Pauline Kael
Page 52
56 “She was one of the most ethical people I ever knew”: Author interview with David Young Allen, September 9, 2009.
57 “Cinema Studio and Guild!”: Remarks by Gina James, memorial tribute to Pauline Kael, November 30, 2001.
57 “Her mind was always moving five times faster”: Author interview with Donald Gutierrez, July 21, 2009.
57 “She had a motherly side”: Author interview with Ernest Callenbach, September 9, 2008.
58 “She started damning his poems”: Author interview with Donald Gutierrez, July 21, 2009.
59 “Her attention to Gina would go on and off like a searchlight”: Author interview with Stephen Kresge, June 15, 2008.
60 “Does a poet edit his own poetry?”: Ibid.
60 “She was overwhelmed in his presence”: Ibid.
60 “She got Gina and me out of the house”: Author interview with David Young Allen, September 9, 2009.
CHAPTER SIX
61 “She was kind of a champion of mine”: Author interview with Alan Rich, February 21, 2009.
61 “I remember running into Pauline on Telegraph Avenue”: Ibid.
63 “I would like to suggest that the educated audience”: Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1965), 31.
63 “large generalizations in order to be suggestive”: Ibid., 31.
63 “incense burning”: Ibid., 32.
63 “audiences of social workers”: Ibid., 34.
63 “It is a depressing fact”: Ibid., 41.
64 “The codes of civilized living ”: Ibid., 129–130.
64 “a study of the human condition at the higher social and economic levels”: Ibid., 148.
65 “cinematic masterpiece”: Ibid., 142.
65 “The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production”: Ibid., 143, 146.
65 “overwrought, tasteless, and offensive”: Ibid., 150.
65 “irresistible evocation of the mood of Mark Twain”: Ibid., 150.
66 “The injustice of it is almost perfect”: John Osborne and Nigel Kneale, screenplay of Look Back in Anger, 1959.
66 “a conventional weakling”: Kael, I Lost It at the Movies, 68.
66 “about the failures of men and women”: Ibid., 69.
67 “Aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for these girls”: Ibid., 176.
67 “very expansive guy”: Author interview with Bob Greensfelder, October 3, 2008.
67 “sleepy and bored”: Pauline Kael, KPFA broadcast, November 22, 1961.
68 “the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns”: Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 629.
69 “interviews with Quakers and Unitarians”: Pauline Kael, KPFA broadcast, December 8, 1962.
69 “Do you really want to be endlessly confirmed”: Ibid.
69 “And you I suppose”: Ibid.
69 “a million words delivered without remuneration is a rather major folly”: Kael, KPFA broadcast, March 27, 1963.
69 “if KPFA is not a station”: Ibid.
70 “although some of her charges made that an attractive possibility”: Letter from Trevor Thomas to KPFA subscribers, April 17, 1963.
70 “Despite your implacable harassment of me in print”: Letter from Dwight Macdonald to Pauline Kael, November 27, 1963.
70 “one of the best I’ve read”: Ibid.
70 “the most urgent task for American film criticism . . . a rationale for . . . Critical practice”: Letter from Dwight Macdonald to John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, November 27, 1963.
70 “cinema has become”: Ibid.
70 “Miss Kael has little income independent from what she earns by her pen”: Ibid.
71 “She had a style that appealed to a lot of people:”: Author interview with John Simon, March 6, 2008.
71 “Her main trouble was, of course”: Ibid.
71 “She felt that it would make me more important than I am”: Ibid.
71 “marvelous ambiguity and split in the content”: Pauline Kael, panel discussion at Donnell Library, September 1963.
71 “enjoying Hud’s anarchism”: Ibid.
71 “That’s sociology”: Ibid.
71 “I am worried about Pauline Kael’s position”: Ibid.
72 “to assuage their own boredom”: Ibid.
72 “I’ve never been bored, John”: Ibid.
72 “wants to be a great film—it cries out its intentions”: Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies, 192.
72 “surprisingly like the confectionary dreams”: Ibid., 263.
72 “And isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity?”: Ibid., 184.
72 “For whom does love last?”: Ibid.
73 “Pauline had her blind spots”: Author interview with Colin Young, June 12, 2009.
CHAPTER SEVEN
75 “The strong director imposes his own personality”: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: E. P. Dutton), 31.
75 “Ultimately, the auteur theory”: Ibid., 30.
76 “If I had not been aware of Walsh”: Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 665.
76 “Would Sarris not notice the repetition”: Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1965), 294.
76 “The greatness of critics like Bazin in France”: Ibid., 295.
76 “technical competence”: Ibid.
76 “The greatness of a director like Cocteau”: Ibid., 296.
76 “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value”: Ibid.
76 “The smell of a skunk”: Ibid., 297.
77 “because Hitchcock repeats”: Ibid.
77 “not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology”: Ibid., 298.
77 “interior meaning”: Ibid., 302.
77 “extrapolated from the tension”: Ibid., 302.
77 “the opposite of what we have always taken for granted in the arts”: Ibid.
77 “Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-term contract”: Ibid.
