



Mark Kermode, Observer film critic

When someone is a giant in their chosen field, it is said that they “cast a long shadow”. Philip French – a giant in the world of international film criticism – did the opposite; he cast a beam of light, like a projector shining out into the darkness of a cinema auditorium. For a generation of film critics he was a beacon, someone who elevated the profession to the level of art. His knowledge was breathtaking, his judgment acute yet generous, his prose style elegant.

His reviews were mini history lessons, carefully situating films within a century of cinema, encouraging the reader to dig deeper and discover more. Even when criticising a film, Philip did so with compassion. His writing was witty, but never flippant.

Most importantly, Philip French was an inspiration. Although it was widely accepted among those privileged to share screening rooms with him that none of us could hold a candle to his craftsmanship, Philip was always gracious and encouraging about the work of others. A kind word from him about some copy you had filed would put a spring in your step for a week; a gentle word of advice would improve whatever you wrote in the future. Despite being one of the most revered film critics in the world, he remained modest, warm and welcoming. On the eve of his retirement from the Observer’s weekly film review column, he took me aside and said with a twinkle, “It is the finest chair in film criticism”, as if the position was somehow magical. Yet as we all know, the magical element was Philip himself.

He continued to write for the Observer, his Classic DVD column an incisive and engaging appointment to read. As recently as last Sunday, he was providing exemplary analysis of The Ladykillers, tracing its genre roots back to 1903’s The Great Train Robbery and spying visual echoes of Hitchcock’s The Lodger.

To the very end, Philip French represented the high-water mark of film criticism, and his light shines on in a wealth of wonderful writing that will inspire generations to come.

David Hare, playwright

British film-makers liked Philip French. We felt he gave us a fair shake. Because he wasn’t a snob and didn’t attitudinise, he contemplated a film for what it was, not for the passing prestige of the names attached to it. Like his brilliant contemporary Nancy Banks-Smith, who reviewed TV for the Guardian, French worked without preconceptions and was immune to the fashions of the day.

In some monastic way, he reminded me of the art critic Bergotte in Proust. French had spent his whole life responsibly contemplating the art form he aimed to serve. He was ready to risk being unexciting if he thought excitement was going to be at the expense of truth. He saw the heart of the job as being to elucidate rather than to judge. Or rather, French didn’t think anyone was qualified to judge unless they also showed some skill and effort at elucidating.

When I’ve come face to face with a few of our more opinionated critics, they’ve been surprisingly muted in person. French was the very opposite. He was able to overwhelm whole lunch tables or restaurants. In a small radio studio he could be deafening. No wonder he was best friends with the explosive lunatic Alexander Walker. But his loudness was also unexpected because, in print, French was so well-tempered.

His book of interviews with Louis Malle, published in 1993, is one of the best ever written about cinema. I would recommend it to any student who wants either to understand the European film tradition or one day to make films about the contemporary world. It took a writer as sympathetic, humorous and sensitive as French to draw Malle out. Malle shows instinctive respect for someone who knew as much as French did, and carried their learning with such delightful modesty.

In Malle on Malle, the film-maker concludes: “Through the 1960s we, the young directors, were the cultural heroes of France. Hiroshima Mon Amour, Les Quatre Cent Coups, Les Amants were tremendously important events. These days, because of television and the incredible saturation of images, I’m not sure this would happen any more. Cinema has become – I don’t want to say obsolete, but somewhat marginal.”

French would probably have agreed, yet somehow the heroism of his life is that he continued to weigh up both trash and works of art alike, as though informed appraisal must be one of the most important activities on earth. In his hands, perhaps it was.

Michael Frayn, playwright, screenwriter and novelist

Philip French claimed to have total recall, and I can believe it, certainly in the case of films. He seemed to be able to refer not only to the content of every film ever made, from Georges Méliès and the Keystone Cops onwards, but to their credits as well, down to the best boy and the clapper-loader. You sometimes had to be patient, reading one of his reviews, while he traced, like some aristocrat in Proust obsessed with the family trees of his neighbours, a film’s remotest antecedents and influences.



Another foible you had to allow for was his weakness for anything set in the American west. But his judgment was always interesting, and I relied heavily upon it – cowboy films apart – for knowing what films to see. His integrity was unshakable. His remarkable indulgence towards films featuring outlaws and gunslingers didn’t extend to the films of friends. Two that I wrote, for instance, both got short shrift. Which was painful, coming from the critic I respected most. But which of course only served to increase that respect. Happy as he was in the badlands of Wyoming, in the company of inarticulate drifters and no-hopers, I think he was perhaps even happier at home, surrounded by his highly articulate family and friends. An evening with the Frenches was always a particular pleasure.

