I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Just as new work in other arts is often attacked because it violates the accepted standards and thus seems crude and ugly and incoherent, great new directors are very likely to be condemned precisely on the grounds that they’re not even good directors, that they don’t know their “business.” Which, in some cases, is true, but does it matter when that “business” has little to do with what they want to express in films? It may even be a hindrance, leading them to banal slickness, instead of discovery of their own methods. For some, at least, Cocteau may be right: “The only technique worth having is the technique you invent for yourself.” The director must be judged on the basis of what he produces — his films — and if he can make great films without knowing the standard methods, without the usual craftsmanship of the “good director,” then that is the way he works. I would amend Sarris’s premise to, “In works of a lesser rank, technical competence can help to redeem the weaknesses of the material.” In fact it seems to be precisely this category that the auteur critics are most interested in — the routine material that a good craftsman can make into a fast and enjoyable movie. What, however, makes the auteur critics so incomprehensible, is not their preference for works of this category (in this they merely follow the lead of children who also prefer simple action films and westerns and horror films to works that make demands on their understanding) but their truly astonishing inability to exercise taste and judgment within their area of preference. Moviegoing kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics: every kid I’ve talked to knows that Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a “masterpiece” by half the Cahiers Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a terrible bore.

  The Middle Circle

  . . . the second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value.

  Up to this point there has really been no theory, and now, when Sarris begins to work on his foundation, the entire edifice of civilized standards of taste collapses while he’s tacking down his floorboards. Traditionally, in any art, the personalities of all those involved in a production have been a factor in judgment, but that the distinguishability of personality should in itself be a criterion of value completely confuses normal judgment. The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better? Hitchcock’s personality is certainly more distinguishable in Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, than Carol Reed’s in The Stars Look Down, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, An Outcast of the Islands, if for no other reason than because Hitchcock repeats while Reed tackles new subject matter. But how does this disinguishable personality function as a criterion for judging the works? We recognize the hands of Carné and Prévert in Le Jour se Lève, but that is not what makes it a beautiful film; we can just as easily recognize their hands in Quai des Brumes — which is not such a good film. We can recognize that Le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madame de . . . are both the work of Ophuls, but Le Plaisir is not a great film, and Madame de . . . is.

  Often the works in which we are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst films — when he falls back on the devices he has already done to death. When a famous director makes a good movie, we look at the movie, we don’t think about the director’s personality; when he makes a stinker we notice his familiar touches because there’s not much else to watch. When Preminger makes an expert, entertaining whodunit like Laura, we don’t look for his personality (it has become part of the texture of the film); when he makes an atrocity like Whirlpool, there’s plenty of time to look for his “personality” — if that’s your idea of a good time.

  It could even be argued, I think, that Hitchcock’s uniformity, his mastery of tricks, and his cleverness at getting audiences to respond according to his calculations — the feedback he wants and gets from them — reveal not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology, that his methods and approach are not those of an artist but a prestidigitator. The auteur critics respond just as Hitchcock expects the gullible to respond. This is not so surprising — often the works auteur critics call masterpieces are ones that seem to reveal the contempt of the director for the audience.

  It’s hard to believe that Sarris seriously attempts to apply “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value” because when this premise becomes troublesome, he just tries to brazen his way out of difficulties. For example, now that John Huston’s work has gone flat* Sarris casually dismisses him with: “Huston is virtually a forgotten man with a few actors’ classics behind him . . .” If The Maltese Falcon, perhaps the most high-style thriller ever made in America, a film Huston both wrote and directed, is not a director’s film, what is? And if the distinguishable personality of the director is a criterion of value, then how can Sarris dismiss the Huston who comes through so unmistakably in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, or Beat the Devil, or even in a muddled Huston film like Key Largo? If these are actors’ movies, then what on earth is a director’s movie?

  Isn’t the auteur theory a hindrance to clear judgment of Huston’s movies and of his career? Disregarding the theory, we see some fine film achievements and we perceive a remarkably distinctive directorial talent; we also see intervals of weak, halfhearted assignments like Across the Pacific and In This Our Life. Then, after Moulin Rouge, except for the blessing of Beat the Devil, we see a career that splutters out in ambitious failures like Moby Dick and confused projects like The Roots of Heaven and The Misfits, and strictly commercial projects like Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. And this kind of career seems more characteristic of film history, especially in the United States, than the ripening development and final mastery envisaged by the auteur theory — a theory that makes it almost de rigeur to regard Hitchcock’s American films as superior to his early English films. Is Huston’s career so different, say, from Fritz Lang’s? How is it that Huston’s early good — almost great — work, must be rejected along with his mediocre recent work, but Fritz Lang, being sanctified as an auteur, has his bad recent work praised along with his good? Employing more usual norms, if you respect the Fritz Lang who made M and You Only Live Once, if you enjoy the excesses of style and the magnificent absurdities of a film like Metropolis, then it is only good sense to reject the ugly stupidity of Journey to the Lost City. It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that you are incapable of judging either.

