I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  At the end of La Notte (conceptually, the ugliest sequence in modern films), the writer and his wife leave the party, and dawn’s early light finds them walking across the golf course and coupling — if we can call it that — near a sandtrap. I couldn’t resist subversive thoughts: why can’t he wait until they get home? And finally I whispered to my companion, a professor of English, “How can he do it with his clothes on?” and my friend answered, “Maybe that’s why those Italian suits are becoming so popular.” The sleepwalking husband and wife do a turn worthy of the contortionist.

  These reactions will no doubt infuriate La Notte lovers — I know very well that we are supposed to be so involved in the interior problems of the characters that we shouldn’t think in such terms. But how far can we go in following a director who has refined narrative and character out of his drama, who is attempting to turn the peripheral elements of drama into its center, who is so preoccupied with boredom and isolation and drifting and the failure of communication and the impermanence of desire, that he has lost the sense that people share other interests and pleasures not so impermanent? (The only parent in these movies is Steiner, who murders his children! Don’t these people even have any pets?) If there are people this bored and vacuous, how did they get this way, and what makes the directors think these people are so central to the modern world that they symbolize our experience? (I admit that when I talk with people who find La Notte “beautiful,” they sound as weak and empty as the people in the movie. Surely this must be the power of suggestion? They also accept Antonioni’s self-serious, literary dialogue as art.)*

  Is Antonioni so different from his contortionist? Doesn’t he experience a sense of accomplishment after completing this ugly, pointless, but difficult-to-do act, this film with its titillations for the blasé (the nymphomaniac in the hospital) and its arty-intellectual appeal for the naive (the tape-recorded poetry)? But, more dishonest than the contortionist, he condemns the act while performing it: he builds in the morality for the audience so that they can feel the desolation of their own emptiness — oh, the pity of it all. And if they have ever experienced despair, they can imagine that it was like this, part of the universal sickness of the rich and gifted, and that they, too, were elegantly above it all.

  Antonioni’s dawn is not merely the dawn of people who have been up all night; it is dawn as the fag end of the night before; it is the cold light in which you see yourself and know that there is no new day — just more sleepwalking and self-disgust.

  In film after film, the contortionist and the sleepwalkers. The symbols are artistically arranged, beautifully composed, but they are not really under control. The directors are not saying what they think they are saying. All we need to undermine and ridicule this aimless, high-style moral turpitude passing itself off as the universal human condition is one character at the parties — like, say, Martha Raye in Monsieur Verdoux — who enjoys every minute of it, who really has a ball, and we have the innocent American exploding this European mythology of depleted modern man who can no longer love because he has lost contact with life.

  A Taste of Honey

  The audiences at popular American movies seem to want heroes they can look up to; the audiences at art houses seem to want heroes they can look down on. Does this mean that as we become more educated, we no longer believe in the possibilities of heroism? The “realistic,” “adult” movie often means the movie in which the hero is a little man like, presumably, the little men in the audience.

  A year or so ago art-house audiences were carried away by Ballad of a Soldier and its “refreshing” look of purity and innocence. The new refresher may be A Taste of Honey. The inexperienced young hero of Ballad of a Soldier was too shy and idealistic to make any direct overtures to the heroine; the hero of A Taste of Honey goes beyond inexperience, he’s inadequate — and audiences love him all the more for it. I didn’t much like the material of Ballad of a Soldier, but it was well handled to achieve its effects; I do like Shelagh Delaney’s material, but the movie treatment is rather coarse. Tony Richardson is beginning to gain assurance of the wrong kind: in A Taste of Honey his direction is more controlled than in Look Back in Anger or The Entertainer, but it is at the expense of some of the best material in the modern theater. His treatment of A Taste of Honey is both more pretentious and less exciting than the slender material of the play. He has learned how to package the material and build in the responses like an American director. He doesn’t take a chance on our reaching out to the characters or feelings; everything is pushed at us. What should be a lyric sketch is all filled in and spelled out until it becomes almost a comic melodrama.

  The play, written by an eighteen-year-old working-class Lancashire girl, has fresh dialogue and feeling and warmth. The story is simple: Jo (Rita Tushingham), a schoolgirl, temporarily abandoned by her fun-loving mother who goes off with a new husband, has an affair with a Negro seaman, and then meets a lonely fellow-spirit, a homosexual, Geoff (Murray Melvin), who moves in with her and looks after her during her pregnancy. I use the novelettish term “fellow-spirit” intentionally, because I think it helps to establish the idyllic frame of reference. The story is about a little mock paradise that is lost: the mother comes back and throws Geoff out, but Jo has had her taste of the honey of sweet companionship. A Taste of Honey is a fairy tale set in modern industrial ugliness. Little, sad, shy, dignified Geoff in this story is a combination Peter Pan and homemaking Wendy who had to have a pretend baby, and he’s a fairy godmother as well. The girl Jo is herself a Peter Pan figure: stubborn, independent, capering and whimsical, ignoring most of the world, moved only by what interests her. The background music — children’s songs — further aligns Jo and Geoff with the world and the charm of children. Their pleasures are innocent and carefree; by contrast, the grown-ups are almost all horrible objects, sexual in a nasty, grotesque way.

