I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Others may wonder why I take the time to answer letters of this sort: the reason is that these two examples, although cruder than most of the mail, simply carry to extremes the kind of thing so many of you write. There are, of course, some letter writers who take a more “constructive” approach. I’d like to read you part of a long letter I received yesterday:

  I haven’t been listening to your programs for very long and haven’t heard all of them since I began listening . . . But I must say that while I have been listening, I have not heard one favorable statement made of any “name” movie made in the last several years. . . . I have heard no movie which received any kind of favorable mention which was not hard to find playing, either because of its lack of popularity or because of its age. In your remarks the other evening about De Sica’s earlier movies you praised them all without reservation until you mentioned his “most famous film — The Bicycle Thief, a great work, no doubt, though I personally find it too carefully and classically structured.” You make me think that the charge that the favorability of your comments on any given movie varies inversely with its popularity, is indeed true even down to the last nuance.

  But even as I write this, I can almost feel you begin to tighten up, to start thinking of something to say to show that I am wrong. I really wish you wouldn’t feel that way. I would much rather you leaned back in your chair, looked up at the ceiling and asked yourself, “Well, how about it? Is it true or not? Am I really biased against movies other people like, because they like them? When I see a popular movie, do I see it as it is or do I really just try to pick it apart?” You see, I’m not like those other people that have been haranguing you. I may be presumptuous, but I am trying sincerely to be of help to you. I think you have a great deal of potential as a reviewer. . . . But I am convinced that great a potential as you have, you will never realize any more of that potential than you have now until you face those questions mentioned before, honestly, seriously, and courageously, no matter how painful it may be. I want you to think of these questions, I don’t want you to think of how to convince me of their answers. I don’t want you to look around to find some popular movie to which you can give a good review and thus “prove me wrong.” That would be evading the issue of whether the questions were really true or not. Furthermore, I am not “attacking” you and you have no need to defend yourself to me.

  May I interrupt? Please, attack me instead — it’s this kind of “constructive criticism” that misses the point of everything I’m trying to say that drives me mad. It’s enough to make one howl with despair, this concern for my potential — as if I were a cow giving thin milk. But back to the letter —

  In fact, I would prefer that you make no reply to me at all about the answers to these questions, since I have no need of the answers and because almost any answer given now, without long and thoughtful consideration, would almost surely be an attempt to justify yourself, and that’s just what you don’t have to do, and shouldn’t do. No one needs to know the answers to these questions except you, and you are the only person who must answer. In short, I would not for the world have you silence any voices in you . . . and most certainly not a concerned little voice saying, “Am I really being fair? Do I see the whole movie or just the part I like—or just the part I don’t like?”

  And so on he goes for another few paragraphs. Halfway through, I thought this man was pulling my leg; as I got further and read “how you missed the child-like charm and innocence of The Parent Trap . . . is quite beyond me,” I decided it’s mass culture that’s pulling both legs out from under us all. Dear man, the only real question your letter made me ask myself is, “What’s the use?” and I didn’t lean back in my chair and look up at the ceiling, I went to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a good stiff drink.

  How completely has mass culture subverted even the role of the critic when listeners suggest that because the movies a critic reviews favorably are unpopular and hard to find, that the critic must be playing some snobbish game with himself and the public? Why are you listening to a minority radio station like KPFA? Isn’t it because you want something you don’t get on commercial radio? I try to direct you to films that, if you search them out, will give you something you won’t get from The Parent Trap. You consider it rather “suspect” that I don’t praise more “name” movies. Well, what makes a “name” movie is simply a saturation advertising campaign, the same kind of campaign that puts samples of liquid detergents at your door. The “name” pictures of Hollywood are made the same way they are sold: by pretesting the various ingredients, removing all possible elements that might affront the mass audience, adding all possible elements that will titillate the largest number of people. As the CBS television advertising slogan put it — “Titillate — and dominate.” South Pacific is seventh in Variety’s list of all-time top grossers. Do you know anybody who thought it was a good movie? Was it popular in any meaningful sense or do we just call it popular because it was sold? The tie-in campaign for Doris Day in Lover Come Back included a Doris Day album to be sold for a dollar with a purchase of Imperial margarine. With a schedule of 23 million direct mail pieces, newspaper, radio, TV and store ads, Lover Come Back became a “name” picture.

  I try not to waste air time discussing obviously bad movies — popular though they may be; and I don’t discuss unpopular bad movies because you’re not going to see them anyway; and there wouldn’t be much point or sport in hitting people who are already down. I do think it’s important to take time on movies which are inflated by critical acclaim and which some of you night assume to be the films to see.

  There were some extraordinarily unpleasant anonymous letters after the last broadcast on “The New American Cinema.” Some were obscene; the wittiest called me a snail eating the tender leaves off young artists. I recognize your assumptions: the critic is supposed to be rational, clever, heartless and empty, envious of the creative fire of the artist, and if the critic is a woman, she is supposed to be cold and castrating. The artist is supposed to be delicate and sensitive and in need of tender care and nourishment. Well, this nineteenth-century romanticism is pretty silly in twentieth-century Bohemia.

