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That\u2019s one interview I\u2019d love to go back and reexperience, just to see if my memory is playing tricks. Because, in my head, there is absolutely no connection between those two Eddie Murphys. I remember them as completely different people.<\/p>\n
Dear Mr. LaSalle: With the death of Rex Reed, any thoughts on his career? Did he serve a purpose writing critiques or was he just an angry man more interested in being famous?<\/p>\n
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Film critic and journalist Rex Reed sits in a wicker chair at a beach in Malibu, circa 1973.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ellen Graham\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Dear Mr. Oertel: Rex Reed was the first nationally famous film critic. Before him, there were prominent critics, like James Agee, but Reed was the first critic that everybody knew, even if they\u2019d never read a word he\u2019d written.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I knew him from seeing him on talk shows when I was a kid. I always thought he was fun. I still think he was fun. He was also, with the possible exception of my former Chronicle colleague Edward Guthmann, the best-looking film critic in America.<\/p>\n
He probably held on too long and became a bit of a crank in his later years, but he was Rex Reed. Would you volunteer to be the one to tell him to stop?<\/p>\n
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Hello, Mick LaSalle: You were discussing the 1950s, and you said at that time that it was a grim period for American movies. But take a moment to consider \u201cThe Asphalt Jungle,\u201d \u201cAll About Eve,\u201d \u201cAnatomy of a Murder,\u201d \u201cIn a Lonely Place,\u201d \u201cAce in the Hole,\u201d \u201cThe Sweet Smell of Success,\u201d \u201cPaths of Glory,\u201d \u201cOn the Waterfront,\u201d \u201cThe Bad and the Beautiful.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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James Stewart carries Kim Novak at Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge, in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s \u201cVertigo\u201d (1958).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Paramount Pictures\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Hello, Stan Campbell: And don\u2019t forget \u201cA Face in the Crowd\u201d and \u201cA Streetcar Named Desire,\u201d plus the Hitchcock movies, \u201cVertigo,\u201d \u201cRear Window\u201d and \u201cNorth by Northwest.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 1950s weren\u2019t a wasteland. In fact, it\u2019s possible that I\u2019m just wrong, and it was a good era for movies. However, you can pretty much do that with every decade: find 15 or 20 unquestionably great films \u2014 because, after all, that\u2019s still only two a year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Perhaps the better way to measure a decade\u2019s output is to count how many good movies were made, or to judge the routine releases. This is harder, because it requires seeing almost everything in every decade, just to be able to make an honest comparison, and no one has seen that many movies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My impression of the 1950s is that they don\u2019t have the star power of movies of the 1930s and 1940s, and they lack the freedom of the 1960s and 1970s. They\u2019re hampered by censorship, and their presentation of sex and relationships lands in a creepy zone mixing puritanism with prurience. If you were an actress, it was a particularly bad time. Look at Marilyn Monroe, a singular talent who spent almost her entire career playing morons.<\/p>\n
Still, grand pronouncements are an unfortunate tendency of critics, and I might have given in to temptation in assessing that decade.<\/p>\n
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at askmicklasalle@gmail.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eddie Murphy attends American Film Institute\u2019s\u00a0Life Achievement Award event at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on April 18.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[329,838,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-352271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-movies-and-tv","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}