by Brian Kellow
In 1964 Pauline and Andrew Sarris first came face to face while she was on her Guggenheim-sponsored stay in New York, when she phoned Sarris and asked if he could meet her for a drink. He was stunned at the invitation from a woman he assumed hated him, and hesitated. But Pauline wouldn’t be put off. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Won’t your lover let you go?” At the time, the word “lover” had specific connotations. At the time, Sarris was living with his mother in Kew Gardens, Queens. Half-fearing that she really would think he was gay if he didn’t turn up, he took the subway into Manhattan and met Pauline, Gina, and Dan Rosenblatt at a midtown restaurant.
“She was always on the boil,” Sarris observed. “It was a sort of temperamental difference between us. She was a very lively writer, and she was very readable. I give her a lot of credit for what she did. I think that a lot of people who professed to like her were a bit condescending to her. Even her supporters. There was something unthreatening about her as opposed to people like Mary McCarthy, who really knew how to get at you. And Pauline had a way of getting at people, but she didn’t really threaten them.”
That night Pauline was bold, confident and inquisitive, Sarris retiring and uneasy, wanting to be anywhere else but sitting across the table from his critical adversary. “I wasn’t as worldly and aggressive as she was about sex,” Sarris recalled. “About who was gay and who wasn’t. I wasn’t an expert on such things.” There were other matters to discuss, however, than the sexual politics of their film-critic colleagues. “Pauline acted as if I were a great menace of American criticism,” Sarris said. “I wasn’t getting any money for these pieces. I had no sense that I was being read, even. She talked about going to different places and people would say, ‘What about what Andrew Sarris said?’ She provided me with the first indication I had that I was being read.”
However passionately felt and persuasively argued, to what extent was “Circles and Squares” a careerist move? By taking such a hard public line against another respected critic—at the time Sarris was, by his own admission, hardly the widely read critic he later became, but he was one of the darlings of intellectual and academic film circles—Pauline was clearly clamoring for attention. In “Circles and Squares” she believed she was taking the position of good common sense, challenging the auteurists’ dubious claims. In her aggressive, can-you-believe-this? tone, she was practically daring the movie-loving public not to take her side of the argument. At this, she was enormously successful. Sarris himself admitted that Pauline’s “attack on the theory received more publicity than the theory itself.” In the end Pauline’s hostility toward the auteurists was, more than anything, a matter of taste: She could not believe that any thinking person would prefer the work of an erratic filmmaker like Nicholas Ray over that of a proficient, gifted craftsman like John Huston.
One of the misconceptions about “Circles and Squares” was that it engendered a lifelong feud between the two critics. Although Sarris did bring up the disagreement in occasional articles over the next several decades, Pauline put the matter squarely behind her. There was a certain clean detachment in many of her broadsides against other critics, and she was often astonished to learn that the objects of her critical wrath were under the impression that she hated them personally. Again, her behavior betrayed a certain naïveté: She could not always understand why a fellow critic whom she had roundly criticized might feel threatened by her.
Certainly the reading public’s response to her essay—which wouldn’t become fully clear for years to come—would make it clear to both Pauline and Sarris that they had arrived at a greater level of recognition than they had ever had before. Their meeting was historic, in a sense. They had no way of knowing that in the years ahead, their highly individual points of view would line up critics on either side of a dividing line, pro-Kael and pro-Sarris. And that division would become part of one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of movie criticism.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The mid-1960s was a good time for Pauline to be coming into her own as a writer: The postwar flourishing of the art-house circuit and the explosion of interest in new foreign films meant that there were now more opportunities for film critics than ever before. Movies were no longer just a great common pastime, like Saturday afternoon baseball games. Now they were playing a more significant role in the culture as people became interested in exploring the connections between cinema and contemporary life. Hit films stayed in theaters longer and were dissected in national magazine cover stories, on television and radio talk shows, and in film studies courses, and movies were well on their way to demonstrating to the world that they really were the liveliest art.
The change had been coming since the 1950s when, in the flush of postwar prosperity, Americans became more inquisitive about the arts. “Growing numbers of middle-class consumers felt it their responsibility to be au courant,” wrote the social historian Todd Gitlin in his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. “They were accumulating coffee-table books, subscribing to Saturday Review and the Book-of-the-Month Club, buying records, briefing themselves about art.” By the following decade the national fascination with arts and culture had taken on a decidedly different shade of meaning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the tremendous upheaval wrought by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Young audiences, in particular, wanted more from the movies than mere entertainment. There was still an enormous audience for Walt Disney family pictures and fluffy comedies, but people had also developed an appetite for films that conveyed the anxieties of the times. Movies such as The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb became extremely popular among college students and in intellectual communities. (In the previous decade, many of the most downbeat movies, such as Sweet Smell of Success, Twelve Angry Men, and A Face in the Crowd, had been box-office failures, perhaps because they seemed too dark and pessimistic.) “The rock ’n’ roll generation,” wrote Gitlin, “having grown up on popular culture, took images very seriously indeed; beholding itself magnified in the funhouse mirror, it grew addicted to media which had agendas of their own—celebrity-making, violence-mongering, sensationalism.”
