by Pauline Kael
Those are my unkind words on A View from the Bridge, except to add that Sidney Lumet doesn’t do a very good job of direction, and that, in particular, his handling of the crowd in the street toward the end of the film is oppressively clumsy.
Miller seems to want to love his worker stereotypes; Lillian Hellman hates her upperclass stereotypes. William Wyler’s production of The Children’s Hour is such a portentous, lugubrious dirge (that seems to be part of the funeral of Hollywood moviemaking) that I developed a rather perverse sympathy for the rich old lady villainess — I thought the schoolteachers treated her abominably. Where I come from, if somebody, particularly an older person, says, “I’ve been wrong, I’m sorry, what can I do to make amends?” you take the hand they hold out to you. I’ve never understood Lillian Hellmanland, where rich people are never forgiven for their errors. But then, has Miss Hellman even recognized hers? I can’t help thinking she wouldn’t waste any sympathy on sexual deviation among the rich. Aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for these girls because they’re so hardworking, and because, after all, they don’t do anything — the lesbianism is all in the mind (I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy — that there isn’t much they can do).
There has been some commiseration with Wyler about the studio hacking out the center of the film: that’s a bit like complaining that a corpse has had a vital organ removed. Who cares? I’m not sure the material of The Children’s Hour would work even if you camped it up and played it for laughs; I don’t know what else you could do with it.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire
I mentioned on the last broadcast that I had been disappointed in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and that I would discuss it on this broadcast, and I received an extraordinary communication from a man who says he would “like to dissuade me” from an unfavorable review. He cautions me that I should not apply the same standards to science fiction that I would to The Seventh Seal or L’Avventura — and I can only assure him that I had not intended to. I have read his communication carefully and I cannot disagree that The Day the Earth Caught Fire attempts to accomplish a worthy purpose. I hope that he — and you — will not think I am anxious for nuclear war or avid to see the world go off its axis if I say that, worthy purpose or no, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is not a very good movie. And perhaps I can make this a little stronger by saying that precisely because its avowed aims are so high, it should be a better movie: artists who want to save the world should not make the world seem so banal. It rather takes the gloss off things, don’t you think?
In bookstores you can buy a paperback of The Day the Earth Caught Fire and on the jacket you’ll see the blurb: “The book of the movie that the Saturday Review calls even greater than On the Beach.” This is the kind of greatness, isn’t it, that dwarfs our poor powers of speech or analysis? It is the greatness not of art but of calamity. The film is, I suppose, better than On the Beach, but I shall always be grateful to Stanley Kramer for either intentionally or unintentionally including that beautiful moment when Gregory Peck, after spurning Ava Gardner’s advances, returns to find her in a wheat field, and asks, “Is your invitation to spread a little fertilizer still open?”
After seeing The Day the Earth Caught Fire I was so puzzled by the ecstatic reviews that I did a bit of research. There had to be some reason why Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote a think piece with such glowing embers as, “Life today is filled with tragic choices” (one of them was his decision to become a film reviewer), and why this film was being treated so seriously. As science fiction it isn’t nearly so amusing as, say, The Time Machine, and as drama it doesn’t exist. I think I found a partial answer in Variety:
PITCH TO INTELLECTUALS & WORRYERS FOR U’S USA-USSR EXPLOSION PIC
A sort of nuclear question hangs over Universal — how to sell the public (domestic market) on a downbeat picture dealing with the No. 1 issue of the day?
Film is the British “Day the Earth Caught Fire,” which cost U $350,000 for western hemisphere rights. Yarn depicts Soviet-U.S. simultaneous test explosions at either pole which get the planet off its axis and out of its orbit, headed for the sun and extinction. The horror is left unresolved at fadeout.
Anxiety in the U echelons is not whether the pic can turn a nice profit — they’re convinced it can, obviously — but the shrewdest policy for tapping revenue. As a first step toward solution, but as part of the total effort in any case, the distrib is wooing the so-called opinion-makers per one of the most intensive pre-release screening schedules ever to engage a major company. Slated over a nine-week period, the showings are being aimed almost exclusively for the intelligentsia — scientists, diplomats, religionists, labor leaders, and such.
Pic has already been screened for such groups as the National Press Club, Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, National Conference of Christians and Jews, National Lawyers’ Guild, United World Federalists, Synagogue Council of America, and American Assn. for the United Nations.
Variety subsequently reported that Universal had spent more than twice the purchase price of the film on the promotion, and that the schedule of preview screenings had set a new high record for the company. I think the intellectuals — the opinion makers — were wooed and flattered and won. And I guess Universal is getting more than its money back. As science fiction the film is really a bit of a cheat, for it employs stock disaster footage — subtly but completely wrong for the final catastrophe: we expect something more mind shattering than familiar newsreel horrors of fire and flood and famine.
