Thanx again for posting the Film Comment link.

Sarris’ American Cinema is an invaluable reference but is in tremendous need of an updated edition. I almost wish it would go out of print and force him to revise the damn thing since Sarris has changed his view on a number of things. He has frequently issued mea culpas on putting Billy Wilder in the Less Than Meets the Eye category (and said so to Wilder in person) and has written that he would today place Wilder in or near his personal Pantheon. I think his view of Kubrick has also been upgraded. (Some of his revised opinions appear in the book You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet, though Kubrick falls outside that book’s chronological scope.)

But this is what I really appreciate about Sarris — his acknowledgment that his views change over time. He’s always argued against critics treating their opinions as holy writ. The categories created for that book was a way of beginning to assess the massive amount of movies produced in Hollywood and determining who the most interesting directors were — it was a project begun in the early 1960s, at a time when film literacy was in its infancy and there was a need to make connections in directors’ filmographies, so you could begin to understand, say, what makes a John Ford western different from an Anthony Mann western or a Howard Hawks western. For all of his pronouncements and categories, though, Sarris encourages readers to go see any and all movies for themselves and not take his review as the definitive word.

I think Mr. Sarris is sort of missing the point here, like, completely.