Watch Siskel and Ebert Defend ‘Star Wars’ Against the Ultimate Hater
Do the original Star Wars films qualify as “great” movies? Few of todays’ critics would argue otherwise, but when George Lucas’ films first hit theaters, they set off a cultural debate over whether an effects-heavy sci-fi movie could be anything but kids’ stuff. In a 1983 TV segment shared by Chaz Ebert on RogerEbert.com, Star Wars lovers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (longtime co-hosts of At the Movies) face off against famously scathing critic John Simon, who believed that Lucas’s trilogy was turning cinema to the dark side. Watch the battle above.
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“They’re brutalizing children, they’re stultifying children, they’re making children dumber than they need to be,” Simon says of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi (the last of which was new in theaters when this segment was filmed). The former New York magazine critic argues that a film that’s “90 percent special effects” with “lousy actors” and no “flesh and blood” does nothing to teach children valuable lessons about growing up in the real world, and “might as well be an animated cartoon.”
Ebert, the populist critic from the Chicago Sun-Times, offers a rebuttal: “I don’t know what [Simon] did as a child, but I spent a lot of my Saturday matinees watching sci-fi movies and serials… and having all sorts of visions take place in my mind that helped me to become an adult and to still stay young at heart. And I would say not that I’m childlike, but that he is old at heart.” As for the films resembling cartoons, Ebert argues, “These are the sorts of movies the Disney people should be making.” And too many special effects? “ I think all movies are special effects! Movies are not real, they’re two-dimensional,” Ebert declares, and adds that his appreciation for the films of Ingmar Bergman doesn’t detract from his appreciation for a movie like Return of the Jedi.
Meanwhile, The Chicago Tribune’s Siskel takes the middle ground, arguing that the Star Wars movies are “well made fun” for kids, as opposed to campy B-movies like 1983’s Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. “This is very good of its kind,” Siskel says of Jedi.
So what movie would John Simon recommend for kids in 1983? The critic says that Tender Mercies, starring Robert Duvall as an alcoholic country singer seeking to turn his life around, is “the sort of thing that I would take my children (to), if I had them.” Bet that would have been a fun family outing!
To read Simon’s original pan of Star Wars, go here. And for Ebert’s unqualified rave, go here.
