Early in my research, I was even surprised to learn that for a handful of years, Didion was a movie critic for Vogue. In January 1964, eight years after she started working at the magazine, an announcement appeared in the Movies column: a young writer named Joan Didion would be reviewing films, alternating weeks with another writer, named Paul Breslow. (Soon, Didion would briefly share the column with a pre–New Yorker Pauline Kael.)
In her introduction to her column, Didion started strong: “Let me lay it on the line: I like movies, and approach them with a tolerance so fond that it will possibly strike you as simple-minded.” Further on, she elaborated that she didn’t need her movies to be masterpieces—“neither L’Avventura nor Red River, neither Casablanca nor Citizen Kane.” She required them only to have what she calls “moments,” which translates, roughly, to points where she feels something.
Didion’s movie reviews have not yet been collected into books. That means that when I first read this column—with the help of a librarian at the New York Public Library, who in the pandemic’s early months jumped onto Zoom to help me access the Vogue archives—I was surprised. Knowing she’d been around New York’s literati for a long while by the time she took on this role, I assumed she had the taste of a young 1960s cinephile: a little snobbish, fond of underground and downtown cinema, obsessed with form and with auteur theory. She didn’t.
While not undiscerning, Didion had quite populist taste, and the more I read, the more often I disagreed. She declared that Billy Wilder, the director of Some Like It Hot, had “only the most haphazard feeling for comedy”; that Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World was almost so bad as to “not be worth mentioning”; that Sidney Lumet’s films were “dutifully rendered and almost totally unfelt.” She wrote at length about how irritating it was to watch a movie in which an actor played against type, how frustrating crime movies were when they became “cast studies of deranged individuals in a sane society” rather than old-school gangster films.
Like most movie critics, I disagree with critics—even the ones I think are great—all the time. So Didion’s film reviews intrigued me because they revealed a mindset about movies that you can trace through her later writing, heavily influenced by being brought up in the golden age of the big studios. To her (and to Dunne), movies were predominantly entertainment turned out by large-scale teams designed to tug at your emotions, rather than the gritty, artist-driven form that would come to dominate the New Hollywood.—Alissa Wilkinson for Air Mail
Billy Wilder’s letter to Joan Didion.
David Berlin It was Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. “Only Disconnect.” When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer -- not entirely facetiously -- that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new diningroom curtains. These, and other assorted facts -- such as the fact that Didion chose to buy the dress Linda Kasabian wore at the Manson trial at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills -- put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called America's finest woman prose stylist. (Thinking of Didion's drapes, it occurred to me that in the worst of all possible worlds, Franny Glass might have grown up to be Maria Wyeth of Play It As It Lays. Her faith in the Jesus Prayer permanently misplaced, and possessed of no secular equivalent to fill the vacuum, in her second incarnation Franny is Maria, a fragile madonna of acedia and anomie. This feeling was confirmed when I reread all of Didion, an activity that, trust me, is roughly akin to spending several days in the company of Job's comforters.)
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