Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  In March of 1964 Pauline wrote to Macdonald thanking him for his assistance: The Guggenheim grant had come through. Immediately she began making plans to travel, for although she had been writing for several years about foreign-language films, she had never visited Europe. That summer she returned to New York for the first time in years. staying with an old friend, the film writer and psychoanalyst Dan Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt had a floor-through apartment on Patchen Place in Greenwich Village, which delighted Pauline with its bohemian character. He was also well connected with the management of the New York Film Festival, which was set to open in the fall of 1963, and suggested that it should include some substantive panel discussion along with all the screenings. The result was an evening at the Donnell Library on East Fifty-third Street, moderated by Rosenblatt and featuring three provocative critics—Pauline, Dwight Macdonald, and John Simon. Pauline respected Simon’s formidable intellect but was wary of him, feeling that many of his opinions were needlessly sadistic and abusive.

  For his part Simon was far from an unqualified admirer of Pauline. He recognized her writing ability and respected her sharp wit and her gutsiness as a critic. “She had a style that appealed to a lot of people: those who loved to read, ignorant movie buffs, other critics,” he said. “Even critics who didn’t agree with her had to admit that she had a real style. And not many people have such a style.” But Simon was disturbed by her acceptance of so much that he considered vulgar and lowbrow; he felt that as someone who aspired to be a critic of the first rank, she should hold to a higher aesthetic standard.

  Simon also found her problematic on a personal level. “Her main trouble was, of course, that she did want to be a force in the field, an influence, someone you had to reckon with, no matter what,” he observed. “In other words, a kind of arrogance.” Simon was always suspicious of Pauline’s lust to become a powerful player in criticism; to him, this degree of ambition was something that threatened to compromise or even undermine a writer’s critical judgment. For most of their careers Pauline and Simon would keep a careful distance from each other, and she didn’t go out of her way to denounce him in print. “She felt that it would make me more important than I am,” said Simon.

  The panel discussion by Pauline, Macdonald, and Simon at the Donnell Library made for a lively and provocative evening, with much of the debate centering on two 1963 releases, Hud and 8½. The discussion of Hud, in particular, pointed up some of the ideas about audience reaction that would intrigue Pauline throughout her career. She felt that the movie had “marvelous ambiguity and split in the content.” The audience, she felt, was completely on the side of the heel-hero, “enjoying Hud’s anarchism, his nihilism, his rejection of the role of the government.” The movie caught her completely by surprise with its ending, in which Hud isn’t redeemed for his coarse, self-centered behavior: Instead of cleaning up his act, as he would have done had the movie been made a few years earlier, he rapes the family housekeeper, Alma (played by Patricia Neal).

  Macdonald dismissed her concerns about the division between audience and critical reaction by arguing, “That’s sociology. That’s not criticism.” Simon, for his part, said, “I am worried about Pauline Kael’s position. What she says identifies her in my mind hopelessly not only with the audience, which is bad enough, but with a kind of audience that loves movies so indiscriminately that it is not merely content to accept almost anything that comes its way gratefully for what it is, but will even work overtime inventing a rationale which will somehow justify the inadvertencies and the shortcomings and in some cases even the stupidities of what they see.” He also accused her of being one of the critics who imposed an idea on the film that was unjustified simply “to assuage their own boredom.” Pauline laughed. “I’ve never been bored, John, except sometimes, you know, caught by lecturers.”

  Her views on 8½ were even more controversial. Critics had lined up to applaud Federico Fellini’s view of the fantasy life of a bored, creatively stymied director. Unlike nearly all of her major critic colleagues, Pauline hadn’t warmed to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which had been released to immense worldwide success in 1960 but which had struck her as a work that “wants to be a great film—it cries out its intentions.” While admiring its cleverness, she felt that Fellini had misstepped in using Rome’s beautiful people as stand-ins for the aimlessness of modern life, and she was temperamentally unresponsive to any attempt to dramatize the anxieties and fears of a creative artist who had the good fortune to be rich and famous. She found 8½ alienating as well, because it was “surprisingly like the confectionary dreams of Hollywood heroines, transported by a hack’s notions of Freudian anxiety and wish fulfillment. 8½ is an incredibly externalized version of an artist’s ‘inner life’—a gorgeous multi-ringed circus that has very little connection with what, even for a movie director, is most likely to be solitary, concentrated hard work.”

