Madam, - Gerald Davis sent me Oliver McGrane's letter of March 3rd defending the film The Pianist against the startlingly patronising listing of your film critic - "Only if you must".
Interestingly enough, I've encountered among friends a similar attitude - "We can't bring ourselves to see it", or "Holocaust films upset me too much" - often from people who relish a good cry at some glittery, literary misery like The Hours. I tell them they won't be upset or depressed by The Pianist.
It is a cool, dispassionate, totally unsentimental look at a non-heroic survivor, in a grim period of history. There are good Germans and Poles and suspect Jewish Police. It is a masterly piece of film making which looks, as a survivor of two camps whispered to me at a screening, "Exactly, precisely, how it was".
So your film reviewer is entitled to be flippant if he failed to appreciate The Pianist but not to be dismissive of a classic, award-winning piece of cinema. Perhaps one should read him only if one must. - Yours, etc.,
MAUREEN LIPMAN,
Colney Hatch Lane,
London N10.