The American Cinema

"This is the book that kick-started appreciation of film noir. It’s a massively influential book that introduced the ‘auteur’ theory into English writing. Sarris made us take the key directors seriously, as well as the genre itself. The French had already been taking popular genres seriously for years, but this was the book that ignited the touch paper here. Sarris is a writer you will pick up if you have any love or appreciation for cinema. You will be inspired by the book – and you will also be throwing it across the room, because, along with the great enthusiasms and the famous pecking order of directors, he has some notable blind spots. There are directors like Hitchcock, of course, who are canonised, but Sarris writes off film-makers who are now held in very high esteem, such as Stanley Kubrick, who made one of the very best films noirs, The Killing . But the book takes the genre seriously and suggests we can look at these films in the same way as ‘art cinema’ directors such as Fellini and Bergman, who were automatically taken seriously. It was an incredibly influential book. People like me almost started writing film criticism because of this book. No, not at all, and I spend most of my time disagreeing with him when reading the book. Andrew Sarris was talking about people like Otto Preminger, who was basically considered to be a studio director, but for Sarris the director is the absolute king and this is now a contentious issue. If you look at Otto Preminger’s wonderful film Laura, the screenplay and the acting are vitally important. So there needed to be a redressing. Things needed to settle down, but Sarris started the ball rolling with this book."