I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  There’s supposed to be something on fire inside Alma, the heroine of Summer and Smoke, but from Geraldine Page’s performance and Peter Glenville’s direction, t’ain’t smoke that rises, just wispy little old tired ideas goin’ to rejoin the Holy Ghost. There’s nothing on fire in the movie. The movie looks artistic, but it’s the opposite of art: it dulls the senses. There are many ways in which a performance can go wrong. Geraldine Page may have discovered a new one: she’s technically so careful, so studied, so perfect in a way that she’s a bore — all delicate shadings and no surprises. Who wants to see a performance that’s so meticulously worked-out and worked-over, it’s finished, it’s dead? Besides, Miss Page’s lonely, inhibited spinster, Alma, is rather an unfortunate mixture of Julie Harris and Zasu Pitts.

  The subject matter of Summer and Smoke is a little anecdote about two people, a preacher’s daughter who represents spirit and a doctor’s son who represents flesh. Each influences the other and so they wind up exchanging roles: she becomes a loose woman and he becomes a dedicated, selfless man. It’s a little QED sort of plot stretched out for two hours of over-composed photography and decomposed characters. There’s one of those hypocritical preachers who looks left over from a stock company of Rain; stage Mexicans flash their gleaming teeth; Thomas Gomez turns up once more, sweating and shouting; and Rita Moreno — who is always described as fiery and tigerish — comes on like a parody of Carmen Jones. Her dance of inflamed jealousy is lethally funny, but in this context of what are called poignant emotions you become too dispirited to laugh. And there’s the ingenue or overgrown infant, Pamela Tiffin, with a face as soft and dimply as a baby’s bottom — and just as expressive. Couldn’t the stork take her back?

  Sometimes Tennessee Williams seems to think with the mind of Stanley Kowalski. If Alma is being spiritual and skittish and old-maidish when she screams at a cock-fight, carry me back to old virginity.

  The men who filmed The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone seem to think the idea of an aging woman buying companionship and love so daring and unusual that they fumble around with it almost as much as the doctor in the screen version of Suddenly, Last Summer, who couldn’t seem to cope with the simple facts of Sebastian’s homosexuality and kept saying, “You don’t mean that?” — “No, it can’t be that?” — “What are you saying?” — “What do you mean?” I assumed the youngest child in the audience would get the point before he did. By trying so diligently to make Mrs. Stone sympathetic and understandable the director and writer, José Quintero and Gavin Lambert, kill all interest in her. We could accept a woman buying love, but why make her haggle over it?

  The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is rather like Sunset Boulevard — without the madness and the wit. In the scene at the tailor’s we can almost hear the clerk murmur — “After all, if the lady is paying . . .” In Sunset Boulevard there was a calculated grotesque — crazy old Norma Desmond in her macabre mansion. Mrs. Stone is more like Elsie Dinsmore on her last legs, and the camera and script persevere over it all so long that the effect is unintentionally grotesque.

  Why explain so much? Anyone who has ever watched the middle-aged and elderly women going in for their Arthur Murray lessons knows that you don’t even have to go to Rome to drift . . .

  The Tennessee Williams novella (in the tradition of the D. H. Lawrence “Lovely Lady” stories) is about a proud cold-hearted bitch without cares or responsibilities who learns that sex is all that holds her to life, it is the only sensation that momentarily saves her from the meaningless drift of her existence. The movie is so insistent about the “shocking” mechanics of purchasing love that that’s what the film seems to be about. It’s too bad because the role seemed ideal for Vivien Leigh, who had been brilliant in the role of the aging woman in The Deep Blue Sea; but as Mrs. Stone she’s parched and monotonous — though Warren Beatty somehow manages to come through. Quintero’s direction is so lacking in rhythm that one might think the Roman spring had got him, that he was losing control along with Mrs. Stone.

  In a variation of this theme in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Patricia Neal is amusing in a rather impenetrable role — she seems to be playing a lesbian and she’s also keeping George Peppard. I don’t think it’s wise to let the mind linger too long over that.