  She was likewise troubled by the art-house audience’s enthusiasm for two other movies released in 1961: Antonioni’s La Notte and Alan Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, both of which explored the angst of modern times, the futility and ultimate failure of human intimacy. While many critics found them daringly experimental and intellectually thrilling, Pauline thought them stultifying and empty—all surface posing and no real substance. “And isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity?” she asked, with the rhetorical question that had become one of her stylistic trademarks. “For whom does love last? Why try to make so much spiritual desolation out of the transient nature of what we all know to be transient, as if this transiency somehow defined our time and place?” Marienbad, in particular, was offensive to her: “Enthusiasts for the film,” she wrote, “start arguing about whether something happened last year at Marienbad, and this becomes rather more important than what happens on the screen in front of them—which isn’t much. The people we see have no warmth, no humor or pain, no backgrounds or past, no point of contact with living creatures, so who cares about their past or future, or their present?” She criticized all three films in a persuasive essay titled “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties,” which The Massachusetts Review published in the winter of 1963.

  In this viewpoint, she often found herself pitted against her colleagues. Colin Young, an editor at Film Quarterly and later head of UCLA’s film school, used to tangle with her often, particularly on the subject of Antonioni. “Pauline had her blind spots,” said Young. “I remember once being at an Academy screening of foreign-language nominees, and in the toilet after the screening of La Notte, I overheard two guys who were peeing. They were saying, ‘What’s the matter with this guy? He’s good-lookin’, he’s got a good job, he’s got a beautiful wife, a mistress—why the fuck is he so miserable all the time?’ Pauline would have said ‘Here here’ to these guys. She couldn’t stand all this agonizing. She was a frontier plainswoman.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  During the early 1960s Pauline’s reviews had drawn a devoted and gradually growing following among readers of film criticism. The numbers were modest: Her work had appeared only in small-circulation publications and listener-supported radio broadcasts. She was a little like the flickering beacon from a lighthouse far off on the West Coast, only dimly perceived in the east. She needed either a major platform or a major critical piece to raise her visibility. Very soon, she got both.

  The critical piece was “Circles and Squares,” a lengthy polemic that she finished early in 1963 against the auteur theory. The premise of auteurism was that the strong, individual personality of a talented director was always visible in his films, and that it was necessary to examine how that personality provided crucial links in his entire oeuvre. Even if the film in question happened to be a routine product of the Hollywood studio system, the auteurists held that a good director’s signature could be found if one knew how and where to look for it. The greater the talent, the clearer the indication of a powerful sensibility and characteristic visual st
yle. Directors such as Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Robert Bresson, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford were all heroes to the auteurists, because their films displayed distinctive themes and stylistic traits. The rise of auteurism was a significant development in the gradual rise of the director in the general public consciousness, and many previously overlooked artists—including such figures as Phil Karlson and Joseph H. Lewis—who had languished in the shadows of the all-powerful stars were delighted to have attention refocused on their own efforts.

  A prime example of an auteur hero is Douglas Sirk, the gifted German director who turned out a series of highly polished tearjerkers in the 1950s. The scripts assigned Sirk to direct were often clichéd romantic dramas, but he brought a striking edge to them. He considered the American family corrupt and unhealthy, and his films displayed a tension and pessimism that made many other directors’ portrayal of family life seem utterly fraudulent.

  In 1962 auteurism attracted major notice in the United States when Andrew Sarris, then film critic for The Village Voice, wrote an essay about it for the Winter 1962–63 edition of Film Culture. “Notes on the Auteur Theory” laid out Sarris’s criteria for directors to achieve auteur status: the display of technical competence of a high order, a recognizable personal style or voice that could be traced from one film to another, and a powerful ability to convey interior meaning. As Sarris later said, “The strong director imposes his own personality on a film; the weak director allows the personalities of others to ran rampant.” He believed that the auteur theory was a crucial tool for understanding film history in that it allowed for the revelation of a kind of directorial autobiography, and the essay brimmed with affection for many little-known, overlooked, and misunderstood films. In his book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, Sarris wrote, “Ultimately, the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography. The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and artist. He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole. The parts, however entertaining individually, must cohere meaningfully. This meaningful coherence is more likely when the director dominates the proceedings with skill and purpose.”

