I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Several of the critics, among them Kauffmann, have complained that the song Jeanne Moreau sings is irrelevant to the action of the film. It’s embarrassing to have to point out the obvious, that the song is the theme and spirit of the film: Jules and Jim and Catherine are the ones who “make their way in life’s whirlpool of days — round and round together bound.” And, in the film, the song is an epiphany: when Catherine sings, the story is crystallized, and the song, like Jim and the child rolling on the hill, seems to belong to memory almost before it is over. In the same way, the still shots catch for us, as for the characters, the distillation, the beauty of the moment. Throughout the film, Georges Delerue’s exquisite music — simple and fragrant, popular without being banal — is part of the atmosphere; it is so evocative that if you put the music on the phonograph, like the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, it brings back the images, the emotions, the experience. Though emotionally in the tradition of Jean Renoir, as a work of film craftsmanship Jules and Jim is an homage to D. W. Griffith. Truffaut explores the medium, plays with it, overlaps scenes, uses fast cutting in the manner of Breathless and leaping continuity in the manner of Zero for Conduct, changes the size and shape of the images as Griffith did, and in one glorious act of homage he recreates a frame out of Intolerance, the greatest movie ever made. Jules and Jim is the most exciting movie made in the West since L’Avventura and Breathless and Truffaut’s earlier Shoot the Piano Player; because of the beauty and warmth of its images, it is a richer, a more satisfying film than any of them. I think it will rank among the great lyric achievements of the screen, right up there with the work of Griffith and Renoir.

  Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man

  I don’t want to waste space discussing this film, which is rather like a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as Norman Rockwell might have conceived it for a Saturday Evening Post cover — the dreariest kind of Americana, with all the full-bodied flavor of a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup served cold, right from the tin. It’s the moviemakers’ mixture as before of Freudianism and anti-Momism in which the young man is torn between the castrating mother and the castrated father, and must free himself in order to become a man. Adventures of a Young Man, one of the thickest servings of this formula, fails to take into consideration what makes the young man in the film an artist: I suggest it didn’t come out of that All-American manly hunting and fishing with Papa — it probably had something to do with the cultural aspirations of that nagging castrating mom, the villainness of the story. But the film is hardly worth talking about — heavy and dull and clearly marked with moral signposts, each episode a lesson in growing up. Even the high spots — the sequences with Dan Dailey and Paul Newman and the romantic cynicism of the Ricardo Montalban scenes — lack rhythm and structure. I want to discuss a basic moral issue that the film raises.

  I think it is a disgrace and a moral offense to take short stories by Hemingway and a piece of a novel and combine them with incidents from his life in a sentimental pastiche which is then presented as some sort of biographical film about Ernest Hemingway. It’s a violation of his life as well as of his work — the integrity of neither is respected in this kind of treatment. And I fear that this kind of opportunistic screenwriting will soon leave only obscure writers with lives they can call their own. It’s so easy to do — and it has the superficial justification that most writers’ early work is partly autobiographical. But, in destroying the boundaries between a man’s life and his art, the meanings are all homogenized. The problem is not merely that the writer has drawn all of his characters out of himself, and the film reduces him to the one that most resembles him, but that his particular qualities as a writer — the shape and form he gave to his experiences — are destroyed. His art is turned back into an imitation of the raw material out of which he made his art. And it’s part of the personality cult of modern life that the movies are more interested in exploiting Hemingway himself than in trying to find some way of making a movie that would do anything like justice to his style and method. There has rarely been even an approximation of the particular qualities of Hemingway’s work in the films based on his novels — the closest was perhaps the first ten minutes of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, and the next closest, the first two-thirds of The Macomber Affair. Adventures of a Young Man follows the direction set in The Snows of Kilimanjaro — in which the hero, played by Gregory Peck, seemed already to be drawn more from Hemingway’s life and legend than from the story on which the film was based. From a film like Adventures of a Young Man you would never be able to guess what kind of a writer Hemingway was trying to be, nor anything of the qualities of his style. He cleaned out the stuffy upholstery of “fine” writing; this movie brings it right back again, padding out the clean lines. Even when his dialogue is retained, it is set in a context of CinemaScope and De Luxe–colored calendar art — and paced in such an old-fashioned way that you may want to cry out that this is the film equivalent of everything Hemingway was trying to eliminate from his writing.

  The movie is neither about his life nor is it truly drawn from his work. Time says, “Time has given Hemingway’s life an aura of the magical. Hence this is an enchanted movie in the same way that forests and sleeping beauties and Prince Charmings in children’s storybooks are enchanted.” But Hemingway was a true writer, not a false magician, and in order to turn him into the Prince Charming of a movie, the film violates what he was as a man also. He has been turned into the most commonplace and generalized public idea of a struggling artist, and I suppose we can look forward to the same kind of sugar-coated sanctification of D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, and just about anybody else you can think of — all turned into the same figure of the artist — all endowed “with an aura of the magical” (I wonder where Time gets all its nimbuses?). Movies have been doing it to painters and singers and actors and dancers — I suppose writers are next. Thus everyone who pulled himself out of the mediocrity of his surroundings is brought back to it, and glorified for having been just like everyone else. The moviemakers who claim to be watering the flowers on the graves of the great seem to use their own water.

