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Looking back now, it seems so obvious. But bear in mind how very new all this was at the time—and how very daring. The word Pop had only lately been coined by critics who were scrambling, as they had at least a score of times in the last century, to stretch the meaning of “art” still more hazardously thin, this time to cover pictures of soup cans and movie stars. The project had only just reached the popular press and was still knocking at the doors of the universities. But in the small, superheated world of film addicts where I was living at the time, we knew all about Pop before anybody got around to giving it a name. After all, we were the custodians of some very special pictures ourselves. Pictures that moved and spoke and glowed in the dark. Pictures that had been with us since our childhood, mingling with our dreams and fantasies. We knew how these pictures could bind the eye, steal the heart. They ruled our lives. They ruled everybody's life. We knew it and had long since faced up to it. To tell the truth, we relished it.

Finally, one of our kind made a movie about the power of movies. He was, of course, French. His movie came to America under the title
Breathless;
it was one of the major hits on the art-house circuit about the time I settled in at The Classic. In it, an American girl just out of college (it was Jean Seberg, exactly the right combination of blank innocence and spoiled-rotten moodiness) walks the streets of the Right Bank selling the
New York Herald Tribune,
getting casually involved in risky adventures with unsavory types. I remember that for months after I saw the movie, I wanted to be that footloose student wandering among the cafés, the bistros, the lowlife of Paris. It was an image of freedom, as well as dangerous fun.

But there was something more to the film than this precocious
image of youthful American alienation. The male lead (Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing a lovable young hood) goes through the picture imitating his idol, Humphrey Bogart. So here was I, watching a movie, wanting to be a character in that movie. And there was Belmondo, himself a French movie idol, playing the part of someone who has modeled his life on the movies. And
what
movies?
American
movies. Old Warner Brothers cops-and-robbers junkers that nobody ever regarded as culture, let alone art. Yet, watching Belmondo, I could remember how I, in my boyhood, had come home from Saturday matinees mouthing the words of Bogie or John Wayne, aping the antics of Buster Crabbe locked in deadly comic-strip combat with Ming of Mongo. Had Homer or Dante or Rembrandt ever reached deeper into the shadowed bottoms of the mind than these celluloid heroes?

Here was a movie that
understood.
And when Belmondo the hoodlum-martyr is finally gunned down in the gutter, he goes out playing Bogart to the end, clinging to a precious remnant of film imagery that has become his life and death.

Not many months after
Breathless
opened, I bought my first movie poster and pinned it to the bedroom door as a gift for Clare. A larger-than-life blowup of Bogart and Bergman in a still from
Casablanca.
I bought it because it was there to be bought, in the bookshops and drugstores, soon to be joined by Laurel and Hardy, Astaire and Rogers, and top-shot bouquets of Busby Berkeley's near-nudie cuties. Novelty items, mass produced, mainly for college kids. Another year and I was meeting undergraduates at parties wearing T-shirts that told the world “I'm Doing All I Can for Regis Toomey.”

Clare had lots of reservations about
Breathless.
They seemed to stem mainly from insults she'd once traded with Jean-Luc Godard when they crossed paths at the Cinémathèque. His impish decision to dedicate his film to Monogram Studios, that epitome of gutter culture, was one of those gestures of reverse snobbery that Clare deplored in the French. Still, the film brought back fond memories. “Believe it or not,” she told me in a rare wistful moment, “I actually did the Jean Seberg bit in Paris. For about six months when things got tight and I didn't want to take money from home. Finally had to throw in the towel. The only way you could even earn lunch money as a newsy was by chiseling the tourists into paying a buck for a seventy-five-cent paper. On the other hand, if I'd looked as good as Seberg does in a T-shirt, I might've done lots better.”

