Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Members of the U.S. government were also guilty of pandering, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-Communist attacks were about on the level with the sentiments expressed in Night People:

  When Senator McCarthy identifies himself with right and identifies anyone who opposes him with the Communist conspiracy, he carries the political morality play to its paranoid conclusion—a reductio ad absurdum in which right and wrong, and political good and evil, dissolve into: are you for me or against me? But the question may be asked, are not this morality and this politics fundamentally just as absurd and just as dangerous when practiced on a national scale in our commercial culture? The world is not divided into good and evil, enemies are not all alike. Communists are not just Nazis with a different accent; and it is precisely the task of political analysis (and the incidental function of literature and drama) to help us understand the nature of our enemies and the nature of our opposition to them. A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts.

  “Morality Plays Right and Left” was initially accepted by one of the publications Pauline most revered, The Partisan Review, but was eventually taken by the British film journal Sight and Sound in 1954. Sight and Sound’s editor, Penelope Houston, wrote that the section on Night People was “the type of thing I have been trying to get hold of for a long time; it is so much better for these things to be written by an American than by a journalist on our side.” The cofounding editor of The Partisan Review, Philip Rahv, responded enthusiastically to Pauline’s lively critical voice, but he was consistently troubled by the length of her pieces and always urged that they be cut.

  1955 was a pivotal year for Pauline. She had become friends by then with Weldon Kees, one denizen of the Bay Area who genuinely deserved to be called a Renaissance man. Kees was a native of Nebraska who had enjoyed early success publishing short fiction in a string of distinguished literary quarterlies. During World War II, he moved to New York City, where he did a fairly good job of taking the town by storm. He published his first book of poems, The Last Man, in 1943 and went on to write for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times. He also became a highly skilled abstract painter and a gifted jazz pianist. In 1950 he left New York for San Francisco, where he became part of the circle that included Pauline and James Broughton; he provided the musical score for Broughton’s film The Adventures of Jimmy. Kees and Pauline had many passions in common, including the movies and New Orleans jazz, which Kees performed locally every chance he got.

  Kees was also a fixture on Berkeley’s KPFA-FM, the first listener-supported radio station in the United States, which aimed to provide its audience with a respite from America’s commercially dominated pop culture and to spread liberal ideas beyond the confines of academia—to reach out to the common citizen and bring him into a discussion of art, politics, and ideas. The ultimate, idealistic goal was to create a more enlightened society—a particularly urgent objective in the age of McCarthyism.

  One of KPFA’s popular programs was a weekly show featuring Kees called Behind the Movie Camera. Seeing in Pauline a kindred movie-lover, he invited her to be a guest on his program several times, as he enjoyed her scorching directness and her provocative views about what was going on in the movie industry.

  Unfortunately, Kees was a deeply troubled man, given to fierce mood swings and prolonged feelings of desolation. One day he asked Pauline sadly, “What keeps you going?” For years, she blamed herself for failing to perceive the depth of his emotional state. On July 19, 1955, his Plymouth Savoy was found just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. No suicide note was found, and his body was never recovered.

  In the aftershock of Kees’s disappearance, KPFA asked Pauline to step in as a semiregular film critic. The station manager made it clear that they would not be able to pay her for her broadcasts, but she judged that the exposure and the chance to hold forth for a regular audience would be hugely beneficial. She was broadcasting to a subscription audience of more than four thousand, whose educational background and income level were well above the norm. She was also surrounded by other broadcasters who shared many of her ideas about the regrettable division between classical and contemporary music. Among them was Alan Rich, KPFA’s music director, who joyously combined Mozart and Bach with Schoenberg and David Diamond. She was also delighted to find KPFA such a strong proponent of jazz, notably by way of Phil Elwood’s highly informative regular program.

  Pauline was a natural on the radio, firing off her opinions of the latest movies in crisp diction, even occasionally saying “rah-ther” and almost consistently pronouncing “movies” as “myoovies.” She could sound almost cultivated, an occasional affectation that her friend Donald Gutierrez teasingly called her “Mrs. Lamont of the Air” voice. But her radio pieces, almost always carefully written out beforehand, were notable for their wit, drive, and guts, and slowly, she began building a loyal, growing band of listeners.

