I Lost It at the Movies Read online

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  I LOST IT

  AT THE MOVIES

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  PAULINE KAEL

  An Atlantic Monthly Press Book

  LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY • BOSTON • TORONTO

  COPYRIGHT 1954, © 1955, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, BY PAULINE KAEL

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW TO BE PRINTED IN A MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 65-10908

  FIRST PRINTING

  “Throwing the Race” is reprinted by permission of Moviegoer. “The Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: La Notte, La Dolce Vita, Marienbad” is reprinted from The Massachusetts Review, © 1963, The Massachusetts Review, Inc. “The Earrings of Madame de . . . ,” “The Golden Coach,” “Smiles of a Summer Night” are reprinted by permission of Kulchur. “Morality Plays Right and Left,” “Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?,” “Fantasies of the Art House Audience,” and “Salt of the Earth” are reprinted by permission of Sight and Sound. “Commitment and the Straitjacket,” “Circles and Squares,” “Hud,” “The Innocents,” “One, Two, Three,” “Billy Budd,” “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man,” and “Films of the Quarter,” note on L’Avventura, are reprinted from Film Quarterly, by permission of the Regents of the University of California.

  ATLANTIC–LITTLE, BROWN BOOKS ARE PUBLISHED BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Little, Brown & Company (Canada) Limited

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to express my gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and its president, Mr. Gordon N. Ray.

  I wish to thank Peter Davison and William Abrahams of the Atlantic Monthly Press, and Gary Arnold and Alan Hislop for editorial advice and assistance. And I wish to express my admiration and respect for Dwight Macdonald, who despite my hectoring him in print has, personally, returned good for evil.

  Acknowledgment is made to the Atlantic Monthly, Film Quarterly, Partisan Review, Sight and Sound, the Massachusetts Review, Kulchur, Art Film Publications, the Second Coming, Film Culture, and Moviegoer for permission to use material which they originally published.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?

  I: BROADSIDES

  Fantasies of the Art-House Audience

  The Glamour of Delinquency

  On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Blackboard Jungle . . .

  Commitment and the Straitjacket

  Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Sons and Lovers, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . . .

  Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood

  II: RETROSPECTIVE REVIEWS: MOVIES REMEMBERED WITH PLEASURE

  The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953)

  The Golden Coach (1953)

  Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

  La Grande Illusion (1937)

  Forbidden Games (1952)

  Shoeshine (1947)

  The Beggar’s Opera (1953)

  The Seven Samurai (1954)

  III: BROADCASTS AND REVIEWS, 1961–1963

  Breathless, and the Daisy Miller Doll

  The Cousins

  Canned Americana

  West Side Story

  L’Avventura

  One, Two, Three

  The Mark

  Kagi

  The Innocents

  A View from the Bridge, and a Note on The Children’s Hour

  The Day the Earth Caught Fire

  The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita

  A Taste of Honey

  Victim

  Lolita

  Shoot the Piano Player

  Jules and Jim

  Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man

  Fires on the Plain (Nobi)

  Replying to Listeners

  Billy Budd

  Yojimbo

  Devi

  How the Long Distance Runner Throws the Race

  8½: Confessions of a Movie Director

  IV: POLEMICS

  Is There a Cure for Film Criticism? Or, Some Unhappy Thoughts on Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality

  Circles and Squares

  Morality Plays Right and Left

  Introduction

  Zeitgeist and Poltergeist;

  Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?

  Reflections from the side of the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel

  “Bring your bathing suit,” said the movie producer, who was phoning me to confirm our date for lunch at his hotel, and before I could think of a way to explain that I didn’t have one with me, he added, “And remember, you’re meeting people for cocktails in my suite at six, so just bring your change of clothes.” Now I was completely out of my depth: I just said I would join him at 2:30 and hung up. Somehow I didn’t want to come right out and say that I didn’t have a change of clothes in the evening sense that he meant. Los Angeles dislocates my values, makes me ashamed of not being all the things I’m not and don’t ordinarily care to be. Each time I get on the jet to return to San Francisco it’s like turning the time-machine backward and being restored to an old civilization that I understand.

  Los Angeles is only 400 miles away from where I live and so close by jet that I can breakfast at home, give a noon lecture at one of the universities in LA, and be back in time to prepare dinner. But it’s the city of the future, and I am more a stranger there than in a foreign country. In a foreign country people don’t expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don’t consider that you might be different because they don’t recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.

  Feeling rather seedy in the black and brown Italian suit which had seemed quite decent in San Francisco, I arrived at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, sans bathing suit or change of clothes. And as I walked past the recumbent forms to the producer, also recumbent, who was limply waving to me, I remembered Katharine Hepburn as poor Alice Adams in her simple organdy frock among the plushly overdressed rich girls at the party. Only here it was I who was overdressed; they were expensively undressed. They didn’t look young, and they didn’t act old, these people eating and drinking and sunning themselves around the pool. They seemed to be ageless like crocodiles; and although they weren’t fat, they were flabby.