I don’t think there’s really too much more to say about this film, though at least it disposes of the myth of city-room wit. We view the disasters through the eyes and imaginations of the newspapermen of the London Daily Express, and what should be black graveyard humor among the newspapermen is just tattletale gray. So many newspaper critics have applauded the veracity of this picture of newspaper life that I suppose they couldn’t rise any higher to the occasion. One trouble with the film is that the film makers, who want to do good, portray average men because they think that will help us identify with them. But as protagonists, average — which comes to mean stereotyped — men are so limited and unimaginative that when we react on their commonplace level, even the end of the world is a dud.
The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties
La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita
La Notte and Marienbad are moving in a new filmic direction: they are so introverted, so interior that I think the question must be asked, is there something new and deep in them, or are they simply empty? When they are called abstract, is that just a fancy term for empty? La Notte is supposed to be a study in the failure of communication, but what new perceptions of this problem do we get by watching people on the screen who can’t communicate if we are never given any insight into what they would have to say if they could talk to each other?
For the past year on the radio I had tried to persuade, goad, and even shame people into seeing L’Avventura, which I think a great film. Then La Notte opened in San Francisco and people were phoning and writing to tell me how marvelous it was and to thank me for opening the world of Antonioni to them. They hadn’t much liked L’Avventura, but they loved La Notte and felt that now they understood why I had been so excited about Antonioni. And I dislike La Notte. Perhaps detest is the better word.
Antonioni is a master of the medium — but in a highly individualistic and peculiar way. He has none of the conventional director’s tricks of the trade, perhaps not even the ordinary syntax, and he is painfully inept and obvious when he has to fall back on a simple action sequence (like the street fight in La Notte). But he doesn’t often need this kind of simple expertise because he doesn’t tell conventional stories. He uses a seemingly random, peripheral course of development, apparently merely following the characters through inconsistencies and inadvertences; and without all the usual plot cues and paraphernalia, we can be far more interested in following him. We go into
byways, we don’t stay on the U.S. 40 of most American plots. In L’Avventura, and in La Notte, Antonioni’s camerawork is an extraordinarily evocative mixture of asceticism, lyricism and a sense of desolation. He is a master of space; he can take bleak landscapes and compose or transform them into visions of elegance and beauty. The people are rich but the atmosphere is cold: it is upper-class neorealism — the poetry of moral and spiritual poverty. But in La Notte, the architectural sense, integral to the theme and characters of L’Avventura, begins to dominate the characters, and as the abstract elements take over, the spacial becomes glacial: drama and character and even narrative sense are frozen.
During La Notte, a woman sitting in back of me kept explaining the movie to her husband. She had obviously come to the wrong sort of “art” film, and she was trying to give a conventional narrative interpretation of the story. Determined not to admit that she had led him to the theater by mistake, she was soon reduced to a desperate admiration of the scenery and clothes. But then something came on the screen that she could exclaim over with delight and full approval — it was the performance of the Negro girl contortionist in the nightclub scene, which, like the bitch-elegant Negro performers in Fellini’s films, was, of course, introduced to show the decadence and boredom of the beholders. There was nothing else in the movie the female Babbitt in back of me could enjoy and she gave up.
Most of the audience seemed to accept Antonioni’s terms. But I wonder if perhaps Americans don’t accept the all-passion-is-spent bit in a special way that relates to the failure of his method and something distasteful and offensive in his whole conception. There is a glamour that his characters seem to find in their own desolation and emptiness, and I think to an American art-house audience this glamorous world-weariness looks very elegant indeed. How exquisitely bored and decadent are the Antonioni figures, moving through their spiritual wasteland, how fashionable is their despair.
The images are emptied of meaning. Marcello Mastroianni is used as a handsome, mindless mask, the actor as mature juvenile, the experienced, tired, fortyish man of all these films (he is also the hero of La Dolce Vita, and the hero of Marienbad is just like him). The intellectual gifts attributed to Mastroianni in La Notte are not so much unconvincing, unproved, as totally alien. His face fails to show the ravages of an artist’s mind.
And there is the repeated view of Jeanne Moreau walking away from the camera. Jeanne Moreau is a brilliant film actress and her face is a marvel of sullen boredom that can suddenly be brought to life by a smile, even a forced, meaningless reflex of a smile; but what are we to make of this camera fixation on her rear? In Marienbad I had laughed at the views of Delphine Geyrig’s elegant backside, with its delicate Swiss-watch movements, the walk that was so absurdly high-toned that I took it, rightly or wrongly, for parody, but in La Notte, obviously we are supposed to be interested in Jeanne Moreau’s thoughts and feelings while we look at her from the back, walking around the city. What kind of moviemaking, what kind of drama is this? Is the delicate movement of the derrière supposed to reveal her Angst, or merely her ennui? Are we to try to interpret the movement of her rear, or are we to try to interpret the spacial and atmospheric qualities of the city streets — and the only kind of interpretation we can draw from the settings is, for example, that the impersonal modern glass city reflects the impersonal life of modern man, that city people have lost their roots in the earth and all that sort of thing. It isn’t much, is it?