  One of them was Edward Landberg, who operated a revival theater located at 2436 Telegraph Avenue. A physician’s son who had been born in Vienna in 1920, Landberg had come to New York City at the age of nine. He had ambitions to become an author, and after graduating from the University of Iowa’s prestigious writers’ program, he slaved away at scattered teaching jobs at Berkeley, at Ithaca College, and in France. Eventually he wound up in Mexico City, teaching Shakespeare and writing movie reviews for an English-language newspaper, The Mexico City News, a job that ended when his opinions inflamed some of the advertisers. Thinking that he might be better off showing movies than writing about them, Landberg leased a screening room in Mexico City and was soon making a decent amount of money exhibiting films on a weekly basis. He had pleasant memories of his time in Berkeley, so moved back there, found a defunct market on Telegraph Avenue, and rented and renovated it. There were columns dividing about two-thirds of it, so he had the idea of turning the space into two separate theaters. The result was the Berkeley Cinema Guild, which Landberg opened in 1951 and always claimed was the first twin art house in the United States. (At times, he claimed it was the first in the world.)

  Most of the time movies were shown simultaneously in the two theaters. The larger one, the Cinema Guild, had two hundred seats and was reasonably long and narrow, with the screen positioned somewhat high, meaning that the best place to sit was in the back. The smaller theater, holding around one hundred seats, was the Studio. It was wider and shorter than the Guild and offered better general seating. Landberg began programming according to his own taste, which mostly ran toward European film.

  One evening Ed Landberg heard Pauline broadcasting on KPFA, and after telephoning to compliment her on the program, they arranged to meet. “She was the closest thing to somebody who had my kind of vision about movies,” Landberg recalled. “Not that she did have. But she was more intelligent than most people who had anything to do with movies. One day, when I was over at her place, I happened to graze her breast with my hand, and she kind of looked up at me and said, ‘What have you got to lose?’”

  Landberg and Pauline had not been romantically involved for very long when Pauline made it known that she would like to write program notes for the Cinema Guild. “I hadn’t written notes,” said Landberg, “because I wasn’t into audience manipulation. But she wrote some notes, and one thing led to another.” The Cinema Guild was doing well enough, but almost immediately Pauline saw that it could be made into a bigger attraction than it was, and she decided that she was the person to make that happen. Her notes, written on fold-out programs, were available at the theater, mailed out to local moviegoers, and distributed to some of the neighborhood businesses, and they caught on almost immediately. Although the programs were very carefully printed, with thoughtfully selected photographs and Pauline’s incisive descriptions of the movies, plus the monthly calendar running down the center, they were anything but public relations fluff. Pauline di
dn’t hesitate to poke fun at some of the films being shown at the Guild, but even when she was taking swipes at them, her energetic critical tone seemed only to make people all the more determined to turn up to see them.

  Soon enough she was taking an aggressive hand in programming as well, pressing Landberg to show more vintage American movies from the 1930s and ’40s—screwball comedies, gangster dramas, film noir, musicals. “There was a little resistance to the notion that there was something good to be said about American musicals,” recalled Stephen Kresge, who worked on the Cinema Guild’s staff for several years. “When we first showed Gold Diggers of 1933, there wasn’t anyone walking out, but I think there was a lot of puzzlement as to why this was thought to be fun. She started that whole revival of American musicals having a place in the canon. They were willing to accept things like Casablanca and so on, but... There was nothing quite so hidebound and stuffy as a Berkeley intellectual at that time. They were inhibited by European values and philosophy that she no longer had any use for. She wanted to open the windows and let in some air.”

