Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever
By Matt Singer
(G.P. Putman’s Sons, 352 pages, $30)

In the late 1960s, Gene Siskel was a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert a young reporter at the rival Chicago Sun-Times when each was offered his respective newspaper’s movie beat. Neither had a background in professional criticism of any kind; they weren’t film scholars or trained practitioners of the in-depth critical analysis of, well, anything. No, they were newspapermen of the old school, ready to cover anything from a murder trial to a baseball game to a chamber-music recital. Movies? Siskel, as Matt Singer writes in his entertaining and reverential new book, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, remembered having had “an intense reaction” at age 6 to the Tony Curtis biopic Houdini; Ebert had fond memories of seeing Danny Kaye in the RKO musical Hans Christian Andersen, which came out when he was 10. (I loved that one, too.) But neither of them had been the kind of kid, like Steven Spielberg or Peter Bogdanovich, who was obsessed with film. 

Still, fate made them film critics. And in 1975, a Chicago public-TV channel, WTTW, invited them to team up for a series that, in one incarnation after another, would last until Siskel’s death in 1999 (and, in other formats, and of course without Siskel, would limp along for a few more years). Singer — who edits a website called ScreenCrush.com and has written a previous book about, of all things, Spider-Man — confesses in his acknowledgments that he became a devoted fan of the series at age 13, and his continued devotion to it is obvious not just from his rather hyperbolic subtitle but from statements like this: “Siskel & Ebert was the first and perhaps greatest TV show in history where the struggle between the two antagonists was entirely intellectual.” 

“The first”? Really? Um, Firing Line, anybody? (Later in the book, Singer — who pays virtually no attention to Siskel and Ebert’s newspaper reviews — actually suggests that Siskel & Ebert was the direct ancestor of shows like The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s Crossfire.) As for “entirely intellectual” — well, when one watches old episodes of Siskel and Ebert’s show, many different adjectives come to mind, but “intellectual” isn’t one of them. Singer records that when Ebert first saw the gory 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde, he “immediately recognized it as the first masterpiece of his tenure as the Sun-Times’ film critic,” calling it “a work of truth and brilliance.” Well, at the time I thought Bonnie and Clyde was cool, too. I was 10. In later years I came to recognize it, along with pictures like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, as part of a lamentable revolution in American film that made heroes out of bums, creeps, and crooks. As for Siskel, he loved the moronic Saturday Night Fever so much that he placed the winning bid on John Travolta’s dance outfit when it went up for auction. 

And both of them, as Singer records, slobbered over the sappy, synthetic Terms of Endearment, celebrating it as a rich portrait of human relationships. Quoting their encomia, Singer shows no signs of finding the praise excessive. By contrast, in his account of one 1988 episode of the TV show, Singer dismisses the truly masterly Cinema Paradiso — which they discussed on that episode — as a not “particularly extraordinary” film that is only “slightly remembered” today. One episode that Singer doesn’t mention, but that I recall vividly, is the one on which they reviewed The World According to Garp, a film that had absolutely bowled me over. I still remember watching that episode and being shocked at both men’s utter failure to grasp the film’s point. One more gripe: The other day, I watched an old clip of them discussing the 1994 Best Film nominees with David Letterman; while they gushed over Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, they didn’t say a word about another nominee, The Shawshank Redemption, which is now widely — and rightly — considered one of the most monumental films ever. 

No, the main appeal of Siskel and Ebert’s TV show wasn’t intellectual stimulation. Or critical insight. Or impeccable taste. But what their debates about new movies did provide, in spades, was a diverting display of brio, humor, passion, chutzpah, and (not least) near-pathological competitiveness. And it succeeded beyond anybody’s expectations. Eventually it went from a monthly to a weekly broadcast; it was put into national syndication; it moved from WTTW to Tribune Entertainment and then to Disney. And as these changes took place over a period of many years, the series went through several names, among them Sneak Previews and At the Movies. Finally, it was simply Siskel & Ebert. That’s how famous these guys were, in the end: their very names, by the mid 1980s, had become synonymous with film reviewing. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: The Crown’s Death Porn)

And yet their show’s formula was exceedingly simple and essentially unchanging. So were their reflections about the art of film criticism — at least, the ones that Singer chooses to hold up for our admiration and edification. He tells us, for example, about Siskel’s discovery that when reviewing a movie “he had to think along two parallel tracks simultaneously: one watching the movie, the other watching himself as he watched the movie, trying to understand his own reactions.” Siskel also proposed what he called “The Great Movie Test,” which Singer explains as follows: “If you rewatch a classic over and over, do you get new things out of it each time? If yes, then it is a truly great film.” I understand that Singer adores Siskel and Ebert, but I wish he hadn’t served up these truisms as if they were rocket science, or as if his heroes had actually come up with them.

Yes, Singer does address the fact that not everyone shared his enthusiasm for the Windy City duo. “Some hard-core cinephiles,” Singer admits, “accused Siskel & Ebert of dumbing down the conversation around cinema, reducing nuanced discourse to a series of binary yes or no votes.” By now, of course, the crudely “binary” approach to criticism that gives Singer’s book its title is a familiar cultural phenomenon. But it wasn’t ever thus. When I first became aware of Siskel and Ebert, I was a graduate student in English; and, yes, perhaps I was a bit too sober about these things for my own good, but their “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” schtick struck me as downright barbaric. 

Then again, thanks to Siskel and Ebert, a great many Americans who never would’ve read a full-length movie review, let alone a long, dense essay in Film Quarterly, at least became acquainted with the notion of pondering films critically. At the time, phenomena like Siskel & Ebert and MTV and minimalistic “Literary Brat Pack” fictions by tyros like Jay McInerney and David Leavitt had some of us convinced that the future of middlebrow culture lay in catering to short attention spans; then, somewhere between Gene’s death in 1999 (at 53) and Roger’s in 2013 (at 70), the World Wide Web came into its own, making possible a wide range of podcasts and similar offerings that provide serious long-form discussions of cinema and that render TV shows like Siskel & Ebert superfluous and outdated. No, most of these online cineastes don’t make anywhere near the kind of money that Siskel and Ebert ended up raking in, but — hey — that’s entertainment. 

And in the final analysis, that’s what Siskel & Ebert was: entertainment. They deserved their wealth and fame — not because they were world-class models of critical acumen, but because they hit on a TV formula that was perfectly designed for them and for the times and that delighted a huge audience, and they plugged away at it year after year, heaven bless ’em, until it had made them TV legends. Jamie Bennett, the Disney executive who snatched Siskel & Ebert away from Tribune Entertainment, tells Singer that it was one of two series in American television history “that are really just all about the talent and who they are and the fact that what they do and how they do it is perfect TV.” The other such show, according to Bennett? Julia Child’s The French Chef. It’s precisely the right comparison. For, like Julia, Siskel and Ebert came along at just the right historical moment; like her, they put their very specific sets of skills into a zingy, zippy format that served up useful information with a big dose of personality. No, it wasn’t brilliant film criticism. But it was great TV. And in Opposable Thumbs, Matt Singer has written a charming, well-deserved tribute to those two fellows in the balcony. 

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