  A few years ago, a friend who reviewed Jean Renoir’s University of California production of his play Carola, hailed it as “a work of genius.” When I asked my friend how he could so describe this very unfortunate play, he said, “Why, of course, it’s a work of genius. Renoir’s a genius, so anything he does is a work of genius.” This could almost be a capsule version of the auteur theory (just substitute Hatari! for Carola) and in this reductio ad absurdum, viewing a work is superfluous, as the judgment is a priori. It’s like buying clothes by the label: this is Dior, so it’s good. (This is not so far from the way the auteur critics work, either.)

  Sarris doesn’t even play his own game with any decent attention to the rules: it is as absurd to praise Lang’s recent bad work as to dismiss Huston’s early good work; surely it would be more consistent if he also tried to make a case for Huston’s bad pictures? That would be more consistent than devising a category called “actors’ classics” to explain his good pictures away. If The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre are actors’ classics, then what makes Hawks’s To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (which were obviously tailored to the personalities of Bogart and Bacall) the work of an auteur?

  Sarris believes that what makes an auteur is “an élan of the soul.” (This critical language is barbarous. Where else should élan come from? It’s like saying “a digestion of the stomach.” A film critic need not be a theoretician, but it is necessary that he
know how to use words. This might, indeed, be a first premise for a theory.) Those who have this élan presumably have it forever and their films reveal the “organic unity” of the directors’ careers; and those who don’t have it — well, they can only make “actors’ classics.” It’s ironic that a critic trying to establish simple “objective” rules as a guide for critics who he thinks aren’t gifted enough to use taste and intelligence, ends up — where, actually, he began — with a theory based on mystical insight. This might really make demands on the auteur critics if they did not simply take the easy way out by arbitrary decisions of who’s got “it” and who hasn’t. Their decisions are not merely not based on their theory; their decisions are beyond criticism. It’s like a woman’s telling us that she feels a certain dress does something for her: her feeling has about as much to do with critical judgment as the auteur critics’ feeling that Minnelli has “it,” but Huston never had “it.”

  Even if a girl had plenty of “it,” she wasn’t expected to keep it forever. But this “élan” is not supposed to be affected by the vicissitudes of fortune, the industrial conditions of moviemaking, the turmoil of a country, or the health of a director. Indeed, Sarris says, “If directors and other artists cannot be wrenched from their historical environments, aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate branch of ethnography.” May I suggest that if, in order to judge movies, the auteur critics must wrench the directors from their historical environments (which is, to put it mildly, impossible) so that they can concentrate on the detection of that “élan,” they are reducing aesthetics to a form of idiocy. Élan as the permanent attribute Sarris posits can only be explained in terms of a cult of personality. May I suggest that a more meaningful description of élan is what a man feels when he is working at the height of his powers — and what we respond to in works of art with the excited cry of “This time, he’s really done it” or “This shows what he could do when he got the chance” or “He’s found his style” or “I never realized he had it in him to do anything so good,” a response to his joy in creativity.

  Sarris experiences “joy” when he recognizes a pathetic little link between two Raoul Walsh pictures (he never does explain whether the discovery makes him think the pictures are any better) but he wants to see artists in a pristine state — their essences, perhaps? — separated from all the life that has formed them and to which they try to give expression.

  The Inner Circle

  The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.

  This is a remarkable formulation: it is the opposite of what we have always taken for granted in the arts, that the artist expresses himself in the unity of form and content. What Sarris believes to be “the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art” is what has generally been considered the frustrations of a man working against the given material. Fantastic as this formulation is, it does something that the first two premises didn’t do: it clarifies the interests of the auteur critics. If we have been puzzled because the auteur critics seemed so deeply involved, even dedicated, in becoming connoisseurs of trash, now we can see by this theoretical formulation that trash is indeed their chosen province of film.

  Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that’s handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots. If his “style” is in conflict with the story line or subject matter, so much the better — more chance for tension. Now we can see why there has been so much use of the term “personality” in this aesthetics (the term which seems so inadequate when discussing the art of Griffith or Renoir or Murnau or Dreyer) — a routine, commercial movie can sure use a little “personality.”