  Many of the double bills were delightfully unexpected: Ingmar Bergman’s medieval allegory The Seventh Seal was paired with the Beatrice Lillie comedy On Approval, Clouzot’s thriller Diabolique with Frank Capra’s comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, Laurence Olivier’s 1953 The Beggar’s Opera with René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris, which Pauline described in her notes as “one of the first imaginative approaches to the musical as a film form.” Sometimes there was a thematic connection, as with the English comedies The Man in the White Suit and Lucky Jim, or Pauline’s “corruption-in-Mexico” double bill of John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Frequently Pauline’s notes were hilariously personal and direct: when the Guild showed Howard Hawks’s Red River, she wrote that the film was “not really so ‘great’ as its devotees claim (what Western is?) but it’s certainly more fun and superior in every way to that message movie The Gunfighter, which Dwight Macdonald, in the November Esquire, puts forward as ‘the best Western’ because it showed ‘movie types behaving realistically instead of in the usual terms of romantic cliché.’”

  Pauline was not deeply enamored of much of the pre- and postwar British cinema, but she had a great fondness for some of the great Ealing comedies, such as The Happiest Days of Your Life, as well as Laurence Olivier’s stirring 1955 version of Richard III, and she saw to it that they all got generous exhibition. With her exceptional taste, as well as the rapidly growing popularity of her program notes, hers began to become the voice of the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Audiences picked up, and the Friday and Saturday night showings often had lines down Telegraph. Audience members were almost giddy with a sense of discovery of so many hard-to-locate movies. Carol van Strum, who became a friend of Pauline’s in these years, remembered the thrill of receiving her movie education at the Cinema Guild. “My parents hardly ever went to the movies,” said van Strum. “Part of it was me: they took me to see Drums Along the Mohawk, and I got so scared I never wanted to go back. I missed The Third Man, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields—and it was magic finding them at the Guild.” The exhibitors who supplied the prints began to notice the Guild’s success and began to talk about changing the way they were going to charge. “They were doing it on a nightly rental basis,” said Stephen Kresge. “Then they found out that many weekends, the Cinema Guild was grossing the highest of any of the theaters in Berkeley.”

  It was becoming well known around the Bay Area that Pauline was the prime mover responsible for putting the Cinema Guild on the map. Friendly, gregarious, and bawdy, she was becoming something of a local character. She dressed down—with her finances in the shape they were in, it was impossible to do anything else—and locals grew accustomed to seeing her up on a ladder changing the Guild’s marquee, a hip flask filled with Wild Turkey dangling from a belt loop. Landberg, on the other hand, struck people as cold and diffident. “Landberg was very remote,” recalled Ariel Parkinson, widow of the poet and Berkeley English professor Thomas Parkinson. “He almost cultivated the image of the faceless man. The theater was a fully cooperative enterprise, or at least it seemed to me. I think it’s a shame that people don’t remember Ed Landberg, but then he was very self-effacing. Pauline was the one.”

  Pauline’s relationship with Landberg was more in the nature of a meeting of minds, and even that was a bit shaky, as Landberg was a peculiar, somewhat morose man who seemed unable to express joy and enthusiasm in the same way Pauline did. She tried her best to see him as a man of quality and refinement and was encouraged by certain gestures on his part; he had given her a gift of a recording of Gluck’s opera Orphée et Eurydice, and she clung to this as evidence that he would make a good match for her. Landberg also provided a degree of financial security, and she thought that at last she might be able to establish a bit of stability for herself and for Gina. If she was searching for a father figure for her daughter, however, she was doomed to be disappointed: Landberg made no secret of his dislike for children in general and showed no interest in Gina whatsoever.

  Despite all the reasons she shouldn’t have, Pauline married Edward Landberg. She later told friends that she had cried all through the ceremony, knowing that the marriage was a mistake. She also liked to tell the story that on their wedding night, Landberg fell asleep.

  Gina’s observation that her mother never told the same story twice is borne out in Pauline’s puzzling and perverse account of her marriages. Although she delighted in confusing reporters by suggesting to them that she had married two or three times, she was married only once, to Landberg. “We were married for something like a year,” Landberg said decades later. “It was very brief. I didn’t find her sexually attractive, among other things. She was also very bossy, and it wasn’t a happy marriage. It was out of mutual interest.” (Attempts to track down a marriage certificate yielded nothing; Landberg claims not to remember where the marriage took place.) Friends and colleagues agreed that they were a bizarre match. “Pauline and Ed Landberg came for dinner one night,” remembered Ariel Parkinson. “They struck me as having a very tenuous relationship to one another. They weren’t on the same set of vibrations, really.”

