I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  If a film deals with boys rejecting society and ignores what they reject, it’s easy to pretend there are no grounds for rejection — they’re just mixed-up. In denying that there are reasons for not wanting to adjust, the films are left to wrestle clinically, rather than dramatically, with the boys’ anger, dealing with the boys at face value, just as the newspapers do. The strongest film element is always the truculent boy, whose mixture of shyness, fear and conceit has a peculiarly physical assertiveness: there’s bravado in his display of energy. That energy — which adjusted, genteel types subdue or have had drained away or never had — is itself an assault upon the society that has no use for it. He can be invited to work it off only in games, or in leathercraft in some youth center.

  The delinquent is disturbing because he is delinquent from values none of us really believe in; he acts out his indifference to what we are all somewhat indifferent to. And in acting it out, he shocks us by making us realize that necessary values are endangered. When he is moody and uncooperative and suspicious of the adult, official world we understand something of what he is reacting against and we think we perceive values that he must be struggling for. But when he attacks the weak, when he destroys promiscuously, when, as in Mad at the World, he wantonly throws a whisky bottle and kills a baby, we become possible targets and victims of a moral indifference that we both share and do not share.

  In the gangster films we knew where we were: if we identified with the small businessmen trying to protect their livelihoods and their pride against extortion, the gangster was an enemy; and if the gangster rubbed out a rival or, when cornered, shot a policeman, these were occupational hazards for gangsters and police, and they were rational. But in the delinquent films we who feel ourselves to be innocent, and even sympathetic, become as vulnerable as a cop. Just as Negro hatred of whites includes even the whites who believe in equality, so the delinquent’s violence may strike any one of us. The hold-up victim who offers no resistance is as likely to be beaten as the one who resists, and despised for his cowardice as well.

  Confused feelings of identification and fear turn us into the mixed-up audience. There’s been plenty of violence in Hollywood films for many years, but it did not stir up the violent audience reactions produced by On the Waterfront and Blackboard Jungle (many theaters have had, for the first time, to call in police to keep order). In these films the violence means something, it’s not just there to relieve the boredom of the plot as in The Prodigal, and pressure groups are right in seeing it as a threat. This violence is discharged from boredom with American life, and we have no available patterns into which it fits, no solutions for the questions it raises, and, as yet, no social or political formulations that use indifference toward prosperity and success as a starting point for new commitments.

  Though films take up social discontent only to dissolve it in unconvincing optimism, the discontent has grown out of that optimism. A Polynesian coming to an industrial country for the first time might see a technological civilization as a state of nature; Americans who have lost the passion for social involvement see the United States almost the same way (we have lost even the passion for technology). Our economic system, our social order, are accepted, not with respect, but as facts, accepted almost at the same level on which “regular” films are accepted — a convictionless acceptance which is only a hair’s breadth away from violent negation. When language is debased to the level of the pitch man, why not use animal grunts? They’re more honest, and they say more. Why respect authority which is weak, uncertain, and corrupt? Why care about social relations when they have reached such interpersonal virtuosity that no one shows off or presses an opinion too hard? Why care about acquiring the millionaire’s equipment of the middle-class home; does anyone really enjoy a power-driven lawn mower? Everything in America makes life easier, and if Americans are not really happy, they’re not really unhappy either. If they feel some pangs of dissatisfaction, what can they blame it on? Only themselves — guiltily — and so the IBM operator who begins to fantasize, the file clerk who can’t fight off sleep, hie themselves to the analyst. What a relief to go to the movies and hear mixed-up kids say it out loud. They don’t always say it in attractive ways, but it is a no and somebody has to say it. It’s explosively present.

  Though the expressions of the mixed-up kids are antisocial, in a society which insists that all is well, these expressions are interpreted as a psychological disorder. It’s a social lie to pretend that these kids are only in conflict with themselves or that they merely need love or understanding. Instinctively, the audience knows better. Pressures can emasculate the theme and remove it from the screen: this exploitation and destruction of every theme is the history of American movies. Marlon Brando can be cleaned up and straightened out for the approval of the family magazines, just as he is in his movie roles; he can become a model of affirmation, impersonating baseball players or band leaders in “regular” pictures. But won’t his fans want to kill his pigeons?

  [1955]

  Commitment and the Straitjacket

  Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Sons and Lovers, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . . .

  The new look in English films is reality: the streets, the factories and towns, houses and backyards of grim, modern, industrialized England. The young English authors and directors are striking at social problems of every type; but the backgrounds, the environment, show us a larger theme: the ugliness, the fatalism, the regimentation of daily life. In Hollywood, in the thirties, Warner Brothers produced the socially conscious gangster and depression melodramas that starred Paul Muni, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson. Viewed today, most of those films don’t look like much. But they were an angry reaction to the frustrations, poverty, and injustices of the thirties, and they had tremendous impact at the time. That English moviemaking should now become just about the most socially conscious in the world is amazing when you consider that, as the critic-director Tony Richardson put it, “It is a frightening and disturbing comment on British democracy that certain institutions — the monarchy, the army, the church, the public school, the prisons, the police — are guarded from any candid presentation with as hard and tough an iron curtain as the Russian bloc has ever imposed.” How can you produce social criticism when you can’t criticize the official organs of power? You look at the way people live.

