The Age of Movies Read online

  THE AGE OF

  MOVIES

  SELECTED

  WRITINGS OF

  PAULINE

  KAEL

  Edited by Sanford Schwartz

  A SPECIAL PUBLICATION OF THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

  Copyright © 2011 by Gina James.

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Sanford Schwartz.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced commercially by offset-lithographic or equivalent copying devices without the permission of the publisher.

  For sources and acknowledgments see page 787.

  Material from I Lost it at the Movies and Going Steady is reprinted by permission of Marion Boyars Publishers.

  The letters of Pauline Kael are reprinted courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  Frontispiece photograph copyright © Jerry Bauer, Cannes, 1977

  Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  and in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Ltd.

  THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing. Each year the Library adds new volumes to its collection of essential works by America’s foremost novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and statesmen.

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  Book designed by David Bullen.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-59853-109-1

  eISBN 978-1-59853-171-8

  First eBook Edition: December 2011

  :: CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Books by Pauline Kael

  Movies, the Desperate Art

  from I Lost it at the Movies

  The Glamour of Delinquency

  The Golden Coach

  Shoeshine

  Breathless, and the Daisy Miller Doll

  West Side Story

  Lolita

  Jules and Jim

  Billy Budd

  Yojimbo

  Devi

  Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood

  from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

  Laurence Olivier as Othello

  Marlon Brando: An American Hero

  Movie Brutalists

  Tourist in the City of Youth

  [Blow-up]

  Movies on Television

  Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way

  [Falstaff / Chimes at Midnight]

  Bonnie and Clyde

  from Going Steady

  Movies as Opera

  [China Is Near]

  A Minority Movie

  [La Chinoise]

  Faces

  A Sign of Life

  [Shame]

  Trash, Art, and the Movies

  Saintliness

  [Simon of the Desert]

  from Deeper into Movies

  The Bottom of the Pit

  [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid]

  High School

  Fellini’s “Mondo Trasho”

  [Fellini Satyricon]

  Notes on Heart and Mind

  The Poetry of Images

  [The Conformist]

  Pipe Dream

  [McCabe & Mrs. Miller]

  Helen of Troy, Sexual Warrior

  [The Trojan Women]

  Louis Malle’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

  [Murmur of the Heart]

  Urban Gothic

  [The French Connection]

  The Fall and Rise of Vittorio De Sica

  [The Garden of the Finzi-Continis]

  Stanley Strangelove

  [A Clockwork Orange]

  Alchemy

  [The Godfather]

  Collaboration and Resistance

  [The Sorrow and the Pity]

  from Reeling

  Tango

  [Last Tango in Paris]

  Pop Versus Jazz

  [Lady Sings the Blues]

  The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book

  Days and Nights in the Forest

  A Rip-Off with Genius

  [Marilyn]

  After Innocence

  [The Last American Hero]

  Everyday Inferno

  [Mean Streets]

  Movieland—The Bums’ Paradise

  [The Long Goodbye]

  Moments of Truth

  [The Iceman Cometh]

  Politics and Thrills

  Survivor

  [Sleeper]

  Killing Time

  [Magnum Force]

  Cicely Tyson Goes to the Fountain

  [The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman]

  The Used Madonna

  [The Mother and the Whore]

  When the Saints Come Marching In

  [Lenny]

  Fathers and Sons

  [The Godfather, Part II]

  Beverly Hills as a Big Bed

  [Shampoo]

  Coming: Nashville

  from When the Lights Go Down

  The Man from Dream City

  [Cary Grant]

  All for Love

  [The Story of Adèle H.]

  Walking into Your Childhood

  [The Magic Flute]

  Notes on the Nihilistic Poetry of Sam Peckinpah

  [The Killer Elite]

  The Artist as a Young Comedian

  [Next Stop, Greenwich Village]

  Underground Man

  [Taxi Driver]

  Sparkle

  Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences

  Hot Air

  [Network]

  Marguerite Duras

  [The Truck]

  A Woman for All Seasons?

  [Julia]

  Shivers

  [The Fury]

  Fear of Movies

  Bertrand Blier

  The God-Bless-America Symphony

  [The Deer Hunter]

  Pods

  [Invasion of the Body Snatchers]

  from Taking It All In

  Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  The Man Who Made Howard Hughes Sing

  [Melvin and Howard]

  Used Cars

  Religious Pulp, or The Incredible Hulk

  [Raging Bull]

  Atlantic City

  Hey, Torquemada

  [History of the World—Part I]

  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gadgeteer

  [Blow Out]

  Pennies from Heaven

  Shoot the Moon

  Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip

  E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

  Up the River

  [Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams]

  Tootsie

  Memory

  [The Night of the Shooting Stars]

  from State of the Art

  A Masterpiece

  [The Leopard]

