I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Sometimes, when I read film critics, I think I can do without brothers.

  L’Avventura

  In answer to the question, “What is the best film of 1961?”

  It had begun to look as if only those with a fresh eye — working in poverty and inexperience and in underdeveloped countries, discovering the medium for themselves — could do anything new and important (like The Apu Trilogy). The future of movies seemed to lie with film makers who didn’t know that it had all been done before. For those with great traditions behind them, the only field to explore seemed to be comedy — and “black” comedy at that — or, at least, works which suggest black comedy: Eroica, Kagi, Breathless, The Cousins, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal.

  L’Avventura is, easily, the film of the year, because Antonioni, by making his movie about this very problem — depleted modern man — demonstrated that the possibilities for serious, cultivated, personal expression in the film medium were not yet exhausted. L’Avventura is a study of the human condition at the higher social and economic levels, a study of adjusted, compromising man — afflicted by short memory, thin remorse, easy betrayal. The characters are passive as if post-analytic, active only in trying to discharge their anxiety — sex is their sole means of contact and communication. Too shallow to be truly lonely, they are people trying to escape their boredom in each other and finding it there. They become reconciled to life only by resignation. Claudia, the only one capable of love, is defeated like the rest; her love turns to pity.

  It’s a barren view of life, but it’s a view. Perhaps compassion is reserved for the lives of the poor: the corruption of innocence is tragic in Shoeshine; the intransigence of defeated man is noble in Umberto D.; hope and gullibility are the saving grace of Cabiria. But modern artists cannot view themselves (or us) tragically: rightly or wrongly, we feel that we defeat ourselves — when were we innocent? when are we noble? how can we be “taken in”? Antonioni’s subject, the fall (that is to say, the exposure) of rich, handsome, gifted man is treated accumulatively and analytically — an oblique, tangential view of love and society, a view not raised to the plane of despair. In its melancholy L’Avventura suggests Chekhov. Because it is subtle and ascetic, yet laborious in revealing its meanings, it suggests the Henry James who chewed more than he bit off. And perhaps because the characters use sex destructively as a momentary black-out, as a means of escaping self-awareness by humiliating someone else, it suggests D. H. Lawrence. Most of all, I think, it suggests the Virginia Woolf of The Waves: the mood of L’Avventura is “Disparate are we.” Antonioni is an avowed Marxist — but from this film I think we can say that although he may believe in the socialist criticism of society, he has no faith in the socialist solution. When you think it over, probably more of us than would care to admit it feel the same way. A terrible calm hangs over everything in the movie; Antonioni’s space is a kind of vacuum in which people are aimlessly moving — searchers and lost are all the same, disparate, without goals or joy.

  For those who can take movies or leave them alone, La Dolce Vita is obviously the film of the year: audiences can enjoy its “vice” (the name they give their own fantasies when somebody else acts them out) and they can hold up their hands in horror (peeking through the fingers) at all that wicked decadence and all those orgies.

  One, Two, Three

  I try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story. — SAUL BASS

  His design for One, Two, Three shows a cartoon of a girl holding up three balloon-breasts. Is he trying to tell us something about the picture? Is his come-on really a warning to stay away? Bass says, “A successful communication entices the viewer to participate. The minute you’re in a position of getting him to pick up a shovel and hurl a spadeful in the pile, you’re beginning to reach him.”

  Just about every reviewer of One, Two, Three has been “enticed” into shoveling it on. One, Two, Three has been almost universally praised: in Show Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., went so far as to call it an “irresistible evocation of the mood of Mark Twain. A couple of months ago, I lamented the disappearance of the uproariously funny film — the film which left one helpless, spent, and gasping for breath. My regrets were premature. One, Two, Three is such a film.” And so forth. The critics have been picking up their shovels all right, but they’re digging the grave of humor. As a member of the audience, I felt degraded and disgusted, as if the dirt were being hurled right in my face.