  Fires on the Plain (Nobi)

  Cautious as I am about superlatives, I think the term “masterpiece” must be applied to Fires on the Plain. It has the disturbing power of great art: it doesn’t leave you quite the same. A few hours after seeing it, or a few days or weeks, it rushes up and overwhelms you.

  If Dostoyevsky had been a film maker telling his Grand Inquisitor story with a camera, it might have been much like this great visual demonstration that men are not brothers. Fires on the Plain is an obsessive, relentless cry of passion and disgust. The subject is modern man as a cannibal, and after a few minutes of Fires on the Plain, this subject does not seem at all strange or bizarre: it seems, rather, to be basic. When violence is carried to the extremes of modern war, cannibalism may appear to be the ultimate truth.

  The setting is Leyte. Tamura, the hero, is one of the stragglers of the disintegrating retreating Japanese army — terrified of the Americans, the Filipinos, and each other. Tamura walks across the plain unharmed because he is already a dead man; he is tubercular, no one wants his flesh. In the middle of this desolation, there are bonfires — ambiguous flames in the distance that kindle hope. (Perhaps they are signal fires? Perhaps Filipino farmers are burning corn husks? Perhaps there is still some normal life going on?) At the end Tamura approaches the flames and the last illusion is dispelled.

  What can be said of a work so powerfully felt and so intensely expressed that it turns rage into beauty? Fires on the Plain is an appalling picture; it is also a work of epic poetry. The director, Kon Ichikawa, and the writer, his wife Natto Wada, are among the foremost screen artists of Japan; their other collaborations include The Burmese Harp, Enjo, and Kagi. Fires on the Plain is based on the book by Shohei Ooka, the greatest Japanese novel to come out of the war, which, as the translator Ivan Morris says, draws a shocking analogy “between
the cannibalism of the starving soldiers . . . and the Christian doctrine of the Mass.”

  Fires on the Plain is a passion film — and a new vision of hell. The passion that informs the character of Tamura is so intense, so desperate and overwhelming, that he seems both painfully close to us and at the same time remote, detached from what is ordinarily thought of as emotion. The atmosphere of the film is also remote from our normal world: there is nothing banal, nothing extraneous to the single-minded view of man in extremis. And what is both shocking and, in some terrible sense, beautiful is the revelation of man’s extraordinary passion for life even in an inferno. The soldiers will commit any crime, will kill each other, devour each other, to go on living a few more minutes, a few more hours. Even though there is no future, they are trying to sustain life as if there were; it becomes the new variant of La Grande Illusion — that if they can just make it to this forest or that port, they will be saved. Historically, in terms of World War II, some were saved; but Ichikawa’s film is not, at this level, realistic. It is not merely about World War II, or the experiences on Leyte; it is not an anti-war film in the usual sense. We see no causes, no cures, no enemy; it goes beyond nationalism or patriotism. All men are enemies. It is a post–nuclear-war film — a vision of the end, the final inferno. And oddly, when survival is the only driving force, when men live only to live, survival comes to seem irrelevant.

  There is a fiendish irony involved in the physical condition of the hero: he alone can be a hero — act human — because he can’t save his own life anyway. He can be human because he is beyond self-interest; he becomes a Japanese Christ-figure. Tamura, so close to death, is passionately — instinctively and intellectually — committed to the amenities of humanity and civilization. He shares his potatoes with another man because this is how men behave; he refuses to eat human flesh because this practice is a destruction of human behavior. It is the only place left to draw the line: Tamura has been degraded in every other way; he has murdered a helpless, terrified girl, but cannibalism is the final degradation. It is the line he will not cross: it becomes the only remaining dividing line, not between man and beast but between beast and beast who clings to the memory, the idea of man. Tamura’s rejection of cannibalism is the only morality left. Yet, in the circumstances, his behavior — obsessed with the image of man — is what is called “unrealistic”; that is to say, in total war, man preserves himself (if he is lucky) only by destroying his humanity. Nothing is left.

  Just as Ivan Karamazov is obsessed with the evil in the world that stands in the way of believing in God because he wants to believe, Ichikawa’s revulsion is the negative image of aspiration and hope. In this film, so harshly realistic, so apparently inevitable that it becomes surrealistic, man is defined as man who cannot forget he is man. As in Céline’s novels, there is the poetry of disgust, of catharsis. There is even a black form of humor in a weird Mack Sennett–like sequence — the sudden astonishment of comedy as a succession of soldiers discard their shoes and put on the ones discarded by others.

