Setting aside those not in the Pantheon, there is no denying the greatness of those included, and as a young critic with no formal film education, I seized upon his Pantheon.
Billy Wilder was later promoted to the Pantheon, but Sarris relegated to lower levels such as Kubrick, Preminger, Wyler, De Mille and other considerable names. Sarris published a book, The American Cinema, which partitioned American directors into categories: In the Pantheon were Chaplin, Flaherty, Ford, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Keaton, Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau, Ophuls, Renoir, von Sternberg, and Welles. They gave a name to film noir, and by identifying its masters they helped form a new Hollywood Pantheon. The French were particularly fond of American directors in such genres as war movies, Westerns, musicals and others which were deliberately not highbrow art. That was the theory, shaped by French critics in the 1950s, arguing that chosen directors had a personal style that shaped all of their film, regardless of genre, and in that way their work was one extended exercise in that style. Sarris was the critic of the Village Voice, was also given a great deal of space by his editors, and was said to be the man who brought the Auteur Theory to America. She became known in her early days for a feud with Andrew Sarris that became legendary in film criticism circles. Her book titles hinted passion in the dark: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper into Movies, Reeling, When the Lights Go Down, Taking It All In, State of the Art, Hooked, and her collection of her favorite work, For Keeps.
For her a movie was like a lover-good or bad in the sack. She responded strongly to movies, in love or hate. That book sold 150,000 copies-surprising, since she lacked a national platform or reputation. Usually poor, often living in uncertain circumstances, raising her daughter Gina, presiding over an expanding coterie of creative outsiders, she made no substantial money until her early free-lance pieces were collected in I Lost it at the Movies.
She fell into the task of managing an art theater, and her program notes became locally famous. The book tells me many things I didn't know, about her youth and spotty education and early experience among the bohemians, artists and poets of Berkeley and San Francisco. More than anybody else, she captured what those heady days of the 1970s were like, when the directors seemed to be running the Hollywood asylum and the cinema seemed to be shaping a generation. Reading her was like running into her right after a movie and having her start in on you.
In her years at the New Yorker, she had no apparent restrictions on length. She never saw a movie twice, and wrote her reviews first-draft, in longhand on yellow legal pads. She might have liked that- "quite a dame." She wrote with slangy, jazzy prose, always pepped up, spinning on the edge of a whirlpool.