Viewpoint

By Stefan Kanfer

In celluloid as in petroleum, value is determined by scarcity. From the '30s to the '50s, Hollywood produced hundreds of popular entertainments that audiences and critics considered standard fare. Now that the major studios have shrunk slowly in the West, the antique movies have been revalued upward. According to many film scholars and au-teurists, old Hollywood seems to have been an amalgam of quattrocento Florence and Periclean Greece.

The truth, never plentiful along Vine Street, may be glimpsed in NET'S bright new series The Men Who Made the Movies. Produced, written and directed by Author and TIME Movie Critic Richard Schickel, The Men concludes next week with a profile of King Vidor. The other past masters of American cinema profiled on the series: Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Raoul Walsh, William Wellman.

The acute and often hilarious interviews are illuminated with clips from some 108 films, including rare footage from Hitchcock's silent The Lodger and Vincente Minnelli's neglected adaptation of Madame Bovary. Some of the films reveal youthful naivete; a few are outright embarrassments. But most are works of honest craft, and a surprising number are examples of authentic art.

If the clips are endlessly fascinating, the recollections are worth the entire price of production. Here, for instance, is Howard Hawks recalling a hunting trip on which an actor and an author met for the first time. The actor asked who the good living writers were. The author answered, "Thomas Mann, Willa Gather, John Dos Passes, Ernest Hemingway and myself." The actor said, "You write, Mr. Faulkner?" And the author replied, "Yes. What do you do, Mr. Gable?"

Scarcely less indelible is Raoul Walsh's detailed account of kidnaping

John Barrymore's corpse in order to frighten a performer. When he returned the body to the mortuary, an undertaker asked, "Where did you take him, Mr. Walsh?" Walsh said, "I took him up to Errol Flynn's." The undertaker said, "Why the hell didn't you tell me? I'd have put a better suit on him."

Vigorous Egos. On occasion, the camera lets the speaker enlighten the audience at his own expense: Alfred Hitchcock's comparison of a murder in Torn Curtain with the holocaust of Auschwitz betrays a pompous misreading of history. Howard Hawks' decrying of self-consciousness is contradicted by the rigidities of Red River. For the most part, however, the directors are shown as canny and incorrodable professionals, sustained by vigorous memories and egos. Schickel makes no attempt to hide their flaws: Frank Capra often lurches from sentimentality to unabashed bathos; William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks appear to have been terrors on the set and in their private lives. But whatever their methods, all eight men achieved results that permanently altered the style of world cinema. Those results have never been better analyzed on television.

Stefan Kanfer

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