“I am big,” Gloria Swanson declared in Billy Wilder’s film 

. “It’s the pictures that got small.” It’s one of the iconic lines in American movies, but it means something very different now than it did when Swanson, playing a faded silent-picture star, said it in 1950. Then, it was a clever rejoinder in a piece of slightly disreputable popular entertainment. Now, it’s part of the national artistic ­canon.

Shyon Baumann, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, traces this shift in 

, a swift, absorbing academic study of “the acceptance of Hollywood films as art among a large segment of the public, particularly (though not exclusively) those with postsecondary education.” His argument isn’t that movies have ­improved—­the works of 

 director P. T. Anderson do not sit on a loftier plain than those of Preston Sturges, the 1930s screwball­comedy genius; rather, Baumann makes the case that the real change is in the way we talk about movies. The assumption of artistic merit is embedded in the language of ­filmgoing—­even in the way I describe 

 as “Billy Wilder’s film.” That’s an implied characterization of the director as artist, and one that Wilder didn’t accept. “Look here, my friend,” he told an interviewer in 1960, “I don’t want to talk about Art.”

How did the conversation shift? Or, as Baumann puts it, after citing a particularly overheated piece of ­film-­studies prose on 

, “How did we get to the point where the analysis of the shark is perhaps more frightening than the shark itself?” He spreads the responsibility around, emphasizing several developments in the 1960s: The rise of ­film-­studies programs, the ­self-­promotion of ­second-­generation directors as auteurs, and movie critics who borrowed terms from French film theorists. For the first time, movies were discussed in the same breath as operas or paintings, and directors could project the fantasy that they were making art, not simply trying to pack ­theaters.

But art is not ordained by wishful thinking ­alone—­or by quality, for that matter. It requires a dash of snobbery, too. Baumann’s book is most revealing in its second chapter, where he demonstrates that the movies stopped being mere popular entertainment at precisely the moment they stopped being popular. The rise of film’s accept­ance as an art form coincided with a drastic decline in movie attendance; from 1945 to 1960 weekly audiences shrank from 90 million to 25.1 million, as Americans abandoned movie palaces for television programs. At the same time university enrollment skyrocketed, with the result being an educated class that could cham­pion a less vulgar leisure activity. “Cultural gems can only look like lost treasure,” Baumann observes, “if they are not currently being worn by those who are thought to have bad taste.”

Studios began catering to people who saw film not as a cheap diversion but as an estimable creative form. At the same time, they put on offer mass-entertainment spectacles (

, released in 1975, has been called the first blockbuster) to attract whomever they could. Today, both 

 are discussed in terms of creative vision, and artistic distinction has become another marketing tool. (Baumann includes tables that show a sharp increase, starting in the 1960s, in the frequency with which high-­art phrases appeared in movie advertisements.)

is not a book that’s quick to offer a moral to its story, but it brings to mind another line from a classic film, 

: “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” Movies have been around long enough to join the ­list.

Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to ­Art

. By Shyon Baumann. Princeton University Press. 225 pp.

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“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough,” says a character in the film classic Chinatown. Reviewer Aaron Mesh concludes that movies have been around long enough to join the list.

Vanity Projects

I loved the movies, I loved Roger Ebert. As a teenager, I spent hours lying on my bed, engrossed in a fat purple volume of his 

, with its summaries of “grownup” films I had never dared to see: 

. Later, I would understand how much more grownup Ebert’s reviews were than many of the movies themselves, but at the time, I just knew he was genuine. His informal prose, often suggesting a chat between intimate friends, radiated a nearly aching romance with cinema. He retold other people’s stories, and sometimes I recognized my own.

My reading was a solitary pleasure, though hardly a unique one. Just about everybody loves Roger Ebert. Instantly recognizable from his long-running television shows 

, he didn’t so much teach us to take movies seriously—at a time when critics such as Pauline Kael were enshrining films as high art—as make criticism seem like a universal pastime. His naysayers, who are not without their ammunition, charge that he never became much of a student of cinema, and deride his plainspoken, democratic style as artless. But for more than 40 years, he has celebrated the joy of moviegoing and given his readers confidence in their ability to read a film intelligently without being snooty about it.