  One, Two, Three is overwrought, tasteless, and offensive — a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine. It is supposed to be a topical satire of East-West relations, and it was actually shot in Berlin and Munich (where the Brandenberg Gate was reconstructed), but the real location is the locker room where tired salesmen swap the latest variants of stale old jokes. A few examples and you can descend to the level of its rancid humor: When Arlene Francis, the wife of the Coca-Cola executive James Cagney, learns that the young Communist Horst Buchholz doesn’t wear any shorts, she says “Doesn’t wear any shorts! No wonder they’re winning the cold war!” Her little daughter, who has apparently inherited her mother’s wit, explains that a girl is pregnant with the cute remark, “She’s going to have puppies.” People are described as sitting around on their “assets”; when Cagney is being bossy, Miss Francis addresses him as “My Fuehrer”; there is much humor about the SS background of various characters, and we are invited to laugh at the Russians for rejecting a shipment of Swiss cheese because it was full of holes. There is the by-now-to-be-expected female impersonation bit, with the man wearing balloons for boobies, so that the sequence can end with that weary old punch line, “I never saw one yellow one and one green one before.” If you find these jokes fresh and funny, then by all means rush to see One, Two, Three, which will keep shouting them at you for two hours. It’s like you-know-what hitting the fan.

  Though I haven’t seen anything but rave reviews for One, Two, Three, I think that, like Saul Bass, the reviewers give the show away by their tone, by the quality of the language they use in praising it. They, too, evoke “the essence of the story.” Here, for example is Time:

  One, Two, Three is a yell-mell, hard-sell, Sennett-with-a-soundtrack satire of iron curtains and color lines, of people’s demockeracy, Coca-Colonization, peaceful noexistence, and the Deep Southern concept that all facilities are created separate but equal. What’s more, Director Billy Wilder makes his attitude stick like Schlagobers slung in the spectator’s kisser. He purposely neglects the high precision of hilarity that made Some Like It Hot a screwball classic and The Apartment a peerless comedy of officemanship. But in the rapid, brutal, whambam style of a man swatting flies with a pile driver, he has produced a sometimes beWildered, often wonderfully funny exercise in nonstop nuttiness. . . .

  Surely it takes a very peculiar movie to drive Time’s reviewers to such a rat-tat-tatty prose. And, as examples of what is referred to as the “edge and temper” of Wilder’s and I. A. L. Diamond’s writing, Time quotes these remarks:

  Cagney’s wife (Arlene Francis): “But she can’t stay long. Doesn’t school open soon?” Cagney: “In Georgia? You never know.” Cagney’s ten-year-old son, hopefully, when the boss’s daughter has a fainting spell: “If she dies can I have my room back?” First Communist, bitterly: “Is everybody in this world corrupt?” Second Communist, thoughtfully: “I don’t know everybody.”

  There is a temptation to ascribe this last remark to a bit of self-awareness on the part of Time’s reviewer. It’s almost inconceivable that he or they could write this way about a film they’d really enjoyed.

  And here is Brendan Gill in the New Yorker:

  The Messrs. Diamond and Wilder have had the gall to manufacture a hundred outrageous wisecracks about the desperate duel that Russia and the West are currently waging . . . the whole German people, as if in a trifling aside, are indicted as lickspittles or martinets, and we sit watching and roaring with delight. F
or this tour de force of fratricidal subversion we have to thank not only Mr. Cagney, who makes it shamefully attractive, but, again, Mr. Wilder, who produced and directed the picture, and who could no doubt wring a hearty yock from bubonic plague.