  West Side Story

  Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider. I have premonitions of the beginning of the end when a man who seems charming or at least remotely possible starts talking about movies. When he says, “I saw a great picture a couple years ago — I wonder what you thought of it?” I start looking for the nearest exit. His great picture generally turns out to be He Who Must Die or something else that I detested — frequently a socially conscious problem picture of the Stanley Kramer variety. Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness).

  It’s experiences like this that drive women into the arms of truckdrivers — and, as this is America, the truckdrivers all too often come up with the same kind of status-seeking tastes: they want to know what you thought of Black Orpheus or Never on Sunday or something else you’d much rather forget.

  When a really attractive Easterner said to me, “I don’t generally like musicals, but have you seen West Side Story? It’s really great,” I felt a kind of gnawing discomfort. I love musicals and so I couldn’t help being suspicious of the greatness of a musical that would be so overwhelming to somebody who didn’t like musicals. The gentleman’s remark correlated with other expressions of taste — the various encounters in offices and on trains and planes with men who would put on solemn faces as they said, “I don’t ordinarily go for poetry but have you read This Is My Beloved?”

  I had an uneasy feeling that maybe it would be better if I didn’t go to see West Side Story — but, if you’re driven to seek the truth, you’re driven. I had to learn if this man and I were really as close as he suggested or as far apart as I feared. Well, it’s a great musical for people who don’t like musicals.

  You will notice that nobody says West Side Story is a good movie; they say it’s great — they accept the terms on which it is presented. It aims to be so much more than a “mere” musical like Singin’ in the Rain (just about the best Hollywood musical of all time) that it is concerned with nothing so basic to the form as lightness, grace, proportion, diversion, comedy. It is not concerned with the musical form as a showcase for star performers in their best routines; it aspires to present the ballet of our times — our conflicts presented in music and dance. And, according to most of the critics, it succeeds. My anxiety as I entered the theater was not allayed by a huge blow-up of Bosley Crowther’s review proclaiming the film a “cinematic masterpiece.”

  West Side Story begins with a blast of stereophonic music that had me clutching my head. Is the audience so impressed by science and technique, and by the highly advertised new developments that they accept this jolting series of distorted sounds gratefully — on the assumption, perhaps, that because it’s so unlike ordinary sound, it must be better? Everything about West Side Story is supposed to stun you with its newness, its size, the wonders of its photography, editing, choreography, music. It’s nothing so simple as a musical, it’s a piece of cinematic technology.

  Consider the feat: first you take Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and remove all that cumbersome poetry; then you make the Montagues and Capulets really important and modern by turning them into rival street gangs of native-born and Puerto Ricans. (You get rid of the parents, of course; America is a young country — and who wants to be bothered by the squabbles of older people?) There is Jerome Robbins to convert the street rumbles into modern ballet — though he turns out to be too slow and painstaking for high-powered moviemaking and the co-director Robert Wise takes over. (May I remind you of some of Robert Wise’s previous credits — the names may be construed as symbolic. So Big, Executive Suite, Somebody Up There Likes Me, I Want to Live.) The writers include Arthur Laurents, Ernest Lehman, and, f
or the lyrics, Stephen Sondheim. The music is said to be by Leonard Bernstein. (Bernstein’s father at a recent banquet honoring his seventieth birthday: “You don’t expect your child to be a Moses, a Maimonides, a Leonard Bernstein.” No, indeed, nor when you criticize Bernstein’s music do you expect people to jump in outrage as if you were demeaning Moses or Maimonides.) Surely, only Saul Bass could provide the titles for such a production, as the credits include more consultants and assistants, production designers, sound men, editors, special effects men, and so forth than you might believe possible — until you see the result. Is it his much-vaunted ingeniousness or a hidden streak of cynicism — a neat comment on all this technology — that he turns the credits into graffiti?