Since 2006, when thyroid cancer and complications of surgery deprived him of his jaw, his ability to eat and drink, and his speech—his communication is now limited to the written word and the thumb that for years warred with that of the late Gene Siskel on television—Ebert has been granted the chance, like his boyhood hero Huckleberry Finn, to sit in the back of the church for his own eulogies. Even as the tributes pile up, Ebert, now 69, keeps expanding his following. Pundits wondered if there could be an Ebert in the Internet age; it turned out that that new-media critic was—Ebert. His Web site, rogerebert.com, attracts more than 100 million visitors a year. Ebert is one of the few movie critics working today who is comfortable engaging his readers as equals in online comment threads. With this new audience, he has also broached a new subject: himself.

From the personal blog posts that mingle with his reflections on movies have emerged 

, a discursive, companionable memoir that foremost confirms what fans have long known: Ebert is a natural born writer. But the book also makes clear how little we have known of a person who seems to have lived so much of his life in public. For all the years wags spent ridiculing the once rotund Ebert’s fondness for food, we never knew that his real, dangerous weakness was booze. The book’s most compelling essays are sober considerations of alcohol. Ebert celebrates a rollicking Chicago journalists’ dive called O’Rourke’s, then makes an impassioned case for the honest self-appraisal offered by Alcoholics Anonymous. (Of the barroom he remarks, “We knew who we said we were, who we wanted to appear to be, and who O’Rourke’s thought we were, and that was knowing each other well enough.”) He also celebrates his history of interracial romances—his wife, Chaz, is African- American, and he once tried, unsuccessfully, to date Oprah Winfrey.

Though Ebert never cites it explicitly, the book that 

, the 1954 autobiography of the fluent Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, a former reporter who wrote 

. Like Hecht, Ebert spends more time chronicling Windy City newsroom capers and childhood idylls than he does contemplating the pictures he liked or didn’t. And the two men, each a writer working at the edges of a temporal art, give special place to the enduring quandaries: God and girls. For Ebert, these two are inextricably linked: His mother wanted him to be a priest, and he resisted, keeping “as much of my life as possible a secret from her” as she slipped into angry alcoholism. He remains anguished about the relationships he let slip away, sheltered in movie theaters watching other lives.

It is perhaps with these losses in mind that he offers his ultimate philosophy. “To make others less happy is a crime,” he writes. “To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.” This book will bring others happiness, because the author so deeply feels pleasure and so honestly acknowledges its obstacles.

 an alternative weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon.

 by Roger Ebert, Grand Central, 2012, 435 pp.

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I loved the movies, and I loved Roger Ebert.

The Natural

 was released in 1988, it met with thunderous outrage. Paul Schrader, the film’s screen­writer, recalls walking into Scorsese’s office to find the director bemoaning the furor. “I said, ‘Marty, we wanted to make a controversial film,’” Schrader re­counts. “‘We have now 

 a controversial film.’” Scorsese replied, “I know, I know, but I didn’t think it would be this controversial.”

 is Thomas R. Lind­lof’s detailed account of that controversy and how it dug the trenches for two decades of social battles between Christian conservatives and ­left-­wing artists. Lindlof, a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky, observes that 

 was released before the phrase “culture wars” had ap­peared much in print. The movie helped to make it part of the American ­vocabulary.

 came to be made is from a more innocent time. A prestigious director could make a movie featuring Jesus Christ fantasizing about having sex with Mary Magdalene, and a powerful studio, Universal Pictures, would ­green-­light the project. Both parties thought nobody would ­mind—­or that they would mind just enough to make the film notorious, and ­profitable.

The book plays as a bleak comedy of naiveté lost. During the summer of 1988, 

 “survived the denunciations of preachers and politicians, mountains of mail delivered to Universal City, death threats to executives, demonstrations at­tended by thousands of citizens, and assaults on theaters and moviegoers.” As both Universal Pictures and Christian groups such as Focus on the Family congratulated them­selves for standing firm, they created a template for unending hostility: Evangelicals believe that Hollywood is constantly plotting new blasphemies, while studios fear that any treatment of religious content will draw an outcry.

Lindlof documents absurdities on both sides. Conservative newsletters, for example, had long circulated rumors of a movie in the works that would portray Jesus as a homosexual, and many Christians’ fears about 

 were intensified when they confused the two projects. Evangelical activists first threatened pickets when 

 wasn’t screened for ­them—­and when Universal belatedly arranged a showing, they refused to attend. The most outrageous preachers relied on anti-Semitism—blaming Jewish studio heads for attacking ­Jesus—­even though the movie was directed by a Roman Catholic, written by a Dutch Calvinist, and based on a novel by the Greek Orthodox writer Nikos ­Kazantzakis.