It might end as a busman’s holiday, with a screening of some old favourite in the cinema he had installed in his house. But first there would be dinner, perhaps starting with a little akvavit that he and Kersti had brought back from their summers in her native Sweden, and Philip beaming with helpless pleasure as she and their sons affectionately mocked him. And everyone, unlike his friends in the cattle-raising industry, talking, talking, talking. Philip himself, famously, unstoppably, wittily, eruditely, most of all.

Just as well, perhaps, if the hind legs of horses have the same vulnerability as the hind legs of donkeys, that he was never let loose on the American west directly, or he would have lamed every horse from Arizona to Montana, and brought his favourite genre to an end.

Anne Billson, film critic and novelist

When I first started going to national press screenings in the 1980s, I found myself surrounded by living legends – film critics whose work I had been devouring for years without ever dreaming that one day I’d be sitting among them. One of the sweetest and most approachable was Philip French, whose book The Movie Moguls formed part of my autodidactic education in film history.



Philip’s zest for the cinema was boundless. I never knew him to be jaded, even during that ghastly period in the late 1990s when every other release seemed to be a bad British gangster movie. He knew more about films than anyone I’d ever met, but wore his erudition lightly. And he could be delightfully self-deprecating – declaring a fondness for the TV show Murder One, for example, because it had a leading man who was bald, like him.

Long after I’d stopped going to press screenings, I would still dip into Philip’s Observer columns whenever I needed a fix of his wit, knowledge and impeccable judgment. While his confrères vied with one other to crack cheap jokes about Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger, Philip turned out a beautiful, thoughtful piece that placed the film in its rightful context as a flawed but eminently worthy contribution to his favourite genre, the western.

But my abiding memory of him will always be of his gleeful reaction to the bawdy profanity of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. (“I laughed like a dirty drain,” he would write.) The last credits had rolled, and we stragglers had emerged from the screening room and exchanged our farewells on the pavement outside. As Philip strolled off down the street, I could clearly hear him singing one of the film’s musical numbers: “Shut your fucking face, Uncle Fucka.”

Clive James, critic and broadcaster

In my early days as a pundit on BBC radio arts programmes, Philip was often my producer, and there was never a better one, although he had a sharp temper if he caught me slacking. The stammer which he lived with so bravely kept him from being the broadcaster he might have been, so he made sure his contributors were at their best on his behalf. He was brighter and better-informed than any of them.

His only weakness was to believe that Heaven’s Gate was an unjustly neglected masterpiece; but that might have been an example of his generosity of appreciation exceeding, for once, the bounds of reason. Otherwise he was impeccable, and his diligence was a chastening example to all of us. I read his Observer column every week, wondering how he did it. Love helped: he was mad about the arts, which is always the best start to being sane about them.

Michael Schmidt, poet and publisher

In 1990, to mark Philip’s retirement from the BBC, Carcanet Press published Ariel at Bay, A Critics’ Forum Festschrift for Philip French. Getting on for 50 Critics’ Forum veterans contributed, from Gilbert Adair to Marina Warner, with a Bradbury, Byatt, Frayling, Hoggart, Melly and Quinton among them. Philip’s retirement marked the end of that legendary programme in which four “critics” – novelists, historians, philosophers, academics etc – discussed a current book, film, exhibition and play. High Table and Grub Street made common cause. Behind the pane, in the editor’s chair, Philip presided. He selected the critics, the works discussed and provided briefings. The formula worked well: he shuffled and reshuffled his ever-growing pack of critics.

I remember Philip most vividly as a BBC producer in the 70s and 80s. A fine talks producer, he taught many of us how to write with the directness radio requires. He did not urge you to simplify syntax or diction, but to put yourself in the listener’s place and hear your infelicities. He did this good-naturedly, with a kind of repressed joviality that accompanied his stammer, his kindness.

Encyclopaedically learned, his own creative radio work – in particular his composite voice-portraits collected in Three Honest Men: Lionel Trilling, FR Leavis and Edmund Wilson – formally anticipated the polyphonic mode of the 2015 Nobel prize in literature winner, Svetlana Alexievich. Philip conducted extensive interviews with his central quarries’ contemporaries, then intercut them, creating seeming-dialogues from which his subjects luminously emerged.

