Quotes

If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be "Rio Bravo".

A light entertainment can have depth, subtlety, finesse, it can embody mature moral values; indeed, it seems to me that it must.

[on the films of Howard Hawks]:It is distressing that one should have to remind people that a great work of art can be, at least on certain levels, immediately accessible and pleasurable, but, in the age of Beckett and Burroughs, of "Finnegans Wake" and "Marienbad", it has become necessary. We must beware of dismissing Hawks's films because we enjoy them.

[on "High Noon"]: It strikes me as the archetypal 'Oscar' film, product of the combined talents of the archetypal 'Oscar' director (Zinnemann), the archetypal 'Oscar' writer (Carl Foreman) and the archetypal 'Oscar' producer (Stanley Kramer): three gentlemen whose work has been characterized by those Good Intentions with which we understand the road to Hell to be paved.

[on Luis Bunuel] Society, he suggests, condemns the abnormalities that it has itself produced; his refusal to be shocked by anything is refreshing and liberating.

[on "Zabriskie Point", 1970] I am not advocating any crudely utilitarian, give-us-a-message view of art when I say that what strikes me most forcibly about the new film is its almost total uselessness.

[on "Marnie" (1964)]: The general critical reception accorded to "Marnie" in Britain would appear quite staggeringly obtuse if one had not been well prepared for it by many precedents.