"You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet" The American Talking Film: History and Memory, 1927-1949 By Andrew Sarris Oxford. 573 pp. $35 Reviewed by Charles Matthews, a managing editor of West, the Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News, and the author of "Oscar A to Z." Sunday, May 17, 1998; Page X04

As indicated by its ungainly title (the top deck of which consists of the first words, spoken by Al Jolson, in the first talkie, "The Jazz Singer"), Sarris's new book concentrates on the first two decades of the talkies, often thought of as Hollywood's golden age. It was also the era in which Sarris, who turns 70 this year, was born and raised, and this identification with the movies of his childhood and adolescence makes You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet a warmer, less polemical work than The American Cinema.

The auteur theory holds that the director is the chief "author" of a film, and that the best movies are those in which a director is working out a personal vision. Directors still dominate Sarris's thinking: Almost half of the new book is devoted to them. But he also includes sections on the studios, major genres, actors and actresses, and some personal "guilty pleasures."

Sarris occasionally wastes time wrangling with the already much-wrangled-with, as in his attempts to define such genres as film noir and screwball comedy. But there are keen insights in his essays on studio style and genres of the '30s and '40s: It's fun, for example, to follow his lead and think of "Casablanca" and "To Have and Have Not" as musicals, whose "rhythms . . . seem to flow out of the piano more than the moviola." His unchecked admiration for stars such as Greta Garbo and Margaret Sullavan and Myrna Loy makes you want to go back and see the performances he writes about.

You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet reminds us why movies defeat attempts to intellectualize them, to make them fit the confines of theory. The trouble many of us have with the auteur theory is that if the greatest movies are the work of directors crafting a personal vision, how come some very good movies have been created by directors who put no discernible personal stamp on their films?

Take everyone's favorite movie, "Casablanca," for example. Its director, Michael Curtiz, was responsible for "Captain Blood," "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Angels With Dirty Faces," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Mildred Pierce" and other memorable movies. But in The American Cinema Sarris damned Curtiz with faint praise as the "most amiable of Warners' technicians." And "Casablanca," "the most decisive exception to the auteur theory," is only "the happiest of happy accidents."

Thirty years later, in his new book, Sarris uses precisely the same phrase about "King Kong": "supreme in its genre as the happiest of happy accidents." In neither case is Sarris willing to acknowledge that the producer -- Hal Wallis for "Casablanca," David O. Selznick for "King Kong" -- might have had something to do with making the happiness less accidental. Producers and directors are natural enemies, and Sarris invariably sides with the director. (His distaste for producers may be why he constantly misremembers Irving G. Thalberg's middle initial, calling him "Irving J. Thalberg" at least four times in the new book.)

But unlike some auteurist critics, Sarris was never a hidebound ideologue. "The auteur theory is merely a system of tentative priorities, a pattern theory in constant flux," he insisted in The American Cinema. Thirty years later William Wyler gets a more appreciative treatment in the new book, as does Billy Wilder, to whom, Sarris tells us, he has twice apologized for his placement in the "Less Than Meets the Eye" group.

Sarris acutely observes of Wilder that "his apparent cynicism was the only way he could make his raging romanticism palatable." In a way this could be said of Sarris: His advocacy -- he refers to himself as "a practicing polemicist" -- of the auteur theory was the only way he could make his own romanticism palatable. For the auteur theory itself is romantic in essence. It puts the emphasis on the director's personal vision rather than on his skill as a movie-maker, valuing sincerity over technical competence, just as the Romantic poets valued true feeling over true wit. In this scheme of things, not only does a self-destructive genius like Orson Welles rank higher than a perfectionist craftsman like Wyler, but a B-movie wild man like Sam Fuller gets a higher rating than an A-list "technician" like Curtiz.

One reason Sarris never became as popular a critic as, say, Pauline Kael is that he allowed his passion to be subsumed in a defense of the auteur theory, whereas Kael put her passions on parade in books with such hot-to-trot titles as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, I Lost It at the Movies and Hooked. In the best parts of You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet, Sarris is less polemical than passionate about movies. And this is to the good. For Sarris, as for most of us who grew up loving movies, history and memory and the movies are inseparable.