  The film follows the novel very closely except that in the novel Tamura does cross the line: he eats human flesh, or “monkey meat” as the soldiers call it (a term that’s like a hideous self-inflicted use of the wartime American expression of contempt for the Japanese). And there is an epilogue to the novel which has not been filmed. At the end of the novel, several years have passed, and Tamura, who has been telling the story, is revealed to be a madman in a mental hospital near Tokyo. Guiltily, he believes that in rejecting the proffered flesh of a dying soldier who had raised his emaciated arm and said, “When I’m dead, you may eat this,” he rejected God’s flesh. His new formulation is that “all men are cannibals, all women are whores. Each of us must act according to his nature.” In his madness, he concludes, “. . . if as a result of hunger human beings were constrained to eat each other, then this world of ours was no more than the result of God’s wrath. And if I at this moment, could vomit forth anger, then I, who was no longer human, must be an angel of God, an instrument of God’s wrath.” Ichikawa (wisely, I think) has infused the whole story with this obsessive angelic wrath, rather than attempting to film the epilogue.

  As an ironic aside to the subject of mankind devouring its humanity, man becoming “monkey meat,” here is John Coleman’s description in the New Statesman of an English audience’s reaction to the film:

  Fires on the Plain is showing to an audience of turnip-headed morons . . . screams of laughter welcoming such acts as the impaling of a mad dog on a bayonet (the spray of blood that hit the ground really rolled them in the aisles), fitters as the Japanese hero declines the invitation to cannibalism, bellows of fun as machine guns stuttered and gaunt men ran away.

  I have seen just one review in a San Francisco paper: it seems to have been written by one of those turnip-headed morons. I don’t know how American audiences — if there are any — will react. If it’s anything like the English reaction, perhaps the mad Tamura is right and all men are cannibals.

  Replying to Listeners

  I am resolved to start the New Year right; I don’t want to carry over any unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, “Miss Kael, I assume you aren’t married — one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others.” Isn’t it remarkable that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve not only got the idea that being married is healthier, more “mature,” they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs. John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial experience out of which she writes.

  I wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument; they like to console themselves with the notion that the woman is semi-masculine. The new Freudianism goes beyond Victorianism in its placid assumption that a woman who uses her mind is trying to compete with men. It was bad enough for women who had brains to be considered freaks like talking dogs; now it’s leeringly assumed that they’re trying to grow a penis — which any man will tell you is an accomplishment that puts canine conversation in the shadows.

  Mrs. John Doe and her sisters who write to me seem to interpret Freud to mean that intelligence, like a penis, is a male attribute. The true woman is supposed to be sweet and passive — she shouldn’t argue or emphasize an opinion or get excited about a judgment. Sex — or at least regulated marital sex — is supposed to act as a tranquilizer. In other words, the Freudianized female accepts that whole complex of passivity that the feminists battled against.

  Mrs. Doe, you know something, I don’t mind sounding sharp — and I’ll take my stand with those pre-Freudian feminists; and you know something else, I think you’re probably so worried about competing with male egos and those brilliant masculine intellects that you probably bore men to death.

  This lady who attacks me for being nasty and sharp goes on to write, “I was extremely disappointed to hear your costic speech on and about the radio station, KPFA. It is unfortunate you were unable to get a liberal education, because that would have enabled you to know that a great many people have many fields of interest, and would have saved you from displaying your ignorance on the matter.” She, incidenta
lly, displays her liberal education by spelling caustic c-o-s-t-i-c, and it is with some expense of spirit that I read this kind of communication. Should I try to counter my education — liberal and sexual — against hers, should I explain that Pauline Kael is the name I was given at birth, and that it does not reflect my marital vicissitudes which might over-complicate nomenclature?

  It is not really that I prefer to call myself by my own name and hence Miss that bothers her or the other Mrs. Does, it is that I express ideas she doesn’t like. If I called myself by three names like those poetesses in the Saturday Review of Literature, Mrs. Doe would still hate my guts. But significantly she attacks me for being a Miss. Having become a Mrs., she has gained moral superiority: for the modern woman, officially losing her virginity is a victory comparable to the Victorian woman’s officially keeping hers. I’m happy for Mrs. Doe that she’s got a husband, but in her defense of KPFA she writes like a virgin mind. And is that really something to be happy about?

  Mrs. Doe, the happily, emotionally-secure-mature-liberally-educated-womanly-woman has her opposite number in the mailbag. Here is a letter from a manly man. This is the letter in its entirety: “Dear Miss Kael, Since you know so much about the art of the film, why don’t you spend your time making it? But first, you will need a pair of balls.” Mr. Dodo (I use the repetition in honor of your two attributes), movies are made and criticism is written by the use of intelligence, talent, taste, emotion, education, imagination and discrimination. I suggest it is time you and your cohorts stop thinking with your genital jewels. There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of if-you-know-so-much-about-the-art-of-the-film-why-don’t-you-make-movies. You don’t have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good. If it makes you feel better, I have worked making movies, and I wasn’t hampered by any biological deficiencies.