Derek Malcolm

Derek Elliston Michael Malcolm (12 May 1932 – 15 July 2023) was an English film critic and historian. He was the main film critic of The Guardian for about thirty years and later wrote for the London Evening Standard.

Quotes

1971–1981

• For [Thomas] Mann's interior dialogue is substituted some of the most ravishingly wrought images Visconti has ever committed to the screen. Aschenbach’s arrival at the Hotel des Bains of the early century is meticulously detailed and observed. His first sight of the boy, in the bosom of his Polish family, his sniffing out of the cholera epidemic which suddenly decimates the tourists, his ill-at-ease attempts to refurbish himself with the help of the hotel barber, all these episodes could scarcely be better done in terms of direction, art direction and acting. True, the camera lingers lovingly on what has been created. There are times when Visconti scarcely seems concerned about moving the story onwards. Yet it serves its purpose quite as well at Mann’s prose. It is in the final half hour that one's doubts grow, as the boy smiles and smiles at the man, and the man visibly dies under the untouching assault. Perhaps it is here that Dirk Bogarde's otherwise superb performance shows a bit at the seams. We become aware that he is an actor acting, manoeuvring a mask, and that Visconti is watching him do it, lost in admiration.
  • "Death in Venice: 'a slow, precise, and beautiful film' – archive, 1971" The Guardian (4 March 1971; reprint on the website: 4 March 2021)

• All [Mrinal] Sen's films, even his most lightweight, have attacked, with undisguised horror and anger, the poverty, exploitation and inherent hypocrisy of Indian society. That is why he has remained a hero for so many of the young, who criticise [Satyajit] Ray for a lack of overt political commitment and wish to see a truly revolutionary Indian cinema undiluted by European classicist and humanist sympathies. Yet, like Ray, he is certainly not a specifically Indian director whose films show no outside influences at work. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk with him – and he is an indefatigable talker – without constant reference to European, Russian and particularly English culture, often literary rather than cinematic.
• Throughout his career he has unashamedly hopped from one outside influence to another in an attempt to clothe the content of his films in a form which will surprise and shock. He has sloganised, fantasised and parodied as well as presenting us with neo-realism, documentary and even Chekovian pastiche. But that is only the half of it. His films also show the seminal influence of a great deal of Indian popular and folk culture. He will beg, borrow or steal from anything to form an appropriately striking style and, for all that, still remain resolutely his own man.
  • "Guerrilla fighter: Derek Malcolm on Mrinal Sen" Sight & Sound ([Autumn] 1981), as republished on the BFI website (18 July 2023).

2000–2021

• Jeanne Moreau was the perfect choice for Catherine: she gives a performance full of gaiety and charm without conveying an empty-headed bimbo. She makes the watcher understand that this is no ordinary woman whom both men adore. It is possibly the most complete portrait of any feminine character in the entire ouevre of the New Wave and it made her an international star.
• Jules et Jim seemed revolutionary at the time, but Truffaut's revolution, unlike Godard's, implied not so much the destruction of the past as a turning back to the humanism of Vigo, Renoir and the French cinema of the 30s. The film's "rondo of love" represents both a backward glance at the best of the past and a forward glance into the cinema's future. Its enthusiasm for what the cinema is and can be is what makes it so special.
  • "François Truffaut: Jules et Jim", The Guardian (11 May 2000).
  • Reprinted in A Century of Films: Derek Malcolm's Personal Best (I.B. Taurus, November 2000) Century of Cinema, pp. 20–22, 21–22

• No film I ever saw was any more dramatic than the story of my parents, whose marriage was so soon overtaken by a tragedy that received huge publicity and effectively destroyed the happiness of both.
  • From Family Secrets (2003), as cited in "Inside Story: Cannes critics" The Independent (15 May 2006)
  • Lieutenant Douglas Malcolm, his father, murdered his mother's lover, but was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1917 the jury concluding it was a justifiable homicide and the judge accepting it as a crime passionnel.

• I've had the luck if that is what you call it to get stuck in a lift with the great Orson Welles and his large wolfhound to take tea with Charlie Chaplin and to interview the always testy John Ford. Ford hated critics and had stomach trouble at the time He summoned me into the room as follows: "Come on in. I can deal with two shits at once".
  • "Stars galore, but what makes a legend?" Evening Standard (10 September 2004), p. 13

• But I was thrilled to bits just to see them and I asked my mother at the interval whether I could meet them. She asked the theatre manager and he came back with a note. It said: "Yes, but don't bring your mother …"
  The manager took me to the door of their dressing room and knocked, but left before Hardy answered the door. "Come in, young man," he said. "We have tea and buns on the way for you. This is Stan, by the way, as you can see by his hat. He seldom takes its off, even in bed."
  I was tongue-tied. But when the tray of tea and buns came in, I tucked in enthusiastically. Whereupon Hardy took a bun from the tray, placed it on his chair and sat on it. It was, of course, squashed flat. I'm pretty sure he did it to amuse me. But you never knew with Hardy, who preferred playing golf to working.
  • "Tea and buns with Laurel and Hardy: Derek Malcolm on the day he met his comedy heroes" The Guardian (11 October 2018)
  • On meeting Laurel and Hardy backstage at the London Coliseum in 1947

• [How Malcolm began a film critic] I was on the Gloucestershire Echo and wrote to Brian Redhead, who was the Manchester Guardian‍'‍s arts editor, asking if I could write about the Cheltenham literary festival. He said I might send my piece in and it was published, and he told me to come and see him. I knew Redhead was a socialist and if he knew I was at Eton and Oxford I would never get a job. So he asked me where I went to school and I said: "Somewhere near Slough". I ended up as a designer, and then called down to London where I was the late-night sub and the only one who could read the reviews by Neville Cardus [the renowned music critic and cricket correspondent] who submitted his copy in longhand. I became the letters editor, and – because I had been an amateur jockey in the 1960s — the racing correspondent.
  I was also the deputy drama critic to Philip Hope-Wallace, who took great delight in sending me to review Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. I became the film critic because the editor fired the existing critic, Richard Roud, for writing a one-word review of The Sound of Music — he just wrote "No". Just that.
  • Interview with Peter Bradshaw, as cited in "Boozy lunches and sober sandwiches: how the Guardian film critic's job has changed", The Guardian (27 June 2021, modified 26 August 2021)
  • The anecdote about Richard Roud's review of The Sound of Music may not be entirely correct as his entirely straightforward review was published in The Guardian on 26 March 1965 (and republished on the website exactly fifty-five years later in 2020). Roud continued as the newspaper's "London film critic" until December 1969 when he was succeeded by Malcolm. Brian Redhead was himself a graduate of Cambridge University.

About Derek Malcolm

• To publish a book on the "100 best films of the century" is really putting your head on the block, even if that "best" is qualified as "personal". Derek Malcolm's choice strikes me as sound and stimulating, a mixture of the conservative and the adventurous.
• Personally, I regret the absence of Sirk, Boetticher, Donen, Vertov, Tourneur, Whale, Kazan, Boorman, Malle and Roeg, but recognise that Malcolm is making a statement by omitting Spielberg. There are no Australian directors represented, and no SF flicks. All lists reveal something about the compiler, and there's a lot of sex and socialism here.
  • Philip French "What the critics say - it's a question of taste" The Guardian (18 January 2001)
  • The Guardian ran a series of Malcolm's own selection which were collected in A Century of Films: Derek Malcolm's Personal Best. Other critic's contributions were included in this assessment.