This new climate had its effects even in movie-critic circles. For years many reviewers at major newspapers and magazines had acceded to studio publicists in exchange for access to the biggest movie stories and star interviews. But during the 1960s a number of critics began to speak out and show a much more independent spirit than had previously been the case. In 1963 Judith Crist, then movie critic of The New York Herald-Tribune, found herself at the center of a major standoff with a leading studio. When she slammed that year’s Easter attraction at Radio City Music Hall—Spencer’s Mountain, a sentimental family drama starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara—in both the daily and Sunday editions of the Herald-Tribune, Warner Bros. retaliated the following Monday by withdrawing an invitation to an upcoming screening and, more crucially, by pulling all of its advertising from the paper. Radio City Music Hall followed suit, and because the theater’s advertising provided income for the newspaper seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, the loss was felt immediately. The Herald-Tribune’s publisher, Jock Whitney, and editor, Jim Bellows, held firm, running an editorial affirming their support for Crist and her right to say what she thought. “The Associated Press picked up the editorial and transmitted it coast to coast,” Crist remembered, “and it made a nice little fuss.”
The message was clear: With the steady collapse of the once-powerful studio system and the immense publicity machine that operated within it, the public was forming a new, closer connection with movie critics. As personalities they were becoming better known via radio and television; starting in 1964, Crist would become a familiar face via her appearances on NBC’s Today Show. Talk show hosts frequently invited Pauline and Andrew Sarris, who were far more in tune with the latest trends in filmmaking, and the new audience it had c
reated, than The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, who increasingly resembled a relic from another era. As the subject matter of movies became more and more provocative, Crowther began to seem more and more out of touch—particularly in his distaste for onscreen violence.
The public’s appetite for writing about film was also growing. Only a few years earlier “film studies” was an all but nonexistent category in book publishing. Now there was a demand for film history, theory, and biography, and for published screenplays. Pauline spent all of her spare time hard at work on her own book project, and although a few friends tried to talk her out of her plan to call it I Lost It at the Movies, she held fast. The title precisely conveyed its tone—wicked, funny, provocative—and, in terms of her own development as a moviegoer, was absolutely to the point.
She had acquired a New York agent, the estimable Robert P. Mills, and in the summer of 1963 he phoned her with the news that I Lost It at the Movies had been accepted for publication by the Atlantic Monthly Press. She received an advance of $1,500 (a year later, the publisher would increase that sum by an additional $1,000), and that, combined with her Guggenheim money and her genius for managing to survive on very little, permitted her to settle down and finish the book.
Despite her hard work on the manuscript, she was tempted by the occasional plum freelance assignment. One came her way in late August 1963, when Robert B. Silvers, the recently appointed editor of The New York Review of Books, asked if she would be willing to write a 1,500-word review of The Group, Mary McCarthy’s new novel about eight bright and promising Vassar graduates. The book had caused a sensation with a surprisingly frank sex scene and an equally detailed sequence in which one of the women gets fitted for a diaphragm. Only a few weeks after publication, it was well on its way to becoming one of the year’s most popular and critically praised novels. Pauline, who had liked much of McCarthy’s work in the past, snapped up the assignment, which Silvers asked her to turn around in two weeks.
Pauline’s review offered a fresh point of view about McCarthy’s achievement:
“The Group is the book that Mary McCarthy’s admirers have been waiting for.” The dust jacket is wrong: this is the book that people who have never liked Mary McCarthy before will admire. Her Vassar girls, misled by “progressive” ideas, are the women as victims so dearly beloved of middle-class fiction.... It’s like a Hollywood movie: the girl who wants “too much” gets nothing, is destroyed; the girl waiting for the right man gets the best of Everything.... As a group, the girls are as cold and calculating, and as irrational and defenseless and inept, as if drawn by an anti-feminist male writer. Those who want to believe that the use of the mind is really bad for a woman, unfits her for “life,” miscellanies her, or makes her turn sour or nasty or bitter (as in the past, Mary McCarthy was so often said to be) can now find confirmation of their view in Mary McCarthy’s own writing.
This opening salvo was the strongest part of her assessment; elsewhere, her review did not represent her best work. In dissecting the problems with McCarthy’s overall conception of the book, she seemed to circle without ever quite landing. A few days after she had submitted the review, she received a letter from Elizabeth Hardwick, editorial adviser at The New York Review of Books (and a close friend of McCarthy). Hardwick apologized for the magazine’s tight deadline and then politely, if somewhat condescendingly, rejected the piece, without offering Pauline an opportunity to make revisions. Hardwick told Pauline that it was “rather fruitless to care so much about how fairly or unfairly womankind is treated in this or any other book,” that such questions, unless treated in an entirely new way, “seem a bit tired and irrelevant.” She added that the piece Pauline had submitted did not seem up to her best work.