After his retirement, he facilitated Carcanet’s film books series, beginning with substantial anthologies of film writing by Graham Greene, CA Lejeune, Humphrey Jennings and Dilys Powell. We included his own books, Westerns and I Found it at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile. His legacy may prove to be his writing on film, but his impact as a radio producer should be celebrated. He created a community of critics, bridged the gap between academia and the other world, and affected the style of many journalists and academics. I cannot think of the old BBC without thinking of Philip, his mischief, his wry seriousness, his belief in the creative centrality of informed criticism and dialogue, sure antidotes to the language of marketing and the impoverishing reflexes of prejudice.

Claire Tomalin, biographer

I first worked with Philip in 1968 when he was theatre critic of the New Statesman and I was deputy literary editor. He was already a BBC producer and reviewing films for the Times. Blessed with prodigious energy, he seemed to know everything and forget nothing. His put-downs were fierce and funny, his praise generous, his enthusiasm serious. I learned to trust his judgment and I was dazzled by his conversation.

During the 70s he often asked me to take part in his BBC radio programme, Critics’ Forum. It felt a bit like a royal command, and you had to commit yourself to a month of hard work preparing to discuss a book, a play, an exhibition, a film and a radio or TV programme each week. It was sometimes terrifying but always fun to work for him. He gave me good advice for any debate, not to worry about what I was going to say next, but to listen properly to the others. I once tried to persuade him to change an item for the programme, bringing down thunderbolts of rage on my head. By the fourth week I would be worn out, losing my notes and my voice, but I never refused to do it. Philip was one of those rare people who cared passionately about culture without ever being false or pretentious and working with him was a privilege.

Jason Solomons, film critic

With an apt irony he would surely have appreciated, news of the death of Philip French reached me at the end of a movie. It was in one of his regular spots, the Soho screening rooms, one of those darkened rooms in D’Arblay Street where Philip spent thousands of hours watching his beloved films over the years.



This particular movie was Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran, whose closing credits consist of a brief lament from the director about the fact that, due to the Iranian government censor and his ban from officially making films, there could be no closing credits. The supreme irony being that Philip always stayed to the end of the credits, whatever the film.

Of all the film critics, Philip was the man. His 35-year career at the Observer gave him an unprecedented platform from which he could impart his passion and equanimity on a weekly basis. Other reviews would come out first, but it was Philip’s Sunday opinion we all waited for, critics and film-makers alike. His was, quite literally, le dernier mot.

He was often funny, going to any lengths to squeeze in a pun. He was always erudite, his writing bringing in references not just from cinema but literature, theatre and even long-forgotten radio plays. He contextualised cinema for many generations and made it part of the artistic conversation. He was proud of his position as an influencer and saw the role of the critic as a vital one in shaping culture. He was rarely unkind or cruel and never dismissive, even when squeezed for space in the later years when new releases became an onslaught rather than a pleasure. He would select his Film of the Week lead review on merit rather than on marketing.

The Observer always let him lead on the obscure foreign-language film ahead of the Hollywood blockbuster or over-promoted British comedy, and as such he exerted a huge influence on the success of such films, nurturing the reputations of directors he admired – one such beneficiary was Inception and Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, whose tiny debut, Following, immediately intrigued Philip and he led on it the following weekend, marking out the name of Nolan as one to remember.

Philip loved Clint Eastwood and westerns, Woody Allen and Groucho Marx and New York wits such as SJ Perelman. He loved humanists such as Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, the Ealing comedies and Ken Loach and admired craftsmen and literary film-makers such as Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, Louis Malle and Bertrand Tavernier. He adored going to Cannes (“There, I’m like a child in a sweetshop”), which became too arduous a task in his later years.

I kept in touch with Philip when he left the Observer. I’d decided to leave at the same time, having cherished every time I got to deputise for him and not wishing to do it for anyone else. His shadow probably inhibited my writing – one always felt one should start with a French-esque bon mot from cinema lore, but of course I didn’t have anything like the depth necessary to do four paragraphs loosely connected to that particular film’s actor, or director or previous incarnations as fledgling scripts for, I don’t know, Faulkner or Graham Greene, one of his own great heroes.