  The new English movement got its impetus and much of its style from the documentaries made under the group title “Free Cinema.” In the mid-fifties, these short explorations of the modern cities, with their jazz clubs, night life, seaside resorts, factories, and markets were the first films shot by a group of young critics — Richardson, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson.

  But unlike the French New Wave group of critics who became both directors and scenarists, when the English critics began to make features, they did not prepare their own scenarios. They joined with some of the new English literary figures — John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, Wolf Mankowitz, and others. Their features are not so cheap as the French ones — nor so individual in style and subject matter. They share the documentary look of the Free Cinema shorts; in fact, the five big films are all the work of two cameramen — Freddie Francis photographed Room at the Top, the first feature by Jack Clayton, Sons and Lovers by Jack Cardiff, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the first feature by Karel Reisz; Oswald Morris did Look Back in Anger, the first feature by Tony Richardson, and his second, The Entertainer.

  The semidocumentary surface of these films is linked to an ideology which is in its way peculiar to English film critics — the ideology of commitment. If you read Sight and Sound, in which so many films are appraised for the degree of the director’s commitment to a social point of view (good if left wing, bad if not), you will discover that in this ideology, location shooting, particularly around working-class locations, is, in itself, almost a proof of commitment. In judging works from other countries, the English will overestimate a film like Marty, and the
y’ll suggest that a film that is stylized or that deals with upper-class characters is somehow “evasive” — that it doesn’t want to come to terms with the material. This attitude gives the critics an extraordinarily high moral tone. They are always pecking away at failures of conviction or commending a show of conviction. A few issues back, the editor, Penelope Houston, praised some new actors in these terms: “This kind of purposeful acting is something encouragingly new on the British screen; and the cinema cannot be allowed to imagine it can continue to do without it.” Doesn’t that sound a bit like a high-minded social worker addressing her charges? As a result of this rigid and restrictive critical vocabulary, Sight and Sound, still the finest magazine in the film world, is becoming monotonous. The critics are too predictable — and this is a danger for the new movement in English films as well.

  Look what happens to these critics when they confront a picture like I’m All Right, Jack — a cynical slapstick farce about the Welfare State. Wherever the innocent hero turns, he sees corruption, and when he tries to expose it, he is considered insane. The big businessmen are the villains in the plot, and they indulge in all kinds of familiar skullduggery, but the film also shows the trade unionists as smug and self-centered. And though the satire of union practices is much more affectionate, it is so accurately aimed — and we are so unused to it — that it comes off much the better. As the shop steward, Peter Sellers is avid to protect the workers’ rights — he’s earnest, he’s monstrously self-serious. He wears a little Hitler mustache — that mustache was always an oddly lower-middle-class adornment on Hitler; this shop steward is lower middle class in his habits, but he’s a fanatical proletarian in theory. He speaks in a self-educated jargon that derives from political pamphlets. The movie satirizes this little stuffed shirt and the featherbedding practices of his union.

  Now, we may assume that the English workers know what their unions are, but the committed critics still regard them as both underdogs and sacred cows. The reviewer for Films and Filming said, “Something rather frightening has happened to the Boulting Brothers. They have turned sour. I’m All Right, Jack is the latest in their run of social comedies. I hope it is the last. . . .” Earlier satires by the Boultings, the critic went on, were innocent fun, but this was “malicious, and worse, depressingly cynical.”

  In its guide to filmgoers, Sight and Sound dismissed I’m All Right, Jack as “more jaundiced than stimulating,” and Penelope Houston wrote, “. . . this is a picture made from no standpoint, other than from the shoulder-shrugging confidence that ‘everything is fair game.’ It looks like the work of sour liberals, men who have retired from the contest and are spending their time throwing stones at the players.” Doesn’t that make you wonder what the “contest” is that moviemakers are supposed to be involved in? The only possible interpretation is that it’s all right to see human folly on the right, but that it’s not fair game if you find it on the left. It’s a little like the old argument that you shouldn’t point out anything wrong with the Soviet Union, or you were giving aid to the reactionaries. How long does it take for liberal film journals to catch up with what, as Stanley Kauffmann pointed out, Shaw indicated long ago, that trade unionism would be the capitalism of the working class? Miss Houston goes on to say of the Boultings, “. . . they are not social satirists because they too overtly revel in the dislocations that give them something to laugh at. One would hate to share all their laughter.” Isn’t that a preposterously prissy approach to satire — as if to say that if you really laugh at the social scene, there must be something the matter with you. The critic’s jargon isn’t far removed from the shop steward’s.