77 “I suspect that the ‘stylistic consistency’”: Ibid., 306.
78 “What’s the matter?”: Author interview with Andrew Sarris, February 17, 2009.
78 “She was always on the boil”: Ibid.
78 “I wasn’t as worldly and aggressive”: Ibid.
78 “Pauline acted as if I were a great menace of American criticism”: Ibid.
78 “attack on the theory received more publicity”: Sarris, The American Cinema, 26.
CHAPTER EIGHT
80 “Growing numbers of middle-class consumers”: Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 16.
80 “The rock ’n’ roll generation”: Ibid., 6.
81 “The Associated Press picked up the editorial”: Author interview with Judith Crist, July 17, 2008.
82 “The Group is the book that Mary McCarthy’s admirers have been waiting for”: Pauline Kael, unpublished review of The Group, September 1963.
83 “rather fruitless to care so much about how fairly”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Pauline Kael, September 14, 1963.
83 “the general recommendations which are truly not too radical”: Letter from Peter Davison to Pauline Kael, July 16, 1964.
83 “some of the very best pieces were marred by being too long”: Ibid.
84 “It’s all right, I want to say”: Eudora Welty, “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?,” Critical Inquiry (September 1974), 220.
84 “were restless and talkative”: Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1965), 15.
84 “accepts lack of clarity”: Ibid.
85 “boob who attacks ambiguity and complexity”: Ibid.
85 “more and more people”: Ibid.
85 “There are very few American film critics”: Library Journa
l, undated review.
85 “the artistry, literacy, fine style and clearheaded reasoning”: Publishers Weekly, undated review.
85 “Never dull, blazingly personal, provokingly penetrating”: Kirkus Reviews, undated review.
85 “I am not certain just what Miss Kael thinks she lost at the movies”: The New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1965.
86 “the surest instinct”: Ibid.
86 “That she is able to analyze”: Ibid.
86 “always gratifying when a friend”: Letter from James Broughton to Pauline Kael, April 2, 1965.
86 “My good wishes to you and Gina”: Ibid.
86 “Billy dear”: Various correspondence from Pauline Kael to William Abrahams.
86 “I don’t really want to do it”: Letter from Pauline Kael to Robert Mills, February 9, 1965.
87 “I think there was a moment”: Author interview with David Young Allen, September 2, 2009.
87 “I know you love California”: Author interview with Dan Talbot, October 7, 2008.
87 “the cover seems to illustrate the title”: Letter from Robert Mills to Marcia Nasatir, November 8, 1965.
87 “In the evenings, especially, Bob and Pauline drank and talked”: Author interview with Tresa Hughes, September 20, 2009.
88 “People shouldn’t marry you”: Play by Pauline Kael, Wearing the Quick Away, housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.
88 “how my thumbnails got worn down”: “It’s Only a Movie”: speech by Pauline Kael given at Dartmouth College, October 1965.
89 “goes against the grain”: Ibid.
89 “a world more exciting”: Ibid.
89 “something we wanted”: Ibid.
89 “Surely only social deviates”: Ibid.
89 “large-scale campaigns designed to cut him down”: Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1968), 191.
89 “His greatness is in a range that is too disturbing”: Ibid., 195.
89 “still the most exciting American actor on the screen”: Ibid.
90 “The only thing she was really lacking”: Author interview with Sidney Lumet, February 13, 2009.
90 “rather brusque and strict”: Author interview with Shirley Knight, February 21, 2009.
90 “I remember doing so many takes”: Author interview with Jessica Walter, March 30. 2009.
90 “He’ll do a bunch of takes”: Author interview with Shirley Knight, February 21, 2009.
91 “We had a good dinner and a lot to drink”: Author interview with Sidney Lumet, February 13, 2009.
91 “My job”: Ibid.
91 “I thought, this is a very dangerous person”: Ibid.
91 “changed the way their readers viewed the world”: Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight (New York: Crown, 2005), 7.
92 “What really offended me”: Author interview with Sidney Lumet, February 13, 2009.
92 “he would not try to reshape the scenario”: Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 71.
92 “I had heard it was going to be butchery”: Author interview with Sidney Lumet, February 13, 2009.
CHAPTER NINE
93 “Appreciation courses have paralyzed reactions”: Pauline Kael, McCall’s (February 1966).
93 “rather like watching an old movie”: Pauline Kael, McCall’s (March 1966), 24.
94 “stately, respectable and dead”: Pauline Kael, McCall’s (April 1966), 36.
94 “watching a giant task of stone masonry”: Ibid.
94 “that will probably have to bankrupt several studios before a halt is called”: Ibid.
95 “the single most repressive”: Pauline Kael, McCall’s (May 1966).
95 “You begin to feel”: Ibid.
95 “The reviews became less and less appropriate”: Newsweek (May 30, 1966).
95 “What would you like us to do with all this money?”: Letter from Robert Mills to Pauline Kael, June 7, 1966.
96 “ploddingly intelligent and controlled”: Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1968), 132.
96 “I could hardly get a word in edgewise”: Author interview with Joseph Morgenstern, May 8, 2009.
