I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Some months ago, reviewing The Mark, I discussed the uncomfortable feeling I got that we were supposed to feel sympathetic toward the hero because he was such a pained, unhappy, dull man, and that his sexual problem was the only focus of interest in him. In Victim there is so much effort to make us feel sympathetic toward the homosexuals that they are never even allowed to be gay. The dreadful irony involved is that Dirk Bogarde looks so pained, so anguished from the self-sacrifice of repressing his homosexuality, that the film seems to give rather a black eye to the heterosexual life.

  Lolita

  The ads asked “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita for persons over 18 years of age?” A few days later the question mark was moved, and the ads asked “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” and after that, the caution: “for persons over 18 years of age.” Either way, the suggestion was planted that the movie had “licked” the book, and that Lolita had been turned into the usual kind of sexy movie. The advertising has been slanted to the mass audience, so the art-house audience isn’t going. A sizable part of the mass audience doesn’t like the movie (their rejection is being interpreted as a vote for “wholesomeness,” which according to Variety is about to stage a comeback) and the art-house audience is missing out on one of the few American films it might enjoy.

  Recommend the film to friends and they reply, “Oh I’ve had it with Lolita.” It turns out (now that Lolita can be purchased for fifty cents and so is in the category of ordinary popular books) that they never thought much of it; but even though they didn’t really like the book, they don’t want to see the movie because of all the changes that have been made in the book. (One person informed me that he wouldn’t go to see the movie because he’d heard they’d turned it into a comedy.) Others had heard so much about the book, they thought reading it superfluous (they had as good as read it — they were tired of it); and if the book was too much talked about to necessitate a reading, surely going to the film was really de trop?

  Besides, wasn’t the girl who played Lolita practically a matron? The New York Times had said, “She looks to be a good seventeen,” and the rest of the press seemed to concur in this peculiarly inexpert judgment. Time opened its review with “Wind up the Lolita doll and it goes to Hollywood and commits nymphanticide” and closed with “Lolita is the saddest and most important victim of the current reckless adaptation fad . . .” In the Observer the premiere of the film was described under the heading “Lolita fiasco” and the writer concluded that the novel had been “turned into a film about this poor English guy who is being given the runaround by this sly young broad.” In the New Republic Stanley Kauffmann wrote, “It is clear that Nabokov respects the novel. It is equally clear that he does not respect the film — at least as it is used in America . . . He has given to films the Lolita that, presumably, he thinks the medium deserves . . .” After all this, who would expect anything from the film?

  The surprise of Lolita is how enjoyable it is: it’s the first new American comedy since those great days in the forties when Preston Sturges recreated comedy with verbal slapstick. Lolita is black slapstick and at times it’s so far out that you gasp as you laugh. An inspired Peter Sellers creates a new comic pattern — a crazy quilt of psychological, sociological commentary so “hip” it’s surrealist. It doesn’t cover everything: there are structural weaknesses, the film falls apart, and there’s even a forced and humiliating attempt to “explain” the plot. But when the wit is galloping who’s going to look a gift horse in the mouth? Critics, who feel decay in their bones.

  The reviews are a comedy of gray matter. Doubts may have remained after Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, ex cathedra judgment that Lolita is “willful, cynical and repellent . . . It is not only inhuman; it is anti-human. I am reluctantly glad that it was made, but I trust it will have no imitators.” Then, “for a learned and independent point of view, Show invited Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned theologian, to a screening in New York and asked him for an appraisal.” The higher primate discovered that “the theme of this triangular relationship exposes the unwholesome attitudes of mother, daughter, and lover to a mature observer.” (Ripeness is all . . . but is it enough?) This mature observer does however find some “few saving moral insights” — though he thinks the film “obscures” them — such as “the lesson of Lolita’s essential redemption in a happy marriage.” (Had any peripheral redemptions lately?) If you’re still hot on the trail of insights, don’t overlook the New Republic’s steamy revelation that “the temper of the original might . . . have been tastefully preserved” if Humbert had narrated the film. “The general tone could have been: ‘Yes, this is what I did then and thought lovely. Dreadful, wasn’t it? Still . . . it has its funny side, no?’ ” It has its funny side, oui oui.

