Quotes by Film Historians

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Sally Berger
One is not required to like a movie in order to learn from it. Our personal views provide a legitimate perspective, as long as we recognize and acknowledge how they may color our interpretation.
Richard Barsam
Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half.
Jeanine Basinger
Movies endorsed unwanted ideas by putting them into story form and resolving them up there on the screen. The goal was, as always, identification, but also relief.
Jeanine Basinger
In-laws were often used as plot devices to drive a happy couple apart, to destroy marital love and trust.
Jeanine Basinger
Movies with interfering in-laws and kids are often presented as comic, the ridicule bringing welcome relief to beleaguered married folks suffering offscreen at the hands of relatives.
Jeanine Basinger
Joanne Woodward’s Mrs. Bridge is one of the best performances ever given on film of a middle-aged woman.
Jeanine Basinger
Another superb movie about a mature marriage grounded in a fundamental lack of communication is Dodsworth, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel.
Jeanine Basinger
Excellent films do exist on the subject, however, and one is a pure marriage movie in which Newman and Woodward make it work. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge exists to tell moviegoers that the marriage of their parents—especially if they were those tragic dogsbodies, Midwesterners—were fogbound. The film depicts a steady relationship that has no real communication between its couple
Jeanine Basinger
When it came to portraying couples who never directly connected, the Newmans were the Olympic gold champions
Jeanine Basinger
... this film taps perfectly into the viewers’ sense of the world. It was a big, big hit, and one of Hollywood’s best-remembered marriage movies, although by grounding itself in trendy political issues, it avoids ordinary day-to-day marital problems. Its bottom line is, however, marry your own kind.
Jeanine Basinger
The story of a marriage was an excellent way to fulfill the goal of discussing class without discussing class, and to tell an audience that they were upwardly mobile.
Jeanine Basinger
The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.
Jeanine Basinger
The true marriage movie involving in-laws and children is a story about how marriage is directly affected by external characters who impact the central relationship in various ways.
Jeanine Basinger
In order to get [Mean Streets] made I had to learn how to make a movie," says Scorsese. "I didn't learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different.
Peter Biskind
The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of "happily ever after" films. But some victors didn't feel too good about their spoils. They'd seen too much by then. Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress. A bundle of unfinished business lingered from the Depression — nagging questions about ingrained venality, mean human nature, and the way unchecked urban growth threw society dangerously out of whack. Writers and directors responded by delivering gritty, bitter dramas that slapped our romantic illusions in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie. Still, plenty of us took it — and liked it.
Eddie Muller
When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.
Donald Richie
What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies.
Donald Richie
Those without color—say, dressed in all black—can go about almost unnoticed. Where the rainbow is conspicuous, their darkness acts as a kind of camouflage, masculine by contrast, and allows them to watch without being watched. It’s the choice of someone who needs not to attract. Someone self-sufficient. Someone more distant, less knowable, and ultimately, mysterious. Powerful.
Sam Wasson
Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.
Donald Richie
Japan never considers time together as time wasted. Rather, it is time invested.
Donald Richie
It was hard to know what to make of the brothers' dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows.
Peter Biskind