Pauline Kael
Page 51
Thanks to Ann Bassart, who allowed me to look over Pauline’s former home on Oregon Street in Berkeley, my former professors at Oregon State University, Kerry Ahearn and Michael Oriard, to Ron and Howard Mandelbaum at Photofest, Marilyn Horne, and to Linda Allen for her generosity in providing some previously unpublished photos of Pauline. Deepest thanks to Jill Krementz for her amazing generosity.
Many of the movies mentioned here I saw in the 1970s, at the Whiteside and State theaters in Corvallis, Oregon, in the company of my friend Cynthia Peterson. Writing this book has brought back many happy movie-going memories.
For constant support, advice, and encouragement, I thank a wonderful group of friends: Ronald Bowers, Clifford Capone, Bob Demyan, Lauren Flanigan, Craig Haladay, Omus and Jessica Hirshbein, Anne Lawrence, John Manis, Arlo Mc-Kinnon, Cheryl McLean, Francesca Mercurio, Steven and Lisa Mercurio, the late Geoff Miller, Eric Myers, David Niedenthal, Patricia O’Connell, Fred Plotkin, Judy Rice, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Helen Sheehy, Michael Slade—and Erik Dahl, whose phone calls are always one of the best parts of the day. And thanks most of all to my partner, Scott Barnes, for his extreme patience and loving presence.
At Opera News, my employer for more than twenty years, I have the pleasure of working with a movie-loving editor in chief, F. Paul Driscoll, who was never too busy with his own deadlines and life to offer insightful comments about my work on the book. Thanks also to editorial production coordinator Elizabeth Dig-gans for her wise judgment and for being the best colleague I’ve ever had, associate editor Louise T. Guinther for her eagle-eyed copyediting, and art director Greg Downer for his help with photos. Thanks also to Oussama Zahr, Adam Wasser-man, Tristan Kraft, Kathy Beekman, Fred Cohn, Susan Albert, and Beth Higgins, for making coming in to work a pleasure, every day.
I am grateful to Viking’s Francesca Belanger, Sharon Gonzalez, and Kyle Davis and to the astute copy editor, John McGhee, for the keen attention they have shown to this project.
The best for last. There are two people who have enhanced my professional life in ways I never imagined possible: my inimitable and irreplaceable agent, Edward Hibbert, and one of New York’s finest—my editor Rick Kot.
Brian Kellow
New York City
April 2011
NOTES
INTRODUCTION:
page ix “too many erotic sequences”: “The World Looks at Films”: Atlas (September 1971).
ix “I certainly did not set out to do a film about incest.... But I began exploring”: The New York Times, March 19, 1989.
ix “not only the prudent, punctilious surface”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (October 23, 1971).
ix “but the volatile and slovenly life underneath”: Ibid.
ix “the only shock is the joke”: Ibid.
x “the Muhammad Ali of film critics”: Author interview with Richard Daniels, January 18, 2010.
x “How many times . . . thirty years”: Pauline Kael, speech at Oregon State University, April 1976.
xi “Definitely her engagement was libidinal”: Author interview with Hal Hinson, July 20, 2009.
xi “I am the most grateful human being in the world”: David Frost interview with Joan Crawford, The David Frost Show, 1970.
CHAPTER ONE
1 “Judith Kael resented her lot”: Author interview with Bret Wallach, September 16, 2009.
1 “who runs her fingers over books as if they were magic objects”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (November 28, 1983).
3 “affection radiated at about two degrees above absolute zero”: Author interview with Bret Wallach, September 16, 2009.
4 “a community of idealists”: Kenneth L. Kann, Joe Rappaport: Life of a Jewish Radical (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 178.
4 “retained a Jewish identity”: Ibid.
4 “bore an unmistakable resemblance to the shtetl”: Ibid.
5 “the one white Jew in Petaluma”: Ibid.
5 “she loved to eat and cook”: Author interview with Stephanie Zacharek, September 4, 2009.