  Despite the narcissism of their attitudes, and the extraordinary amount of loving care they lavished on their bodies, each giving way to the sun-blessed fantasy of himself, stretching this way and that to catch or avoid the rays, it was impossible to feel superior to them. They could afford to make this spectacle of themselves.

  In San Francisco, vulgarity, “bad taste,” ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that it is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can’t afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety. Big money and its way of life is exciting; the vulgarity of the powerful is ugly, but not boring. This, you begin to feel, is how people behave when they’re strong enough to act out their fantasies of wealth. In this environment, if you’re not making it in a big way, you’re worse than nothing — you’re a failure. But if you can still pass for young, maybe there’s stil
l time to make it; or, at least, you can delay the desperation and self-contempt that result from accepting these standards that so few can meet. It’s easy to reject all this when I’m back in San Francisco. But not here. You can’t really laugh at the Beverly Hills Hotel and people who pay $63 a day for a suite that’s like a schoolboy’s notions of luxury. It’s too impressive. Laughter would stick in the throat — like sour grapes.

  What “sensible” people have always regarded as the most preposterous, unreal and fantastic side of life in California — the sun palace of Los Angeles and its movie-centered culture — is becoming embarrassingly, “fantastically” actual, not just here but almost anywhere. It embodies the most common, the most widespread dream — luxury in the sun, a state of permanent vacation. And as it is what millions of people want and will pay money for, the Hollywood fantasy is economically practical. Across the country, homes become as simple, bare and convenient as simulated motels, and motels are frequently used as residences.

  But pioneers suffer from stresses we don’t know about, and the people I met in Los Angeles seem to have developed a terrible tic: they cannot stop talking about their “cultural explosion.” The producer went on and on about it, about their new museums, and their concerts, and their galleries, and their “legitimate” collegiate theater. It was like my first trip to New York, when I wanted to see skyscrapers and go to shows and hear jazz, and New Yorkers wanted me to admire the flowers blooming in Rockefeller Plaza. I wanted to talk about the Los Angeles that fascinated and disturbed me, and about movies and why there were fewer good movies in 1963 than in any year in my memory. He discussed the finer things in life, trying to convince me and maybe himself that Los Angeles, in its cultural boom, was making phenomenal strides toward becoming like other cities — only, of course, more so.

  I dutifully wrote in my notebook but not about what he was saying. Perhaps, because the whole scene was so nightmarish, with all the people spending their ordinary just-like-any-other-day at the pool, conducting business by the telephones whose wires stretched around them like lifelines, and this earnest man in wet trunks ordering me double Bourbons on the rocks and talking culture while deepening his tan, I began to think about horror movies.

  Zeitgeist and Poltergeist;

  Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?

  The week before, at home, some academic friends had been over and as we talked and drank we looked at a television showing of Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula. Dwight Frye’s appearance on the screen had us suddenly squealing and shrieking, and it was obvious that old vampire movies were part of our common experience. We talked about the famous ones, Murnau’s Nosferatu and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and we began to get fairly involved in the lore of the genre — the strategy of the bite, the special earth for the coffins, the stake through the heart versus the rays of the sun as disposal methods, the cross as vampire repellent, et al. We had begun to surprise each other by the affectionate, nostalgic tone of our mock erudition when the youngest person present, an instructor in English, said, in a clear, firm tone, “The Beast with Five Fingers is the greatest horror picture I’ve ever seen.” Stunned that so bright a young man could display such shocking taste, preferring a Warner Brothers forties mediocrity to the classics, I gasped, “But why?” And he answered, “Because it’s completely irrational. It doesn’t make any sense, and that’s the true terror.”

  Upset by his neat little declaration — existentialism in a nutshell — by the calm matter-of-factness of it, and by the way the others seemed to take it for granted, I wanted to pursue the subject. But O. Henry’s remark “Conversation in Texas is seldom continuous” applies to California, too. Dracula had ended, and the conversation shifted to other, more “serious” subjects.

  But his attitude, which had never occurred to me, helped to explain some of my recent moviegoing experiences. I don’t mean that I agree that The Beast with Five Fingers is a great horror film, but that his enthusiasm for the horror that cannot be rationalized by the mythology and rules of the horror game related to audience reactions that had been puzzling me.

  Last year I had gone to see a famous French film, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, which had arrived in San Francisco in a dubbed version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and was playing on a double-horror bill in a huge Market Street theater. It was Saturday night and the theater, which holds 2646, was so crowded I had trouble finding a seat.

  Even dubbed, Eyes Without a Face, which Franju called a “poetic fantasy,” is austere and elegant: the exquisite photography is by the great Shuftan, the music by Maurice Jane, the superb gowns by Givenchy. It’s a symbolist attack on science and the ethics of medicine, and though I thought this attack as simpleminded in its way as the usual young poet’s denunciation of war or commerce, it is in some peculiar way a classic of horror.