  The dialogue has lovely turns of humor — and rather old-fashioned but sweet pathos. The film kept reminding me of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in Seventh Heaven, of scenes in A Man’s Castle and other old Frank Borzage films. They, too, were set in poverty, and the characters found humor and poetry in it. The sweet man is now a motherly little queen who looks after the heroine, but the basic emotion is the same as it was in the gentle sentimental love stories of the twenties and thirties — the hero and heroine, friendless babes in the woods who need each other. Geoff’s last scenes — suddenly fascinated by the children in the street, then moving off alone — take us right back to a Chaplin finale, but now “the little fellow” is carried to its psychosexual extreme.

  Perhaps the greatest charm of A Taste of Honey, and this is a distinctively modern charm, is in the poetry of role confusion. The mother and daughter don’t have a parent-child relationship; they are more like bickering siblings. And Jo and Geoff are not like woman and man but like non-bickering siblings, Geoff the older sister looking after Jo, the disorderly younger sister, in what is a bit of a parody of the maternal relationship Jo has not previously experienced. These role confusions are presented by Shelagh Delaney with simple directness and without any moralizing.

  What’s the matter with the film? Perhaps I can get at this indirectly. Have you ever, after an exhausting all-night party or conversation, taken a walk at dawn? It’s cleansing and beautiful and you decide that you’ll change your way of life, get up early, breathe the fresh air. But by nightfall, your drinking companions are good and who wants to go to bed in order to get up early? If you think at all about the clear air of dawn, it’s with a shudder. How awful it would be to have to get up to go out into it, and you laugh at yourself for having thought it was your air. Well, the movie is about the way the morning air feels for those who naturally get up in it, but it appears to be made by people who stayed up all night and then, tired and hung over, discovered the morning air and thought it was a great thing and more people should know about it.

  It’s not as if it were done in Hollywood — you may have heard about the Hollyw
ood producer who wanted to make the film with Audrey Hepburn as Jo and give it a typical American upbeat ending by having the child born dead. You have to be familiar with Hollywood’s curious codes to understand that killing off the little bastard squares everything; and the heroine, having suffered, would then be redeemed. This film doesn’t attempt to lick the material at the Hollywood level, but the director simply can’t find the innocence or the imagination or the style that the boisterous, contagious material deserves and needs; he makes too much of every good thing. The performers are good, but the camera emphasizes their qualities until even their best work seems overdone. If only we could discover the lyric qualities in Rita Tushingham’s Jo — but Richardson doesn’t give us credit for enough vision (perhaps because his own eye isn’t very good); he keeps shoving close-ups at us until we’ve had too much of her homely gamin beauty. And the mother (Dora Bryan), in particular, is handled with low comic crudity. It’s enough to see her singing and on a dance floor; do we also need the easy laugh of seeing her in a room alone bending over, with the camera glued to her corseted backside? Do we need to see her aging flesh in the bathtub? Do we need to have her behaving like a crude villainess, turning the hapless, unwanted little Geoff out of the house? (You may want to quip “odd girl out” but the director treats it like the most heartrending eviction since Way Down East.)

  As a director, Richardson does moralize. He’s always looking for points he can drive home, for larger social nuances — for the obvious that he finds so meaningful. (The working-class author couldn’t be expected to have the social consciousness that an educated liberal can supply.) He isn’t content with the material; he wants to make a statement. And what can make a statement so visually as the grimy working-class wastelands of industrial England? Richardson uses actual locations, but he uses them like sets; the backgrounds are cleverly selected, but merely cleverly selected. The documentary backgrounds are additional visual material: they don’t so much help to tell Jo and Geoff’s story as to reveal the director’s story.

  There is an attempt to tell the story by images in the contrast of the fairground scenes. In the first, a remarkable and upsetting sequence, Jo is miserable with her mother’s raucous and ugly friends and she uncontrollably, but consciously and deliberately, makes a pest of herself and makes everyone miserable. In the second, Jo is with Geoff: they are orphans in the storm who have found each other, and the fairground is an enchanted, innocent background for their delight. Unfortunately, the fairground, the setpiece of so many recent English movies, has become overloaded with social comment: all too obvious as a symbolic playground for impoverished lives it has now become an actual playground for impoverished directorial imaginations. It is but one example of Richardson’s strong and I think lamentable tendency to use backgrounds for too facile a social comment (he’s very keen on the poetry in naturalism) — which is not so very different from the way Hollywood composers use soaring passages of romantic music to swell up emotional response to the plot.

