"Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives." – Vincent Canby

 

Born in Chicago on July 27, 1924 Canby had the distinction of being both the chief film critic AND the chief theater critic for The New York Times – the only person to ever do so.  As film critic he reviewed more than 1,000 films and he did the hundreds of theater reviews, right up until his death in 2000.

  

He was such a respected writer and reviewer that Bob Hope requested that Canby write his obituary, but Canby died first.  However, he still received the byline on Hope’s story since he had crafted most of it prior to his own death, and Times’ editors didn’t think it could be topped. 

 

Canby’s career was highlighted in an award-winning film For the Love of Movies:  The Story of American Film Criticism, and he also turned his writing into plays and novels authoring the well-received  novels Living Quarters and Unnatural Scenery, and plays like End of the War and The Old Flag, a drama set during the Civil War.  But it was film that he loved best.

 

“Through the magic of motion pictures,” he said, “someone who’s never left Peoria knows the softness of a Paris spring, the color of a Nile sunset, the sorts of vegetation one will find along the upper Amazon and that Big Ben has not yet gone digital.”