The movie doesn’t begin to suggest the American tradition that Miller belongs to — or, more exactly, belonged to, because it is by discounting his work after the thirties that one can clearly see him as the link between Leaves of Grass and the beats, and, of course, as the precursor of Mailer. Since the movie doesn’t bother to keep the book in its period, Miller loses his place in history and, with it, his originality... One hears Miller's prose as one reads him; in the early forties, when a friend of mine got hold of a smuggled-in copy of Tropic of Cancer, our immediate impulse was to read him aloud. But when that same prose is used in the film as a voice-over narration, it doesn't have the drive of common speech, it has the static fake poetry of cultivated literary language. Somehow, Strick has performed a reverse miracle—a feat like turning bread into stones...

With the actual Henry Miller available, the director couldn’t think of anything to do with him but to plunk him into a shot, just standing in front of a church. The poverty of imagination represented by that shot haunts me. I’ve been torturing myself thinking of the ways that Strick would probably use other authors if they were around. If he made a film of Hamlet, he might stuff Shakespeare into a seat at the Globe watching the performance; in his Don Quixote, Cervantes could be planted among the guests dining at an inn; and so on.