  With all these reservations, the film is one to see: Shelagh Delaney’s dialogue is as clear and surprising as dawn. What a movie this and the Osborne adaptations might have been! The English have so many good actors, so much good material, and so many unimaginative directors. It’s like gathering together all the ingredients for an exquisite soufflé and putting a scullion in charge.

  A Taste of Honey doesn’t do anything for the art of the film, but it has, nevertheless, altered our environment. The sad-eyed queen is the new hero. Audiences longing for a hero to lavish their sympathies on have a new unfortunate they can clasp to their social-worker hearts: the ideal “little man,” the homemaker, the pure-in-heart, childlike, non-threatening male, the man a girl can feel safe with — and who could be more “deprived”? They can feel tender and tolerant, and they can feel contemptuous, and in-the-know at the same time: the man a girl can feel safe with is a joke, he’s not a man at all. The role confusion of the story becomes the source of gratification for the audience: Geoff is poetic because he’s inadequate, and you’re not just having a dirty laugh, you’re accepting life. Romance and comedy are one: the hero is the butt. And the audience, having had him both ways, feels worldly and satisfied.

  Victim

  It was a bit startling to pick up an English newspaper and see that the review of Victim was entitled “Ten-letter word” — but as it turned out, the Observer was referring not to Lenny Bruce’s much publicized hyphenated word but to the simple term “homosexual,” which it appears is startling enough in a movie to make the Johnston office refuse to give Victim a seal of approval.

  I suppose it’s too crude simply to say that Victim is The Mark in drag but that’s not so far from the truth. Like the man who wanted to rape a child but didn’t, the hero of Victim wants to but doesn’t make it with another guy. The lesser characters make out; they don’t have the hero’s steel will, and they are very pathetic indeed, given to such self-illuminating expressions as “Nature played me a dirty trick.” I’m beginning to long for one of those old-fashioned movie stereotypes — the vicious, bitchy old queen who said mean, funny things. We may never again have those Franklin Pangborn roles, now that homosexuals are going to be treated seriously, with sympathy and respect, like Jews and Negroes. It’s difficult to judge how far sensitivities will go: Remembrance of Things Past may soon be frowned upon like Huckleberry Finn and The Merchant of Venice. Social progress makes strange bedfellows.

  Victim manages to get past other censorial bodies by being basically a thriller, a fairly slick suspense story about a blackmailing ring. But it’s a cleverly conceived moralistic thriller: as the victims of the ring are homosexuals, various characters are able to point out the viciousness of the English laws, which, by making homosexuality a crime, make homosexuals the victims of ninety per cent of the blackmail cases. Just about everyone in the movie has attitudes designed to illuminate the legal problems of homosexuality; without the thriller structure, the moralizing message could get awfully sticky. As it is, the film is moderately amusing.

  A number of the reviewers were uneasy about the thesis that consenting adults should be free from legal prosecution for their sex habits; they felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread. (The assumption seems to be that heterosexuality couldn’t hold its own in a free market.) Time’s attitude to the film is a classic example of Time’s capacity for worrying:

  But what seems at first an attack on extortion seems at last a coyly sensational exploitation of homosexuality as a theme — and, what’s more offensive, an implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice. Almost all the deviates in the film are fine fellows — well dressed, well spoken, sensitive, kind . . . Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself.

  On one page Time is worried about the population explosion, and on the next it’s upset because homosexuals aren’t reproducing. (An unwarranted assumption, by the way.)

  Time should really be very happy with the movie, because the hero of the film is a man who has never given way to his homosexual impulses; he has fought them — that’s part of his heroism. Maybe that’s why he seems such a stuffy stock figure of a hero. Oedipus didn’t merely want to sleep with Jocasta; he slept with her.

  There is, incidentally, a terribly self-conscious and unconvincing attempt to distinguish between the “love” the barrister feels for his wife and the physical desire — presumably some lower order of emotion — that he felt for a boy who is more interesting in every way than his wife. And I find it difficult to accept all the upper-class paraphernalia of stage melodrama; it’s hard to believe in people who live at the level on which if you feel insulted by someone’s conversation, you show him the door. Generally when I tell someone to leave, that’s when he most wants to stay, and I’m stuck for eighteen hours of sordid explanations of how he got so repulsive and how much he hates himself. A minor problem in trying to take Victim seriously even a
s a thriller is that the suspense involves a series of “revelations” that several of the highly-placed characters have been concealing their homosexuality; but actors, and especially English actors, generally look so queer anyway, that it’s hard to be surprised at what we’ve always taken for granted — in fact, in this suspense context of who is and who isn’t, it’s hard to believe in the actors who are supposed to be straight.