Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  “The Making of The Group” would not see the light of day until 1968, when it was published in Pauline’s second book, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. “I had heard it was going to be butchery, and I never read it,” Lumet claimed. “If there’s an unpleasantness to avoid, I avoid it.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Pauline’s first column for McCall’s appeared on schedule in the magazine’s February 1966 issue. “The Function of a Critic” was a reprise of some of the ideas set forth in “It’s Only a Movie”:

  Appreciation courses have paralyzed reactions to modern music, painting, poetry and even novels, but movies, ignored by teachers as a Saturday afternoon vice, are one of the few arts (along with jazz and popular music) Americans can respond to without cultural anxieties.

  This, unfortunately, is beginning to change. At art houses and film festivals, audiences are beginning to show the same kind of paralysis. They seem to think that a highly praised movie or a movie selected for a festival must be art, and if they don’t respond to it, they are uncomfortable about saying so. They no longer trust themselves. Ultimately, if this fear of authority develops even in movie audiences, our responses will contract, movies will join the paralyzed high arts. There are already signs of this. At a recent opening, I said to the manager, “It was wonderful, but I was puzzled. I couldn’t tell whether the audience liked it or not.” He answered, “They’re waiting for the reviews.”

  Initially the editors of McCall’s seemed pleased with her tough, smart writing, and in the March issue she covered a number of new releases, including the movie that would turn out to be John Ford’s last, Seven Women, starring Anne Bancroft as the head of a group of women missionaries in 1930s China. Pauline observed that sitting through Seven Women was “rather like watching an old movie on TV and thinking, ‘No, no, they’re not really going to do that next’—but they do, they do, and superior as you feel to it, you’re so fascinated by the astounding, confident senselessness of it all that you can’t take your eyes off it.” In the same column, she lamented that Laurence Olivier’s magnificent Othello had been preserved only in a cheap filmed version of the play, not in a proper screen transcription with the full arsenal of technical possibilities at his disposal.

  In the April issue, however, she ventured into more controversial territory with her review of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. This mammoth, meticulously detailed screen version of Boris Pasternak’s 1958 bestseller about the Russian Revolution had long been anticipated as one of the big movie events of the year, and it was already on its way to becoming one of the top-grossing films of all time. Pauline loathed the hype for the picture as much as she loathed Lean’s meticulously detailed and worked-out style of moviemaking, with every response carefully calculated, every shade of meaning put properly in place. She dismissed it as “stately, respectable and dead” and likened it to “watching a gigantic task of stone masonry executed by unmoved movers. It’s not art, it’s heavy labor—which, of course, many people respect more than art.” She went on to predict that it would further accelerate the race for superspectacles “that will probably have to bankrupt several studios before a halt is called.”

  Pauline always claimed that none of the McCall’s editors attempted to dictate to her how to review a particular movie. It was one thing for her to dismiss a run-of-the-mill film that either made or lost a little money, and quite another for her to attack such a prestigious picture that had found its cultural niche so quickly. Still, the editors at the magazine gave her the benefit of the doubt for the moment.

  Dwarfing even Zhivago, however, was The Sound of Music, which had been released in March of that year and would soon surpass Gone With the Wind as the top-grossing film of all time. A big, handsome film, shot in spectacular Technicolor in Austria, brimming with wholesomeness, The Sound of Music confirmed what Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady had shown the year before: that the movie musical wasn’t dead at all; provided it was big and splashy and colorful enough, it could be box-office gold. The Sound of Music also single-handedly rescued its studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, where production had slowed to a trickle after the devastating failure of the astronomically expensive Cleopatra. The Sound of Music’s soundtrack album was an enormous success; an entire generation of parents and children memorized the songs at home, and then treated themselves to repeat viewings of the movie. And in the spring of 1966, The Sound of Music beat Doctor Zhivago for the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1965.

  Because it had been released months before she began work at McCall’s, Pauline had not reviewed The Sound of Music for the magazine. But in April 1966, when MGM released its own big entry in the family-musical sweepstakes—The Singing Nun, starring Debbie Reynolds—Pauline took it as an opportunity to annihilate retrospectively The Sound of Music, which she predicted would prove to be “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies for the next few years.”

  While she herself was not immune to the movie’s basic appeal, as she acknowledged,

  You begin to feel as if you’ve never got out of school.... This is the world teachers used to pretend (and maybe still pretend?) was the real world. It’s the world in which the governess conquers all. It’s the big lie, the sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat. They even seem to think that they should feed it to their kids, that it’s healthy, wonderful “family entertainment” . . . Why am I so angry about these movies? Because the shoddy falseness of The Singing Nun and the luxuriant falseness of The Sound of Music are part of the sentimental American tone that makes honest work almost impossible.

  Taking such a morally indignant tone was a risky move, for while her righteous anger might have had its place in one of the small film or literary quarterlies, to attack a movie that the world had taken to its heart in a big-circulation women’s magazine such as McCall’s struck many readers as unsuitable and oddly misplaced.

