In the world of Boston film criticism, few names loom larger than Gerald Peary. He signed on as film critic for the legendary Boston alt-weekly The Real Paper in 1978. In the decades since, Peary has written for the Globe, the Phoenix, and at 81 is still reviewing for the Arts Fuse. He’s interviewed luminaries from Agnès Varda and Akira Kurosawa to John Waters and Mel Brooks. He’s edited or written 10 books, including 2024’s “Mavericks: Interviews with the World’s Iconoclast Filmmakers.” Peary’s latest book, “A Reluctant Film Critic,” turns the spotlight on a subject closer to home: Gerald Peary.
It’s a book he started in 1986, while in an arts colony in Canada. “I was supposed to do one project, [but] I didn’t like it, and I ended up doing this one instead.” More recently, Peary has taken to a daily Facebook practice of posting brief remembrances of his childhood.
The book has richly detailed stories of his youth, much of which the Cambridge native spent in the hills of West Virginia.
It’s a remarkably warm and vivid book, though Peary said he had no family photos to draw on. “Our family did not have a camera,” he said. “While most people have thousands of childhood photos to wake their memory up, I have none of those.” He drew on a deep bank of memories. “People don’t seem to remember what happened to them between the ages of four and eight, and I do.”
One that might be an origin story for the critic involves the Brattle Theatre as a child in the early 1950s. Coming full circle, Peary will be back at the Brattle Saturday to host a double feature, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and “The Boy With Green Hair” (both 1948, though Peary reckons he saw both around age seven in ’51 or ’52).
“I picked two films which were seminal to my childhood, that I was completely crazy about,” Peary said. “I’ve seen them since, and continue to think they’re really just sublime films.”
Part of the appeal of both films was that they terrified the young moviegoer, particularly “The Boy with Green Hair.”
“I was so scared that my hair would turn green that I had nightmares for weeks and weeks and weeks!” he said. It proved formative to Peary’s budding tastes: “I want movies to move me intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and that’s what ‘The Boy with Green Hair’ did.”
Peary says taking in a movie at the Brattle has remained largely unchanged. “The charm of the Brattle is that it will always look the same and feel the same and smell the same,” he said, then gave an affectionate laugh, “Nobody ever has enough money to fix it in any major way!”
Peary said we look at our upbringings “to try to figure out who you are today.”
“I’m a kind of an alternative, intellectual person, and [I’ve been] trying to figure out, where did that come from?’ And it seems to have always been there. At age four and five I was already trying to read books, and by the time I was six and seven I was movie crazy. And that’s me today: book crazy and movie crazy.”
The world of criticism, and of journalism as a whole, has changed dramatically since the 1970s. In a time when even legacy publications are trimming or eliminating their arts coverage, aspiring critics find themselves faced with a narrowing path. As the city’s elder statesman of film criticism, Peary’s advice is simple: “Get a day job!”
Then, more seriously, he adds, “It’s about love of the movies. If you love them enough to want to write about them, you’ll do it probably as a happy amateur today.”
For those willing to write despite the financial realities of the field today, he said “We always need good film criticism, and it’s really interesting to see what young people have to say about movies.” So, he says “Write away. Write away.”
A stronger
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