  Exactly. And it’s hard to believe that a man who uses a phrase about wringing “a hearty yock from bubonic plague” doesn’t somehow know that that’s not how one would ordinarily describe a good comedy. Brendan Gill says that it “all miraculously works” but it doesn’t work — not even in his own enthusiastic description: “Mr. Wilder’s not very secret formula is to keep ’em coming. Gag follows gag at breathtaking speed, and one ends by consenting to his highhanded methods as one consents to a roller coaster that is already clicking up the first fearful slope; what else is there to do?” What else is there to do! You can get sick. Gill says, “By the time the picture is over, we are exhausted, but what has caused our exhaustion is laughter, and few of us will object to paying such a price for that.” I don’t think it’s laughter that causes our exhaustion; it’s the coercive, frenzied, insulting crudity of it all, the assembly-line approach to gags. As Gill said, Diamond and Wilder “manufactured” the wisecracks. Time and the New Yorker are amazingly accurate in their descriptions; what’s astonishing is that having described a very bad movie they then tell us how good it is.

  In Hollywood it is now common to hear Billy Wilder called the world’s greatest movie director. This judgment tells us a lot about Hollywood: Wilder hits his effects hard and sure; he’s a clever, lively director whose work lacks feeling or passion or grace or beauty or elegance. His eye is on the dollar, or rather on success, on the entertainment values that bring in dollars. But he has never before, except perhaps in a different way in Ace in the Hole, exhibited such a brazen contempt for people. Is it possibly life in Hollywood that is so conducive to this extreme materialist position — a view of the world in which human experience is reduced to a need for sex and gadgets (with even sex turned into a gadget), a view in which people sell out their souls and their convictions for a pair of silk stockings, in which Americans, Russians, and Germans — all men — are brothers in petty corruption and lasciviousness? Hollywood may see itself as a microcosm of America, and may consider that its shoddy values are the American way of life that the rest of the world aspires to, but is this degraded view of political conflicts and human values really supposed to be funny? It would have to be relevant to something first. Surely satire must have some closer relationship to its targets than these cheap “topical” jokes which were dated decades before Berlin was divided. Is One, Two, Three really the irreverent political satire the critics have called it, or is it just a lot of scattershot and noise and simulated action — Hellzapoppin’ in Berlin?

  In Eroica in 1957 Andrzej Munk made a satire on a far more unlikely subject: the “heroic” 1944 Warsaw uprising. The black humor was in the disjunction between the humanity of the characters and the absurdity — the insane inhumanity — of the situation. Munk was tough and sardonic enough to laugh at sentimental myths about courage, about war, about prison camp life; he used comedy as a way of expressing and reacting to disillusionment, and the horror in his comedy shocks us into a new kind of clarity and vision.

  Perhaps a diabolic satire could be written on the theme of Coca-Cola haves and have-nots, but Wilder’s comedy isn’t black and there are no disjunctions: his method is as mercenary as the characters. In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann, who thinks “the film has an over-all intelligent energy,” says, “the picture is worth seeing just to watch Cagney . . . or to hear him say, ‘the race that produced the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad.’ ” Really? It’s amazing how many critics can quote lines like that admiringly, and can sum up the movie with such boomerang compliments as “breakneck,” “screwball,” “hard-hitting,” “relentlessly maintains the pace that refreshes.” Dwight Macdonald, who picked One, Two, Three as one of his best films of the year, says, “The mood is established when Cagney complains that the East Germans are hijacking his shipments — ‘and they don’t even return the empties!’ It’s all like that. Wife (Arlene Francis is just right): ‘Our marriage has gone flat, like a stale glass of beer!’ Cagney: ‘Why do you have to bring in a competing beverage?’ ” Yes, it’s all like that. There is one nice touch — an old man singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in German, and there’s also the dance of a behind on a table that’s quite a “set piece.” But even the portrait of Khrushchev slipping from its frame, revealing Stalin’s picture beneath, was a reprise of a dimly remembered gag. And the three Commissars whom Wilder revived from his earlier script for Ninotchka have become coarsened with the years — another indication of the changing climate of Hollywood. They were grotesquely pathetic and sentimental in 1939; now they are even more grotesquely crude than the Cagney character. And buried beneath all this there is the almost unrecognizable corpse of a Molnar play.

