Still, it is hard to believe that any dedicated reader of FILM COMMENT can consider any movie a priori too trivial or too tawdry for serious study. Much of the snobbery I encountered in the beginning of my career as a defender and rationalizer of “fun” movies has been replaced by a pervasive credulity. Hoist by my own petard, I now find myself encountering learned disquisitions on movies I myself consider trash. And so it goes.

Now for some quibbling with the people who preceded me.

Roger Ebert: His list, like all the others, tends to be eclectic. I have not seen Big Foot or Infra-Man, but Roger makes them sound so hilariously awful that I can’t help feeling that he has included them simply to display his bellelettrist virtuosity with the synopsizing of schlock. I have seen Invasion of the Bee Girls, however, and I can vouch for its esoteric eroticism. With Heat, Ebert pulls the rug out from under the New York chi-chi set with his “No, no, not the 1972 Andy Warhol version. The real thing: The 1970 version produced, written, and directed by the unsung Argentine filmmaker Armando Bo, who co-stars his wife, Isabel Sarli, Miss Agentine of 1955.” My own South-of-the-Border favorite happens to be Libertad Leblanc—perhaps on the premise that, in Latin America particularly, blondes have more fun than brunettes.

In this context, however, Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected, festival fodder of a relatively high order, seems unduly sophisticated and ironic amid all its affection for its primitive subject. By the same token, a relatively obscure Polish film entitled The Lodger enables Ebert to exclaim, “no, no not the 1926 Hitchcock version,” as Last House on the Left enables Ebert to acknowledge the movie’s rip-off of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, and yet praise the rip-off for its “artlessness” and “blunt force.”

I am completely in agreement with Ebert on The Money Trap, a work that exemplifies what I once described as the beatitude of B pictures. Villa Rides remains massively problematical for me. As for the obligatory homage to Russ Meyer: though I am a certified Joe Sarno man ever since the beginning of softcore on the side-streets, I did book Meyer’s Vixen in my Columbia seminar on eroticism. Despite Ebert’s infectiously exuberant prose, I am not convinced that foreign-language films, with their inescapable residue of ethnographic edification, can qualify as Guilty Pleasures. Otherwise, I would have to acknowledge Nicole Berger in Game of Love, Bibi and Harriet, Michele and Simone, Herta and Magda, and all the other enchantresses from abroad.

Martin Scorsese: His is by far the most comprehensive listing, genre by genre, and for the most part, pleasure seems to outweigh guilt, and admiration outweighs both. He shows a nice feeling for plot (Play Dirty, My Dream Is Yours, Khartoum, The Counterfeit Traitor, I Walk Alone), mood (Land of the Pharaohs, In Harm’s Way, One-Eyed Jacks, Night and the City, Station Six—Sahara), psychology (Twelve O’Clock High, Always Leave Them Laughing), mythology (The Man I Love, The Magic Box), and physical energy (Hell’s Angels, Lady in the Dark, Dark of the Sun).

My biggest quibble is with The Silver Chalice, a thoroughly bad movie with memorably inauthentic set design. I am surprised no one mentioned Red Garters, a strained Fifties parody with the craziest color schemes in living memory. The inclusion of The Uninvited is equally baffling for the opposite reason: I have never met anyone who has seen it who has not loved it. Pleasures yes, Guilty why? It would take several articles to comment on Scorsese’s “100 Random Pleasures.” I have seen all but two or three movies on this longer list, and can see what he means in most instances. I would say that the list is subtly anti-Truffaut—or, rather, non-Truffaut, in that a distinctive personal style on the Renoiresque and Hitchcockian scale is subordinated to gleams of talent. Also, Scorsese mentions an unusually large number of British films, a section of the cinema Truffaut officially consigned to oblivion.

Paul Schrader: The trickiest and most problematical of all for me, his list is the only one to contain a silent film: D. W. Griffith’s True Heart Susie. My own feeling is that Schrader is not nearly old enough ever to have felt guilt over his feeling for a silent movie. For that matter, even an old graybeard like me is not quite old enough. Like Scorsese, Schrader has picked up on the inverted snobbery attendant upon appreciation of Abbott and Costello. The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon are too classical. The Ritz Brothers are raucous enough, but they are a little too early for Scorsese’s and Schrader’s generation. Martin and Lewis, together or singly, belong to the French in perpetuity. Wheeler and Woolsey are a little too early even for Vincent Canby and me, the two seniors in this class of game players.