But Clare hadn't gone to Paris to hawk papers along the Champs-Elysées. She'd come on an intellectual pilgrimage in search of French cineasts who could discuss the films of Renoir, Cocteau, Bñnuel. Much to her surprise, when she found the mentors she was seeking, they were as often as not more eager to talk about John Ford and Joseph Lewis and Raoul Walsh. Oh yes, the Americans were hopeless philistines, little better than savages actually. That went without saying.
But
when it came to film, that was a different matter. Hollywood, which was run by a collection of capitalist bandits, had nevertheless invented the western, the musical, Donald Duck. It had turned the rarefied art of cinema into the people's art of movies. And such good movies! To be sure, the Americans themselves had no idea what they were doing. Like true savages, they hadn't the ability to appropriate their own culture. That required the services of European, ideally French, intellect. It was all very dialectical—how something of such charm and fascination could issue from such a debased source.

Clare spent three years being patronized as a visiting barbarian by condescending French film connoisseurs. “Most of what they had to say about America was pretty screwy,” she recalled. “That was back when Sartre was writing works of canonical ignorance like
The Respectful Prostitute.
Any stick to beat a dog with. They could never, never, never be simple, meaning honest. They could never just say they
liked
some good song and dance, or lots of brute action on the screen, the same way any proletarian meathead does.”

By the time Clare's sojourn was over, European sophistication had taught her the virtues of American vulgarity. She brought that lesson home with her and invested it in The Classic. From the outset, she decided she'd never run the place simply as an art house. Alongside the foreign films that were The Classic's bread and butter, she'd show the good old American stuff her audience and their parents had grown up on. Slapstick comedy, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Through her programming and her notes, she freely gave her audience the benefit of her European film studies, showing it how a Preston Sturges comedy or an MGM musical deserved the same critical appraisal as the great classics of the screen—and needed it more. Because, so Clare insisted, entertainment rules more lives than art, and rules them more despotically. People don't put up their guard when they're being entertained. The images and the messages slip through and take hold deeper.

“This country is a living picture show and doesn't know it,” I remember
her telling me the night we ran
Dr. Strangelove
at The Classic. “The kids grow up on John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe, but the professors go on teaching Chaucer, the intellectuals go on lint-picking their way through Wittgenstein. Christ! Bugs Bunny has more cultural clout in America than the hundred great books. Just look out the window, see how right Kubrick is. We've got gunslingers acting out
High Noon
in the White House. You don't find that kind of politics in Aristotle; you find it at the movies. Next time some president casts himself in a shootout like the Cuban missile crisis, we may all be dead. I wouldn't be surprised if we reach the point where America stops having elections and just holds auditions for high office. Then we can just send over to central casting for any two-bit actor who
looks
presidential.”

She was exaggerating, but I took her point.

As Clare saw things, she belonged to a tiny band of intrepid critics who had been trail-blazing the pop-cultural scene in America for twenty years. Now a new, more media-versed generation was catching up with her almost too rapidly—like an avalanche descending upon someone who cried out too loud in the icebound wilderness. We were approaching that precarious midspan of the sixties, a period whose insurgent style would usher in so many surprises both delightful and appalling. Clare was convinced that movies had played a big part in giving the parental order a well-deserved kick in the pants. “Movies began rubbing the shine off the Social Lie as far back as
film noir
cynicism. Then antiheroes like Brando, Dean, and Newman started dumping all-purpose contempt on Daddy's values. Brando's mumble, Montgomery Clift's slouch, Tony Perkins' sneer—they did more than a thousand political manifestos to rock the pillars of society.”

Clare had reservations about much that she saw; she
always
had reservations. Her judgments could be maddeningly convoluted. She claimed to have coined the term “radical chic” (as part of some film notes for
La Dolce Vita)
for the sort of work that glamorizes the corruption it purports to condemn. Of that she saw worrisomely plenty. But she fretted especially whenever the power of a movie outdistanced its intellectual merit.

“What are you
against,
kid?” asks the pretty blonde in
The Wild One.

“What have you got?” Brando, the brooding delinquent, asks back.

