Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  American movies, Pauline believed, were in a shambles. She was certain that she had been right about the dangerous example set by The Sound of Music. Big, expensive, self-important pictures seemed to be all that interested the studios. Very seldom did she see anything that reflected the current climate in America in a serious or challenging way, and she had come to fear that perhaps there wasn’t even a public for such movies. Impressed as she had been by Truffaut’s and Godard’s early films, she had stopped short of genuine capitulation to them: that degree of abandon she still reserved for an American movie.

  And then, on August 4, 1967, Bonnie and Clyde opened at the Montreal Film Festival.

  The picture had first gone into development in 1963, when David Newman and Robert Benton, both staff art directors at Esquire, had gotten together to write a treatment based on the legendary Depression-era crime sprees of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Like Pauline, Newman and Benton were impatient for the American film to move forward, and their telling of the story of Bonnie and Clyde showed the influence of the French New Wave filmmakers. When it was released, it was clear that the restless, often violent spirit of the’60s pervaded practically every frame of the movie.

  Versions of the story of Bonnie and Clyde had reached the screen many times before—in Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Twice (1937) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950), among others—but never with such complexity, such wit, such unexpected shifts of tone, the wild, jaunty scenes of the early part of the picture leading seamlessly into the more violent and disturbing second half. Warren Beatty’s Clyde and Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie were so vital and attractive that it was easy for those watching the movie to accept them as folk heroes; the film seemed to embrace them as stand-ins for all those disenfranchised by the worst economic disaster in U.S. history, and the audience wanted them to get away with everything. There was a remarkable scene midway through the picture in which Bonnie and Clyde shoot up a house that has been repossessed by the bank—and, with the fervor of a student protester, the owner joins them in shooting out the windows and the bank’s sign. In the horrifying finale the couple dies in a shower of bullets—agonizingly and yet, somehow, beautifully—in a staggering orgy of violence. This was tough stuff for audiences at the time, but the director, Arthur Penn, and Beatty gambled that contemporary moviegoers would connect with what was happening on the screen.

  At first it appeared that their gamble might fizzle. Warners opened Bonnie and Clyde in a string of mostly undistinguished theaters in mid-August 1967. Some of the reviews—from Judith Crist and a few others—were positive, but many of the most important ones were not, and the most important one of all was, of course, written by Pauline’s bête noire, Bosley Crowther, in The New York Times. Long known for his abhorrence of violence, Crowther found the portrayal of Bonnie and Clyde nothing less than an act of moral repugnance. He denounced the film as “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredation of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

  From the moment she saw Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline was one of the film’s most enthusiastic champions. It excited her as no movie had in years. If a picture as thrillingly bold and original as Bonnie and Clyde could come out of a climate that was desperate to create another Sound of Music or Doctor Zhivago, there might yet be amazing possibilities in store for American movies. The trouble was, she had not had an opportunity to write about it. She had submitted a lengthy essay to The New Republic during the month that she departed from the magazine, but the editors considered it overlong and refused to run it.

  There was one place where length would not be an issue: The New Yorker. The magazine had already featured Penelope Gilliatt’s very favorable notice, but Pauline knew that the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, had been following her work for some years. Shawn was a serious moviegoer and he had been particularly intrigued by Pauline’s writings on Godard in The New Republic . She had already made her New Yorker debut in the June 3, 1967, issue with an article titled “Movies on Television,” in which she discussed the mixed blessing of reencountering old films on the small screen. Robert Mills now called William Shawn with an offer: Would he be interested in publishing a 7,000-word essay on why Bonnie and Clyde represented a moment of enormous importance in America’s pop culture?

  In terms of the impact it would have on her career, it was the most important essay Pauline would ever write. It ran in The New Yorker’s issue of October 21, 1967, and it opened on a strong note of defiance, in one of her favorite devices, the rhetorical question:

  How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. Yet any movie that is contemporary in feeling is likely to go further than other movies—go too far for some tastes—and Bonnie and Clyde divides audiences, as The Manchurian Candidate did, and it is being jumped on almost as hard.

  She felt that the screenwriters had tapped into something very important in that “they were able to use the knowledge that, like many of our other famous outlaws and gangsters, the real Bonnie and Clyde seemed to others to be acting out forbidden roles and to relish their roles. In contrast with secret criminals—the furtive embezzlers and other crooks who lead seemingly honest lives—the known outlaws capture the public imagination, because they take chances, and because, often, they enjoy dramatizing their lives.”

  She could tell from the vibe in the theater that “Bonnie and Clyde keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance—holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces. To be put on is to be put on the spot, made the stooge in a comedy act. People in the audience at Bonnie and Clyde are laughing, demonstrating that they’re not stooges—that they appreciate the joke—when they catch the first bullet right in the face.” In a sense Bonnie and Clyde played the audience in a way that wasn’t unlike the way Hitchcock had been playing them for years. But it did so with a cleanness and open-heartedness that Hitchcock could never come near. Part of the genius of Penn’s direction had such sleight of hand; he was driving the vehicle, but both hands weren’t clenched fiercely on the steering wheel. “Audiences at Bonnie and Clyde are not given a simple, secure basis for identification,” Pauline wrote; “they are made to feel but are not told how to feel.”