I last communicated with him two weeks ago, after he sent me a typically generous and constructive review of my new Woody Allen book. By then, he was lamenting his deteriorating physical condition. He couldn’t attend my book launch, having recently taken to a wheelchair and had a lift installed in his Dartmouth Park home – “rather like the one Charles Laughton has in Witness for the Prosecution”.

Of my (heavy) book, he wrote: “With my arthritis and Still’s disease the problem is reading the book without a lectern. Didn’t Bergman make a film called A Lectern in Love? Or was that the working title for his Winter Light?” Typical Philip.

This tribute appears in full on jasonsolomons.com





Facebook Twitter Pinterest . Photograph: Clemens Bilan

Christopher Frayling, writer and educationist

A few weeks ago, while I was preparing a speech for the opening of the Bradford Widescreen film festival, I contacted Philip to ask if he could think of a suitable poem for the occasion. After all, he had edited The Faber Book of Movie Verse (1993) and his knowledge of the connections and crossovers between literature and film was unrivalled. He replied with To the Film Industry in Crisis, written in 1957 by the New York poet of the Mad Men era Frank O’Hara – with its powerful last line “roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on” – and added a witty footnote about how O’Hara must surely have seen the then recent musical film Silk Stockings which included a Cole Porter chorus sung by Fred Astaire about “Glorious Technicolor, breathtaking Cinemascope and stereophonic sound”.

This was vintage Philip French: the erudition across art forms, the respect for film, the hard-won expertise, the good humour and generosity of spirit, all were undimmed. The poem proved in the event to be just right. The last time I saw him, at his home, the conversation ranged like a series of fascinating jump-cuts from the westerns of Richard Widmark, to the impact of the House Un-American Activities Committee on British cinema (especially Joseph Losey and Carl Foreman), to the literary reviews of Edmund Wilson, to the extraordinary ability of humorist SJ Perelman to look the world straight in the eye.

I worked with Philip for more than 35 years, and knew him to be – with Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who had many more column inches – the most significant, respected and important film reviewer of the second half of the 20th century, a refreshing weekly antidote to the legion of star-scoring, self-regarding phrase-makers. He called his collection of essays about film I Found It at the Movies, a reference to Kael’s first collection I Lost It at the Movies. Philip liked to find it, while Pauline preferred to lose it. He signed off his final review in the Observer on 1 September 2013, with his customary grace, by quoting the title of the autobiography of his great predecessor CA Lejeune. The title was Thank You for Having Me.

Ken Loach, film and television director

I knew Philip for a long time, but not well because, it seemed to me, he tended not to become close friends with people he was going to have to write about, which was fair enough. If you’re writing critically about someone, you don’t want to have personal obligations. But I did get to meet him on the C2 bus because we lived quite near each other in Gospel Oak in north London for a long time. We would meet on the bus and sit and natter, and made a very determined effort not to talk about film. We would talk about the small things of living in London, why the traffic was so bad, why the council was so awful, the new buildings that spoiled the area, and generally complain about modern life. We also talked about the Spanish civil war a bit.



Obviously you tend not to always agree with reviewers, but I think he was very fair. He would often put the film in a cinematic rather than a contemporary political or social context: we would hope for the latter, but Philip often did the former. It was a happy relationship and he was generally very supportive.

One thing for which I applaud him was that he resisted putting stars to films. A lot of critics have been cajoled or bullied by their editors into putting stars against films and of course if you put stars on, people don’t bother to read the reviews, so it was very much to his credit that he resisted this. Philip represented an older newspaper tradition, a very honourable one. He was someone you would respect. I enjoyed our chats on the C2.

Marina Warner, novelist and historian

In the cold fens near Cambridge when I was growing up, news of another, more marvellous world of people and experience reached us, mainly through the radio programme Philip French created and presided over for many years – Critics’ Forum. Before I met Philip in person, before he gave me a chance on his programmes, the Saturday round table was my mother’s lifeline and gave me my first encounters with – how can I put it without sounding like a fossil? – culture, with the Royal Court and Angry Young Men, with strange, whispering radio drama by Samuel Beckett, with the smart new satire, Op Art and Pop Art and dirty realism and the Whitechapel Gallery, the New Yorker, film noir and spaghetti westerns. Philip, who could give you the name of the lighting cameraman on the second crew of a David Lean, identified and loved Ennio Morricone when nobody else had heard of him. It’s crucial not to give a falsely solemn impression about all this, because Philip, who was responsible for choosing the material and the speakers on the programme, was that rare phenomenon, a man who read everything, watched everything, thought about it all carefully and incisively, never seemed to forget any of it, and yet, with all these heavyweight intellectual credentials, found irrepressible pleasure in the process.