But Hollywood made its blunders, too. Scorsese, a lapsed Catholic whose faith was informed by existential doubt and struggle, failed to anticipate how violently evangelicals would react to a movie that was, as one executive said, basically 

 with Jesus as George Bailey, conjuring an alternative world in which he sired children with several women instead of dying on the cross. Studio bosses were equally clueless, even when they thought they were taking pains to be sensitive: Young Paramount Pictures executive Jeffrey Katzenberg asked Scorsese to “pay special attention to not make Jesus unlikable” in a scene in which he rejects his ­mother.

Lindlof is better on the inner workings of studio politics and crisis management than he is on evangelicalism. His case that fundamentalist leaders seized on 

 to rebound from the sex scandals of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker is purely circum­stantial, and he never displays a firm under­standing of the average protester’s mindset. But 

 correctly identifies the movie’s release as a cultural water­shed. It made $8 million at the box office and broke even, but studios would never again assume that evangelicals were an extremist fringe, and grew shy of even mild religious ­material.

Nearly two decades after Scorsese’s film, Mel Gibson’s T

—“a reverse image of Last Temptation in almost every respect,” Lindlof writes—raked in $370 million and proved that fundamentalists would embrace a cinematic Jesus, so long as he was portrayed as a sacrificial lamb. It didn’t even matter if that sacrifice was reenacted with ceaseless sadism. Hollywood had learned its lesson: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em in beating ­him.

 is the chief movie critic and a culture editor for 

an alternative weekly in Portland, Oregon.

Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious RIght, and the Culture Wars

 by Thomas R. Lindlof, University Press of Kentucky, 394 pp, 2008.

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Aaron Mesh on Hollywood's controversial attempts to portray the last days of Jesus Christ on film.

Hollywood's Crucifixion

Not long after graduating from college, I, like millions of other enthusiasts infected by the millennial poker craze, developed a slightly un­healthy interest in ­no-­limit Texas hold ’em. Nearly every Friday night, I bellied up to a basement card table or, if a home game couldn't be found, ventured out to an East Ten­nes­see bar called Mayo’s, where tour­naments of dubious legality and $50 ­buy-­ins started every half-hour. Sometimes I won. More often I watched my weekend pocket money go out the door in somebody else’s pocket. After bad nights, I would brood over the suspicion that my inability to bet aggressively signaled a deficiency of character.

I wasn't alone in drawing this parallel. Among James McManus’s many insights in 

 is the observation that Americans have long used their homegrown ­game—­a modified French bluffing ­contest—­to define the kind of people they want to be: shrewd, bold, unflappable, and streetwise. In tracing poker’s lineage from Mississippi riverboats to televised tournaments, McMan­us argues that gambling strategies influenced national history from the ­fresh-­start aspirations of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (named after the shuffling and distribution of cards) to the deployment of the insuperable atom bomb (described by a Manhattan Project scientist as “a royal straight flush”). Devised in polyglot 1800s New Orleans and honed on riverboats, poker developed as a uniquely American recreation: a contest played by ­free-­market people, each individual con­vinced he was a little more equal than everyone ­else.

(2003), McManus wryly recounted his improbable ­fifth-­place finish in the 2000 World Series of Poker while on a reporting assignment; as a historian, he is no less lively and nimble. Not a page of Cowboys Full goes by without a crackerjack yarn, as McMan­us shows how the game, like the country, grew in respectability even as its nature remained fundamentally free­wheeling. He compares steamboat card­sharps of the 1830s to the ­bling-­sporting rappers of today and makes a case for poker as the true national pastime, capable of righting base­ball’s wrongs: Arnold Rothstein, the mobster who fixed the 1919 “Black Sox” World Series, was shot dead after refusing to pay his losses in a stud game he thought was rigged. McMan­us revives the legends of ­high-­stakes gunslingers Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holliday, but he also shows how friendly games became a staple of the FDR and Truman Oval Offices. Poker even hewed the destiny of Richard Nixon, who as a World War II Navy lieutenant used his “iron butt” to endure marathon sessions of five-card draw; the $8,000 in winnings he brought home helped stake him to a political ­career.

 shifts focus to the late-­20th-­century rise of poker as a global spectator sport, with an emphasis on epic Las Vegas tournaments at Binion’s Horseshoe casino and emergent World Series of Poker celebrities such as the laconic Texan Doyle Brunson and ­cocaine-­addicted whiz kid Stu Ungar. The game’s “grittiness and peril might help to explain why its outlaw cachet continues to linger,” McManus writes, “even when today’s live games are played mostly by ­well-­scrubbed folks sipping mineral water in ­state-­sanctioned card rooms.” Cheating may have ­diminished—­though it continues to crop up in online ­games—­but players still feel that they’re getting away with ­something.

