If nothing else, the criticism of John
Simon has kept alive a sense of history. No one writing
today has done more to uphold the aesthetic standards of the
Third Reich. As film critic for the National Review and
theater critic for New York magazine, Simon’s specialty is
making punching bags out of people whose looks he finds
repellent, especially those who don’t conform to traditional
modes of beauty. (Barbra Streisand has been a favorite
target over the years: Early in her career, he said she looked
like “a tremulous young borzoi.”) If a performer isn’t
Simon’s idea of pinup material, the merits of his or her work
are beside the point. It was one of his remarks that once
earned him a plate of hot goulash in the face courtesy of
actress Sylvia Miles. His prejudices often make him sloppy
with the facts. In his review of Raúl Ruiz’s film of Proust’s
“Time Regained,” he identified Ruiz as “like Proust, a
homosexual.” As Film Comment pointed out, that should
come as some shock to Mrs. Ruiz.
Charles Taylor tries to go off on critic John Simon the way Simon goes off on everybody else. The occasion was Simon’s comments to director Atom Egoyan, taking questions from the press after the New York Film Festival opening of his film of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, one of the first two movies in a project seeking to film all of Beckett’s plays. Salon