He was the first person I met who determinedly opposed high-low rankings: Dorothy Parker, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, Pasolini and Wes Craven were owed, Philip made clear, the same level of attention. He was exceptional, too, in the interest he showed in American culture, its movies, its fiction, its journalism. I remember we reviewed BIG American Novels – by Saul Bellow, William Styron, for example – before I really knew what they were. Claire Tomalin and I were once on Critics’ Forum together – the first time two women appeared, and a brave innovation then, not that long ago.

Before the programme, we’d meet for lunch and Philip wouldn’t sit down with us but circle the table, pouring wine and encouraging us to talk of other matters because we’d go stale on air if we repeated ourselves, and regaling us in his big cheerful voice with a rapid flow of anecdotes, studded with puns at which we’d all groan and laugh. It happened that, every so often, one of the critics would fall out and then Philip would step in; like Kenneth Tynan, who also stammered, he had no trouble when performing.

When I met Philip, he’d already lost his hair through alopecia and, speaking of this and remembering – without a trace of self-pity – that he had once been a long-haired, bearded type, he wondered at the difference his change of look made in his friendships. It’s true that his smooth baldness gave him a hard, businesslike, even gangsterish authority which seemed to go with his expertise in film noir. But it was unlikely in every other way – Philip was receptive and generous and friendly: kindness itself.

Like many, many others, I am indebted to his intellectual energy and wit and insatiable curiosity, to his sense of fun and friendship. It is a great sadness that his effervescent voice in life and on the page has been stilled.

Samuel West, actor

The first time I met Philip French was also my first time at the Cannes film festival. I was young and understandably nervous, but in a mad setting he was kind, funny and approachable, wearing his considerable learning very lightly. When we met at other festivals he always managed to give the impression that he took film seriously without ever losing the excitement he felt working in and around the great art form of the century.

Whether he was writing about the first time he saw Singin’ in the Rain after six miserable weeks of National Service, or dissecting the trenchant social commentary of The Ladykillers in his last-ever DVD review last Sunday, that joy in the job always shone through. It reminds me of the glorious moment at the end of Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, where a dumped, depressed Mia Farrow slips into the cinema to watch Top Hat for the umpteenth time. As Astaire steps out, her tears dry and her face lights up, transformed.

I well remember Philip’s review of The Golden Compass, an over-produced mishmash that didn’t capture the depth or wonder of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, on which it is based. Philip ended his review by talking about the flying sequences – state of the art, certainly, but less convincing, and less magical in his eyes, than “that moment at Liverpool’s Royal Court theatre when at the age of seven I saw Barbara Mullen as Peter Pan and Joan Greenwood as Wendy take to the air”. It was typical of the man that he should turn to another, simpler art form to encapsulate the magic that was missing; unpretentious, inclusive, accessible, joyous.

Hadley Freeman, journalist

At some point in the spring of 1997, at the end of my first year at university, our tutors told us that, unless we wanted to end up broke, we needed to start thinking about our future careers. The high fliers quickly sorted out internships at banks. I opted for a different tack. “Dear Mr French,” I wrote to Philip French, “How can I become a writer like you? Yours, Hadley Freeman.”

Incredibly, he wrote back and, with the kindness and generosity I would soon learn were characteristic of the man, he suggested I tag along with him during my summer break.

I met up with him in front of a screening room in Soho that summer where we saw some forgettable British period drama. The experience of being with Philip was far more memorable. He asked me afterwards what I thought of the movie, as though I knew anything about anything, and he took me out for lunch, where he asked me to send him the film reviews I wrote for my student paper. This was a date we would repeat occasionally while I was a student. Even back then, it felt like a privilege. But it’s only now that I understand what a unique one it was too.

Christopher Nolan, director and producer

In an era of increasingly anonymous, score-driven critical consensus, the distinctive analytical voice of Philip French will be sorely missed.

Although we never met, his generous championing of my early work was vital in helping my films get noticed at a time when I didn’t have access to marketing budgets and wide distribution. His passing is a great loss for everyone who cares about film, but particularly for today’s emerging film-makers, who might have benefited from his thoughtful, considered writing as I did.

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