  One of the many ways that Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a new era in American moviemaking was with its stunningly direct portrayal of violence and its effect on our lives. Accusing the film of romanticizing crime and promoting violence was an easy, facile way of attacking it, and many critics and columnists had taken it. Arthur Penn objected to this in a New York Times interview that appeared a few weeks after the movie’s release. “The trouble with the violence in most films,” he said, “is that it is not violent enough. A war film that doesn’t show the real horrors of war—bodies being torn apart and arms being shot off—really glorifies war.” Pauline agreed, writing that “the whole point of Bonnie and Clyde is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing. The dirty reality of death—not suggestions but blood and holes—is necessary.... Bonnie and Clyde needs violence; violence is its meaning.” And she cautioned against people who saw “Bonnie and Clyde as a danger to public morality; they think an audience goes to a play or a movie and takes the actions in it as examples for imitation. They look at the world and blame the movies.” Bonnie and Clyde had done contemporary audiences a favor, she felt, because “it has put the sting back into death.” At last, it seemed that
the American film might be on its way to growing up, as she had longed for it to do for decades. The ultimate cinematic seduction she had dreamed of for so long might now actually be on the verge of happening.

  Pauline’s review did not, as was often claimed, turn around Bonnie and Clyde’s fortunes single-handedly. The movie had been doing well in its single-theater bookings in a number of major U.S. cities, but Warner Bros. had never put much promotional muscle behind it, and by mid-October, it was being yanked from theaters to make way for the studio’s new release, Reflections in a Golden Eye, starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.

  But the fascination with Bonnie and Clyde continued, and in December Time ran a lengthy cover story about the movie’s impact on the culture. Early in 1968 Warren Beatty strong-armed Warners into giving the picture a well-orchestrated rerelease, and this time, there were long lines at the box office everywhere. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in competition with another of the year’s trendsetting films, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. (Both lost to the much tamer In the Heat of the Night—but even that, via its exploration of racial tensions in a Mississippi murder case, was indicative of a changing Hollywood.)

  The management of The New York Times, meanwhile, had taken note of the movie’s resonance and decided that the time had come for their chief film critic to step down, and December of 1967 marked the end of Bosley Crowther’s twenty-two-year reign. He continued on staff for a time as a special reporter, but he was devastated that the success of Bonnie and Clyde had unseated him from the powerful position he had held for so long.

  In an act of counterpoint so perfect it might have come out of an old movie, Pauline’s fortunes rose at the precise moment that those of her old nemesis collapsed. She had been out of work since The New Yorker’s piece on Bonnie and Clyde had run, and with the holidays approaching, she was in bed with the flu. Uncharacteristically for her, she had sunk into a state of dejection and self-pity. The irony of her situation seemed particularly nasty: Just as the movies were showing signs of having the dust blown out of them, she seemed further than ever from her dream of making a living as a film critic.

  For weeks William Shawn had been pondering some of the points Pauline had raised in her essay on Bonnie and Clyde. The New Yorker had a long history of movie critics who traded in light, above-it-all dismissals of the pictures they reviewed, a school of criticism that owed much more to the brittle wit of a Dorothy Parker than to the searching curiosity of a James Agee; John McCarten, particularly, had represented this school of criticism, peering at the movies he covered as imperiously as Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s icon, peered through his monocle. Shawn decided that a different approach was needed. He wanted someone in tune with the way movies were now, who could speak to the rabid movie-loving audience that had come along in the last decade. Pauline’s piece on Bonnie and Clyde had been a test, and she had passed. Shawn phoned her and told her that he wanted her to succeed Brendan Gill as movie critic for six months a year, alternating with Penelope Gilliatt. She was to begin in January.

  It is tempting—however wrongly—for those of us examining the lives of writers, actors, and other artists of the mid–twentieth century to see those lives unfold with the rhythm and pace of an old-fashioned three-act Broadway play. Act I entails the long, slow study and preparation for a brilliant career, Act II the vintage years of that career, Act III the inevitable decline to the end.

  Pauline’s Act I had lasted an unusually long time. At age forty-eight, her prolonged apprenticeship was finally completed. What she felt now was the opposite of stage fright: it was an inability to remain standing in the wings any longer, a driving urgency to make her entrance and get on with the best part of the play.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the mid-1960s The New Yorker had long since attained iconic status among its readers. The longtime subscribers who stacked copies of the magazine on their coffee tables felt that it brought something into their homes that no other magazine could come close to offering. In those days the magazine focused principally on cultural and literary matters; while it did frequently run profiles of political figures, it was not primarily concerned with up-to-the-minute journalism that probed troubling social issues and the machinations of contemporary politics. The image of New York that the magazine presented to its readers everywhere was that of a sophisticated, unconventional city where it was possible to seek out the very best in culture twenty-four hours a day, a place where the traditional values and habits of thought that might hamstring the rest of the country did not come into play. A reader in the Midwest or on the Pacific Coast might never come close to touching down at LaGuardia Airport—yet he could feel, through the pages of The New Yorker, that he possessed an intimate knowledge of the city and of the city’s sensibility. In 1940 a piece of promotional literature outlined the magazine’s ethic succinctly: “You cannot keep The New Yorker out of the hands of New York–minded people, wherever they are. For, unlike the myriad points in which New York–minded people live, New York is not a tack on a map, not a city, not an island nor an evening at ‘21.’ The New Yorker is a mood, a point of view. It is found wherever people are electrically sensitive to new ideas, eager for new things to do, new things to buy, new urbanities for living.”