Pauline delivered the manuscript for I Lost It at the Movies early in the summer of 1964. The Atlantic Monthly Press’s director, Peter Davison, wrote to her in mid-July that he was returning the manuscript with “the general recommendations which are truly not too radical.” In general Davison was delighted with the condition of the book, but he stressed that “some of the very best pieces were marred by being too long. In fact, I was deterred from full appreciation by boredom!”
By the fall, word had gotten around the publishing industry that I Lost It at the Movies was, potentially, at least, a hot project—so much so that Marcia Nasatir, special projects editor at Bantam Books (and future vice president of production at United Artists), wrote to Pauline in October asking to see the manuscript, with an eye toward bringing out a paperback edition.
The intense social upheaval of the 1960s had a curious effect on the arts—and, more particularly, on the audiences for the arts, in whom a certain restless spirit was now in evidence. People who read or attended the theater, concerts, and movies were unsure of what they wanted, and even more unsure of exactly how to react once they had gotten settled into their seats. On the music scene, serial composition had won overwhelming favor with the academic community and music critics; the result was that geniuses such as Aaron Copland more or less lost their footing musically, or in the case of Samuel Barber, languished completely.
In her essay “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?” Eudora Welty commented on reader reaction to her famous short story “A Worn Path,” in which an old Mississippi country woman, Phoenix Jackson, makes the trek into Natchez to get medicine for her grandson. Many of Welty’s readers wrote to her, intrigued by the idea that Phoenix’s grandson had already died, that the old woman was making the trip out of habit—the implication being that this somehow improved the story. It was an interpretation that disturbed Welty. “It’s all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say.” More and more people seemed to be having some sort of breakdown of identity in relation to what they consumed; they were learning not to trust their own reactions to what they experienced in the arts. This might have been regarded as a healthy sign, as a breaking out of complacent patterns and a reaching toward something new and different—but there were many who did not view it that way, and Pauline was one of them. She expressed her concerns on this subject in an essay called “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” which was published in December 1964—her first appearance in a large-circulation periodical, The Atlantic Monthly.
“Are Movies Going to Pieces?” was a lively examination of what she believed to be the increasing incomprehensibility of many of the new pictures being produced. The New Wave classics might have been free-form, but they had a strong, unified vision behind the experimental style; some of the more recent movies seemed to throw logic and cohesion and structure out the window in search of something more sensational or self-consciously “artistic,” and it disturbed her that viewers didn’t seem to be wise to the trend. Television, with its constant interruptions, might be partly responsible for audiences’ acceptance of gaping lapses of logic in movies, of the breakdown of a reliable storytelling method. But she sensed that there was much more to it than that, and she felt that the true cause was to be found in the chaotic pace of modern life: Audiences were so revved up emotionally that they had lost the ability to discern when a movie’s form and structure had let them down.
It was a film that not many saw which crystallized Pauline’s concerns: Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), a haunted-house thriller in which the horror is unseen. In her essay she reported what had become one of her favorite reviewing habits: scrutinizing the audience as a way of sorting out what was happening to the movie industry. She reported that at the showing of The Haunting that she had seen, the few people in attendance “were restless and talkative, the couple sitting near me arguing—the man threatening to leave, the woman assuring him that something would happen. In their terms, they were cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along.” From this point, she drew a connecting line to another of her favorite targets, the art-house audience, which she felt “accepts lack of clarity as complexity
, accepts clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style.”
She was careful to warn her readers that, while she didn’t want to be branded as a “boob who attacks ambiguity and complexity,” she did believe that even complex subject matter should be expressed as lucidly as possible. The fracturing of narrative, the habit of taking simple ideas and stories and rendering them “complex” through superficially tricky and dazzling technical means, meant that “more and more people come out of a movie and can’t tell you what they’ve seen, or even whether they liked it.”
Having placed “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” with the widely read Atlantic Monthly, Mills was now able to sell Pauline’s essay “Old Movies Never Die” to Mademoiselle, which, despite being a women’s fashion magazine, had for years published a good deal of quality nonfiction and fiction. “Old Movies Never Die” was a fairly routine roundup of ’30s movies, and she herself thought little of it when it was eventually published in the July 1965 issue. But she was delighted with the money and exposure that publication in another wide-circulation magazine brought her.
On March 11, 1965, I Lost It at the Movies was published. It had an advance sale of 5,227 copies—an excellent showing for a book about film by an author whose name was still relatively unknown to the general reading public. The Atlantic Monthly Press gave it a significant push with full-page ads in trade publications such as Library Journal and the American Library Association’s Booklist, and smaller ads in such prestigious venues such as The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and The New York Times Book Review. The prepublication reviews from the trade press were encouraging. Library Journal stated, “There are very few American film critics whose collected writings would maintain the high level of this book,” while Publishers Weekly found “the artistry, literacy, fine style and clearheaded reasoning of this criticism is outstanding” and predicted that it should be an “explosively controversial book.” The exacting Kirkus Reviews wrote, “Never dull, blazingly personal, provokingly penetrating . . . Miss Kael is a ‘find.’”
