Feature: Interview - Film critic Philip French talks to Dan Carrier

Published: 16 June, 2011
by DAN CARRIER

FILM critic Philip French always waits until the last credit has rolled before he leaves a screening. He harrumphs a little if there is chat as the cast list pops up.

Other critics have often wondered why he does this. The reason is now revealed in I Found it at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile, a collection of his work from 1963 to 2009. French states he is on the lookout for titbits to feed into his essays, those cast or location oddities that lift the curtain and offer readers a peek at what is going on backstage.

This collection is the first of three instalments which will cover his six decades of journalism. The Dartmouth Park-based writer’s range of anecdotes is apparent. 

“Over the past 50 years, I have churned out millions of words on films, theatre, fiction, non-fiction and related cultural matters for newspapers and magazines or to be delivered on air or as lectures or symposiums,” he says, and wide examples are contained here. 

French went to his first film aged four, and it became a regular staging post in his weekly timetable as a National Serviceman by 1952.

In 1955, he had a review published in the Oxford undergraduate newspaper Isis, and he’s been at it ever since.

The first entry dates from 1963 and the latest is from 2009 – a period of massive cultural change. Robert Graves’ 1971 book The Long Weekend offered a guide to the social mores of the inter-war period, and it is hard not see French’s collection of essays as a similarly valuable staff to lean on if you are looking at the post-war landscape. 

These are the stories that make up the art of the cinema, offering a sense of what it’s all about and how film mirrors the world it springs from. 

The range is vast. His eulogy to the designer Ken Adam, written for a Serpentine Gallery catalogue, shines a light on an area of cinema the average popcorn-eater doesn’t much bother themselves with. Adam put the backdrops in place for such stylish films as Dr No, Goldfinger, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In French’s usual flourish, we are told the war room in Dr Strange­love, with its mushroom cloud-lighting above the cabinet table, so impressed Ronald Reagan that he expected to reside there after he was elected president. 

Other essays include missives on Ealing Studios, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Doris Day and John Ford; how the archetypal Englishman is portrayed on screen; newspapers in films; violence and the cinema, New York, The Cold War, Spain, and even film references in film. When writing about “Sportsmen in Movies” he considers the John Ford dictum: “It’s easier to teach an actor to ride than a cowboy to act.” He reveals Johnny Weismuller was given the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” line because the Olympic swimmer was pretty incapable of saying more with conviction. Boxing movies are given a whole essay to themselves. 

This collection illustrates the depth of knowledge French possesses: he puts everything into a cultural context. It is also entertaining. He quotes American journalist Harold Ross: “If you can’t be funny, be interesting” – and French is both. 

He uses words in a Wodehousian way. In “British Cinema and the Post Office”, he says: “I don’t know much about philately, but I know what I lick.” Writing on prison films, in which he identifies strands that run through them, he says  censors protected British prisons from any serious effort to criticise: “The poor angry? Let them eat Porridge,” is how he succinctly puts it. It reminds the reader that the critic is not only about informing (or warning), but entertaining, too. 

In 1995, French turned his attentions to his own trade, offering a piece that puts criticism into a historical context. He tells us that both George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells wrote on film when was in its infancy, but from such heights it is a long way down. 

“Unfortunately, newspaper editors in the English-speaking world over these past 80 years have not quite grasped the significance of the cinema,” he says. “The tabloid press has usually let loose on the movies any confident ignoramus with a big name and a readiness to feed the readers’ prejudices, while the serious press has often employed fashionable literary names to savage and patronise the cinema.”

French’s regular readers will know that he acts as a bastion against these practices.

In an obituary on film critic Dilys Powell for the Observer, also in 1995, he says: “From Graham Greene, she learnt to look at the cinema as an industry and an art form that affected people’s lives, to write about what she saw on the screen, and to aim at brevity, particularity and clear, unpretentious writing.” 

These words, as this collection shows, could be applied to French himself.

• I Found it at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile. By Philip French. Carcanet Press £19.95