Posted 12:43 PM by Gene

Looking over Sydney Pollack's record -- and we're unfamiliar with his films except for their reps -- we'd guess his best work was middlebrow, commercial, made by an adult for adults, and entertaining, a Stanley Kramer without the message. He was, as the Big V puts it, "a competent and dependable filmmaker." That would seem a minimum for Hollywood, but in the last two decades the cultural rat-trap on the Pacific hasn't even climbed to that minimum, extruding theme parks and grotesqueries, and forgetting there was a time, as Pollack himself would probably acknowledge, that the movie biz worked for grownups, a time now hopelessly in the past.