  I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

  Some of you write me flattering letters and I’m grateful, but one last request: if you write me, please don’t say, “This is the first time I’ve ever written a fan letter.” Don’t say it, even if it’s true. You make me feel as if I were taking your virginity — and it’s just too sordid.

  Billy Budd

  Billy Budd is not a great motion picture, but it is a very good one — a clean, honest work of intelligence and craftsmanship. It ranks as one of the best films of 1962, and by contrast, it exposes what a slovenly, incoherent production Mutiny on the Bounty is. Billy Budd not only has a strong story line; it has a core of meaning that charges the story, gives it tension and intellectual excitement.

  In the film version of Billy Budd, Melville’s story has been stripped for action; and I think this was probably the right method — the ambiguities of the story probably come through more clearly than if the film were not so straightforward in its narrative line. The very cleanness of the narrative method, Peter Ustinov’s efficient direction, Robert Krasker’s stylized, controlled photography, help to release the meanings. The film could easily have been clogged by metaphysical speculation and homo-erotic overtones. Instead, it is a good, tense movie that doesn’t try to tell us too much — and so gives us a very great deal.

  Terence Stamp is a remarkably intelligent casting selection for Billy. If he were a more feminine type — as the role is often filled on the stage — all the overtones would be cheapened and l
imited. Stamp, fortunately, can wear white pants and suggest angelic splendor without falling into the narcissistic poses that juveniles so often mistake for grace. Robert Ryan gives a fine performance in the difficult role of Claggart. Ryan has had so few chances at anything like characterization in his movie career that each time he comes across, it seems amazing that he could have retained such power and technique. I don’t know how many dozens of times I’ve seen him, but the roles that I remember are his prizefighter in The Set-Up, the anti-Semite in Crossfire, the vicious millionaire in Max Ophuls’s Caught, the projectionist in Clash by Night, the central figure in God’s Little Acre. Considering that he is a very specialized physical type — the tall, rangy American of Western mythology — his variety of characterizations is rather extraordinary. Perhaps just because he is the type who looks at home in cowboy movies, critics rarely single out his performances for commendation. The American reviewers of Billy Budd seem more concerned to complain that this Claggart doesn’t have an English accent than to judge his performance. But it is not at all necessary that Claggart speak with an English accent: his antecedents are deliberately vague in Melville as in the film, and the men on board are drawn from all over. It may even be better that Claggart’s accent does not define his background for us.

  Ryan’s Claggart has the requisite Satanic dignity: he makes evil comprehensible. The evil he defines is the way the world works, but it is also the self-hatred that makes it necessary for him to destroy the image of goodness. In the film Claggart is drawn to Billy but overcomes his momentary weakness. Melville, with all his circumlocutions, makes it overwhelmingly clear that Claggart’s “depravity according to nature” is, among other things, homosexual, or as he coyly puts it, “a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady’s fan.” Billy’s innocence and goodness are intolerable to Claggart because Billy is so beautiful.

  Neither Stamp nor Ryan can be faulted. Unfortunately, the role of Captain Vere as played by Ustinov is a serious misconception that weakens the film, particularly in the last section. Ustinov gives a fine performance but it doesn’t belong in the story of Billy Budd: it reduces the meanings to something clear-cut and banal. Ustinov’s physical presence is all wrong; his warm, humane, sensual face turns Melville’s Starry Vere into something like a cliché of the man who wants to do the right thing, the liberal. We believe him when he presents his arguments about justice and law.

  Perhaps it is Ustinov’s principles that have prevented him from seeing farther into Melville’s equivocations. Ustinov has explained that he was concerned “with a most horrible situation where people are compelled by the letter of the law, which is archaic, to carry out sentences which they don’t wish to do. That obviously produces a paradox which is tragic.” This is, no doubt, an important subject for Ustinov, but it is not the kind of paradox that interested Melville. Melville, so plagued by Billy Budd that he couldn’t get it in final form (he was still revising it when he died), had far more unsettling notions of its content. As Ustinov presents the film, the conflict is between the almost abstract forces of good (Billy) and evil (Claggart) with the Captain a human figure tragically torn by the rules and demands of authority. Obviously. But what gives the story its fascination, its greatness, is the ambivalent Captain; and there is nothing in Ustinov’s performance, or in his conception of the story, to suggest the unseemly haste with which Vere tries to hang Billy. In Melville’s account the other officers can’t understand why Vere doesn’t simply put Billy in confinement “in a way dictated by usage and postpone further action in so extraordinary a case to such time as they should again join the squadron, and then transfer it to the admiral.” The surgeon thinks the Captain must be “suddenly affected in his mind.” Melville’s Vere, who looks at the dead Claggart and exclaims, “Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!” is not so much a tragic victim of the law as he is Claggart’s master and a distant relative perhaps of the Grand Inquisitor. Sweet Starry Vere is the evil we can’t detect: the man whose motives and conflicts we can’t fathom. Claggart we can spot, but he is merely the underling doing the Captain’s work: it is the Captain, Billy’s friend, who continues the logic by which saints must be destroyed.

