Harshness is no virtue, but sometimes it comes in handy for an entertainment critic. In that line of work, you make a stronger impression by taking a jab now and again. Making friends is not the objective. Critics who get that can be fun to read.
Back when he was young and bratty, Rex Reed was an expert jabber. Often this worked to the detriment of his craft, a lack of restraint that made him come off more nasty than honest. Yet spiciness did make him colorfully readable, especially when traversing a broad array of culture.
Big Screen, Little Screen is a series of essays and capsule reviews that first appeared in journals like Women’s Wear Daily, Holiday, and The New York Times. Mostly about movies, with some television reviews, Big Screen, Little Screen is an incisive, unabashedly opinionated round-up of cinema as it entered the golden auteur era of the late 1960s-1970s.
When Reed liked a film, he wasn’t shy. Take The Lion In Winter:
Katharine Hepburn is magnificent as Eleanor of Aquitaine, a role that finally rises to the level her extraordinary genius is prepared to meet, and although Peter O’Toole, as Henry II, foams at the mouth and rolls his eyes a lot – in short, doing the Peter O’Toole bit with a sidecar of annoying mannerisms – they are intriguingly paired in a film full of clanging doors, crowing cocks and entrances heralded by trumpets and madrigals.
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| Reed loved everything about Geraldine Page's performance in Whatever Happened To Aunt Alice (above), except the film she was in. "I especially enjoyed the scene in which she eats bacon - chewing on it, digesting it, breaking up every sentence between bites to savor its juices..." Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMDG76MeIsc |
Some newer talents like Sandy Dennis, Maggie Smith, and Barbra Streisand can do no wrong. Joanne Woodward’s starring role in Rachel, Rachel earns an avalanche of bouquets and some poignant observations:
Everybody knows a Rachel. There is a Rachel in every town and a Rachel in every family. Sometimes she’s a librarian, sometimes a school teacher. People seldom get to know her well, because she’s usually something of a bore. But in [Paul] Newman’s film, we have no other choice. There she is, on the X-ray table, warm and sad and vulnerable and appealing in a loyal, cocker spaniel sort of way, exposed by the camera in her every nuance.
I’m front-loading this post with raves, because it wasn’t what Reed was known for. The more familiar Reed, then and later, wrote about entertainers as if he nursed some deep personal insult:
[Richard] Harris makes everything around him turn to bile. He can’t sing… He has the sense of humor of a hogshead cheese and the physical attractiveness of an unwashed corpse…
The only explosive thing about Blow-Up is the title. Otherwise it is just another exercise in petrifying boredom from Italy’s nihilist director Michelangelo Antonioni…
Christopher Plummer has a lot of guts to allow himself to be exposed to millions of people in a loin cloth, an Indian headdress left over from some old Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, long false fingernails, gold earrings, and enough Man Tan to color half the guest list at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel on a Labor Day weekend…
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In reviewing Anthony Newley’s self-directed flop Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (above, with Joan Collins), Reed tags it a “cheap, sewer-level pornographic home movie” and asks where Newley’s considerable talent had gone.
Image from
Even an appreciative, sensitive notice for Midnight Cowboy can’t help but add this:
It is much too long, the Texas flashbacks are confusing and shot through so many filters they are visually incomprehensible… The psychedelic party scene with Viva and the Warhol creeps is endless, boring, pointless, and should be re-edited. Dustin Hoffman is supposed to have a bum leg, but his limp varies from scene to scene at times giving the impression he is doing the Carioca.
The more of Reed’s reviews you read, the more you sense he can’t lay off the brickbats. Often they are his best bits. Through the 1970s, as he became more of a celebrity himself, doing the talk show circuit and becoming a regular on “The Gong Show,” mordant negativity became his schtick. But here he isn’t playing a character, just being candid.
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| Rex Reed in 1969: "Bad movies that pop up continually, like buttercups along a highway, are almost always easy to write about. What is difficult in reviewing films is finding new ways to praise good pictures without getting sappy or sentimental." Image from https://airmail.news/issues/2024-3-16/the-last-angry-man |
At one point, when filing a scathing review of The Wild Bunch, Reed lays out a philosophy that is somewhat self-congratulatory but honest:
I do react strongly to what I dislike. I am almost never middle-of-the-road, and if I am, I just sit back and wait until something comes along to stir the old passion again. There are plenty of critics around who cannot be accused of these crimes. Read them. They need your support. But if you are going to read me, you better get used to the passion, because I do not know any other way to write.
Two things endear the Reed of Big Screen, Little Screen to me. One is simply the ground he covers, writing about films I grew up with when they were brand new and neither cultural touchstones nor forgotten flotsam. Two is the take-no-prisoners style. Like he says, he wrote here with unbridled passion, whether the subject was politics, John Wayne westerns, or Peter Sellers comedies. Everything mattered.
With most film critics, it’s easy to guess which movies they will or won’t like. Not Reed. With musicals, he embraces The Young Girls Of Rochefort but hates on Hello, Dolly! and Paint Your Wagon. French films do get love, but also criticism for being impenetrable or featuring Catherine Deneuve, of whom he’s not a fan.