From what I have seen of Wheeler and Woolsey, I would rather continue examining the comparatively obscure claims of Bobby Clark, the funniest man I have ever seen work a stage; Joe Cook, even faster with semi-gibberish than Groucho, and a far more convincing con man; and Raymond Griffith, the last of the largely unknown major silent clowns. Yet, one of the most incredibly raunchy and misogynous routines I have ever seen on a moue screen occurs in Wheeler and Woolsey’s Half Shot at Sunrise, a World War I divertissement in which a long-skirted French soubrette type mounts Woolsey’s shoulders, her skirt dropping completely over his head like a shroud, after which he lurches out of control, sending her tumbling off his shoulders, a maneuver that reveals Woolsey holding his nose with one hand , and brushing away the noxious fumes of her underclothes with the other. A guilty pleasure? Not exactly. But it is certainly one of the damnedest things I have ever seen.

Decision at Sundown and Peeping Tom are fairly ritualized cult material. Reflections in a Golden Eye is a creditable movie on any level. Anything with Brando in it is almost too easy for this kind of game. I, the Jury is Schrader’s Silver Chalice, with cinematography the alleged virtue of the latter, as set design was of the former. This kind of choice reminds me of the old Hollywood routine at the exit from the preview, “Relax, I just loved the decor.” Schrader displays his religious background with a Billy Graham-Ethel Waters production entitled The Heart is a Rebel, and the schlock is represented by something called Two Thousand Maniacs! But Scorpio Rising and Wavelength and Last Year at Marienbad are so enduringly respectable as avant-garde enterprises that it is hard to see how anyone who has written a book on Bresson, Dreyer, and Ozu can feel at all guilty.

Vincent Canby grew up during the studio system and guilty pleasures of the Thirties, during which time guilty pleasures were few and far between. Maureen O’Sullivan (as Jane), Hedy Lamarr (in Ecstasy), Claudette Colbert (in The Sign of the Cross), and Joan Craw (in Rain) were hot stuff indeed—and Mom and Dad was nothing short of a primal scene. He recalls this period with an impeccable style of cool disenchantment. For the hot flush of guilt we must go instead to his exquisitely written novels and plays.

David Newman anticipated my own second-guessing with some of his own, and he is the only contributor to my knowledge to have thrown a Guilty Pleasures party at which he screened one of his own Guilty Pleasures, to which he had gained temporary access. The movie in question—I Changed My sex, a heartfelt defense of transvestism with a bizarre cameo performance by Bela Lugosi—amused the movie buffs in attendance, but only baffled the uninitiated, which would seem to indicate that Guilty Pleasures is not a game that any number can play.

Newman’s other choices—Carry On, Constable, Hopalong Cassidy, Shack Out on 101, Three Little Girls in Blue (for shiksah Vera-Ellen, about which more later), Rollerbabies (the only hard-core porn in the series), Riding High, The Adventures of Hajji Baba, and an unnamed tenth film Newman is ostensibly too ashamed to identify—fall with more consistency into the category of aggressive stupidity. These are not even Orwell’s Good-Bad, but out-and-out Bad-Bad, described with a zestful perversity in which there is nothing of the closet film historian one suspects in Scorsese and Schrader.

Well then, I might as well begin my own shameful confessions with Vera-Ellen. I cannot count the times I sat through dull Danny Kaye vehicles like Wonder Man and Kid from Brooklyn. I saw her many times also in Three Little Girls in Blue. George Jean Nathan, no less, once wrote of her in the stage production of Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart’s Connecticut Yankee that she could come dance on his typewriter anytime she liked. I didn’t see the production, but I bought the cast album with her chirping rendition of “Thou Swell” in those ancient days of 78 RPM. Curiously, she was not as overwhelmingly appealing to me when she moved over to Metro to dance with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. Even the supposedly surefire “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” number in Words and Music did not stir me as I thought it should, though Kelly’s version was infinitely superior to a Balanchine botch job I saw years later on the stage.

