Alright, it’s not actually a film review, but in a letter of correspondence from 1981, to lover Janet Eagleson, the Catcher in the Rye author does pan the original Indiana Jones film. However, it’s difficult to say the man doesn’t have good taste in movies. In the same handwritten note, he also mention that he enjoyed Truffaut’s The Last Metro. Behold the great American novelist’s actual words:
…Have seen no good movies, except The Last Metro…I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors…
I guess it’s not all that amazing, but I find Salinger’s comments interesting because I’d always figured he was a curmudgeonly hater of films. Part of my misconception is due to Holden Caulfield’s attitude toward cinema in Catcher, and part is due to Salinger’s refusal to permit a movie adaptation of Catcher or any other works post-My Foolish Heart (an adaptation of Salinger’s story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” that apparently resulted in the author’s subsequent refusals).
Yet according to Salinger’s daughter Margaret (via Wikipedia), who wrote the memoir Dream Catcher, the author was in fact a film buff. She even listed his favorite films as Gigi, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps, and the comedies of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy. However, according to Joyce Maynard (also via Wikipedia), an ex-lover who also wrote a memoir, Salinger “loves movies, not films.” Of course, that would mean that he should have loved Raiders and disliked Truffaut, right?
Anyway, you can bid on the letter with the Last Metro and Raiders comments in an Ebay Live Auction tomorrow evening, or if you’re short the few thousand bucks, you can just look at the photo of it on the auction’s listing.
