Judging from the lack comments, it’s apparent nobody even remotely liked the guy or had anything to say about his demise. This thread probably wasn’t a good idea.
John Simon was the dictionary definition of beyond the pale in his field. He was a high-paid troll. If he posted here, there would be a mass movement to ban him and his posts would be continually reported.
The mods wouldn’t do anything, to be sure, but we would never lack for misogyny.
And he was describing Barbara Hershey in her prime. He was even more merciless about Diana Rigg’s appearance just a few years after she played Emma Peel. Aside from his constant dissection of actresses’ physical appearances, it seemed Simon’s standards for beauty were far beyond what any mortal woman could ever achieve. As I’ve stated before, you got the impression that whenever Simon looked at a fashion magazine covergirl, his first thought would be to wonder why she didn’t dress like Joseph Merrick while going out in public.
If I’m remembering correctly, Simon had a major crush on British actress Lindsay Duncan. All other women were, apparently, under-bridge dwellers by comparison.
(Didn’t know Simon was still alive this late; I hadn’t thought about him in years.)
He also had it in for Carol Kane. Calling her ugly in terms that were borderline anti-semitic. That was back in…maybe?..the 70s? I never trusted his judgment.
You never got a sense that he loved movies, the craft, or his job. It was a burden he had to bear and we were lucky to be spared the experience of being tortured by the things he was forced to sit through. So his air of superiority always seemed rooted in contempt, that few things were rarely worth his time, and there was rarely a film (even one he championed) that wouldn’t get shivved in the process. The type of critic where you might have a morbid fascination in what he might say, but one that nobody will miss because he was toxic to the core.
In fairness to Simon, I can’t see evidence that he primarily thought of himself as a film critic. He was a theater critic who, for brief periods, reviewed movies, too:
From the same source, some information that may please most readers of this thread:
He had a heavy Serbian accent:
It’s an interesting piece by one of Simon’s editors.
I wasn’t very familiar with Simon as a reviewer, though I knew he had done theater reviews and that they were usually pretty strongly negative. Thanks for the review excerpts, Exapno Mapcase– just astonishing, especially the first one.
I do remember him as a staunch member of the Language Police, convinced that any slippage in the Rules of Grammar and Usage signified the death of civilization as we knew it. He was given a chapter of his own in Jim Quinn’s delightful early-eighties book American Tongue in Cheek, which took on the self-described language mavens (Simon, Edwin Newman, William Safire…) by pointing out their ignorance about how language worked and the history of language. Simon, in Quinn’s estimation, was perhaps the ignoramus-est of them all.
It must be difficult to live in a world where you know everything and everyone else knows nothing and most of them refuse to agree with you. Perhaps Mr. Simon is now in a more agreeable place.
OTOH, I think your last paragraph perfectly describes a lot of people who post here and other places on the internet. How many hundred threads have you read where one person keeps goings on and on about a pet belief in the face of unanimous opposition by the rest?
In light of his passing and in the spirit of the season, here’s David Sedaris’ piece about a John Simon-esque critic reviewing a children’s Christmas pageant.
Saddening news.
I’ll never forget the Odd Couple episode where Oscar ignorantly subs for his paper’s theatre critic, and eventually ends up on a TV panel where he fakes a mouth ailment, “preventing” him from talking, so that theatre-savvy Felix can “speak” for him, instead, and, in the process, insults panellist John Simon, who, quite affronted, rejoins with some butthurt riposte, and then storms off.