  The Perfectionist

  [Yentl]

  Golden Kimonos

  [The Makioka Sisters]

  from Hooked

  Out There and In Here

  [Blue Velvet]

  Irish Voices

  [The Dead]

  The Lady from the Sea

  [High Tide]

  from Movie Love

  Unreal

  [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown]

  A Wounded Apparition

  [Casualties of War]


  Satyr

  [My Left Foot]

  The Grifters

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Index

  :: INTRODUCTION

  Describing the Italian film The Night of the Shooting Stars, in 1984, in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote, in words that readers of hers over the years might have used to describe her own reviews, that the movie “is so good it’s thrilling.” Kael’s movie criticism, with its racing, urgent, crystal clear way of making us see the depth, liveliness, or speciousness of whatever film she was handling, and the funny and uncannily intimate way she got into the skin of actors, or presented miniaturized biographies of directors, or drew out the larger social or ethical implications of a given film, affected readers in precisely that manner. We were given writing replete with so many separate, brilliant awarenesses as to take us, as we absorbed them, to another sphere. The very phrasing Kael used about the Tavianis’ movie—“so good it’s thrilling”—has her transformative power. The words are plain and conversational, yet they have been brought together with a blunt assurance that makes us pause and see them anew.

  When she stepped down from writing movie reviews at The New Yorker, in 1991, at seventy-two, Kael’s retirement was a national news story. For the little over two decades that she had been at the magazine she was undoubtedly the most fervently read American critic of any art. But her renown was based on far more than her coverage of the films of the 1970s and 1980s. In a 1977 review of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, she wrote that Spielberg “is a magician in the age of movies,” and perhaps more deeply than any other writer Kael gave shape to the idea of an “age of movies.” In a career that began in the mid-1950s and was fully underway by the early 1960s, she explored movies as an art, an industry, and a sociological phenomenon. A romantic and a visionary, she believed that movies could feed our imaginations in intimate and immediate—and liberating, even subversive—ways that literature and plays and other arts could not. But she also understood the financial realities and artistic compromises behind moviemaking, and she described them with a specificity and a pertinacity that few other critics did. As concerned with audience reactions as with her own, she could be caught up in how movies stoke our fantasies regardless of their qualities as movies.

  She was also, as she wrote, “lucky” in her timing. Her tenure as a regularly reviewing critic coincided with the modern flowering of movies, the period, primarily the 1960s (for foreign films) and the 1970s (for American films), when moviemakers were working more than ever with the autonomy associated with poets, novelists, and painters. While hardly always laudatory (and to some readers plain wrongheaded), she nonetheless, in the earlier decade, gave a breathing, textured life to the aims and sensibilities of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among other European and Asian directors; and she endowed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola, among American directors of the following decade, with the same full-bodied presence.

  Kael’s grasp of film history was encyclopedic. She had seen silent films as a child, in the 1920s, sometimes taking them in on her parents’ laps. Speaking for her generation, she could thus write of motion pictures that “We were in almost at the beginning, when something new was added to human experience”; and in her full-length reviews and essays (put together over the years in eleven volumes), and her short notices on films (collected in the mammoth 5001 Nights at the Movies), she encompassed much of that “something new.” (Her literal output can be gauged by noting that Kael described her 1994 For Keeps, an over 1,200-page selection of what she thought was her best writing, as representing about a fifth of her complete work.)

  She had few occasions to write about silent films; but she kept them a living part of her universe by maintaining, for instance, that D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was “perhaps the greatest movie ever made” and that Maria Falconetti gave possibly the “finest performance ever recorded on film” in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Her views on individual American, European, and Asian movies of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s also exist somewhat in the background of her work as she wrote about them mainly in compressed reviews. But these highly factual and irresistibly readable reviews, which appear in 5001 Nights alongside entries on movies made up through the 1980s, provide for countless films what feel like both perfect introductions and last words.

  What gives Kael a distinctive place in American writing, however, has as much to do with what movies prompt in her as it does with her capturing so much of the breadth and lore of movies. Following through on her conviction that movies release us from our normal emotional and social guardedness, she built her criticism, whether her subject is an epochal masterpiece or a tinny Hollywood product, on her most spontaneous and sensory reactions. In a body of work that as a result sometimes has the impact of a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography, she immerses us in a flow of dazzlingly stated, unpredictable, sometimes needling and exhortatory, and always humanly large and forthright perceptions. Speaking with the insights of simultaneously a drama coach, a club comedian, a social agitator, a connoisseur, and a psychotherapist, she illuminates the ways that artists of any kind succeed or fail. When she shows how movies can excite, demean, frighten, or stretch us, she makes it seem as if she were talking about the power and capacities of art no matter what its form. Her deepest subject, in the end, almost isn’t movies at all—it is how to live more intensely.

