Obituary - Richard Grenier, R.I.P - Brief Article - Obituary

National Review, March 11, 2002 by John O'Sullivan

Through the most important decade of the 20th century, Richard Grenier was the most important film critic in the world. If that sounds a slightly grudging encomium for a writer of great range and variety, what should be added is that he made film criticism his surfboard for wide-ranging cultural, moral, and political criticism. And surfing against the waves, he nonetheless rode them triumphantly until he landed in 1989 to find that the world had unexpectedly shaken itself awake and agreed with him.

Before his emergence as Commentary's film critic in 1980, however, Grenier had lived the kind of eventful life that writers used to live before the age of NEA grants and writer-in-residence sinecures. He was educated at Harvard and took an engineering degree at the Naval Academy. As a young naval officer he both won a boxing championship and formed a lifelong friendship with Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- two activities that somehow explain each other. He served a long apprenticeship in workaday journalism in Europe, where his wife, Cynthia, was the representative for a Hollywood studio. He was arrested as a Western spy during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Reporting from Paris for the Financial Times, he became for a while the landlord to Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda (in her pre-feminist prime). And then, as people say of those who hone their skills and amass just the right experience over decades, he became an overnight success. It is hard to exaggerate the impact of Grenier's first few reviews for Commentary in 1980. Everybody seemed to be discussing them, recommending them to friends, reading passages from them over the phone through shouts of laughter. Within a short time his reviews were being devoured by people who, even if they never went to the movies, nonetheless ate up his fantastical stew of Tory wit, general cultural erudition, well-researched knowledge of the films' topics, and absorbing readability. From Mutiny on the Bounty to Gandhi to the James Bond series, each review was in itself a short college course by an unusually well-traveled professor who had learned to detect intellectual fraud and to despise intellectual credulity in the face of totalitarianism. Those reviews, reprinted in his 1991 book Capturing the Culture, will educate, provoke, and delight as long as Hollywood makes movies.

Grenier's brilliance was perceived even by those who felt its lash. The New York Times hired him as its roving critic to redress the fashion- struck nihilism of its cultural pages. But the paper balked when he performed this task too well. He moved to the more congenial pages of the Washington Times, where for 14 years he dissected the follies of America's collapsing culture in a column of Martini-dry wit. He wrote a comic novel, The Marrakesh One-Two, on the then-undetected menace of Islamo-fascism; surely the book is now ripe for republication. And he wrote -- too infrequently, but always brilliantly -- for National Review.

Reading Richard Grenier, to use Kingsley Amis's words in praise of an earlier satirist, "one feels that THEY can never win." And though THEY dominate the battleground of cultural criticism where Grenier pitched his tent, he never

lost so much as a skirmish. Richard Grenier died in Washington on January 29, leaving Cynthia, his devoted wife of 43 years, and his many friends to mourn a great loss but also to celebrate a talent lived to the full.