Martin Scorsese Remembers Richard Schickel, ‘A Very Perceptive Critic and a Wonderful Writer’
Martin Scorsese has shared his thoughts on Richard Schickel, the influential film critic who passed away at 84 on Saturday. Schickel wrote dozens of books, most recently his 2015 memoir “Keepers: The Greatest Films — and Personal Favorites — of a Moviegoing Lifetime,” and served as film critic for Time from 1965–2010. Read Scorsese’s statement below.
“Richard Schickel was a very perceptive critic and a wonderful writer and documentary filmmaker,” writes the filmmaker. “As a person he was, to use a once popular term, ‘crusty,’ and he could be brutally funny. But it’s his deep and abiding love of movies that I’ll always remember about him. His early 70s PBS series ‘The Men Who Made the Movies,’ his 2004 restoration of Sam Fuller’s ‘The Big Red One,’ his wonderful little book about ‘Double Indemnity,’ his biographies of Chaplin and Cary Grant…this is a man who gave his life to the thing he loved.”
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Throughout his decades-long tenure as a critic, Schickel also wrote for Life and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His death was preceded by a series of strokes.
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