by Pauline Kael
The codes of civilized living presuppose that people have an inner life and outer aims, but this new race lives for the moment, because that is all that they care about. And the standards of judgment we might bring to bear on them don’t touch them and don’t interest them. They have the narcissism of youth, and we are out of it, we are bores. These are the youthful representatives of mass society. They seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form that mass society takes: indifference to human values.
Godard has used this, as it were, documentary background for a gangster story. In the traditional American gangster films, we would have been cued for the gangster’s fall: he would have shown the one vanity or sentimental weakness or misjudgment that would prove fatal. But Breathless has removed the movie gangster from his melodramatic trappings of gangs and power: this gangster is Bogart apotheosized and he is romantic in a modern sense just because he doesn’t care about anything but the pleasures of love and fast cars. There is not even the American gangster’s hatred of cops and squealers. Michel likes cops because they’re cops. This gangster is post-L’Etranger and he isn’t interested in motives: it’s all simple to him, “Killers kill, squealers squeal.” Nobody cares if Michel lives or dies, and he doesn’t worry about it much either.
Yet Godard has too much affection for Michel to make him a squealer: a killer yes, a squealer no. Despite the unrest and anarchy in the moral atmosphere, Michel is as romantic as Pépé Le Moko and as true to love (and his death scene is just as operatic and satisfying). A murderer and a girl with artistic pretensions. She asks him what he thinks of a reproduction she is trying on the wall, and he answers, “Not bad.” This doesn’t show that he’s sufficiently impressed and she reprimands him with, “Renoir was a very great painter.” In disgust he replies, “I said ‘Not bad.’ ” There’s no doubt which of them responds more. He’s honest and likable, though socially classifiable as a psychopath; she’s a psychopath, too, but the non-classifiable sort — socially acceptable but a sad, sweet, affectless doll.
There are more ironies than can be sorted out in Patricia-Jean Seberg from Iowa, selected by Otto Preminger from among thousands of American girls to play the French national heroine, Joan of Arc, and now the national heroine of France — as the representative American girl abroad. Patricia, a naive, assured, bland and boyish creature, is like a new Daisy Miller — but not quite as envisioned by Henry James. She has the independence, but not the moral qualms or the Puritan conscience or the high aspirations that James saw as the special qualities of the American girl. She is, indeed, the heiress of the ages — but in a more sinister sense than James imagined: she is so free that she has no sense of responsibility or guilt. She seems to be playing at existence, at a career, at “love”; she’s “trying them on.” But that’s all she’s capable of in the way of experience. She doesn’t want to be bothered; when her lover becomes an inconvenience, she turns him in to the police.
Shot down and dying, the young man gallantly tries to amuse her, and then looks up at her and remarks — without judgment or reproach, but rather, descriptively, as a grudging compliment: “You really are a bitch.” (The actual word he uses is considerably stronger.) And in her flat, little-girl, cornbelt voice, she says, “I don’t know what the word means.” If she does know, she doesn’t care to see how it applies to her. More likely, she really doesn’t know, and it wouldn’t bother her much anyway. The codes of love and loyalty, in which, if you betray a lover you’re a bitch, depend on stronger emotions than her idle attachment to this lover — one among many. They depend on emotions, and she is innocent of them. As she had observed earlier, “When we look into each other’s eyes, we get nowhere.” An updated version of the betraying blonde bitches who destroyed so many movie gangsters, she is innocent even of guilt. As Jean Seberg plays her — and that’s exquisitely — Patricia is the most terrifyingly simple muse-goddess-bitch of modern movies. Next to her, the scheming Stanwyck of Double Indemnity is as archaic as Theda Bara in A Fool There Was.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the hood, is probably the most exciting new presence on the screen since the appearance of Brando; nobody holds the screen this way without enormous reserves of talent. At twenty-six, he has already appeared in nine plays and nine movies; he may be, as Peter Brook says, the best young actor in Europe today. In minor parts, the Alfred Hitchcock personal-appearance bit is compounded, and Truffaut (The 400 Blows), Chabrol (Le Beau Serge, The Cousins), and Godard himself flit through. Truffaut supplied the news item on which Godard based the script; Chabrol lent his name as supervising producer. But it is Godard’s picture, and he has pointed out how he works: “The cinema is not a trade. It isn’t teamwork. One is always alone while shooting, as though facing a blank page.” His movie is dedicated to Monogram Pictures who were, of course, the producers of cheap American gangster-chase movies, generally shot in city locations. (Breathless was made for $90,000.) Another important director appears in the film — Jean-Pierre Melville — who a few years ago performed one of the most amazing feats on film: he entered into Jean Cocteau’s universe and directed, with almost no funds, the brilliant film version of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, sometimes known as The Strange Ones. He is regarded as a sort of spiritual father to the New Wave; he appears in the movie as a celebrity being interviewed. (The true celebrity and progenitor of the movement is, of course, Cocteau.) Asked by Patricia, “What is your ambition?” the celebrity teases her with a pseudo-profundity: “To become immortal, and then to die.”