  Pauline did gain one important thing in her brief union with Landberg—a big step up in living quarters: a handsome, redwood-shingled two-story Craftsman home at 2419 Oregon Street in Berkeley. In the small front yard was a magnificent deodar cedar tree, and in the back was a small garden. The house had a decent-sized front room, a spacious living room with a separate dining area, a kitchen with redwood cabinets, and three upstairs bedrooms. Pauline loved it, and when she and Landberg purchased it, she lost no time in putting her own personal stamp on it, beginning with her vast assortment of books. The downstairs of the house was quite dark, but she had a remedy for that. Pauline was drawn to color, and for years she had been collecting a number of brilliant Tiffany lamps. At the time, they were regarded by many as gaudy junk, but Pauline made a point of picking them up for very little at garage sales and antique shops. She loved the bright, warm pools of light that they cast around the room. The kitchen floor was done in a pattern of bright, Harlequin-colored square tiles by Harry Jacobus: sea green, black, salmon, yellow, mauve. It became her house, not Landberg’s—and soon that was true in the literal sense. Out the back door, on the other side of the small garden, the newlyweds had a little couple’s house built. In a matter of months the marriage had become so rocky that it became Landberg’s new home; he came into the big house mostly for meals and to discuss Cinema Guild business with Pauline, but it was clear that their marriage was doomed. As Landberg bluntly put it, “I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman.”

  At the Cinema Guild, Pauline supervised all the details of presentation, taking great care to choose the music that was piped in before and in between screenings. Always she selected pieces that connected in some way to what was being shown. One thing she didn’t involve herself in were the theater’s financial
affairs. That was Landberg’s territory, and he watched over it obsessively. At each showing of a movie he would stand in the back counting the heads in the audience. Then he would check the ticket count, and if the two numbers didn’t match, the theater staff was expected to make up the difference.

  In 1956 Pauline turned out her finest essay to date. Originally published in The Berkeley Book of Modern Writing, No. 3 by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Movies, the Desperate Art” was a critical view of what Pauline felt was the deplorable level of expensive, wide-screen filmmaking in the mid-1950s. It was a chaotic period in Hollywood: The postwar demand for greater realism, and the rise of the Actors Studio in New York, with its emphasis on sense-memory as a way of creating an authentic, emotional moment pulled out of the actor’s personal past, had paved the way for more adult performers and subject matter. This was all good news to Pauline, who was pleased to see the emergence of pictures such as Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), Richard Brooks’s The Blackboard Jungle (1955), and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955, scripted by James Agee). However, there was a danger, Pauline felt, in the new quest for more serious and complicated emotional subject matter, which was exemplified by George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951) and Shane (1953). Stevens, who had delighted her with warm, human dramas such as Alice Adams (1935) and thrilling, tongue-in-cheek adventures like Gunga Din (1939), had become a self-appointed Minister of Relevance; his movies now wore their serious intentions on their sleeve.

  But a parallel universe was rising in 1950s Hollywood, and it was a place where none of the new dramatic content had much currency. The wide-screen spectacle had grown out of the movie studios’ desperation to compete with the onslaught of television. To Pauline, big-screen romances such as Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and biblical spectacles like The Robe (1953) and The Egyptian (1954) had set moviemaking back decades. “Like a public building designed to satisfy the widest public’s concept of grandeur,” Pauline wrote in “Movies, the Desperate Art,” “the big production loses the flair, the spontaneity, the rhythm of an artist working to satisfy his own conception. The more expensive the picture, the bigger the audience it must draw, and the fewer risks it can take.” She was not impressed with the so-called visual splendor made possible by the wide-screen process; she deemed it “about as magical as a Fitzpatrick travelogue.”