5 “Such wonderful evenings”: Kenneth L. Kann, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 61.
5 “Yiddish books—the classical writers, history, politics”: Ibid.
5 “We were so eager for the movie to go on”: Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book (New York: Bantam, 1971).
5 the “Three Amazons”: Author interview with Dana Salisbury, September 20, 2009.
6 “only in a vague sort of way,”: Author interview with Stephanie Zacharek, September 4, 2009.
6 “Chicken ranching?”:, Kann, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, 65.
6 “a celebration and glorification of materialism”: Kael, I Lost It at the Movies , 79.
6 “not the legendary west”: Ibid., 82.
7 “The summer nights are very long”: Ibid., 88.
7 “My father, who was adulterous”: Ibid., 89.
7 “He put up everything he had as security”: Ibid., 65.
CHAPTER TWO
9 “Pauline had no patience or even any kind of feeling for her mother”: Author interview with Dana Salisbury, September 20, 2009.
9 “these ideas had saved her life”: Ibid.
9 “All of us have probably had the feeling”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (March 13, 1978).
10 “The youngest in a large family has a lot of of advantages”: Mandate (May 1983).
10 “I was quick to understand things”: Ibid.
11 “Pauline looked down with such contempt on my aunt Rose”: Ibid.
12 “one of the best of the social-protest films”: Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 348.
12 “How do you live?”: Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes, screenplay of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932.
12 “The girls we in the audience loved were delivering wisecracks”: Leo Ler-man, “Pauline Kael Talks About Violence, Sex, Eroticism and Women & Men in the Movies”: Mademoiselle (July 1972), 15.
12 “suggested an element of lunacy and confusion in the world”: Ibid., 16.
13 “She was crazy, ga-ga, over my dad,”: Author interview with Janna Ritz, February 5, 2009.
13 “Though she came from the theatre”: Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, 403.
13 “remarkable modernism”: Ibid.
13 “an amazing vernacular actress”: Ibid., 30.
13 “halfway human”: Ibid., 599.
14 “extraordinary sensual presence”: Ibid., 116.
14 “shiny and attractive”: Ibid., 859.
14 “I don’t know of any other scene”: Kael, The New Yorker (November 27, 1971).
15 “the embodiment of the sensational side of ’30s movies”: Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, 466.
15 “hypes it with an intensity”: Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, 170.
15 “a gooey collection of clichés”: Ibid., 173.
15 “slams her way through them in her nerviest style”: Ibid.
15 “that made the picture seem almost folk art”: Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1968), 41.
15 “I think I understand what my father meant”: Ibid., 43.
16 “term-paper pomposity”: Mandate (May 1983).
17 “the English are the inheritors of civilization and style”: Untitled college paper by Pauline Kael, housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
17 “immersed in a sensibility”: Interview (April 1989).
18 “the liveliest of his novels”: Kael, The New Yorker (August 6, 1984).
18 “a more earthly kind of greatness”: Ibid.
18 “the best novel in English about what at the time was called ‘the woman question’”: Ibid.
18 “She would come in and inspect the cream on my arms”: Mandate (May 1983).
18 “Oh, that’s how to do it”: Inte
rview (April 1989).
19 “Renoir isn’t a sociologist”: Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown,1965), 109.
19 “a triumph of clarity and lucidity”: Ibid., 110.
19 “perhaps the most influential of all French films”: Ibid., 111.
19 “There was always a circle of people around Pauline”: People (April 18, 1983).
20 “Sissie Symmes”: Ekbert Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society (Santa Barbara: Black Swallow Press, 1983).
20 “He was attracted to strong-mother-archetype women”: Author interview with Jack Foley, October 9, 2008.
21 “Don’t be foolish—you don’t love me—you will never love me”: Undated note from Pauline Kael to Robert Duncan, housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
21 “For Christ’s sake be analyzed!”: Ibid.