The Cousins
The Cousins was so badly received in this country that my liking it may seem merely perverse, so let me take it up in some detail. Perhaps the best introduction to this skillful, complex film is through the American critics who kept people from seeing it. The ineffable Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times that it “has about the most dismal and defeatist solution for the problem it presents — the problem of youthful disillusion — of any picture we have ever seen. . . . M. Chabrol is the gloomiest and most despairing of the new creative French directors. His attitude is ridden with a sense of defeat and ruin.” Youthful disillusion is a fact and that is how The Cousins treats it. The movie doesn’t offer any solution because it doesn’t pose any problem. Robert Hatch wrote in the Nation:
The latest of the “New Wave” French imports is The Cousins, a country mouse–city mouse story that dips into the lives and affairs of today’s Paris student bohemia. The picture is written and directed by Claude Chabrol, but I had the feeling that it was an exercise in self-expression thrown together by the characters themselves. It is just such a story as these bright, aimless, superficially tough and perilously debauched boys and girls might consider profound and moving.
Time put it down more coolly in a single-paragraph review that distorted the plot and missed the point:
The Cousins . . . is a fairly clever, mildly depressing study of France’s I-got-it-beat generation. Made for $160,000 by a 27-year-old film critic named Claude Chabrol, the film offers a switch on the story of the city mouse (Jean-Claude Brialy) and the country mouse (Gerard Blain). In this case the city mouse is really a rat. Enrolled in law school, he seldom attends classes, spends his time shacking up with “can’t-say-no” girls, arranging for abortions, curing one hangover and planning the next. When the country cousin, a nice boy but not too bright in school, comes to live with him, the rat nibbles away at the country boy’s time, his girl friend (Juliette Mayniel), and his will to work. In the end, the country cousin fails his examinations and the city cousin casually shoots him dead with a gun he didn’t know was loaded. And that, the moral would seem to be, is one way to keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.
The critical term, “depressing,” like “gloomiest and most despairing,” almost guarantees that readers will stay away.
Time’s reviewer may not have been briefed on t
he Catholic background of The Cousins, or may have thought that its kind of religiosity would not be inspirational enough for American audiences. After all, it was Time that cautioned the public that if they went to see Diary of a Country Priest — surely the one great religious film of recent years — they “might be grateful for a resident theologian in the lobby.” Yet Time, in its laudatory review of The Hoodlum Priest, indulges in a piece of upbeat theology that might confuse anyone. Time describes what happens when the priest tells the condemned convict about Christ’s love, and, according to Time:
Suddenly, wonderfully, a new dimension of reality surrounds and penetrates the scene: the dimension of divine love. Like an impossible hope it flickers in his heart. In this hope the condemned man and his audience are so intensely interfused and mutually identified . . . that the spectator not only shares the victim’s agony in the gas chamber but may even, at one transcendent moment in this film, feel himself dead in the dead man, feel the dead man living in himself. The experience is extraordinary — nothing less than an illusion of immortality.
The Cousins, oddly enough, is about just such an interchange — but with a complete loss of hope. The hero, who is, of course, the city cousin, knows that he is dead in the dead man. Why did American reviewers consider the honest, plodding, unimaginative, provincial cousin the hero? Possibly identification — they have certainly behaved like country innocents about The Cousins. What is exciting about its content is precisely the oblique view we get of the decadent, bizarre, rich young nihilist — the dissipating cynic who is the antithesis of all bourgeois virtues. It is he, not his hardworking, conscientious, romantic and idealistic cousin, who has moral force, and it is his character that is relevant to the actual world. The only certainties in his life are promiscuity and vice, but he recognizes them for what they are and he has established a code of behavior — it might even be construed as a code of honor.
The Cousins has the most remarkable collection of faces in recent films: in every shot there is someone to look at. And there are the remarkable principals: the suave Jean-Claude Brialy as the city cousin — we first see him made up like Toulouse-Lautrec in his Japanese-gentleman photographs; Gerard Blain in the difficult role of the country boy; and a new young actress, Juliette Mayniel, who has the most astonishingly beautiful cat-eyes since Michele Morgan in her trenchcoat and beret came out of the fog of Port of Shadows.
As a production, The Cousins glitters as if it were terribly expensive. It contains some of the best orgies on film, and every scene is smooth and elegant. Perhaps it is Chabrol’s almost extravagant command of the medium — the fluency of movement and the total subordination of the large cast to their roles and milieu — that made Americans less sympathetic than they have been toward unpolished, rough, uncontrolled work. In the film society and art-house audiences, awkwardness and pretension are often associated with film art, and there seems to be almost an appetite for filmic inadequacy — which looks like proof of sincerity and good intentions. How else can one explain the enthusiasm for that feeble refugee from a surrealist short — the union-suited devil of Black Orpheus? You may like or dislike The Cousins but you certainly won’t feel that the director is an amateur to whom you should be charitable.
