Time & Perspective Quote by Vincent Canby

Canby’s line is a critic’s magic trick: it praises an actor by refusing the usual vocabulary of “timelessness,” and instead invents a paradox that feels more precise. “Forever fixed” suggests cinema’s embalming power - performance as an artifact you can replay, frame by frame, long after the body and the moment are gone. But “a time that never dates” flips the fear embedded in that fixity. Film can trap actors in fashions, mannerisms, and social codes that later read as quaint or, worse, cringey. Canby is saying this actor escapes the museum effect.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to performances that chase contemporaneity: the wink-to-camera self-awareness, the trendy naturalism, the imported cool. Those age fastest because they’re pegged to a cultural timestamp. Canby implies the actor he’s admiring is working from something deeper than the era’s style notes - a bodily truth, a moral clarity, a distinctive rhythm that doesn’t depend on period-specific signals to land. “Fixed” becomes a compliment rather than a limitation: the performance is preserved, yes, but what’s preserved isn’t merely “how people talked then”; it’s a human frequency that stays legible.

Context matters: Canby wrote in an age when film acting was increasingly read through generational shifts (studio-era technique vs. Method vs. post-Method irony). His phrasing stakes out a standard critics love but rarely define: not relevance, not realism, but durability without stiffness - an actor whose work survives the future without pleading with it.