21 “[T]here appears to be nothing between Communist involvement and smug indifference”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 15, 1973).
CHAPTER THREE
24 “When I was first told, in 1921”: R. P. Blackmur, general introduction to The Wings of the Dove (The Laurel Henry James) (Dell: New York, 1958).
25 “a wonderful movie . . . really the most exciting photography”: Letter from Pauline Kael to Violet Rosenberg, February 10, 1941.
25 “the most sustained in quality”: Ibid.
25 “I’m fairly sure that in the long run it would turn out disastrously”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, March 21, 1941.
26 “fairly dull”: Ibid.
26 “awfully vulgar-funny—really quite something”: Ibid.
26 “not too poor”: Ibid.
26 “the most beautiful shot of Frances Dee”: Ibid.
26 “Communication (orally)”: Ibid.
26 “a rather complex essay”: Ibid.
26 “We’ve been working together just about every waking moment”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, May 9, 1941.
26 “It was tremendous fun”: Interview (April 1989).
27 “trouble with Bob is he feels guilty”: Pauline Kael notes, undated.
28 “I haven’t invested a sou in pleasure clothes”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, February 28, 1942.
28 “look at them all over and feel delighted”: Ibid.
28 “a schlock classic”: Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 536.
28 “special, appealingly schlocky romanticism”: Ibid., 122.
29 “patriotic and shiny-faced”: Studs Terkel, The Good War (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 123.
29 “a heavy confusion of young men”: Ibid.
30 “Pleasing news for a change”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, April 15, 1943.
30 “a modern but not moderne chalet”: John Gruen, Menotti: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 50.
30 “One would have to be an imbecile”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, February 18, 1944.
30 “Bob is terribly sweet to me”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, October 19, 1943.
31 “hurried and a little too chic.”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, November 5, 1944.
31 “I am looking forward to a magazine which will stand for the principles”: Letter from Kael to Dwight Macdonald, December 13, 1943.
31 “who have suffered in modern society persecution, excommunication”: Politics (August 1944).
32 “At least I don’t have a fad for your music”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, undated.
32 “He has pride and vanity at a maximum”: Ibid.
32 “I almost feel as if it had become a layer”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, 1945.
32 “masterpiece art”: Film Comment (May–June 1977).
32 “termite art”: Ibid.
32 “feels its way through walls of particularization”: Ibid.
32 “I can’t see any difference between writing about a porno movie”: Ibid.
33 “an excited audience is never depressed”: David Parkinson, ed., The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories (New York: Applause, 1993), xxii.
33 “amuses but he doesn’t excite”: Ibid., xxix.
33 “Movies are such common and lowly stuff”: The New Republic (December 28, 1938).
33 “the only unaffected trouper in the bunch”: The New Republic (September 20, 1939).
34 “It would have a little more stature as a ‘religious’ film”: The Nation (May 13, 1944).
34 “It seems to me that she is quite limited”: The Nation (April 14, 1945).
35 “funnier, more adventurous, more intelligent”: The Nation (February 5, 1944).
35 “Yet the more I think about the film”: Ibid.
35 “Any critic writing for a large publication”: News Workshop (June 1954).
36 “pictures are a great intellectual exercise”: Ibid.
36 “eastern college people”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, November 26, 1945.
36 “they’ll work for almost anything”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FOUR
37 “I don’t think properly on the typewriter”: Letter from Pauline Kael to Violet Rosenberg, undated.
38 “He offered me three gifts”: James Broughton, Coming Unbuttoned (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993), 3–4.
38 “He looked like he was the concept that Marlowe was working on in Doctor Faustus”: Author interview with Ariel Parkinson, November 29, 2009.
39 “adored babies but disliked children”: James Broughton, Coming Unbuttoned (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993), 1.
39 “She deplored little magazines”: Broughton, 68.
39 “She was not sympathetic to avant-garde enterprise”: Author interview with Ernest Callenbach, September 9, 2008.
