Vincent Canby, Prolific Film and Theater Critic for The Times, Is Dead at 76 (original) (raw)
New York|Vincent Canby, Prolific Film and Theater Critic for The Times, Is Dead at 76
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- Oct. 16, 2000
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October 16, 2000
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Section B, Page
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Vincent Canby, whose lively wit and sophisticated tastes illuminated film and theater reviews in The New York Times for more than 35 years, died yesterday at the Columbia-Presbyterian Center in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in New York.
The cause was cancer.
In an era of entertainment as a pervasive, ever-changing feature of American life, Mr. Canby was the ubiquitous, anonymous man in the aisle seat, taking it all in tonight for a million readers tomorrow: the latest Hollywood blockbuster at a multiplex, a subtle cinematic bijou at Cannes, a glittering new Broadway musical or the magical first night of a young star in New Haven.
As senior film critic for The Times from 1969 to 1993 (he began reviewing films for the paper in 1965) and then as a theater critic, Mr. Canby delivered trenchant insights, sober judgments and wry humor in reviews for the daily paper and in longer analysis pieces for Arts & Leisure on Sunday.
His writing was often an entertainment itself: conversational prose that conveyed a bracing disdain for sentiment, a clear eye for meretricious art, rapier cuts for pretentious fools and fine-tuned praise for artistry, all in a monologue -- and sometimes in an invented dialogue with a character he dubbed Stanley. His scholarship and cultural perspective were never flaunted but were as solid as his journalism.
Mr. Canby's film work -- thousands of articles and essays that made up the bulk of his criticism -- was a virtual catalog of the cinematic arts in its most robust era, from the French New Wave and the rise of American independent cinema to the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster and the advent of videocassette recorders and 25-screen theaters.
Along the way, he championed the work of a diverse group of filmmakers, including Spike Lee, Jane Campion, Mike Leigh, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Woody Allen, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, as well as many of the actors who appeared in their films.
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