  Many longtime readers of the magazine, however, had begun to feel that the image of sophistication it peddled was as outmoded as the old black-and-white movies featuring chic café singers on nightclub sets the size of the roof of the Empire State Building. These critics believed that The New Yorker had fallen out of touch with the world to the point of ossification. And their target for blame was William Shawn.

  The New Yorker was perhaps the supreme illustration of the principle that any good magazine is a reflection of its presiding editor’s tastes and ideas. Shawn had started his career at the magazine as a reporter for the front-of-book section “Talk of the Town” in 1933. In only a few years he had become managing editor for fact, and in 1952, he was promoted to the top job, succeeding the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross. The New Yorker was Shawn’s passion; he devoted himself to it, with an attention to minutiae that might have astounded even the most workaholic editors in chief of the day. Shawn followed many of the precepts established by Ross: He did not believe that a magazine succeeded by sending out reader surveys and frantically chasing what it believed its readers’ strongest interests to be. He believed that a good editor compelled readers to become interested in what he was interested in by presenting the material in the clearest, best balanced, and most lucid way.

  But as the 1960s became the most chaotic decade in American memory, Shawn’s chorus of critics grew steadily louder. They complained that the pulse of modern life simply was not present in the magazine; they believed there was a way for The New Yorker to retain its impeccable journalistic standards and still come closer to depicting life as it was really being lived.

  There was no real indication that Shawn was displeased with the job that his writers had been doing with “The Current Cinema” over the years. “William Shawn respected, admired, and enjoyed the movie reviews of John McCarten and Brendan Gill, both of whom he regarded as talented writers who were funny, witty, sharp, and independent,” observed Lillian Ross, a New Yorker staff writer since the 1940s, and Shawn’s longtime companion. “He liked the way both writers took a light-hearted view of much Hollywood product, while—never grim or cranky—they prized the movies of unique artists like Bergman, Renoir, Kurosawa, Fellini, et cetera. Above all else, Shawn loved writers’ humor in their pieces.”

  Shawn brought a number of new critical voices to the magazine during the mid-1960s. In 1966 he hired Michael Arlen to write “The Air,” a regular column on television. George Steiner began contributing his erudite, deeply informed book reviews. Harold Rosenberg, the esteemed proponent of modern American art, joined the staff as art critic. Shawn was an avid moviegoer who sensed that something new and exciting was happening in the world of film
and decided that Pauline would be an excellent choice to cover it. Brendan Gill, whom Pauline regarded as something of a dinosaur, had desired a change of pace and was reassigned to review theater; it was decided that Pauline would cover film reviewing for the months of September through March. Penelope Gilliatt, a former critic for the London Observer who had successfully completed a kind of test run at the magazine during the summer of 1968, would take over from April to August.

  In a business in which the relationship between writer and editor is often a prickly, contentious one, Shawn had the loyalty of the great majority of those who contributed to The New Yorker. It was unusual for any editor in chief to be as closely involved in line editing as Shawn was; every major article that appeared in the magazine bore his stamp. Shawn was, along with many of his subeditors, dedicated to the highly manicured style for which the magazine had long been famous. Those lapidary sentences and smoothly flowing paragraphs that appeared in the magazine each week had been worked over by many people before they made it into print, which led to criticism that there was a kind of sausage-grinder mentality at work in The New Yorker’s editorial process. Pauline, for one, thought that all the obsessively careful editing sometimes yielded a rather uniform, almost generic New Yorker tone.

  There were certain oddities about the daily workings at The New Yorker. The magazine’s fact-checking department was considered the finest in the industry. Accuracy had been a priority since 1927, when the magazine had published a profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay so filled with inaccuracies that a lawsuit had been threatened. Sometimes, however, the clinging to factual accuracy crossed over from obsessive to irrational. John Simon recalled that he once submitted a piece of light verse to The New Yorker called “A Short Social History of the Condor.” “It was totally fictitious,” he remembered, “a fantasy about the history of the condor through the ages, including Europe, where there never was any condor.” He sent it in to the magazine and soon received an enthusiastic letter from Katharine White, the poetry editor, praising it and telling him how wonderful it was to discover a new light-verse writer, something the magazine had been searching for for some time. “The only thing she wanted me to do,” remembered Simon, “was to give her the factual basis for the poem. I said, ‘That’s like asking the Brothers Grimm to give the factual basis for fairy tales.’ I was told by one of the editors that there was a big editorial meeting at which they took up this matter. And the decision finally was that they couldn’t do it.”