McManus suggests a more philosophical side of the game in the person of Herbert O. Yardley, a ­code ­breaker, spy, and poker instructor whose nonchalant resilience over three wars and countless careers becomes the book’s running joke. Yardley’s own book, 

 (1957), coun­seled honesty and patience as the virtues of the poker table. “In the end,” McManus writes, quoting the journalist Al Alvarez, “what he is describing is not so much a game of cards as a style of life.” The game that be­gan as a haven for scofflaws, layabouts, and swindlers can build character, ­too.

 is a film critic and general assignment reporter for 

, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon. 

by James McManus, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. 

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Americans have long used poker, a homegrown game, to define the kind of people they want to be: shrewd, bold, unflappable, and streetwise. 

Card Studs

Tell people that you graduated from a Christian college, and you can expect a common series of reactions. First they express wonderment at the exotic customs of these institutions. (At Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, from which I graduated a few years ago, these included daily praise and worship before classes, mandatory pledges to abstain from drinking and sexual activity, and a performance of Neil Simon’s play 

 from which most of the profanities and references to extramarital sex were excised.) Next comes the suspicion that you are a closet fundamentalist, secretly harboring the belief that homosexuals are eternally damned, or that Adam and Eve kept pet dinosaurs. Finally, there is a confession of relief that you graduated as someone “so normal.”

, a brisk survey of 10 U.S. Protestant colleges—ranging from tiny New Saint Andrews College in Idaho, with a student body of 200, to Texas’s Baylor University, with 14,500—Samuel Schuman attempts to correct some of the misconceptions. A chancellor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Morris, Schuman is the author of 

 (2005), a study of small liberal-arts schools much like his own. Noting that enrollment at religious schools is booming (the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities reports that during the 1990s its member campuses grew by nearly 50 percent), he turned his attention to these institutions, which, he found, are buoyed by “a strong sense of focused mission,” since administrators don’t have to worry about pleasing a wide swath of constituencies. But he also observed a tension between the aspiration to academic respectability and the effort to maintain an unwavering commitment to church doctrines, a paradox ubiquitously referred to in school curricula as “the integration of faith and learning.”

Schuman’s administrator sensibility makes him a better cultural analyst than investigative reporter. In visiting his subject schools (as well as three Roman Catholic colleges, for the sake of comparison), he relied chiefly on the testimony of students and faculty, who reported that religious belief is organically blended into the classroom, though never at the expense of rational instruction. This is reassuring, though one wonders what Schuman would have seen had he sat in on a lecture or two. If he did, he doesn't mention those firsthand findings. But he has an eye for the telling detail (Anderson College, a Baptist school in South Carolina, has soothingly renamed its chapel program “The Journey”), and he precisely dissects each school’s traditions. “Perhaps what I am seeking to describe here,” he writes in a chapter on the hermetically Presbyterian great-books program at New Saint Andrews College, “is a consequence of taking Calvinism with the utmost sincerity: There is belief and there is unbelief; there are the saved and the unsaved.”

Schuman finds that America’s Christian colleges, with roots reaching deep into the colonial era, are far from a monolithic arm of the religious Right: New Saint Andrews might as well be located on a different planet from Michigan’s Calvin College, where students vehemently protested the 2005 campus visit of President George W. Bush. But the schools face a common problem: Each seeks to facilitate intellectual inquiry while ensuring that graduates leave with the same central beliefs with which they entered—chiefly, that God exists, is engaged with the world, and personally cares for them. Thus, New Saint Andrews scholars read Charles Darwin’s original texts on evolution “so as to understand, and be able to refute, his arguments.” An undergraduate at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, tells Schuman, “After four years of questioning, you are solid in what you believe.” The kid does not consider the possibility that such assurance might not be the goal of a liberal arts education.

However, the secular academy is hardly less dogmatic. Schuman relays a colleague’s scornful dismissal of Christian schools as “two-bit Bible colleges,” and cites a 2004–05 study by the Higher Education Research Institute in which most college juniors reported that “their professors have never encouraged discussions of spiritual or religious matters, and never provide opportunities for discussing the meaning or purpose of life.” Wherever you go to college, a mind is a difficult thing to free.

