Richard Corliss is No More

Richard Corliss, Time Magazine’s long serving film critic, died in New York city on April 23 after a stroke. He was 71 and is survived by his wife Mary. Corliss’s was a distinctive voice in film criticism , often at loggerheads with fellow critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. His tastes were ‘populist and eclectic’, something which made him add Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master 2 and Finding Nemo to his list of the 100 Greatest Movies of all time. His reviews for Time – almost 2500 of them – were authoritative, but never intimidating. He had an ‘almost encyclopedic’ knowledge of films, but never flaunted it.

Corliss was also something of a jack of all trades. Apart from covering the film beat with Richard Schickel, he also wrote theatre reviews and ‘grabbed any and every opportunity to write about his many wide-ranging passions: Cirque du Soleil spectacles, new rides at Disney World, the pop singers and songwriters of the Brill Building era’.

Born in Philadelphia, the son of a business man and a kindergarten teacher, Corliss had an epiphany of sorts when he watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. According to a Time Magazine interview, he said, “I had grown up thinking of movies as something to eat popcorn with. Bergman and the other European directors were the first ones to open my eyes to film as art.”

Over a career spanning nearly forty years, Corliss has written for various establishments, the most significant among them being National Review, Film Comment and has published four books, the most recent being Mom in Movies, a look at iconic onscreen mothers. A workaholic, his appetite for writing and reading was huge – he’d often spend his nights working on copies, turning in incredible copies with little over two hours of sleep.

His passing has been mourned by many of the film industry’s leading lights, among them Stephen Spielberg, Katheryn Bigelow and Baz Luhrmann.

Image Courtesy : Time