Let us say simply that the Guilty Pleasure side of me is resolutely non-auterist. I said it more simply some years ago: “Girls! Girls! Girls!” And the operative word is “girls”—not “women,” but “child-women”—all the snooty vestal virgins I worshipped from far in my ridiculously repressed high-school days. It is my first chocolate malted, my first chocolate sundae, and my first western sandwich all wrapped together in my first hopeless crush. I have already confessed my vicarious romances with Vivien Leigh, Margaret Sullivan, Carole Lombard, Jean Arthur, but there is no more guilt attached to these titanic icons. OK, I saw That Hamilton Woman over eighty times. So what?

Leigh and Olivier are guilt-free items. So is Hitchcock and Garbo and the two Hepburns and Capra and McCarey and Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, and with these two latter auteurs out of bounds, how can I commemorate my strange fondness for Diana Lynn (The Major and the Minor, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek). Would you believe that I bought her piano albums? Hungarian Rhapsody anyone?

I have already confessed my childhood infatuation with Gloria Jean in The Underpup. I checked out her performance recently on a cable television channel, and found her emotionally manipulative—just what the doctor ordered for a prepubescent masochist. My vivid memories of Treasure Island, Knight Without Armor, Viva Villa, Dark Journey, and Lancer Spy have all been satisfactorily reappraised. I have come to terms with all my infantile fantasies. And yet the hopeless-crush side of me continues to fill me with feelings of guilt and inferiority. I feel a sweet, sticky, gooey sentimentality splotched all over my sensibility. It has nothing to do with sex. Kenneth Tynan and Philip Roth have taught us not to be ashamed of our first erections. So there are no sex movies as such on my Guilty Pleasures list. I love Lola Albright in Cold Wind in August and Champion. I love Susannah York in anything. I could talk about Audrey Campbell and Laura Antonelli and Jenny Agutter. And I can see what Robin Wood sees in Susan George, and Richard Corliss in Carol Laure. But the whole subject of eroticism has been entombed in the Academy.

The same applies to violence and horror and ugliness. For many years I was fond of Wicked Woman as a transcendentally trashy experience with Beverly Michaels and Percy Helton and Richard Egan, and some incredibly sordid goings-on in a seedy cafe littered with petty avarice and ratty desire. Then I encountered Lily Tomlin at a party, and she began acting out whole scenes from the movie, and it became part of her wide-ranging repertoire, and it was no longer one of my Guilty Pleasures. François Truffaut was visibly shocked a few years ago when I had the temerity to suggest that Jean Dellanoy’s Maigret Sets A Trap with Gabin, Girardot, and Dessaily was more entertaining Simenon than La Nuit du Carrefour with Pierre Renoir, a nondescript cast, and a few reels misplaced by Jean Mitry. Renoir’s mise en scene was infinitely superior, of course. Of course.

And then there was the sheer scandale at the end of 1958 when Stanley Kramers’s The Defiant Ones made my Ten Best list, and both Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil did not. You can look it up. But it is no big deal. I am part of the historical process, and evolutionary change is built into my critical metabolism.

But I still dread the day when I come face to face with the soft, squishy movies that have reduced my mind to mush, and my heart to jello, and I find that I am still not free of their spell. Here then in no particular order are my most shameful carbohydrate cravings on the screen:

Mervyn LeRoy’s Sweet Adeline (1935). Irene Dunne sings Jerome Kern’s “Why Was I Born” at an audition. Her chief competition, the lower-billed Winifred Shaw—who was so sensational that same year singing “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold Diggers of 1935—is given a strained prima-donna-foreign-accent so that she can “lose” convincingly to Dunne. You would think that this invidious big-star anecdote would make me sour on Dunne. No chance. I love Irene Dunne despite James Agee, and despite Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—both of whom I admire enormously, but not on the subject of Irene Dunne.