97 “a modernized version of an earlier, romantic primitivist notion”: Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 20.
97 “so appealing to college students”: Ibid., 22.
97 “And if it be said that this is sociology”: Ibid.
97 “could find good use for another one or two hundred dollars a check”: Letter from Robert Mills to Robert Evett, December 12, 1966.
97 “Judy Crist!”: Author interview with Judith Crist, June 10, 2008.
98 “Your agent was right”: Ibid.
98 “She wanted to explain to me”: Ibid.
98 “the fervor and astonishing speed”: Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 32.
99 “the casting superb and the performance beautiful”: Ibid., 200.
99 “the best of Griffith, John Ford”: Ibid.
99 “And Welles—the one great creative force in American films in our time”: Ibid.
99 “movies made by a generation bred on movies”: Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 115.
101 “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick”: The New York Times, August 7, 1967.
101 “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (October 21, 1967).
102 “they were able to use the knowledge”: Ibid.
102 “Bonnie and Clyde keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance”: Ibid.
102 “Audiences at Bonnie and Clyde are not given a simple, secure basis for identification”: Ibid.
102 “The trouble with the violence in most films”: The New York Times, September 17, 1967.
102 “the whole point of Bonnie and Clyde is to rub our noses in it”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 21, 1967).
103 “Bonnie and Clyde as a danger to public morality”: Ibid.
103 “it has put the sting back into death”: Ibid.
CHAPTER TEN
105 “You cannot keep The New Yorker out of the hands”: Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), 59.
106 “William Shawn respected, admired, and enjoyed the movie reviews of John McCarten and Brendan Gill”: Author interview with Lillian Ross, August 1, 2009.
107 “It was totally fictitious”: Author interview with John Simon, March 6, 2008.
107 “The only thing she wanted me to do”: Ibid.
107 “I think a certain Anglophilia crept into it very early on”: Marc Smirnoff, The Oxford American (Spring 1992), reprinted in Conversations with Pauline Kael, Will Brantley, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 157.
108 “Mr. Shawn was always polite and courteous”: Author interview with Jane Beirn, February 20, 2009.
109 “seemed to seek combat”: Author interview with Lillian Ross, August 1, 2009.
109 “The New Yorker has a long-standing tradition of squalor”: Ved Mehta, Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1998), 111.
109 “The emotional shorthand of television”: Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker (March 16, 1968).
110 “presence is so strong ”: Kael, The New Yorker (March 30, 1968).
110 “this fag phantom of the opera”: Ibid.
111 “Does playing a homosexual paralyze him as an actor?”: Kael, The New Yorker (January 18, 1969).
111 “There is something ludicrous and at the same time poignant”: Ibid.
112 “a volatile mixture of fictional narrative”: Kael, The New Yorker (April 6, 1968).
112 “less a document of Maoist thought”: Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 306.
112 “We all know that an artist can’t discover anything for himself ”: Kael, The New Yorker (April 6, 1968).
112 “f
unny, and they’re funny in a new way”: Ibid.
112 “probably never have a popular, international success”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 5, 1968).
113 “a great original work”: Ibid.
113 “perhaps the briefest statement”: Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1968), introduction.
113 “Katharine Hepburn is probably the greatest actress of the sound era”: Ibid., 353.
114 “she-Shaw of the movies”: Newsweek (May 20, 1968).
114 “blessedly brilliant”: Ibid.
114 “If Miss Kael has a particular bent as a film critic”: The New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1968.
114 “going great guns at the moment”: Letter from William Abrahams to Robert Mills, June 6, 1968.
115 “the best film critic since Agee”: Letter from Louise Brooks to Pauline Kael, May 26, 1962.
115 “You could have knocked me over with Audrey Hepburn”: Letter to Pauline Kael from Louise Brooks, September 13, 1968.
115 “Going through the index ”: Ibid.
115 “Your picture on the dust cover ”: Ibid.
115 “In life . . . fantastically gifted people”: Kael, The New Yorker (September 28, 1968).
115 “It has been commonly said . . . that the musical Funny Girl”: Ibid.
115 “Most Broadway musicals are dead”: Ibid.
116 “She is not quite up to the task”: The New York Morning Telegraph, September 20, 1968.
116 “The one thing you cannot fault her with is that she is unique”: Ibid.
116 “She simply drips as unself-consciously”: Kael, The New Yorker (September 28, 1968).
117 “Glamour is what Julie Andrews doesn’t have”: Kael, The New Yorker (October 26, 1968).
117 “merely coarsen[ed] her shining nice-girl image”: Ibid.
117 “When an actress has been a star for a long time”: Kael, The New Yorker (November 9, 1968).
118 “She hated that kind of thing”: Author interview with Jane Kramer, February 24, 2009.
118 “there was a always a fair amount of drama in getting the copy out of Penelope Gilliatt”: Author interview with Jane Beirn, February 20, 2009.
119 “Gina was a lovely girl”: Author interview with Tresa Hughes, September 20, 2009.
119 “I think she had more of a sense of fellowship and community on the West Coast”: Ibid.