  The movie adaptation tries something so far beyond the simple “narrator” that a number of the reviewers have complained: Bosley Crowther, who can always be counted on to miss the point, writes that “Mr. Kubrick inclines to dwell too long over scenes that have slight purpose, such as scenes in which Mr. Sellers does various comical impersonations as the sneaky villain who dogs Mr. Mason’s trail.” These scenes “that have slight purpose” are, of course, just what make Lolita new, these are the scenes that make it, for all its slackness of pace and clumsy editing, a more exciting comedy than the last American comedy, Some Like It Hot. Quilty, the success, the writer of scenarios and school plays, the policeman, the psychologist; Quilty the genius, the man whom Lolita loves, Humbert’s brother and tormenter and parodist; Quilty the man of the world is a conception to talk about alongside Melville’s The Confidence Man. “Are you with someone?” Humbert asks the policeman. And Quilty the policeman replies, “I’m not with someone. I’m with you.”

  The Quilty monologues are worked out almost like the routines of silent comedy — they not only carry the action forward, they comment on it, and this comment is the new action of the film. There has been much critical condescension toward Sellers, who’s alleged to be an impersonator rather than an actor, a man with many masks but no character. Now Sellers does a turn with the critics’ terms: his Quilty is a character employing masks, an actor with a merciless talent for impersonation. He is indeed “the sneaky villain who dogs Mr. Mason’s trail” — and he digs up every bone that “Mr. Mason” ineptly tries to bury, and presents them to him. Humbert can conceal nothing. It is a little like the scene in Victor Sjostrom’s magnificent The Wind, in which Lillian Gish digs a grave for the man she has murdered and then, from her window, watches in horror as the windstorm uncovers the body. But in Lolita our horror is split by laughter: Humbert has it coming — not because he’s having “relations” with a minor, but because, in order to conceal his sexual predilections, he has put on the most obsequious and mealy-minded of masks. Like the homosexual professors who are rising fast in American academia because they are so cautious about protecting their unconventional sex lives that they can be trusted not to be troublesome to the college administrations on any important issues (a convoluted form of blackmail), Humbert is a worm and Quilty knows it.

  Peter Sellers works with miserable physical equipment, yet he has somehow managed to turn his lumbering, wide-hipped body into an advantage by acting to perfection the man without physical assets. The soft, slow-moving, paper-pushing middle-class man is his special self-effacing type; and though only in his mid-thirties he all too easily incarnates sly, smug middle-aged man. Even his facial muscles are kept flaccid, so that he always looks weary, too tired and cynical for much of a response. The rather frightening strength of his Quilty (who has enormous — almost sinister — reserves of energy) is peculiarly effective just because of his ordinary, “normal” look. He does something that seems impossible: he makes unattractiveness magnetic.

  Quilty — rightly, in terms of the film as distinguished from the novel — dominates Lolita (which could use much more of him) and James Mason’s Humbert, who makes attractiveness tired and exhausted and impotent, is a remarkable counterp
art. Quilty who doesn’t care, who wins Lolita and throws her out, Quilty the homewrecker is a winner; Humbert, slavishly, painfully in love, absurdly suffering, the lover of the ages who degrades himself, who cares about nothing but Lolita, is the classic loser. Mason is better than (and different from) what almost anyone could have expected. Mason’s career has been so mottled: a beautiful Odd Man Out, a dull Brutus, an uneven, often brilliant Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, a good Captain Nemo, and then in 1960 the beginnings of comic style as the English naval commander who pretends to have gone over to the Russians in A Touch of Larceny. And now, in Lolita he’s really in command of a comic style: the handsome face gloats in a rotting smile. Mason seems to need someone strong to play against. He’s very good in the scenes with Charlotte and with her friends, and especially good in the bathtub scene (which Niebuhr thinks “may arouse both the laughter and the distaste of the audience” — imagine being so drained of reactions that you have to be aroused to distaste!) but his scenes with Lolita, when he must dominate the action, fall rather flat.