“A lousy movie,” Clare thought. “But you put a line like that in the mouth of someone with ten tons of screen charisma and it's dynamite.
Though somebody please tell me,” she added, picking up on one of her favorite gripes, “why must all our anti-establishment imagery be so exclusively
male?
When do we get the
new
Bette Davis?”

In Clare's view, the French New Wave, the angry young English directors were still way ahead of America in pioneering this new hip populist sensibility that so blithely mingled all levels and tastes with as much irreverence for old line radicalism as for bourgeois propriety. In Paris, street-fighting students would soon be calling themselves “Groucho Marxists.” But America was coming on strong. Dr. Spock's first wave of spoiled brats was arriving on the campuses infected with much the same strain of loony left-wing disaffiliation, wanting more fun and freedom than even their ever-indulgent parents would give—above all wanting to make love not war. That choice was coming to seem more and more like a matter of life and death with each news bulletin. America's long-secret maneuvers in Vietnam had boiled up into a major bloodbath that looked to the pampered young not the least bit like the pursuit of happiness.

With alarms like this going off on all sides, I sometimes had honest doubts if the questions that raged among Clare and her friends—heavy, all-night debates about veiled motivations in Cassavetes'
Shadows,
Antonioni's daring use of color in
Red Desert
—really mattered all that much. Did film studies have any defensible place in a world that was going berserk? But whenever I so much as breathed a word of such reservations, Clare was quick to slap me down. “Art civilizes,” she insisted. The words were an article of faith for her. “Without aesthetics, no ethics. And vice versa. There isn't a single political issue that couldn't be settled by a heavy dose of good taste. Anyway, Jonny, you've got no call to bad-mouth the movies. You owe them a lot—maybe your life.”

She was right about that. By a crazy twist of fate, I had the movies to thank for my civilian status during the war years. When my student deferment lapsed, I fully expected to find myself on the next plane to Saigon. Instead my draft board regretfully notified me that I was judged unfit for service due to “sociopathic tendencies.” Namely, I'd once been arrested for conspiring to show an obscene movie. Chipsey Goldenstone's
Venetian Magenta
spared me the horrors of Vietnam. I had, of course, beaten the rap in court; but the military was having nothing to do with shameless pornographers.

What Clare was proposing for my academic future made perfect
sense. Looking back now, anybody could see that. Max Castle has long since become a name to conjure with in the art of film; my pioneering studies of his work have become minor classics in their own right. But at the time it took more than a little convincing to overcome my stubborn caution. I was a timid student wanting to stay close to respectability. Under the influence of my thesis adviser (in Clare's opinion an academic drudge; his specialty was publishing pedestrian filmographies on postwar French and Italian directors) I'd been outlining a rather stale project on early Neorealism, a small, secret tribute to those Italian beauties who had lent my youthful lust a touch of artistry. Clare didn't disapprove, but she wouldn't encourage the choice either. “It's just the
usual
thing, Jonny,” she kept insisting. “It's so damned
safe.”

Which, to my unenterprising way of thinking, made it exactly the right choice. But Clare had other, more daring, things in mind for me, and she had her own ways of breaking down the pedagogical barriers.

One night during a memorably steamy bedroom seminar, Clare began to hold forth at some length about the movies of William Keighley. William Keighley? And not his better, later work, but low-grade stuff the likes of
G-Men, Special Agent, Brother Rat. “Each Dawn I Die,”
Clare mused. “Probably that's the best of his hack jobs. Stalin once said it was his favorite movie.” Oh? And what was I to make of that? “Do you realize what it takes to get through to a Stalin?”

From there, the talk drifted off toward the films of Errol Taggart, William Clemens, Sam Katzman … third- and fourth-raters who had once shared quarters with Max Castle along Hollywood's Poverty Row. Clare and I had never discussed such filmmakers before; I assumed because they were outside the boundaries even of her sprawling critical attention. But now she seemed to be saying every good thing in the world about them. About their “raw masculine energy,” their “unabashed directness,” their “robust narrative line,” above all their “sure sense of popular taste.”