  There are other recent lightweight English films that deal with the contemporary scene that are worth a look. Expresso Bongo, a satire on entertainment crazes, specifically rock-’n-roll, is the best British musical comedy since the days of Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale, and Jack Buchanan. The script is by Wolf Mankowitz, who has an ear for the poetry of unlikely places. You may have heard his fine dialogue in the short film, The Bespoke Overcoat; in Expresso Bongo, he stylizes theatrical sentimentality and vulgarity. The talent-agent hero — a liar and pretender who is more likable and humane than many honest heroes — is the closest relative in these films to Archie Rice, The Entertainer.

  Sapphire is a thriller about a light-skinned Negro girl found dead on Hampstead Heath. The manhunt involves going into the Negro sections of London, and going also into the psychological areas of the antagonism of Negroes and whites. Although the movie has its self-conscious preachments, it goes much farther in some ways than American movies. There is an amusingly haughty barrister with a little beard — a Negro bishop’s son, played by Gordon Heath. When asked if he had intended to marry Sapphire, he explains that he couldn’t possibly — “She was part white.”

  You may note that the movie itself falls into a prejudicial racial cliché: nobody wastes any tears over high-yellow Sapphire — she was trying to pass, and so, presumably, she earned her fate as a corpse. But her dark brother is a physician in the Midlands. He’s not ashamed of his skin; he wears a philosophic smile, and he’s intelligent, understanding, and “dignified” — the type of Negro who’s always praised for bringing credit to his people. He’s a bore, but we see a lot of him, probably to offset some of the location shots of Negro streets and the view we get of jazz dives. Most of the Negroes I know aren’t happy about looking Negro, but on the screen it’s certainly a blessing that Negro parts must almost always be played by Negroes. In the movies, the unfortunate fact that Anne Frank was Jewish, and hence, not acceptable as the heroine of an expensive production, was rectified by casting Millie Perkins in the role. Soon, Jeffrey Hunter, like H. B. Warner before him, will make Jesus Christ more socially acceptable. (You may have observed that, although Christ is always played by a Gentile, a Jew is frequently cast as Judas.)

  Another thriller, Tiger Bay, has good performances by Hayley Mills and Horst Bucholtz, and excellent use of locale — the dockland of Cardiff in Wales. Here, too, there is a large concentration of Negroes in the overcrowded tenements. Until this last year, British pictures scarcely gave any evidence that there were Negroes on the island.

  Room at the Top is the good old story of the bright, ambitious boy from the provinces who wants to make good in the big city. Stendhal set it in the post-Napoleonic period in The Red and the Black; Theodore Dreiser set it in the beginnings of industrialization in An American Tragedy. In Room at the Top, the boy comes from the modern industrial slums of Yorkshire; he has acquired a cynical education in a German prison camp; and he has become a civil servant. Like Julien Sorel and Clyde Griffiths, Joe Lampton is on the make; unlike them, he doesn’t get killed for his sexual transgressions, though he does get beaten up in a manner which suggests a ritual punishment. Room at the Top, like its predecessors, is about class, money and power — and about how sex, which is used to get them, traps the user. The theme of the opportunistic social climber is a good, solid theme; the surprise of Room at the Top is the English setting. We wouldn’t be surprised by a costume picture which had, in a bit part, a comic parvenu whom the elegant nobleman could put down. But an aggressive, unfunny young parvenu, a slum-bred man who wants to break through the class structure and get into the Establishment — that’s new. In this country, it would be a rags-to-riches story, the birth of a tycoon — but in English films it’s the sort of thing that just isn’t done.

  The movie tells a story, and it’s absorbing, and, for the most part, convincing in a way that few recent American films have been. In this country, it helped bring adults back into the movie houses. This was partly because of the superb love scenes, and partly, no doubt, because of the unusually blunt dialogue. “Frank,” or “gamy” are, I think, the words the advertisers prefer. The movie has the look, and occasionally the sound, of four-letter words.

  Look Back in Anger doesn’t need four-letter words: the hero’s polysyllabic discourse is infinitely more abusive and shocking. British understate
ment is gone; the case is marvelously overstated. I’m afraid it’s almost at the level of confession that I must state that although Look Back in Anger is obviously a mess in any number of ways, I think this mess — and The Entertainer, also a mess — are the most exciting films to have come out of England in this period.

  During the years when I was programming for the Berkeley Cinema Guild, I developed some pride in being able to get people to come to see a picture I thought ought to be seen. But I couldn’t convince any great number of people to look at Look Back in Anger. I wrote that it was like a blazing elaboration of that one stunning interchange in The Wild One when Brando is asked, “What are you rebelling against?” and he replies, “What have you got?” But the audiences that packed the theater for The Wild One didn’t show up for the intellectual wild one.