  “Notes on the Auteur Theory” was widely discussed in film-critic circles, and though it met with some skepticism, to be sure, its central premise was enthusiastically received, and would eventually result in Sarris’s developing an elaborately worked-out ranking of directors, which ranged from the “pantheon” (which included John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Josef von Sternberg, F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, and Robert Flaherty) to the bottom rank of “miscellaneous” directors in whose work Sarris could discern no striking personality (a group that numbered such figures as Gordon Douglas, Victor Fleming, Joshua Logan, Richard Quine, and W. S. Van Dyke).

  Sarris was a critic whose opinions would vex Pauline for decades to come. She considered him an intelligent man capable of remarkable insight, and anything but negligible. But many of his ideas about movies struck her as absurd.

  She found the auteur theory fundamentally unconvincing: It made no sense to give the director total credit for a work that inevitably reflected the personalities of the screenwriter, the cinematographer, and the actors, as well. She liked to use Casablanca as an example of the wrongheadedness of the theory, pointing out that if the character of the cynical hero Rick Blaine had been played by Robert Cummings rather than by Humphrey Bogart, it was a fair guess that the result would have been a poor picture. She decided to seize the moment and asked Ernest Callenbach if she could publish a broadside against Sarris and the other auteur critics in Film Quarterly. Callenbach, who had admired Sarris’s essay, was somewhat taken aback, but agreed to accept Pauline’s piece, “Circles and Squares,” for the magazine’s Spring 1963 issue.

  Her first objection to the auteur theory was that she felt it attempted to elevate relatively minor studio product. In “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” Sarris, as an example of tracking a director’s signature, pointed out a similar storytelling technique in a scene from Raoul Walsh’s 1935 Alice Faye musical Every Night at Eight and in one from his 1941 Humphrey Bogart crime drama, High Sierra. His conclusion: “If I had not been aware of Walsh in Every Night at Eight, the crucial link to High Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys of the auteur theory.”

  Pauline thought it ridiculous to bother discussing a comparison between a movie she considered poor (Every Night at Eight) with one she considered below-par (High Sierra), and she went on to ask why Walsh was to be praised for merely repeating a given technique several years later. Was this really a sign of artistic growth? And why did the auteur theory even have to come into play in such an analysis? “Would Sarris not notice the repetition in the Walsh films without the auteur theory?” she asked. A first-class critic, she argued, didn’t need to lean on a theory of any kind: “The greatness of critics like Bazin in France and Agee in America may have something to do with their using their full range of intelligence and intuition, rather than relying on formulas.”

  She admitted that Sarris’s emphasis on “technical competence” sounded reasonable enough on the surface, yet she found it misleading, pointing out that “the greatness of a director like Cocteau has nothing to do with mere technical competence: His greatness is in being able to achieve his own personal expression and style. And just as there were writers like Melville or Dreiser who triumphed over various kinds of technical incompetence, and who were, as artists, incomparably greater than the facile technicians of the day, a new great film director may appear whose very greatness is in his struggling toward grandeur or in massive accumulation of detail. An artist who is not a good technician can indeed create new standards, because standards of technical competence are based on comparisons with work already done.”

  Moving on to the next argument—that of “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value”—Pauline shifted into higher gear. “The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?” She was particularly disturbed by the auteur critics’ elevation of Hitchcock, a director whose work had exasperated her over the years. She felt that Sarris was correct about Hitchcock’s personality being readily identifiable, but felt it was not a quality that should necessarily elicit critical praise. Comparing Hitchcock with a director whose work she deeply admired, Carol Reed, Pauline wrote that Hitchcock’s signature was easier to spot than Reed’s “because Hitchcock repeats while Reed tackles new subject matter.” She believed that Hitchcock’s signature was “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.”

  Pauline then penetrated Sarris’s “inner circle,” with its concentration on “interior meaning,” which by Sarris’s definition was “extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.” Here Pauline’s anger was almost palpable, as she denounced this aspect of the theory as “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.” Again, she felt that the theory was conferring virtues on undistinguished studio product that simply weren’t there. “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.�
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  The end result of all this, she believed, was that some of the least-deserving movies, and directors, were often candidates for the greatest critical praise. She had seldom liked the work of Otto Preminger; with the exception of his stylish early melodramas like Laura, she found his films crude and heavy-handed. But Preminger was a hero to the auteur critics, who praised his characteristic use of the tracking camera. Pauline was having none of it: “I suspect that the ‘stylistic consistency’ of say, Preminger, could be a matter of his limitations and that the only way you could tell he made some of his movies was that he used the same players so often (Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, et al., gave his movies the Preminger look.)”