Vincent Canby, who influenced moviegoers and theater audiences for more than three decades with his sophisticated, often wryly humorous reviews in the New York Times, died of cancer Sunday in Manhattan. He was 76.
Canby occupied a powerful position as the paper's senior film critic for 28 years, an era that spanned the development of French New Wave movies and mega-budget Hollywood blockbusters.
He championed filmmakers such as Woody Allen, Jane Campion, Spike Lee and James Ivory. His columns sometimes featured a mythical producer named Stanley, who personified Hollywood and its excesses.
Yet he did not regard himself as powerful or as a celebrity critic, even though a good word from him might translate into riches at the box office.
"He was a wry and civilized man who took the job seriously but didn't take himself too seriously," said critic and film historian Richard Schickel. "He had a kind of balance in his view of movies that was particularly useful for a critic appearing before the public on an almost daily basis."
Canby was born in Chicago and grew up in Lake Forest, Ill. He served in the Navy during World War II, then lived in Paris, where he supported himself in part by writing summaries of French scripts.
Back in the United States, he studied English literature at Dartmouth, earning a bachelor's degree in 1947. After brief stints at the Chicago Journal of Commerce and in public relations work in New York, he moved into entertainment journalism for the Motion Picture Herald and later at Variety.
He was hired as a film writer at the New York Times in 1965. For the next three decades, he turned out daily reviews well-grounded in the history of movies, as well as longer features and analysis pieces that appeared on Sundays.
Canby, who was also a playwright and novelist, preferred a conversational tone and wrote reviews that were at least as entertaining as the movies themselves. He made humorous asides about actors, such as a reference to the sculpted bulges of Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique as something the actor ought to exchange for something more comfortable.
In a review of "Jaws" in 1975, he wrote that if you are what you eat, "then one of the sharks in 'Jaws' is a beer can, half a mackerel and a Louisiana license plate." His columns featuring the fictional Stanley, "my movie producer friend," skewered the whims and foibles of the film business. The pieces were written as dialogues that usually took place over lunch at Sardi's, the New York hangout, or at Stanley's Trump Tower pied-a-terre.