39 “She liked the word ‘precious’”: Author interview with Bruce Baillie, November 5, 2010.
40 “He ‘threw her out’”: Author interview with Joel Singer May 29, 2008.
40 “Pauline is Pauline”: Author interview with Dana Salisbury, September 2009.
40 “what sounded like such a solid thing”: Letter from Robert Horan to Pauline Kael, undated.
40 “excepting the fact”: Letter from Horan to Kael, July 25, 1949.
40 “When it happens to you”: Author interview with Meredith Brody, February 28, 2011.
41 “The pictures of Gina are a delight”: Letter from Horan to Kael, July 25, 1949.
41 “I’m Gina!” “I’m a baby!”: Gina James’s baby book, May–June 1950, housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
41 “a farce for people who read and write”: Orpheus in Sausalito, play by Pauline Kael, housed at Lilly Library.
41 “The world doesn’t find you”: Ibid.
42 “There is not an unintelligent line in The [sic] Shadow of a Man”: The Santa Barbara Star, November 2, 1950.
42 “brash, confident, pugnacious”: Original screen story by Pauline Kael, The Brash Young Man, housed at the Lilly Library.
42 “He became modest and shy”: Ibid.
42 “Mr. Benjamin Burl’s infatuation”: Ibid.
43 “no”: Ibid.
43 “about the substance and quality of a slick-paper magazine story”: Columbia Pictures reader report on The Brash Young Man, housed at the Lilly Library.
43 “its first best chance would be with the magazines”: Ibid.
44 “I was never hungry in my life”: Author interview with Warner Friedman, May 12, 2009.
44 “You never were?”: Ibid.
45 “When Shoeshine opened in 1947”: Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown,1965), 114.
46 “somewhat segmented art-film audience”: City Lights, winter 1953.
46 “When the mass audience becomes convinced”: Ibid.
46 “The Chaplin of Limelight is no irreverent little clown”: Ibid.
46 “surely the richest hunk of self-gratification”: Ibid.
46 “My dear, you are a true artist”: Ibid.
46 �
��The camera emphasis on Chaplin’s eyes”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FIVE
48 “The new wide screen surrounds us”: Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1965), 323–24.
48 “When Senator McCarthy identifies himself”: Ibid., 328.
49 “the type of thing I have been trying to get hold of for a long time”: Letter from Penelope Houston to Pauline Kael, July 23, 1954.
50 “What keeps you going?”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (July 4, 2005).
51 “She was the closest thing to somebody who had my kind of vision about movies”: Author interview with Edward Landberg, May 24, 2008.
51 “I hadn’t written notes”: Ibid.
52 “There was a little resistance to the notion”: Author interview with Stephen Kresge, June 15, 2008.
52 “one of the first imaginative approaches to the musical as a film form”: Pauline Kael, Berkeley Cinema Guild notes for Sous les toits de Paris.
52 “not really so ‘great’ as its devotees claim”: Kael, Berkeley Cinema Guild notes for Red River.
52 “My parents hardly ever went to the movies”: Author interview with Carol van Strum, February 11, 2010.
53 “They were doing it”: Ibid.
53 “Landberg was very remote”: Author interview with Ariel Parkinson, November 29, 2009.
54 “We were married for something like a year”: Author interview with Edward Landberg, May 24, 2008.
54 “Pauline and Ed Landberg came for dinner one night”: Author interview with Ariel Parkinson, November 29, 2009.
54 “I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman”: Author interview with Edward Landberg, May 24, 2008.
55 “Like a public building designed to satisfy the widest public’s concept of grandeur”: “Movies, the Desperate Art,” Daniel Talbot, ed., Film: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 52.
55 “about as magical as a Fitzpatrick travelogue”: Ibid.
55 “protagonists in any meaningful sense”: Ibid., 65.
56 “been quick to object to a film with a difficult theme”: Ibid., 57.