Hollywood films as superficial. His formula for an ultimate triumph on Broadway: “A loud, vulgar musical about Jewish Negroes.”
In his long gaze, the arts in America were in decline, or at least in a state of perpetual confusion, and he insisted that his mission was to raise standards through unflinching criticism.
“My greatest obligation is to what, correctly or incorrectly, I perceive as the truth,” he told The Paris Review in 1997. “Kastner says, in essence, ‘All right, the world is full of idiots and they’re in control of everything. You fool, stay alive and annoy them!’ And that, in a sense, is my function in life, and my consolation.
“If I can’t convince these imbeciles of anything, I can at least annoy them, and I think I do a reasonably good job of that.”
Many readers delighted in what they considered Mr. Simon’s lofty and uncompromising tastes, and especially in his wicked judgments, which fell like hard rain on icons of culture: popular authors, Hollywood stars, rock and rap musicians, abstract artists and their defenders in critics’ circles, for whom he expressed contempt.
But Mr. Simon was himself scorned by many writers, performers and artists, who called his judgments biased, unfair or downright cruel, and by readers and rival critics with whom he occasionally feuded in print. They characterized some of his pronouncements as racist, misogynist, homophobic or grossly insensitive.
He denied being any of those things and argued that no person or group was above criticism, especially those who, in his view, lacked talent and covered themselves in mantles of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity and used them to claim preferential treatment in the marketplaces of culture.
“I do not like uniforms,” Mr. Simon told the author Bert Cardullo in 2008. “I do not like people who are a professional this, that or the other. Professional writers, actors and singers are OK, but I don’t like professional Jews, professional homosexuals, professional blacks, professional feminists, professional patriots. I don’t like people abdicating their identity to become part of some group, and then becoming obsessed with this and making capital of it.”
Mr. Simon liked the plays of August Wilson, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley. “From time to time a play comes along that restores one’s faith in our theater,” he wrote of Ms. Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” which won a 1981 Pulitzer Prize. He said Mr. Shanley’s “Doubt” (2004), about Catholic school scandals, “would be sinful to miss.”
He invited readers to see the world through the literary works of Heinrich Boll, Jane Bowles, Alfred Chester, Stig Dagerman, Bruce Jay Friedman, J.M.G. Le Clezio, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, Ferenc Santa and B. Traven, and through the films of Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini or Kurosawa — but only “at their best.”
In the Times, he hailed the 1971 film “Hoa Binh,” a story of two Vietnamese children by the French cinematographer Raoul Coutard. “‘Hoa Binh’ should be seen by everyone, but especially by those who don’t want to see it,” he wrote. “They should come and be surprised, for they will leave, I promise them, filled with gratitude.”
But such praise was a rarity. In “Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Films” (1982), he recommended only 15 of the 245 films he discussed.
His attacks on actors were often meanspirited. He likened Liza Minnelli’s face to a beagle’s and said Barbra Streisand’s nose “cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south.” William F. Buckley Jr., the publisher of National Review, once said Mr. Simon “reviewed movies in the same sense that pigeons review statues.”
Offend Mr. Simon did. In “Movies Into Film: Criticism, 1967-1970” (1971), he wrote of the Beatles: “Particularly grubby are John Lennon and his worse half, Yoko Ono, who sits, smug and possessive, almost always within touching distance of him. Flouting, it would seem, even minimal sanitary measures, their hair looks like a Disneyland for the insect world, and their complexions appear to be portable bacterial cultures.”
Mr. Simon was barred from some film screenings. A 1980 ad, signed by 300 people, in Variety called his reviews racist and vicious. At the 1973 New York Film Festival, actress Sylvia Miles dumped a plate of food on his head after he described her in print as a “party girl and gate crasher.”
“This incident was so welcomed by the Simon-hating press that the anecdote has been much retold,” Mr. Simon recalled. “She herself has retold it a thousand times. And this steak tartare has since metamorphosed into every known dish from lasagna to chop suey. It’s been so many things that you could feed the starving orphans of India or China with it.”