The sensationalism and glossy stylishness of The Cousins suggests commercial film making at its most proficient. As a critic, Chabrol is identified with his studies of Hitchcock. He particularly admires Strangers on a Train, which, as you may recall, also suggested a peculiar role transference between two men — Farley Granger and Robert Walker — and dealt with a particularly corrupt social climate of extreme wealth and extreme perversity. Chabrol is the showman of the New Wave, but he is also a moralist who uses the dissolute milieu of student life for a serious, though chic, purpose. The students are products of the post-Nazi world, and in one disturbing sequence, the city cousin interrupts a wild party he is giving to stage an extraordinary ritual: with Wagner on the hi-fi, he puts on an SS officer’s hat and walks among his drunken guests with a lighted candelabrum, as he recites in German what sounds like a mawkish parody of German romantic poetry.
The older characters are, ironically, misleading or treacherous or disgusting. There is, for example, a kindly bookseller, whom, at first, one might take to be the chorus, as he counsels the country boy to stick to his studies and stay away from the nasty sophisticates. But his advice is dated and it won’t work. The others — the procurer, and the Italian industrialist — are obsessed by sexual desires they can’t satisfy. The students abhor the industrialist because he is an old-fashioned kind of lecher who wants to buy his way into the company of youth. The students are, within their own terms, honest in the way they take their pleasure: The Cousins, more than any other film I can think of, deserves to be called The Lost Generation, with all the glamour and romance, the easy sophistication and quick desperation that the title suggests.
Chabrol shows that the old concepts of romance are inadequate to a world of sexual ambiguities, and he shows that, from the point of view of the bright and gifted, and in our world — where the present, as much as the future, is uncertain — a country cousin who plods to make good and get ahead must be a little dull witted. Perhaps that country boy is not really so honest as he seems: his diligence, his sobriety, all his antique virtues may be just a self-deceiving defense against the facts of modern life. The heroine, who almost thinks she loves him, realizes that this is just an intellectual and aesthetic response; she would like to be able to believe in a pure, sweet and enduring love. It would be so much prettier than the truth about herself. The others treat him with a gentle nostalgia — as toward a figure from the past.
Canned Americana
In older films, protagonists were fighting their impulses, trying to subordinate their drives to their aspirations; they were capable of ideas and ideals. Now, Freudianized writers tell us more about their people than the people themselves know, and they are shown as smart, or as gaining insight, when they discover what we have already been posted on — their sexual desires, their fears and anxieties. The authors condescend to us, at the same time putting us in a position to feel superior to the people in the movies who know so much less than we do. The only figures in some of the recent films who could be called characters are more exactly caricatures — the father as played by Pat Hingle in Splendor in the Grass, the mother as played by Una Merkel in Summer and Smoke.
Perhaps in modern terms, character is a caricature. The only person who gives any sense of character to All Fall Down, is the mother, played by Angela Lansbury — and once again, it’s a howling caricature. And yet the moments when she really moves us (and Angela Lansbury is at times extraordinarily moving, reminiscent of Bette Davis at her best) are when she steps free of the caricature and becomes a character. This makes me wonder a little if perhaps one of the reasons why character is disappearing is that audiences don’t want to respond or feel. It’s much easier to laugh at or feel superior to a caricature than feel with a character. For isn’t the essence, the defining quality of a caricature, that it tells us how to react? It’s a character with the responses built in.
All Fall Down is deep in William Inge territory — homespun and Gothic — that strange area of nostalgic Americana where the familiar is the Freudian grotesque. It’s also a peculiar kind of fantasy in which hideous lecherous women (schoolteachers seem to be the worst offenders) paw handsome young men and the one girl who might seem attractive disqualifies herself by becoming pathetically pregnant. The movie turns out to be the portrait of the writer as an adolescent (Brandon de Wilde plays the part) who grows up — “matures” — when he learns that the older brother he idolizes (played by Warren Beatty) is an empty wreck. Does anybody really grow up the way this boy grows up? He learns the truth, squares his shoulders, and walks out into the bright sunlight as Alex North’s music rises and swells in victory. How many movies have pulled this damned visual homily on us, this synthetic growing-into-a-man, as if it happened all at once and forever,
this transition to self-knowledge and adulthood? Suggested party game: ask your friends to tell about the summer they grew up. The one who tells the best lie has a promising career ahead as a Hollywood screenwriter.
Inge’s Splendor in the Grass script is based on a neo-Freudian fantasy, popular among teen-agers, that sexual repression drives you crazy. Splendor in the Grass is hysterically on the side of young love; it deals with a high-school pair of sweethearts — Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood — whose parents think they are too young to marry. And so, deprived of sexual love together, the boy turns to a floozy, the girl, maddened by loss of him, goes to a mental institution. The parents are the usual hypocritical monsters you expect from this sort of adolescent-slanted movie that pretends to deal with real youthful problems but actually begs the question by having the two kids tenderly and truthfully and presumably, permanently, in love. The movie does not even implicitly come out for the rights of adolescents to sexual experimentation; it just attacks the corrupted grownups for failure to understand that these two kids are in love, and for failure to value love above all else. In other words, it’s the old corn but fermented by Kazan in a new way — with lots of screaming and a gang-bang sequence, and blood and beatings, and girls getting pawed on their twitching little school-girl behinds. This latter feature, rather than nostalgia, may explain why the movie is set in the flapper days of 1928: the girls act with their butts instead of their busts, and Miss Wood probably has the most active derrière since Clara Bow.