So that's what became of John Harkness

Watching Rio Bravo yesterday on TCM I was reminded of the time that I actually saw director Howard Hawks in person. It had to be 1977, the first year of the Montreal World Film Festival, and only a few months before the famed director’s death. He was walking down the aisle and I was sitting nearby along with someone I knew from college days, John Harkness. Harkness, a large boisterous man with thick beard and wire rimmed glasses, shouted out to the passing director, “Thank you!” to which Hawks turn slightly in acknowledgement. Watching Hawks’s  famed Western Rio Bravo (1959) starring John Wayne, Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson - I must say I was disappointed in the supposedly great movie because of its plodding pace and longevity, and quit halfway through - I couldn't help thinking of Harkness, and whatever became of him. Last time I checked he was staff film critic for Toronto's alternate weekly, Now. So I looked him up and there were a couple of obituaries of him. He died in 2007. We were both born in 1954 and attended Carleton University together. We worked on the same college newspaper, The Charlatan. He of course wrote film reviews. Then I bumped into him a few years later in Montreal. Harkness apparently died of a heart attack. I didn’t know him very well but certainly knew that he was astute, had a scathing wit and had an encyclopedic knowledge of film. After university he attended Columbia University to study expressly under the famed Village Voice film critic, Andrew Sarris, originator of the “auteur” theory of cinema, in which the film is ultimately the sole creation or vision of the director. It must have been Harkness’s dream come true. Returning to Canada he freelanced and then landed the film critic job at the soon to be born Now in 1981, where he worked for 26 years. I’m not sure if he was Canada’s best film critic - I thought the late great Jay Scott at The Globe and Mail working at the same time was probably best  - but Harkness’s deep knowledge of film and fine analytical and critical skills certainly made him top tier. There were a couple of things about him that made him stand out. One would think, given his pedigree, he’d be a sure champion of foreign and independent films. But he wasn't. In fact he championed, much like New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, mainstream Hollywood. As Now co-founder Michael Hollett wrote in tribute, “He could see beauty in a cartoon, a fistfight and a fuck. He knew in his bones why John Ford was certain there was no better image than a man thundering across a screen on a galloping horse, and he could still get goosebumps watching a chopper fly low and fast over a rice paddy, all the while enjoying the classical music exploding on the soundtrack.” And while his sensibilities and bohemian outward appearance might have made him seem open-minded to alternative lifestyles, he was of single mind when it came to film. Asked to contribute to Now’s first gay-themed issue, Harkness, Hollett writes,  “confessed that he just couldn’t watch men kiss on screen sorry, folks, that’s just the way it is.” Would he make such a comment in today’s sharp edged uber politically correct and de-platformed environment? Harkness never compromised in his reviews, regardless of the director, whether old school or independent wunderkind. His refusal to compromise lost Now a huge boatload of advertising from Cineplex, when the company cancelled its ad buy after Harkness criticized in GQ magazine the chain’s inferior programming. I could just picture him, in the face of scathing  backlash, standing there, his huge belly protruding, with a fixed glance on the offended party, thinking the reaction entirely beside the point in wake of an intellectually sound and ethical film review.

Speaking of John Wayne and de-platforming, that was terrible that University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts this month pulled an exhibit dedicated to Duke after caving to student protests over one-time controversial remarks made by Wayne about minorities. If you scratch eight out of 10 people - including the protesters - you would probably find some history of objectionable behavior. Get over it, learn from it, but preserve the legacy.