  The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don’t really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms — for whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert. There’s even a heavenly choir. When the fruity, toothsome Romeo-Tony meets his Juliet-Maria, everything becomes gauzy and dreamy and he murmurs, “Have we met before?” That’s my favorite piece of synthetic mysticism since the great exchange in Black Orpheus: “My name is Orpheus.” “My name is Eurydice.” “Then we must be in love.” When Tony, floating on the clouds of romance (Richard Beymer unfortunately doesn’t look as if he could walk) is asked, “What have you been taking tonight?” he answers, “A trip to the moon.” Match that for lyric eloquence! (You’d have to go back to Golden Boy.)

  When Tony stabs Maria’s brother and your mind fills in with “O, I am fortune’s fool,” the expensive scriptwriters come up with a brilliant exclamation for him. “Maria!” he cries. Do not let this exquisite simplicity mislead you — for they do not call the name “Maria” lightly. She is no mere girl like Juliet — she has the wisdom of all women, she is the mother of us all. And that is why, no doubt, they depart from Shakespeare’s plot at the end: suffering Maria survives. And, of course, the appeal to the Catholic audience — which might otherwise become uneasy as both gangs are probably Catholic — is thereby assured. West Side Story plays the game in every conceivable way: it makes a strong appeal to youth by expressing the exuberant, frustrated desires of youth in the ugly, constricted city life, but it finally betrays this youth by representing the good characters as innocent and sweet, and making the others seem rather comic and foolish. They’re like Dead End kids dancing — and without much improvement in the humor of the Dead End kids.

  How can so many critics have fallen for all this frenzied hokum — about as original as, say, South Pacific at home — and with a score so derivative that, as we left the theater, and overheard some young man exclaiming “I could listen to that music forever,” my little daughter answered “We have been listening to it forever.” (At his father’s banquet, Bernstein recalled that at his debut when he was thirteen he had played variations of a song “in the manner of Chopin, Liszt and Gershwin. Now I will play it in the manner of Bernstein.” How, I wonder?) Perhaps the clue is in the bigness, and in the pretensions that are part of the bigness. Arthur Knight in the Saturday Review called it “A triumphant work of art”; Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic says:

  The best film musical ever made. . . . When the film begins, and the Jets move down the streets of the West Side (studio settings faultlessly blended with location shots), as they mold swagger into ballet, we know that we are not seeing dance numbers, we are seeing street gangs for the first time as they really are — only we have not been able to perceive it for ourselves. . . . It is Robbins’ vision — of city life expressed in stylized movement that sometimes flowers into dance and song — that lifts this picture high. If a time-capsule is about to be buried anywhere, this film ought to be included, so that possible future generations can know how an artist of ours made our most congenial theatrical form respond to some of the beauty in our time and to the humanity in some of its ugliness.

  A candidate for a time-capsule is surely no ordinary multi-million-dollar spectacle. Hasn’t Kauffmann, along with a lot of other people, fallen victim to the show of grandeur and importance? If there is anything great in the American musical tradition — and I think there is — it’s in the light satire, the high spirits, the giddy romance, the low comedy, and the unpretentiously stylized dancing of men like Fred Astaire and the younger Gene Kelly. There’s more beauty there — and a lot more humanity — than in all this jet-propelled ballet. Nothing in West Side Story gave me the pleasure of an honest routine like Donald O’Connor’s “Make ’Em Laugh” number in Singin’ in the Rain or almost any old Astaire and Rogers movie.

  Despite Kauffmann’s feeling that “we are seeing street gangs for the first time as they really are,” I wonder how the actual street gangs feel about the racial composition of the movie’s gangs. For, of course, the Puerto Ricans are not Puerto Ricans and the only real difference between these two gangs of what I am tempted to call ballerinas — is that one group has faces and hair darkened, and the other group has gone wild for glittering yellow hair dye; and their stale exuberance, though magnified by the camera to epic proportions, suggests no social tensions more world shaking than the desperation of young dancers to get ahead — even at the risk of physical injury. They’re about as human as the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Maria, the sweet virgin fresh from Puerto Rico, is the most machine-tooled of Hollywood ingenues — clever little Natalie Wood. Like the new Princess telephone, so ingeniously constructed that it transcends its function and makes communication superfluous (it seems to be designed so that teen-agers can read advertising slogans at each other), Natalie Wood is the newly-constructed love-goddess — so perfectly banal she destroys all thoughts of love. In his great silent film Metropolis, Fritz Lang had a robot woman named the false Maria: she had more spontaneity than Natalie Wood’s Maria.