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| Reed called the 1969 musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips "very square indeed, but thanks to an idyllic cast and a magnificent director there is so much love and beauty in it that it made my heart stop with joy." Image from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0023326 |
You expect him to hate a flop, and sometimes he does. But he often calls attention to films ignored in their own time, like the Monkees’s swansong Head, Will Penny, and WUSA, the latter a Paul Newman film no one ever seems to like (maybe it helps Woodward is in that, too.)
Films featuring nudity or radical politics get a lot of his attention, often blistering. Medium Cool had a fair amount of both. Still, he loved it:
It is the stuff of now, of what this country is up to and down on, exposed within the framework of motion picture technique – plot, dialogue, action, character development, atmosphere, mood, and tempo – like some extraordinary historical accident. And because it all works, it is one of the most powerful and moving human documents ever captured on film. In spite of its ridiculous “X” rating (yes, Granny, there’s frontal nudity), I think the young people of the world should be required to see Medium Cool in schools, churches, and courtrooms.
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| When Reed liked a film from the counter-culture, he embraced it. When he didn't, as was the case with Zabriskie Point, he was scorching: "I find all this simple-mindedness boring, old-fashioned, and juvenile. Worst of all, it is uninspired and phony." Image from https://wellesnet.com/zabriskie-point-50th/ |
Big Screen, Little Screen covers a unique era of movie history. Julie Andrews and Anne Bancroft were leading ladies; John Huston and Orson Welles were still directing. There were also up-and-comers; Reed calls out You’re A Big Boy Now, the directing debut of one Francis Coppola, as something that “should be applauded even though it fails.” A young stage actor named Ian McKellen is also applauded for an early screen appearance in A Touch Of Love, though Reed adds he “has the ingratiating look of a gerbil trying to pass an I. Q. test.”
Reed’s television coverage is less dynamic but still fun. He doesn’t really have the same level of investment in what he watches; he’s clearly filling column space: Reporting on the Democratic Convention, that Hitlerized version of Ringling Brothers, took up so much space last week there was no room left to discuss Lauren Bacall’s fall fashion preview of the Paris collections on CBS.
Still, he treads water with aplomb. I especially enjoyed his wrap-up of a Saturday morning watching cartoons, in which he marvels at the excessive violence played for laughs. An appearance on “The Tonight Show” allows him to dish on what a stiff Johnny Carson is backstage.
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| On Saturday morning cartoons, Reed calls "Road Runner" "a rain-bath of violence, physical brutality and sadism in which a poor pea-brained piece of poultry sketched to resemble Hermione Gingold gets electrocuted, stampeded, knocked unconscious, and crucified week after week to gales of sweet childish laughter." Is he confusing the bird with the coyote? Image from https://cartoonhalloffame.fandom.com/wiki/Road-Runner |
But movies were his thing, along with responding to the cultural shifts they heralded. He was all for the iconoclastic anarchy of MASH and ready to address the question of whether the 1970 Best Picture Oscar went to a film that glorified war:
There will undoubtedly be those who loathe Patton and everything he stood for, but I dare anyone who sees this movie of his life to tell me he was ever a bore. Patton is an absorbing testament to the life of a unique human being and a war movie for people who hate war movies.
I think that judgment holds up, even as people still debate the role the film played in extending U. S. involvement in the Vietnam war. Reed also tackles subjects like race and homosexuality with sensitivity, perception, and the occasional epithet that would have gotten him fired today. Obnoxious, yes, but I recognize he was doing a sort of Lenny Bruce-style shock-value thing then in vogue with the cultural elite.
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| After cutting against the majority of his fellow critics by panning The Wild Bunch, Reed heaped praise on director Sam Peckinpah's next film, The Ballad Of Cable Hogue, with David Warner and Jason Robards (above), "a work of beauty, wit, and gentle honesty." Image from https://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2018/06/neglected-gem-ballad-of-cable-hogue-1970.html |
Just in case you think it’s all Hollywood with him, he also spends a few pages on Andy Warhol’s Factory output and the Swedish sensation I Am Curious (Yellow), in both cases calling them lame examples of style over substance that use human nudity to cover over the creative kind.
When it comes to film nudity, which was by now becoming a thing, he calls it out often and rather ungraciously, like with Michael Caine in The Magus: “I can’t imagine any female who prefers her movie’s hero with a flat tire around his middle. Things are tough enough at home.”
That’s funny, though still mean. More egregious with Reed is the liberty with which he gives out spoilers. It’s not a problem for me, since I will either never see a movie he’s describing or will have forgotten anything read here by the time I do, but for a contemporary audience of moviegoers that sort of thing is rightly panned as poor practice.
Reed
still plies his trade in 2025, if not to the same level of attention he was
getting in the early 1970s. Like with most of us, time has passed him by. But
with Big Screen, Little Screen you get a peppery time capsule with a
unique voice firing on all cylinders, taking no prisoners.
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