  Kael might have been describing herself when she called François Truffaut’s The Story of Adèle H. “damnably intelligent—almost frighteningly so, like some passages in Russian literature which strip the characters bare.” Kael had such an intelligence. Analyzing, say, political movies (whether Z, The Battle of Algiers, or The First Circle), or movies with or about stand-up and TV comedians (including Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, or Richard Pryor), or movies based on literary works of some stature (by D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, Melville, Joyce, or Henry Miller, among others), her observations were often so fresh, percipient, and commanding that a reader believed it was this particular subject that drove her to write about movies in the first place.

  She often said of movie stars she particularly loved—Laurence Olivier, or Sean Connery, or Morgan Freeman—that everything they did was permeated by a sense of wit. Kael’s own prose certainly was. But except in the case of terrible movies, when only sarcastic observations could do justice to the depressing products on hand, her own humor was more like a pervasive tone. There were zingers, of course, as when she wrote about a moment of comic confusion at a gravesite in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that “It’s a good gag—I’ve always liked it,” or noted of John Boorman that many of his movies might have been thought “classics if we hadn’t known English”—or said of a scene in Young Frankenstein that “the laboratory machines give off enough sparks to let us know that’s their only function.”

  As memorable as her jokes were Kael’s little torpedoes of common sense, perceptions that could lodge in a reader’s mind, such as her observation about “message” Westerns that their message was that the “myths we never believed in anyway were false,” or when, analyzing the bogus hustle of the movie business, she wrote that “Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement.” About moviegoing habits, she could note that some people “go to the innocuous hoping for the charming.”

  Kael’s consistently richest writing, though, may be her descriptions of actors. She brings actors to life and gives them at times the fullness of characters in fiction—as when she said that Ava Gardner “never looked really happy in her movies; she wasn’t quite there, but she never suggested that she was anywhere else, either,” or called the young Katharine Hepburn (whose work Kael often thought glorious) “someone who could be intensely wrong about everything.” Paul Newman, she commented, “is good at small blowhards who reveal the needs be
hind their transparent lies.”

  Kael’s reactions to performers could lead her far beyond the subject at hand. She wrote of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, for instance, that he rouses in us “the kind of empathy we’re likely to feel for smart kids who grin at us when they’re showing off in the school play. It’s a beautiful kind of emotional nakedness—ingenuously exposing the sheer love of playacting—that most actors lose long before they become ‘professional.’” At times, by analyzing technique alone, Kael brings back the precise spirit of an actor and even of an era. John Candy in Splash, she said, “makes you aware of his bulk by the tricks in his verbal timing: when [Tom] Hanks has said something to him and you expect him to answer, his hesitation—it’s like a few seconds of hippo torpor—is what makes his answer funny.” Sometimes Kael needed less than a sentence to catch the essence of a performer, telling us, for instance, that in Big Business Bette Midler “breezes through, kicking one gong after another.”

  Pauline Kael herself seemed to breeze through the many aspects of her heroically large subject. Our chief source of information about her formative years—her unpublished letters to her college friends the poet and writer Robert Duncan and Violet (Rosenberg) Ginsburg—shows that her confidence was there from early on. In these letters dated from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, when she was in her early twenties, her voice as a writer was little different from the voice she would have years later as a published critic. We hear it in her telling Duncan, in 1940, that Civilization and Its Discontents is perhaps Freud’s “worst work,” having a “logical structure that is more baffling and stupid than genuinely provocative”—or when, in 1944, first reading film history, she found that film writers “don’t conceive that acting can be an extension of understanding and knowledge.” But the setbacks she experienced in being a child of the Depression, and a woman, and the fact that movies as a subject took hold over her only over time, meant that it was a matter of decades before that voice was heard by a large audience.

  Born on June 19, 1919, in Petaluma, California, she was the fifth and last child of Judith and Isaac Kael, who had moved west from New York City with their two sons and two daughters before Pauline’s birth. In 1927, Isaac lost his money. The family had to give up its egg farm and move down to San Francisco; and from the time she entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1936, at seventeen, until some thirty years later, when she landed work on national publications, Kael generally needed to take on one “crummy” (as she called them) job after another to make ends meet. When non-crummy work was available, positions such as writing advertising copy and editing manuscripts at a publishing house—at which she was clearly good and that would have led to promotions—she had to turn them down because they would have exhausted her energies for her own writing. So over the years she answered demands for a nanny or a cook, edited manuscripts for clients on a private basis, taught violin, and worked as a seamstress. In college, she graded papers for as many as three professors at a time and, as a teaching assistant, saw students in an office after school where, according to her detailed letters, she occasionally offered frank life-counseling advice—as when “I suggested to some prissy students from Piedmont that their grades mightn’t be so low if they would get their minds dirtied up a bit and provided book titles for the process.”