 "Seeing the Light: Religious Colleges in Twenty-First Century America" 

by Samuel Schuman, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 

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Correcting misconceptions about America's Christian colleges. 

Jesus College

Aides to Lyndon Baines Johnson always knew when their boss had decided to engage in a political battle. Once he had finished precisely calibrating the personal costs and benefits, he would begin to gather momentum in a ritual that allies described as “revving up”: the effort to persuade himself of the goodness of his cause, regardless of whether he had previously supported or opposed it. Thus motivated, he would “get all worked up,” as his longtime lawyer, Ed Clark, put it, “all worked up and emotional, and work all day and night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Follow me for the cause!’—‘Let’s do this because it’s right!’ ”

Those who have read Robert A. Caro’s three previous biographical volumes on Johnson will recognize this groundswell—the sudden marshaling of outsized energies—because it is also the pattern of these mammoth, magnificent books. They chronicle in exhaustive detail the strengths and flaws of the 36th president of the United States, then surge forward toward a pivotal moment with the full weight of that character study behind them.

In this fourth installment—a comparatively trim 712 pages—the payoff is even greater. In the course of this book, Johnson is bumped from presumptive 1960 Democratic presidential nominee to the bottom half of John F. Kennedy’s ticket, then suffers the further abasement of being vice president in an administration that despises and pities him. His political future shrinks to a narrowness that Caro, with typical flair, compares to “the Dallas canyon” of office buildings and warehouses the presidential motorcade drove through on November 22, 1963. The assassin’s bullet that kills Kennedy instantly makes Johnson president, and the second half of 

 is a headlong rush as LBJ realizes what he can do when handed great authority.

Much of the book’s first half can be summed up with another Johnson phrase, familiar from previous books: “Too slow. Too slow.” Caro has corralled his usual army of details: some uncovered serendipitously (he reveals in the footnotes that his back doctor also treated JFK) but mostly during extensive interviews. To these he adds a deliciously maddening tendency to reach the cusp of a conflict, then pan to a wider angle to give a comprehensive view of its context.

Johnson finally meets his match in the Kennedys—especially Robert, with whom he develops “one of the great blood feuds in American political history.” In the corridors of a Los Angeles hotel during the 1960 nominating convention, JFK offers Johnson the vice presidency, a position that Bobby tries to persuade him not to accept. Soon Johnson finds himself a hick pariah among the denizens of the Camelot inner circle, who nickname him “Rufus Cornpone.” There are several episodes of wounding humiliation (as when Johnson tries to dance with JFK mistress Helen Chavchavadze at a party, slips and falls, and finds himself lying on her, according to one of the guests, “like a lox”).

But these doldrums are a necessary backdrop to accentuate the whirlwind of activity Johnson undertakes once he enters the Oval Office. Before, actually: It’s in the first three days after Kennedy’s assassination, when Johnson is still holed up in room 274 of the Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, that he makes the choices that will not only preserve the country from chaos but elevate its character. Told that he shouldn’t risk his political chips on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he replies, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

Nothing is so moving as when a hard man decides to do good. By the time this Texas politician takes presidential office, Caro has shown us exactly what kind of man he is—grasping, bullying, and almost bottomlessly corrupt—and so it is all the more affecting to see him recognize, if only briefly, a higher purpose to his ambition: giving basic freedoms to black Americans denied them by segregation, and basic human dignity to poor people denied them by inequality of opportunity. The Passage of Power is about how Lyndon Johnson gained power, but it is also about how he conducted it to others.

The book reaches its own emotional peak in an impromptu “revving up” speech delivered to the nation’s governors gathered for Kennedy’s funeral. Johnson knows he’ll need their leverage to pass civil rights legislation, and he leans on them with this pledge: “I am not the best man in the world at this job, and I was thrown into it through circumstances, but I am in it and I am not going to run from it. I am going to be at it from daylight to midnight, and with your help and God’s help we are going to make not ourselves proud that we are Americans but we are going to make the rest of the world proud that there is an American in it.” At this moment, the reader experiences a fleeting but genuinely stirring sensation: pride that Lyndon Johnson was an American.

 is a reporter for Willamette Week, an alternative weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon.

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The "Johnson treatment" meets the "Kennedy mystique" in Robert Caro's latest installment on Lyndon Baines Johnson.