  Perhaps the reviewers have been finding so many faults with Lolita because this is such an easy way to show off some fake kind of erudition: even newspaper reviewers can demonstrate that they’ve read a book by complaining about how different the movie is from the novel. The movie is different but not that different, and if you can get over the reviewers’ preoccupation with the sacredness of the novel (they don’t complain this much about Hollywood’s changes in biblical stories) you’ll probably find that even the characters that are different (Charlotte Haze, especially, who has become the culture-vulture rampant) are successful in terms of the film. Shelley Winters’s Charlotte is a triumphant caricature, so overdone it recalls Blake’s “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

  Sue Lyon is perhaps a little less than enough — but not because she looks seventeen. (Have the reviewers looked at the schoolgirls of America lately? The classmates of my fourteen-year-old daughter are not merely nubile: some of them look badly used.) Rather it is because her role is insufficiently written. Sue Lyon herself is good (at times her face is amusingly suggestive of a miniature Elvis Presley) though physically too young to be convincing in her last scenes. (I don’t mean that to sound paradoxical but merely descriptive.) Kubrick and company have been attacked most for the area in which they have been simply accurate: they could have done up Sue Lyon in childish schoolgirl clothes, but the facts of American life are that adolescents and even pre-adolescents wear nylons and make-up and two-piece strapless bathing suits and have figures.

  Lolita isn’t a consistently good movie but that’s almost beside the point: excitement is sustained by a brilliant idea, a new variant on the classic chase theme — Quilty as Humbert’s walking paranoia, the madness that chases Humbert and is chased by him, over what should be the delusionary landscape of the actual United States. This panoramic confusion of normal and mad that can be experienced traveling around the country is, unfortunately, lost: the film badly needs the towns and motels and highways of the U.S. It suffers not only from the genteel English landscapes, but possibly also from the photographic style of Oswald Morris — perhaps justly famous, but subtly wrong (and too tasteful) for Lolita. It may seem like a dreadfully “uncinematic” idea, but I rather wish that Kubrick, when he realized that he couldn’t shoot in the U.S. (the reasons must have been economic) had experimented with stylized sets.

  There is a paradox involved in the film Lolita. Stanley Kubrick shows talents in new areas (theme and dialogue and comedy), and is at his worst at what he’s famous for. The Killing was a simple-minded suspense film about a racetrack robbery, but he structured it brilliantly with each facet shining in place; Paths of Glory was a simple-minded pacifist film, but he gave it nervous rhythm and a sense of urgency. Lolita is so clumsily structured that you begin to wonder what was shot and then cut out, why other pieces were left in, and whether the beginning was intended to be the end; and it is edited in so dilatory a fashion that after the first hour, almost every scene seems to go on too long. It’s as if Kubrick lost his nerve. If he did, it’s no wonder; the wonder is, that with all the pressures on American moviemakers — the pressures to evade, to conceal, to compromise, and to explain everything for the literal-minded — he had the nerve to transform this satire on the myths of love into the medium that has become consecrated to the myths. Lolita is a wilder comedy for being, now, family entertainment. Movie theaters belong to the same world as the highways and motels: in first-run theaters, “for persons over 18 years of age” does not mean that children are prohibited but simply that there are no reduced prices for children. In second-run neighborhood theaters, “for persons over 18 years of age” is amended by “unless accompanied by a member of the family.” That befits the story of Humbert Humbert.

  Shoot the Piano Player

  The cover of David Goodis’s novel Down There, now issued by Grove Press under the title of the film adapted from it, Shoot the Piano Player, carries a statement from Henry Miller — “Truffaut’s film was so good I had doubts the book could equal it. I have just read the novel and I think it is even better than the film.” I don’t agree with Miller’s judgment. I like the David Goodis book, but it’s strictly a work in a limited genre, well-done and consistent; Truffaut’s film busts out all over — and that’s what’s wonderful about it. The film is comedy, pathos, tragedy all scrambled up — much I think as most of us really experience them (surely all our lives are filled with comic horrors) but not as we have been led to expect them in films.