  Pierre Brasseur, as a doctor, experiments systematically, removing the faces of beautiful young kidnaped women, trying to graft them onto the ruined head of his daughter. He keeps failing, the girls are destroyed and yet he persists — in some terrible parody of the scientific method. In the end, the daughter — still only eyes without a face — liberates the dogs on which he also experiments and they tear off his head.

  It’s both bizarrely sophisticated (with Alida Valli as his mistress doing the kidnaping in a black leather coat, recalling the death images from Cocteau’s Orpheus) and absurdly naive. Franju’s style is almost as purified as Robert Bresson’s, and although I dislike the mixture of austerity and mysticism with blood and gore, it produced its effect — a vague, floating, almost lyric sense of horror, an almost abstract atmosphere, impersonal and humorless. It has nothing like the fun of a good old horror satire like The Bride of Frankenstein with Elsa Lanchester’s hair curling electrically instead of just frizzing as usual, and Ernest Thesiger toying with mandrake roots and tiny ladies and gentlemen in glass jars. It’s a horror film that takes itself very seriously, and even though I thought its intellectual pretensions silly, I couldn’t shake off the exquisite, dread images.

  But the audience seemed to be reacting to a different movie. They were so noisy the dialogue was inaudible; they talked until the screen gave promise of bloody ghastliness. Then the chatter subsided to rise again in noisy approval of the gory scenes. When a girl in the film seemed about to be mutilated, a young man behind me jumped up and down and shouted encouragement. “Somebody’s going to get it,” he sang out gleefully. The audience, which was, I’d judge, predominantly between fifteen and twenty-five, and at least a third feminine, was as pleased and excited by the most revolting, obsessive images as that older, mostly male audience is when the nudes appear in The Immoral Mr. Teas or Not Tonight, Henry. They’d gotten what they came for: they hadn’t been cheated. But nobody seemed to care what the movie was about or be interested in the logic of the plot — the reasons for the gore.

  And audiences have seemed indifferent to incomprehensible sections in big expensive pictures. For example, how is it that the immense audience for The Bridge on the River Kwai, after all those hours of watching a story unfold, didn’t express discomfort or outrage or even plain curiosity about what exactly happened at the end — which through bad direction or perhaps sloppy editing went by too fast to be sorted out and understood. Was it possible that audiences no longer cared if a film was so untidily put together that information crucial to the plot or characterizations was obscure or omitted altogether? What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was such a mess that Time, after calling it “the year’s scariest, funniest and most sophisticated thriller,” got the plot garbled.

  In recent years, largely because of the uncertainty of producers about what will draw, films in production may shift from one script to another, or may be finally cut so that key sequences are omitted. And the oddity is that it doesn’t seem to matter to the audience. I couldn’t tell what was going on in parts of 55 Days at Peking. I was flabbergasted when Cleopatra, with no hint or preparation, suddenly demonstrated clairvoyant powers
, only to dispense with them as quickly as she had acquired them. The audience for The Cardinal can have little way of knowing whose baby the priest’s sister is having, or of understanding how she can be in labor for days, screaming in a rooming house, without anybody hearing her. They might also be puzzled about how the priest’s argument against her marriage, which they have been told is the only Catholic position, can, after it leads to her downfall and death, be casually dismissed as an error.

  It would be easy to conclude that people go to see a “show” and just don’t worry if it all hangs together so long as they’ve got something to look at. But I think it’s more complicated than that: audiences used to have an almost rational passion for getting the story straight. They might prefer bad movies to good ones, and the Variety list of “all-time top grossers” (such as The Greatest Show on Earth and Going My Way) indicates that they did, but although the movies might be banal or vulgar, they were rarely incoherent. A movie had to tell some kind of story that held together: a plot had to parse. Some of the appreciation for the cleverness of, say, Hitchcock’s early thrillers was that they distracted you from the loopholes, so that, afterwards, you could enjoy thinking over how you’d been tricked and teased. Perhaps now “stories” have become too sane, too explicable, too commonplace for the large audiences who want sensations and regard the explanatory connections as mere “filler” — the kind of stuff you sit through or talk through between jolts.

  It’s possible that television viewing, with all its breaks and cuts, and the inattention, except for action, and spinning the dial to find some action, is partly responsible for destruction of the narrative sense — that delight in following a story through its complications to its conclusion, which is perhaps a child’s first conscious artistic pleasure. The old staples of entertainment — inoffensive genres like the adventure story or the musical or the ghost story or the detective story — are no longer commercially safe for moviemakers, and it may be that audiences don’t have much more than a TV span of attention left: they want to be turned on and they spend most of their time turning off. Something similar and related may be happening in reading tastes and habits: teen-agers that I meet have often read Salinger and some Orwell and Lord of the Flies and some Joyce Cary and sometimes even Dostoyevsky, but they are not interested in the “classic” English novels of Scott or Dickens, and what is more to the point, they don’t read the Sherlock Holmes stories or even the modern detective fiction that in the thirties and forties was an accepted part of the shared experience of adolescents. Whatever the reasons — and they must be more than TV, they must have to do with modern life and the sense of urgency it produces — audiences can no longer be depended on to respond to conventional forms.