  I had a sense of foreboding when I saw that Friar Lawrence had become a kindly old Jewish pharmacist called “Doc,” but I was hardly prepared for his ultimate wisdom — “You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop?” These words Bosley Crowther tells us “should be heard by thoughtful people — sympathetic people — all over the land.” Why, I wonder? What is there in this message that has anything to do with thought? These message movies dealing with Negro and white, or Puerto Rican and white, like to get a little extra increment of virtue — unearned — by tossing in a sweet, kindly, harmless old Jew full of prophetic cant. (Presumably, Jews should not be discriminated against because they are so philosophic and impotent.) The film makers wouldn’t dream of having a young, pushing, aggressive Jew in the film — just as they don’t dare to differentiate or characterize the racial backgrounds of the white gang. (Only sweet, reformed Tony can be identified as a Pole.) Yet this is a movie that pretends to deal with racial tensions. The lyrics keep telling us this is what it’s about and the critics seem to accept the authors’ word for it.

  “But,” counter the enthusiasts for the film, “surely you must admit the dancing is great.” No, it isn’t — it’s trying so hard to be great it isn’t even good. Those impressive, widely admired opening shots of New York from the air overload the story with values and importance — technological and sociological. The Romeo and Juliet story could, of course, be set anywhere, but West Side Story wrings the last drop of spurious importance out of the setting, which dominates the enfeebled love story. The dancing is also designed to be urgent and important: it is supposed to be the lyric poetry of the streets, with all the jagged rhythms of modern tensions. The bigger the leap the more, I suppose, the dancer is expressing — on the theory that America is a big, athletic country. Who would have thought that Busby Berkeley’s amusing old geometric patterns and aerial views would come back this way? Add social ideas to geometry, and you
have the new West Side Story concept of dance. And just as the American middle classes thought they were being daring and accepting jazz when they listened to the adaptations and arrangements of big orchestras that gave jazz themes the familiar thick, sweet sludge of bad symphonic music, and thought that jazz was being elevated and honored as an art when Louis Armstrong played with the lagging, dragging New York Philharmonic (under Leonard Bernstein), they now think that American dancing is elevated to the status of art by all this arranging and exaggerating — by being turned into the familiar “high” art of ballet. The movements are so huge and sudden, so portentously “alive” they’re always near explosion point. The dancing is obviously trying to say something, to glorify certain kinds of movement. And looking at all those boys in blue jeans doing their callisthenic choreography, Americans say, “Why it’s like ballet . . . it’s art, it’s really great!” What is lost is not merely the rhythm, the feel, the unpretentious movements of American dancing at its best — but its basic emotion, which, as in jazz music, is the contempt for respectability. The possibilities of dance as an expressive medium are not expanded in West Side Story; they’re contracted. I would guess that in a few decades the dances in West Side Story will look as much like hilariously limited, dated period pieces as Busby Berkeley’s “Remember the Forgotten Man” number in Gold Diggers of 1933.

  After West Side Story was deluged with Academy Awards as the best movie of 1961, Murray Schumach reported in the New York Times that “there seemed to be general agreement that one reason” it won “was that its choreography, music, and direction were devoted to the serious theme of the brotherhood of man.” A few weeks ago, in a talk with a Hollywood director, when I expressed surprise at the historical novel he had undertaken to film, he explained that the “idea” of the book appealed to him because it was really about “the brotherhood of man.” I averted my eyes in embarrassment and hoped that my face wasn’t breaking into a crooked grin. It’s a great conversation closer — the “brotherhood of man.” Some suggested new “serious” themes for big movies: the sisterhood of women, “no man is an island,” the inevitability of death, the continuity of man and nature, “God Is All.”