  Shoot the Piano Player is about a man who has withdrawn from human experience; he wants not to care any more, not to get involved, not to feel. He has reduced life to a level on which he can cope with it — a revery between him and the piano. Everything that happens outside his solitary life seems erratic, accidental, unpredictable — but he can predict the pain. In a flashback we see why: when he did care, he failed the wife who needed him and caused her death. In the course of the film he is once more brought back into the arena of human contacts; another girl is destroyed, and he withdraws again into solitude.

  Truffaut is a free and inventive director — and he fills the piano player’s encounters with the world with good and bad jokes, bits from old Sacha Guitry films, clowns and thugs, tough kids, songs and fantasy and snow scenes, and homage to the American gangster films — not the classics, the socially conscious big-studio gangster films of the thirties, but the grade-B gangster films of the forties and fifties. Like Godard, who dedicated Breathless to Monogram Pictures, Truffaut is young, and he loves the cheap American gangster films of his childhood and youth. And like them, Shoot the Piano Player was made on a small budget. It was also made outside of studios with a crew that, according to witnesses, sometimes consisted of Truffaut, the actors, and a cameraman. Part of his love of cheap American movies with their dream imagery of the American gangster — the modern fairy tales for European children who go to movies — is no doubt reflected in his taking an American underworld novel and transferring its setting from Philadelphia to France.

  Charles Aznavour who plays the hero is a popular singer turned actor — rather like Frank Sinatra in this country, and like Sinatra, he is an instinctive actor and a great camera subject. Aznavour’s piano player is like a tragic embodiment of Robert Hutchins’s Zukerkandl philosophy (whatever it is, stay out of it): he is the thinnest-skinned of modern heroes. It is his own capacity to feel that makes him cut himself off: he experiences so sensitively and so acutely that he can’t bear the suffering of it — he thinks that if he doesn’t do anything he won’t feel and he won’t cause suffering to others. The girl, Marie Dubois — later the smoky-steam-engine girl of Jules and Jim — is like a Hollywood forties movie type; she would have played well with Humphrey Bogart — a big, clear-eyed, crude, loyal, honest girl. The film is closely related to Godard’s Breathless; and both seem to be haunted by the shade of Bogart.

  Shoot the Piano Player is both
nihilistic in attitude and, at the same time, in its wit and good spirits, totally involved in life and fun. Whatever Truffaut touches seems to leap to life — even a gangster thriller is transformed into the human comedy. A comedy about melancholia, about the hopelessness of life can only give the lie to the theme; for as long as we can joke, life is not hopeless, we can enjoy it. In Truffaut’s style there is so much pleasure in life that the wry, lonely little piano player, the sardonic little man who shrugs off experience, is himself a beautiful character. This beauty is a tribute to human experience, even if the man is so hurt and defeated that he can only negate experience. The nihilism of the character — and the anarchic nihilism of the director’s style — have led reviewers to call the film a surrealist farce; it isn’t that strange.

  When I refer to Truffaut’s style as anarchic and nihilistic, I am referring to a style, not an absence of it. I disagree with the critics around the country who find the film disorganized; they seem to cling to the critical apparatus of their grammar-school teachers. They want unity of theme, easy-to-follow-transitions in mood, a good, coherent, old-fashioned plot, and heroes they can identify with and villains they can reject. Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic compares Shoot the Piano Player with the sweepings of cutting room floors; Time decides that “the moral, if any, seems to be that shooting the piano player might, at least, put the poor devil out of his misery.” But who but Time is looking for a moral? What’s exciting about movies like Shoot the Piano Player, Breathless (and also the superb Jules and Jim, though it’s very different from the other two) is that they, quite literally, move with the times. They are full of unresolved, inexplicable, disharmonious elements, irony and slapstick and defeat all compounded — not arbitrarily as the reviewers claim — but in terms of the film maker’s efforts to find some expression for his own anarchic experience, instead of making more of those tiresome well-made movies that no longer mean much to us.