In La Notte we see people for whom life has lost all meaning, but we are given no insight into why. They’re so damned inert about their situation that I wind up wanting to throw stones at people who live in glass houses. At a performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, only a boob asks, “Well, why don’t they go to Moscow?” We can see why they don’t. Chekhov showed us why these particular women didn’t do what they said they longed to do. But in movies like La Notte or Marienbad, or, to some degree, La Dolce Vita the men and women are not illuminated or ridiculed — they are set in an atmosphere from which the possibilities of joy, satisfaction, and even simple pleasures are eliminated. The mood of the protagonists, if we can call them that, is lassitude; there is almost no conflict, only a bit of struggling — perhaps squirming is more accurate — amid the unvoiced acceptance of defeat. They are the post-analytic set — they have done everything, they have been to Moscow and everywhere else, and it’s all dust and ashes: they are beyond hope or conviction or dedication. It’s easy enough to say “They are alienated; therefore, they exist,” but unless we know what they are alienated from, their alienation is meaningless — an empty pose. And that is just what alienation is in these films — an empty pose; the figures are cardboard intellectuals — the middle-class view of sterile artists. Steiner’s party from La Dolce Vita is still going on in La Notte, just as the gathering of bored aristocrats in La Dolce Vita is still going on in Marienbad.
The characters in this group of films seem pawns or puppets rather than characters (this, of course, is carried to the extreme in Marienbad of deliberately treating them as pawns). They have very little personality or individuality; they have no convincing existence. Mastroianni in La Notte is supposed to be a talented and famous writer, but would he behave any differently in the course of the film if he were a hairdresser, or the advertising manager of an airline, or a movie star? But then how can we accept him as a writer? A writer, we assume, is involved in the life around him; he interprets and helps to transform his experience; he has needed will as well as talent to develop his individuality and to fight conformity and insensitivity. When we are told that the hero of La Notte is a writer, he automatically acquires an importance, an almost symbolic status that his character in no way justifies.
And here, perhaps, we begin to get at something centrally wrong in this group of films. La Dolce Vita, La Notte, and Marienbad are all about people who are bored, successful and rich — international café society — but in at least two of them we are told they are artists, and because we know that artists embody and express their age, its soul and its temper, we are led to believe that these silly manikins represent the soul-sickness, the failure of communication, the moral isolation of modern man.
Fellini and Antonioni ask us to share their moral disgust at the life they show us — as if they were illuminating our lives, but are they? Nothing seems more self-indulgent and shallow than the dissatisfaction of the enervated rich; nothing is easier to attack or expose. The decadence of aristocracy and its attraction to and for Bohemia, are nothing new, not especially characteristic of our age, nor even much of a social problem. Unless we can recognize this barren way of life in ourselves, then all we are being asked to do is stare in horror at the decadent upper classes — a pastime as shallow as their own. They show us people walking in a dream, dead without even putting up a fight for life; it’s as if there were nothing to fight for, as if no new experiences were possible. In La Notte the wife goes back to where she and her husband used to go, reads him a letter to remind him how he used to feel. Like the nagging hypochondriacs who enjoy poor health, she has nothing to do but savor the dregs of old experiences as she wanders aimlessly in her melancholy. Well, what has defeated them all? I don’t want to sound like a Doris Day character — the All-American middle-aged girl — but when I put the coffee on in the morning and let the dogs out, I don’t think I feel more alienated than people who did the same things a hundred years ago.
I have heard that at the graduate-school level Antonioni’s endings are said to be very beautiful, even inspiring, that the “shared hopelessness” indicates that modern human experience need not be altogether downhill, that you must make the best of a bad world, and that there is nobility and beauty in resigning yourself to the futility of life. Surely this is the last gasp of depleted academia. In La Notte Antonioni has intentionally created a ghastly spectacle: two people sharing an empty life. The problem of interpretation is simply whether we can accept the meanings and overtones with which he surrounds this dead marriage;
is it so central and so symbolic that all these ornaments and icicles can be hung from it?
I reject the terms of the film on commonplace grounds: why the devil do they stay together, why doesn’t she leave him if this is how she feels? What has made this a world in which there are no alternatives, no hope? And what is so shocking about a married couple, after ten years or so, no longer being in love or having anything to say to each other? What is so dreadful about their looking for other people to whom they can feel some response? Why are they shown as so withered away, destroyed, dead because they are weary of each other? And if they have no other interests, why should we care about them?
And isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity? 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? If it is the sickness of our time that married people get fed-up with each other, when was the world healthy? I thought it was the health of our culture that when married people have had it, they are free and sufficiently independent to separate. (Perhaps the marriage in La Notte just lasted too long: I don’t know anybody who has stayed married for ten years — nobody except relatives.) Surely there are some institutions, like magazines, to which we must apply criteria other than durability: we do not, for example, call Dwight Macdonald’s Politics a failure because it ceased publication or the Saturday Review of Literature a success because it is interminable.