  Now that we have reached the inner circle (the bull’s eye turns out to be an empty socket) we can see why the shoddiest films are often praised the most. Subject matter is irrelevant (so long as it isn’t treated sensitively — which is bad) and will quickly be disposed of by auteur critics who know that the smart director isn’t responsible for that anyway; they’ll get on to the important subject — his mise-en-scène. The director who fights to do something he cares about is a square. Now we can at least begin to understand why there was such contempt toward Huston for what was, in its way, a rather extraordinary effort — the Moby Dick that failed; why Movie considers Roger Corman a better director than Fred Zinnemann and ranks Joseph Losey next to God, why Bogdanovich, Mekas, and Sarris give their highest critical ratings to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (mighty big crevasses there). If Carol Reed had made only movies like The Man Between — in which he obviously worked to try to make something out of a ragbag of worn-out bits of material — he might be considered “brilliant” too. (But this is doubtful: although even the worst Reed is superior to Aldrich’s Baby Jane, Reed would probably be detected, and rejected, as a man interested in substance rather than sensationalism.)

  I am angry, but am I unjust? Here’s Sarris:

  A Cukor who works with all sorts of projects has a more developed abstract style than a Bergman who is free to develop his own scripts. Not that Bergman lacks personality, but his work has declined with the depletion of his ideas largely because his technique never equaled his sensibility. Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder are other examples of writer-directors without adequate technical mastery. By contrast, Douglas Sirk and Otto Preminger have moved up the scale because their miscellaneous projects reveal a stylistic consistency.

  How neat it all is — Bergman’s “work has declined with the depletion of his ideas largely because his technique never equaled his sensibility.” But what on earth does that mean? How did Sarris perceive Bergman’s sensibility except through his technique? Is Sarris saying what he seems to be saying, that if Bergman had developed more “technique,” his work wouldn’t be dependent on his ideas? I’m afraid this is what he means, and that when he refers to Cukor’s “more developed abstract style” he means by “abstract” something unrelated to ideas, a technique not dependent on the content of the films. This is curiously reminiscent of a view common enough in the business world, that it’s better not to get too involved, too personally interested in business problems, or they take over your life; and besides, you don’t function as well when you’ve lost your objectivity. But this is the opposite of how an artist works. His technique, his style, is determined by his range of involvements, and his preference for certain themes. Cukor’s style is no more abstract(!) than Bergman’s: Cukor has a range of subject matter that he can handle and when he gets a good script within his range (like The Philadelphia Story or Pat and Mike) he does a good job; but he is at an immense artistic disadvantage, compared with Bergman, because he is dependent on the ideas of so many (and often bad) scriptwriters and on material which is often alien to his talents. It’s amusing (and/or depressing) to see the way auteur critics tend to downgrade writer-directors — who are in the best position to use the film medium for personal expression.

  Sarris does some pretty fast shuffling with Huston and Bergman; why doesn’t he just come out and admit that writer-directors are disqualified by his third premise? They can’t arrive at that “interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema” because a writer-director has no tension between his personality and his material, so there’s nothing for the auteur critic to extrapolate from.

  What is all this nonsense about extrapolating “interior” meaning from the tension between a director’s personality and his material? A competent commercial director generally does the best he can with what he’s got to work with. Where is the “tension”? And if you can locate some, what kind of meaning could you draw out of it except that the director’s having a bad time with lousy material or material he doesn’t like? Or maybe he’s trying to speed up the damned production so he can do something else that he has some hopes for? Are these critics honestly (and f
utilely) looking for “interior meanings” or is this just some form of intellectual diddling that helps to sustain their pride while they’re viewing silly movies? Where is the tension in Howard Hawks’s films? When he has good material, he’s capable of better than good direction, as he demonstrates in films like Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday; and in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep he demonstrates that with help from the actors, he can jazz up ridiculous scripts. But what “interior meaning” can be extrapolated from an enjoyable, harmless, piece of kitsch like Only Angels Have Wings; what can the auteur critics see in it beyond the sex and glamor and fantasies of the high-school boys’ universe — exactly what the mass audience liked it for? And when Hawks’s material and/or cast is dull and when his heart isn’t in the production — when by the auteur theory he should show his “personality,” the result is something soggy like The Big Sky.

  George Cukor’s modest statement, “Give me a good script and I’ll be a hundred times better as a director”* provides some notion of how a director may experience the problem of the given material. What can Cukor do with a script like The Chapman Report but try to kid it, to dress it up a bit, to show off the talents of Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom and Glynis Johns, and to give the total production a little flair and craftsmanship. At best, he can make an entertaining bad movie. A director with something like magical gifts can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But if he has it in him to do more in life than make silk purses, the triumph is minor — even if the purse is lined with gold. Only by the use of the auteur theory does this little victory become “ultimate glory.” For some unexplained reason those traveling in auteur circles believe that making that purse out of sow’s ear is an infinitely greater accomplishment than making a solid carrying case out of a good piece of leather (as, for example, a Zinnemann does with From Here to Eternity or The Nun’s Story).