  Though it is short, Billy Budd is one of the most convoluted, one of the strangest works Melville wrote (in some ways even stranger than Pierre). Among its peculiarities is a chapter entitled “A Digression,” which is given over to a discussion between the ship’s purser and the ship’s surgeon after Billy’s death. Their subject is why Billy’s body during the hanging did not go through the movements which are supposed to be invariable in such cases. The absence of spasm — which is a euphemism for ejaculation — is rather like a variation or a reversal of the famous death stink of Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov. I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far, but it’s interesting that Melville and Dostoyevsky, so closely contemporary — Melville born in 1819, Dostoyevsky in 1821 — should both have been concerned in works written just before their own deaths with the physical phenomena of death. Billy Budd, by the absence of normal human reactions at the moment of death, turns into a saint, a holy innocent, both more and less than a man. Father Zossima, by the presence of all-too-mortal stench after death, is robbed of his saintliness. Melville’s lingering on this singularity about Billy Budd’s death didn’t strike me so forcibly the first time I read the story, but reading it again recently, and, as it happened, reading it just after William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, with all its elaborate fantasies of violent deaths and gaudy ejaculations, Melville’s treatment seems odder than ever. Billy Budd’s goodness is linked with presexuality or nonsexuality; his failure to comprehend evil in the universe is linked with his not being really quite a man. He is, in Melville’s view, too pure and beautiful to be subject to the spasms of common musculature.

  Before this rereading I had associated the story only with that other work of Dostoyevsky’s to which it bears more obvious relationships — The Idiot. It is, of course, as a concept rather than as a character that Billy resembles Prince Myshkin. It may be worth pointing out that in creating a figure of abnormal goodness and simplicity, both authors found it important for their hero to have an infirmity — Myshkin is epileptic, Billy stammers. In both stories the figure is also both naturally noble and also of aristocratic birth: Myshkin a prince, Billy a bastard found in a silk-lined basket. And in the structure of both, the heroes have their opposite numbers — Myshkin and Rogozhin, Billy and Claggart. For both authors, a good man is not a whole man; there is the other side of the human coin, the dark side. Even with his last words, “God bless Captain Vere,” Billy demonstrates that he is not a man: he is unable to comprehend the meaning of Vere’s experience, unable to comprehend that he will die just because he is innocent.

  What’s surprising about the film is how much of all this is suggested and comes through. What is missing in the film — the reason it is a very good film but not a great one — is that passion which gives Melville’s work its extraordinary beauty and power. I wonder if perhaps the key to this failure is in that warm, humane face of Peter Ustinov, who perhaps, not just as an actor, but also as adaptor and director, is too much the relaxed worldly European to share Melville’s American rage — the emotionality that is blocked and held back and still pours through in his work. Melville is not a civilized, European writer; he is our greatest writer because he is the American primitive struggling to say more than he knows how to say, struggling to say more than he knows. He is perhaps the most confused of all great writers; he wrestles with words and feelings. It is probably no accident that Billy’s speech is blocked. Dostoyevsky is believed to have shared Myshkin’s epilepsy, and when Melville can’t articulate, he flails in all directions. Even when we can’t understand clearly what he is trying to say, we respond to his Promethean torment, to the unresolved complexities.

  The movie does not struggle; it moves carefully and rhythmically through the action to the conclusion. Its precision — which is its gr
eatest virtue — is, when compared with the oblique, disturbing novella, evidence of its limitations. Much of what makes the story great is in Melville’s effort to achieve new meanings (and some of the meanings we can only guess at from his retreats and disguises) and it is asking rather too much of the moviemakers to say what he wasn’t sure about himself. But as Ustinov interprets Vere, Billy is just a victim of unfortunate circumstances, and the film is no more than a tragedy of justice. There’s a good deal in the film, but the grandeur of Melville is not there.

  Yojimbo

  Kurosawa has made the first great shaggy-man movie. Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) is a glorious comedy-satire of force: the story of the bodyguard who kills the bodies he is hired to guard. Our Westerner, the freelance professional gunman, the fastest draw in the West, has become the unemployed samurai; he gun for hire has become the sword for hire. But when our Westerner came into town, although his own past was often shady, he picked the right side, the farmers against the gamblers and cattle thieves, the side of advancing law and order and decency and schools and churches. Toshiro Mifune, the samurai without a master, the professional killer looking for employment, walks into a town divided by two rival merchants quarreling over a gambling concession, each supporting a gang of killers. The hero is the Westerner all right, the stranger in town, the disinterested outsider with his special skills and the remnants of a code of behavior, but to whom can he give his allegiance? Nobody represents any principle, the scattered weak are simply weak.