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Though as domino has pointed out several times, this doc is also featured on MoC's Region B No Way Out release

Right, he has. But I don't want to purchase that title. What are you pushers?

Is Andrew Sarris serious....
“The film’s reputation has diminished hardly at all in the nearly seventy years since its release. Mankiewicz, who had a conspicuous disaster in the following decade with his lavish Liz-and-Dick Cleopatra (1963), may no longer be considered, even by the French, “one of the most brilliant of American directors”; Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema consigns him to the dreaded “Less Than Meets the Eye” category (where he’s at least in good company, with John Huston, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Carol Reed, Fred Zinnemann, and William A. Wellman, among others).”... From the essay by Terrence Rafferty

Just pulled the American Cinema off the shelf because it's literally in arm's reach of my laptop. Here's the opening line to Sarris' entry on Mankiewicz:

The cinema of Joseph L Mankiewicz is a cinema of intelligence without inspiration.

Which is inflammatory (and quite obviously self-consciously outrageous with the arrogance of youth). But it's important to not stop there, as this critic apparently did, as the next line is

His best films-- All About Eve and the Barefoot Contessa-- bear the signature of a genuine auteur.

Thanks Domino. One of the fun aspects about cinema is reading and hearing about the changing views and criticisms of films as time goes by. But to put David Lean, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Carol Reed and others in “A Less Than Meets the Eye” category is borderline outrageous. Is he talking style over substance? I would venture to guess he is probably alone in his overall assessment.

Btw... I just found the book on Amazon. Is it worth a read? Will I get more out of it without the frustration of the little snippet from the All About Eve bluray essay.

FrauBlucher wrote: Sat Dec 14, 2019 2:15 pm Thanks Domino. One of the fun aspects about cinema is reading and hearing about the changing views and criticisms of films as time goes by. But to put David Lean, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Carol Reed and others in “A Less Than Meets the Eye” category is borderline outrageous. Is he talking style over substance? I would venture to guess he is probably alone in his overall assessment.

Btw... I just found the book on Amazon. Is it worth a read? Will I get more out of it without the frustration of the little snippet from the All About Eve bluray essay.

I think it's worth a read considering it's a famous text. A lot of it is frustrating and a bit dated, but I've discovered some gems that I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. His categories are a bit ridiculous at times. For instance, "Less Than Meets the Eye" is clearly just a selection of directors who he doesn't like as he doesn't really offer any valid reason for dismissing them (for instance I don't like Scorsese's films, but I'm well aware that it's a matter of taste and subject matter, and that's what he appears to be doing here).

It's a lot less frustrating if you don't take it all too seriously. But there are some good insights.

My sense is that Sarris either didn't understand (or willfully misinterpreted) the French notion of auteurship. No recognition of the notion that one could be an "auteur" and yet also be a terrible director. He seems to have treated the term as an accolade.

I think Sarris meant these categories to be amusingly polemical. If you look at the yearly lists at the back of the book, the directors classified as less than meets the eye often had movies in his top ten, several in top five and I believe a couple made it to number one. He intimated in later years that he erred especially with Billy Wilder. These directors were considered by the establishment as the best directors of their day and Sarris was enthused to elevate Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford and overlooked genre directors Into the conversation. Whatever one might think of the categories, the book was enormously influential in its time.

Michael Kerpan wrote:My sense is that Sarris either didn't understand (or willfully misinterpreted) the French notion of auteurship. No recognition of the notion that one could be an "auteur" and yet also be a terrible director. He seems to have treated the term as an accolade.

To be fair, that’s not really a misreading of a lot of the Cahiers critics. Truffaut was particularly indiscriminate once a director had been deemed an auteur.

I guess I prefer the more conceptually rigorous French auteurists then. (Never been much of a Truffaut fan -- theoretically or cinematically).

Auteurism in the Cahiers mode is, I've been saying for years now, more complicated than its legacy. But Truffaut was definitely guilty of youthful arrogance by even his own admission in the early polemic days of the concept he spearheaded. That said, he and his colleagues had peculiar tastes that were more or less consistent to moral readings of the films they championed/decried, along with Romantic notions of mise-en-scene and other aesthetic concerns that may not factor as highly for many of us in the lieu of the other functions films often serve. Also worth noting that Cahiers took a while to turn on Mankiewicz and were pretty consistent in their praise for him through at least Barefoot Contessa (and Godard was the last to go, as he notoriously loved the Quiet American)-- they all pretty much were done with him by the time Suddenly, Last Summer came around, though. Sarris would have known this and it may have colored his own reading of the director

Not sure where to post about the packaging issue. I remember few months ago seeing a lot of comments on Criterion's lousy BD packaging. I can't find the thread anymore. Well, I ended up with my messed up copy now. Somebody mentioned here that Criterion provided customers with a better replacement digipak. I would really appreciate if somebody can direct me to right thread or provide me with some information. Thanks a lot.

You can simply email [email protected] though they probably won't be able to help you until people are working in the office again

Thanks!