  This being the age of the big production and the big promotion, there is a tie-in with Coca-Cola which provides truck banners, supermarket ads, contests, and window displays. Who is laughing at whom? The target has been incorporated in the profits of the joke. Perhaps Wilder (who owns 90 per cent of the picture) is closer to his Coca-Colonizer than one might have expected. Is this dollar diplomacy?

  I felt that we in the audience were all being manipulated in some shameful way, and that whenever this feeling might become conscious and begin to dry up the laughs, Wilder showed his manipulative skills by throwing in little sops to sentiment — even more ugly in their way than the “wisecracks.” Arlene Francis has said of her role, “My character is a warm, sensible woman who has a good marriage.” That’s better satirical dialogue than anything I heard in One, Two, Three — a movie that shovels on the wit.

  The Mark

  The advertising campaign for the Anglo-American production The Mark includes this statement:

  SENSATIONALISM BE DAMNED . . . HERE’S THE TRUTH ABOUT “THE MARK.” Because The Mark deals with themes that are, to say the least, touchy, we were a little reluctant to discuss it frankly. We were more than hesitant to tell the story in our advertisements for fear of being accused of “sensationalism.” And so we thought in vague general terms about the picture and its high quality. Now, sensationalism be damned, we want to be truthful and fair to this very uncommon film. What’s it about? In five words, it’s about a victim of sexual deviation. You follow him through psychiatry, through group therapy, through his tenuous meetings with women — and finally the one woman who takes him across the threshold — into manhood. The words are blunt and dramatic. And they’re words you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to understand. At the expense of a blush, or even a moment’s discomfort, why don’t you make an appointment with The Mark? . . .

  In other words the advertising for the movie tries to do just what the movie has the good taste not to do: the advertising tries to work up prurient interest in the theme. But there is another peculiarity in the advertising — the term “a victim of sexual deviation.” Now the problem of the hero of the film is that he was sexually driven to a ten-year old girl, which I think can fairly be classified as a sexual perversion. The term “deviation” suggests that it is about a homosexual — which would certainly have more box-office appeal.

  This time the advertising campaign may, ironically, be more perceptive than the movie. I had the uncomfortable feeling during The Mark that somehow the film makers had gotten their case histories scrambled. Now it may be that the psychological background given the hero is based on the cases of those who attack little girls, but it wasn’t very convincing, it didn’t have the right ring. The family pattern of the suffocating, seductive monster-mother and the rejected, castrated father certainly suggested the development of a homosexual. And in that rather touchingly sweet scene in which the hero, having at last made it with a mature woman, wakes in the morning, and embraces her tenderly and in very masculine fashion, I was irresistibly reminded of a young man
I once knew, a New York dancer, who talked to me late one night about how much analysis had done for him. He wasn’t queer any more and he didn’t need to feel humiliated and weak and afraid of people. He told me that after his first night with a woman, he’d awakened to the new day and the first thought that came to him was, “Now I don’t have to be afraid to shake hands with people.” Well, a week after this eulogy of heterosexuality, he was beaten up and robbed by a Negro he’d picked up.

  The good taste of The Mark is what’s pleasant about it; it’s also what’s the matter with it. When you’re seeing it, you’re carried along for the most part. It’s intelligent and decent, it’s generous toward the characters. It has all the virtues of a fine, sensible, humane thesis picture. Maybe it’s as good as a movie is likely to be without any real imagination, or without taking any chances: it’s made with intelligence rather than with art — but perhaps with not too high an order of intelligence. Could a movie that really dealt with a sex drive toward children be in such unoffending good taste? In The Mark discretion is carried so far that there is nothing left to be discreet about. They have made the hero superficially plausible, and while we’re watching it, it’s convincing enough that he didn’t actually consummate his attack on the child: he experienced a violent revulsion after abducting her, vomited and then took her safely home. But he felt he needed to be locked up: he made no defense at his trial and spent three years in prison. Yes, it’s plausible, but maybe we’re too ready to be convinced — because isn’t it a lot more comfortable and easy to feel noble and generous and able to identify with a sex criminal who isn’t really guilty of anything but confused intentions?