  By mid-May, it was announced that Pauline and McCall’s would part company, a story that was big enough news to merit coverage in Newsweek. “The reviews became less and less appropriate for a mass-audience magazine,” Stein told Newsweek. “I still think she’s one of the best movie critics around. My hiring her was, I thought, a noble experiment. The experiment did not work out.”

  Pauline did not look back on her brief stint at McCall’s with rancor and celebrated her departure from the magazine by taking Gina on a trip to Europe in late May 1966. While they were stopping off in London at the Mount Royal Hotel, Robert Mills wrote to her that she had earned $1,000 in royalties for I Lost It at the Movies and $1,500 from the latest McCall’s payment. “What would you like us to do with all this money?” he asked.

  Mills cast around for another regular reviewing job, and while Pauline and Gina were still abroad, he received an offer: The New Republic wanted her to be its regular movie columnist, to replace one of the critics she admired least, Stanley Kauffmann, who was leaving for what would be an extremely short-lived stay as drama critic for The New York Times. Founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, the magazine had long been known for its in-depth essays on politics and culture that generally embraced a liberal point of view. By the 1960s its political stance was harder to pin down. While it had come out against the Vietnam War, it was also sharply critical of the wave of protest and activism that had swept across America in mid-decade. Its circulation was anything but mass—it hovered on either side of 50,000—and its editor, Robert Evett, offered Pauline terms that were not nearly as lucrative as the McCall’s deal had been—twenty-four columns a year at $300 each. Still, she believed that as an outlet for her talents, The New Republic made more sense than McCall’s had.

  Her debut column appeared on October 8, 1966—“The Creative Business,” another analysis of the artistic bankruptcy rampant in Hollywood—after which she settled down to the business of reviewing movies. Her October 22 column featured reviews of two sprawling epics, Hawaii and The Bible, and surprisingly, for someone who had always harbored an antipathy to the gr
andiosity of David Lean’s films, she liked both. The Bible was directed by John Huston, and she preferred his approach to the “ploddingly intelligent and controlled” work of Lean; she thought Hawaii was superbly edited, and that its director, George Roy Hill, “compensates for his inexperience in the medium by developing strong characterizations that succeed in binding the material.”

  It was a disagreement over Hawaii that led Pauline to one of the most enduring of her friendships with a colleague. Joseph Morgenstern was a young critic at Newsweek who had been invited to appear on the entertainment reporter Pat Collins’s radio show to discuss current films. When he arrived at the studio, he found that Pauline was also a guest. “I could hardly get a word in edgewise,” Morgenstern remembered. “The talk turned to Hawaii. At the time, I thought it was just a big, clumsy movie. Pauline said vociferously on the radio that it has a social conscience, talks about smallpox, this and that. But she overpraised it, as was her wont. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on the air, and I said it. That goaded her. And as soon as we got off the air, she said, ‘That was fun, honey. Let’s have a cup of coffee!’” It was the beginning of a thirty-six-year friendship.

  It had begun to bother Pauline that the youth audience, in particular, didn’t seem more discriminating about the movies it considered “great.” All that seemed to matter was that they felt hip. She regarded this as the worst sort of narcissism, while at the same time dreading that her lack of enthusiasm for many of the new pictures might brand her as some kind of hidebound reactionary. She was particularly troubled by some of the films coming out of Britain, with their bouncing pop-music scores, fast editing, and accelerated camerawork taking in the gritty streets of mod London.

  In her November 5, 1966, column for The New Republic, “So Off-beat We Lose the Beat,” she complained that Morgan! was nothing more than “a modernized version of an earlier, romantic primitivist notion that people are conformists, animals are instinctively ‘true’ and, of course, ‘free.’ ” She suspected that Morgan! was “so appealing to college students because it shares their self-view: they accept this mess of cute infantilisms and obsessions and aberrations without expecting the writer and director to straighten it out or resolve it and without themselves feeling a necessity to sort it out.” Yet she was intrigued by the wild enthusiasm the youth audience showed for it and for Georgy Girl. In an obvious jab at Dwight Macdonald, she added, “And if it be said that this is sociology, not aesthetics, the answer is that an aesthetician who gave his time to criticism of current movies would have to be an awful fool. Movie criticism to be of any use whatever must go beyond formal analysis.”

  By December Robert Mills felt confident in requesting a raise per New Republic column, as Pauline “could find good use for another one or two hundred dollars a check.” In a short time, however, friction developed, as she often had a difficult time confining herself to the assigned word count. The lack of communication also disturbed her: Sometimes her column was dropped from an issue without explanation. When it did appear in print, it was often in a significantly altered form—either cut or, worse yet, rewritten, with observations and word choices that were not her own. She complained to Mills, but the editors continued to make wholesale changes without consulting her.