Victor Saville’s South Riding (1937). Ralph Richardson was great, Ann Todd was mad, Glynis Johns was still a child, but would you believe that I had a thing about Edna Best? There was some political stuff, but all I cared about was the adulterous kiss shared by Best and Richardson. Talk about Anglophilia!

H.C. Potter’s Mr. Lucky (1943). Laraine Day had the most beautiful jaw in pictures, and when Cary Grant socked it (for her own good, of course), it was the most erotic transaction I had ever witnessed between a man and a woman up to that time. I know I indicated I would not include my erotic experiences in this list, but this one is so kinky it comes out the other side into innocence. I liked Laraine Day in Foreign Correspondent, too, but Hitchcock is off limits, of course. Finally, I thought Laraine was much too good for Leo Durocher.

Frank Launder’s The Adventuress (1947). I had a brief fling with Deborah Kerr before she went to Metro. I even mooned over her in Colonel Blimp though that picture clearly belonged to Roger Livesey.

William Dieterle’s Love Letters (1945). Jennifer Jones plus Lee Garmes plus Victor Young plus Ayn Rand plus Joseph Cotten was more emotional intoxication than I and the U.S. Marines in the Pacific Theatre—who voted this their favorite movie in 1945—could bear.

Ralph Thomas’s The Clouded Yellow (1951). If Jean Simmons had gotten the part in Roman Holiday, as she was supposed to, she would have become too big a star to make a Guilty Pleasures list. As it is, she helped fill the vacuum left by Vivian Leigh’s semi-withdrawal from the screen.

Mark Robson’s My Foolish Heart (1949). Very little was left of Salinger’s brilliant short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” but Susan Hayward (with another lovely Victor Young theme) was an emotional axiom unto herself.

Henry Koster’s Music for Millions (1944), Richard Thorpe’s Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), Henry Koster’s Two Sisters from Boston (1946). These were the years of my crush on June Allyson, and even today I cannot be objective about her huskyvoiced sorcery, her bubbly smile, and her ability to cry up an ocean.

Richard Haydn’s Miss Tatlock’s Millions (1948). In his otherwise invaluable and exhaustive reference book, TV Movies, the estimable Leonard Maltin does not even mention the presence of Wanda Hendrix. For shame, Leonard! Wanda Hendrix is the only person in the cast. At least after twenty-five viewings, my eyes glaze over when anyone else takes over the screen, but I go bananas when little Wanda traces her fingers across John Lund’s bare chest, thinking all the time that he is her brother, and he is not, you see, and he has to try to control himself, tee-hee, because he is trying to conceal a scam. Once while I was trying to keep my collegiate heart from beating too fast during this scene, a sophisticated couple sitting in front of me turned to each other with identical what-is-this? expressions, and stalked out of the theater, presumably to catch some adult French film or other. What particularly intimidated me in this galling moment of cultural truth was that I was seeing this movie for the eighth time, and I knew I would have a hard time getting Wanda’s itsy-bitsy fingers out of my veins until at lest the twentieth fix.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going (1947). Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey in Scotland with their beautiful manners and tremulous speaking voices gave me more guilty pleasure than the entire oeuvre of René Clair—with the possible exception of June Duprez in And Then There Were None.

Alexander Korda’s Vacation from Marriage (1945) Deborah Kerr and Glynis Johns were marvelous together, and Kerr and Robert Donat even more so. I could mention Glynis Johns also in Sidney Gilliat’s State Secret ( 1950).

W. S. Van Dyke’s I Married an Angel (1942). This is it, the pits as far as personal exposure is concerned. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a discreet choice by comparison. Just think of it: Jeanette MacDonald in the ripest performance of her series with Nelson Eddy, and an idiotic dream-plot to irritate the audience. I liked it when I first saw it, and I liked it again when I saw it a year or two ago at the Theatre 80 St. Marks, and I still found Jeanette sexy and sophisticated. I should say something about Joan Greenwood, Patricia Roc, Jean Kent, Valerie Robson, and Phyllis Calvert in a group of low-grade British teasingly erotic period adventures, but I have said enough already. If I am not careful I may spill the beans about Helen Chandler in Alimony Madness.