It means nothing to most people that film critic Manny Farber has died at the age of 91. Even most hardcore movie buffs aren't that aware of him except for his name and the fact that he was once well-regarded. That's fine. His was a unique voice and I'd wager that only 1 person in 100 would even be able to make sense of what he was saying. Farber was not a film critic who could write a little bit - he was a great writer who happened to do film criticism. It is utterly irrelevant whether one agrees with his assessment of this film or that actor - the joy of Farber lies in his rambunctious styling, his out-of-leftfield references, his complete and unassailable individualism. Farber wrote with equal insight about crappy genre pictures he happened to find charming and formidable experimental and modernist works. His sensibilities were wide enough to embrace a range of artists from Preston Strurges to Don Siegel to Jean-Luc Godard to Werner Herzog. And, like all great critics, he was a master of the slice-and-dice job. My favorite is his utter excoriation of the John Ford film Two Rode Together, which begins with this all-time-great paragraph:
A 1961 cavalry film that is like an endless frontier-day pageant, Two Rode Together has the discombobulated effect of a Western dreampt by a kid snoozing in an Esso station in Linden, New Jersey. Two wrangling friends, a money-grubbing marshal (Jimmy Stewart) and a cavalry captain (Richard Widmark, who has the look of a ham that has been smoked, cured and then coated with honey-colored shellac), seek out a Comanche named Parker and trade him a stunningly new arsenal of guns and knives for a screaming little Bowery Boy with braids who's only bearable in the last shot when the camera just shows his legs hanging limply from a lynching tree.
Film criticism peaked in the '60s with the works of Farber, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. Now it's a lot of snippy little pipsqueaks and Ebert wannabes dishing blurbs. Goodbye Manny Farber - the world didn't deserve you anyway.