  Pauline was beginning to turn up as a frequent guest on radio programs and film-critic panel discussions. But their organizers began to anticipate her appearances with equal parts excitement and dread, since she behaved with a candor that sometimes crossed over into rudeness. One such episode took place in the spring of 1966, when Judith Crist invited her to appear on a radio program she was hosting. The other guest was Ginger Rogers, who was about to open on Broadway as Carol Channing’s replacement in the hit musical Hello, Dolly!

  Pauline had praised Crist’s critical integrity, and when she showed up to tape the radio show, all seemed promising. “Judy Crist!” she shouted as she got off the elevator. “The one tough critic in New York!” The program got under way, and Crist began questioning Ginger Rogers about Kitty Foyle, the 1940 soap opera that had earned her a Best Actress Academy Award. Rogers began to speak about how her agent had tried to discourage her from doing Kitty Foyle, and how she had persisted and wound up winning the Oscar. “Your agent was right,” snapped Pauline. Rogers, looking as if she was about to burst into tears, was shocked into silence, leaving Crist to vamp about Kitty Foyle and other matters.

  On another occasion, Pauline and Crist had both served on a critic’s panel at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. During the discussion, Pauline lit into her favorite bogeyman, Bosley Crowther, and Crist angrily shouted her down, telling her that she should lay off Crowther—that he had his parish and Pauline had hers. Later, Pauline asked Crist to join her for a cup of coffee. “She wanted to explain to me,” recalled Crist, “that when she was running her theater in Berkeley, running the Cinema Guild, she had to put up posters that featured banner reviews by Bosley in big print. She resented that he was the most important critical voice in the country; she’d harbored it for years.” That year Universal Pictures dropped Pauline from its list of complimentary invitational press screenings. The alleged reason was her behavior at a screening of the studio’s new Ross Hunter–produced soap opera, Madame X. The studio felt that Pauline’s derisive hoots and audible comments in the screening room had adversely influenced the other critics. For a time she would have to pay to see Universal’s pictures in a theater—her preferred setting, anyway, as she could then monitor the reactions of the audience.

  The movie of 1966 that perplexed Pauline most was Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a study of the fast-paced, empty life of a high-fashion photographer (David Hemmings) in swinging London. It was a strikingly filmed and brilliantly edited murder mystery, and this part of the film she found quite successful. But few things vexed her as much as unearned seriousness, and it was here that she felt Blow-Up went off the rails. The basic idea that Blow-Up seemed to be setting forth—that the photographer’s life represented illusion and the murder reality—struck Pauline as impossibly facile, and she also felt that its implicit message that the mod scene represented the spiritual aridity of the times was nothing but a pompous, moralizing pose. While Antonioni had tapped into the alienation and unresponsiveness of modern youth, he had missed “the fervor and astonishing speed in their rejections of older values; he sees only the emptiness of pop culture.”

  In her reviewing career to date, Pauline had shown a powerful gift for defending the great talents she believed had been prevented from doing their best work by Hollywood; Orson Welles’s Falstaff provided her with another such opportunity. After Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’s career had consisted mainly of giving hammy performances in a string of mediocre pictures and trying to amass enough cash to finance a project that might restore his reputation as a director. He had come tantalizingly close with Othello, finally released in 1955 after years of stop-and-start filming, and Touch of Evil, a wholly original thriller set in a Mexican border town, but both films received minimal distribution and flopped.

  In the 1960s he had one more chance, with Falstaff (later known as Chimes at Midnight), which he had been shooting in Europe for years. It was an amalgamation of several Shakespeare plays, with the most poignant part of Henry IV, Part I at its center: Prince Hal’s recognition of his destiny and gradual pulling away from Falstaff. Pauline admitted that technically, the movie was a mess, showing many signs of its chaotic filming, but she found “the casting superb and the performance beautiful.” The Battle of Shrewsbury, she felt, ranked with “the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa—that is, with the best ever done.” And yet its technical defects were preventing it from getting proper distribution. “And Welles—the one great creative force in American films in our time, the man who might have redeemed our movies from the general contempt in which they are (and for the most part, rightly) held—is, ironically, an expatriate director whose work thus reaches only the art-house audience.”
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  The New Republic continued to tamper with her copy, and by the summer of 1967 she realized she could not continue for much longer. She resigned her post, using her latest royalty check for I Lost It at the Movies to take Gina to Europe for a few weeks. She was not at all sure that another steady reviewing job would present itself.

  Pauline was distressed that the creative ferment that had burst out of France and Britain at the end of the ’50s seemed to have dried up. It was particularly sad to see what had happened to François Truffaut, who had taken on the ill-advised Fahrenheit 451 and was now preparing what would turn out to be a hollow parody of his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, The Bride Wore Black. One of the few French directors to keep his hold was Jean-Luc Godard, whose Band of Outsiders Pauline had admired. She felt that Breathless and Band of Outsiders derived their spark from the fact that they were “movies made by a generation bred on movies . . . Godard is the Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world, and movies are for the sixties a synthesis of what the arts were for the post–World War I generation—rebellion, romance, a new style of life.” Unfortunately, Band of Outsiders failed to intrigue American audiences and played in New York for only a single week in March 1966.