Life section
Canby's passion for cinema
Death Of A Movie Man
Vincent Canby enjoyed a high-profile job as New York Times' film critic. But he remained always the "ubiquitous, anonymous man in the aisle seat'
FOR 28 years, from 1965 to 1993, he watched movies for a living, reviewing them in the most influential paper in the United States.
He would spend another seven years at The New York Times as its theatre critic before he retired.
Last Sunday, Vincent Canby died at the Columbia-Presbyterian Centre in Manhattan, of cancer. He was 76.
Back in 1983, when I made my first pilgrimage to New York -- yes, it was a pilgrimage because for me then, the Big Apple was the centre of the universe -- I got to have an audience with Canby in his small, cluttered room on the third floor of the Times building on 43rd Street.
I remember his red hair and his aquiline nose, his tweed jacket and his khaki trousers. The obituary written by Janet Maslin who took over his job as senior film critic in the Times, said he was forever dressed in the part of a Dartmouth graduate -- Oxford shirt with button-down collar under that tweed jacket, and a striped tie.
For our interview, which lasted for almost two hours, Canby loosened his tie, leaned back on his chair and put his feet up on the table, as he chain-smoked and answered my questions.
Even the most hardened journalist can succumb to flattery, and what better flattery than to be told by someone from the other side of the globe that he reads you religiously? It's one thing to know that you have one million American readers, but another to find out that somewhere at the end of the world, there's someone following your work closely.
Canby, 58 at the time, seemed flattered by my visit and my earnest questions, and he showed me gladly the bound files of his cuttings.
Like the Times book critic Anatole Broyard, whom I would meet some years later, Canby was a World War II veteran, and had a college education courtesy of the G. I. Bill.
And like many GIs, before he picked up his liberal arts degree from Dartmouth in New Hampshire, he spent three years bumming around in Paris, at that time the centre of the universe.
After his graduation, he served his apprenticeship in several trade publications and the Chicago Tribune and finally Variety, the movie industry's main trade rag, before he landed a job in The Gray Lady in 1965.
As cultural news reporter, he was really a general dogsbody, doing ""what everybody else didn't want to do'', he recalled in our interview. It was only in 1969, when the paper's film reviewer RenataAdler quit her job, that Canby got the gig that would be his almost lifelong career.
His may be a high-profile job, but for the 35 years that he toiled at the Times, he remained always the ""ubiquitous, anonymous man in the aisle seat'', as Maslin put it in the obituary.
""I'm essentially a loner,'' Canby told me in his office through his haze of smoke.
At the end of our interview, when I rummaged through my backpack to take out the camera to take a picture of him, he said simply, ""No.''
Fascinated as he was by movies, he never aspired to make one himself.
As he explained: ""It's something I could never make by myself. Even our best movie-makers are not just artists. They have to be hustlers and self-promoters in order to raise money, and they have to act like diplomats to keep all the various elements working.
""It demands a kind of energy and interest which I don't have.''
Neither did he hanker for the job of an editor. ""I'd be a lousy editor. I never understood how good reporters can be satisfied editing other people's copies,'' he said.
Canby saw himself first and foremost as a reporter. ""Your function is to report first what the film looks like. You try to evoke what it was like looking at it, and then you must make certain judgements, personal judgements.''
Because there were not enough computer terminals in the office -- isn't this a familiar story in most newspaper offices? -- he did his work on his typewriter at home, and then transferred it to the computer when he went into the office.
Canby's film-reviewing career spanned the era when movie-making was still very much a challenging, innovative art.
In these days of the global blockbuster, which demands not to be taken seriously, and where there is a plethora of state-of-the-art cinema halls but little diversity in the movies, I doubt we'll find another Canby, content to sit anonymously in the dark, taking it all in so that he can report it seriously the next day for an equally committed readership.
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