Pauline Kael (13 page)

The acclaim for
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
disturbed her as much as the mixed reception for the film that she considered to be the best of the New Wave group: Jean-Luc Godard’s
Breathless
(1960), the story of a young, amoral Parisian hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who goes on a crime spree while trying to get himself and his girlfriend (Jean-Seberg) to Italy. Pauline was fascinated by the way Godard had managed to make two characters who cared nothing about anything or anyone both attractive and appealing: They were so detached from the world that impulsiveness was a way of life for them. She found
Breathless
funny and sexy and playful and consistently surprising. It worked on the audience in a way that was unusual for movies at the time; those who saw the film found that it was almost impossible to regulate their responses to what was unfolding on the screen. This style and technique resonated with Pauline—it was another example of her attraction to “messiness” on screen—and in her KPFA review of the film, it is easy to sense her exhilaration:

The New Wave movies were considered by KPFA to be ideal editorial content for its listening audience, and Pauline continued to cover them in her broadcasts. One of her favorites was Antonioni’s
L’Avventura
, which she felt was easily the best film of 1961. Yet her review of it revealed a certain weakness in some of her writing about European movies. She seemed to have a bit more trouble hitting the bull’s-eye with some of the new French and Italian films than she did when dealing with American product. Her assessment for KPFA of
L’Avventura
is a case in point; it’s a bit fuzzy, lacking a strong central point. In fact, when she called it “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,” she sounded perilously close to the mealy pomposity of Bosley Crowther and other critics she had been railing against for years.

When it came to reviewing Hollywood product, however, she was in full command. One of her most provocative broadcasts was the one in which she took on
West Side Story
, which was released in December of 1961 and went on to sweep that year’s Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Robert Wise). Pauline considered the movie perfect fodder for her KPFA show: Here was a blatantly commercial movie trying equally blatantly to achieve some level of “artistry” through its dramatic cinematography, gimmicky editing, crashing stereophonic sound, and its relentless attempt to make some relevant statement about street gangs and the folly of modern youth. The combination worked magic with nearly all the major critics. In
The New York Times
, Bosley Crowther hailed the movie as a “cinematic masterpiece”; in
The New Republic
, Stanley Kauffmann called it “the best musical film ever made.”
West Side Story
might have been made just so Pauline could knock it off its pedestal. She loved classic, comedy-driven movie musicals such as
Singin’ in the Rain
and
The Band Wagon
, but she thought
West Side Story
was, in both conception and execution, a big, loud, pretentious bore:

A specific leitmotif had begun to emerge in Pauline’s reviews of this period: scorn for critics who heaped praise on movies that she felt in no way deserved it. Pauline took to regularly clipping reviews from
The New York Times
,
Time
,
The New Republic
, and other publications and quoting them derisively in her own pieces. In her KPFA review of Billy Wilder’s 1961 comedy
One, Two, Three
, which she found “overwrought, tasteless, and offensive—a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine,” she took
Show
’s Arthur Schlesinger to task for calling the film an “irresistible evocation of the mood of Mark Twain”; in the same review, she also took swipes at Stanley Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, and
The New Yorker
’s Brendan Gill. In her review of
The Innocents
, Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’s
Turn of the Screw
, she dug into Crowther and the
London Observer
’s Penelope Gilliatt for misinterpreting the aims of the movie.

Crowther was a prime target when she wrote about the creative explosion in British cinema, which had sprung up at roughly the same time as the French New Wave. The British movie industry had been moribund for years: The great days of the Ealing comedies were past, and what Britain mostly produced now were tame costume dramas and cozy mysteries. But the industry came roaring back to life in the late 1950s when a group of directors—Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson, among others—turned out a remarkable string of pictures about contemporary British life. One that Pauline particularly took to heart was Richardson’s version of John Osborne’s play
Look Back in Anger
, starring Richard Burton as the hopelessly lost modern man Jimmy Porter, raging against the stranglehold of the British class system. “The injustice of it is almost perfect,” says Jimmy. “The wrong people going hungry. The wrong people being left. The wrong people dying.”

Pauline was incensed by Crowther’s fatuous dismissal of Jimmy as “a conventional weakling, a routine cry-baby, who cannot quite cope with the problems of a tough environment, and so, vents his spleen in nasty words.” For
Look Back in Anger
was “about the failures of men and women to give each other what they need, with the result that love becomes infected. And it is about class resentments, the moral vacuity of those in power, the absence of courage. It’s about humanity as a lost cause—it’s about human defeat.” She found it exhilarating that filmmakers such as Richardson had the courage to confront the bleakness of modern British life onscreen. She had admired Jack Clayton’s
Room at the Top
for its uncompromising portrayal of Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey), an aggressive young Yorkshire man trying to get ahead. The picture had an intimacy and candor that the British cinema hadn’t gone near—it was as new as the black-and-white photography of Freddie Francis, depicting the stifling British cityscapes with their bleak row houses and factories spewing soot from their chimneys.

Those who didn’t like Pauline’s work objected to her caustic tone and what they perceived as her superior, even slightly condescending, attitude, and they often used her bashing of fellow critics as evidence against her, claiming that her lack of collegiality bordered on the unprofessional. But to Pauline, it was essential to draw attention to the ways in which she felt critics had strayed from the path. She believed that they wielded enormous power with the public, and it pained her to see them guiding their readers to what she considered the wrong kind of movies and not giving a fair shake to the ones she felt deserved to be widely seen. Even though she was unpaid, she increasingly approached her reviewing job with a missionary zeal.

She also shook up KPFA by making comments that, decades later, would be viewed as downright callous. From 1960 on, the once-inviolable Production Code had been diluted, and it was now easier for frank subject matter to make it to the screen in some form or another. One of the more controversial movies of 1961 was William Wyler’s version of Lillian Hellman’s play
The Children’s Hour
, a groundbreaking success when it premiered on Broadway in 1934. It deals with a pupil in a girl’s school who circulates the malicious lie that her two women teachers are having an affair, causing one of the women to confront her long-repressed lesbianism. The play had been filmed by Wyler in 1936 as
These Three
, but the strictness of the Code meant that it dealt with a conventional heterosexual triangle. By 1961 the play’s original content could be played out onscreen, even if the producers covered themselves by casting two enormous box-office stars, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, in the leads. Pauline, however, found the movie stodgy and labored. “Aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for these girls because they’re so hard-working 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.)” It was a careless remark, an example of Pauline the Entertainer, going for an easy laugh. Decades later, in more socially conscious times, it would be taken as evidence in the case that some of her detractors sought to build against her.

In addition to her film criticism on KPFA, Pauline also attacked some of the institutions responsible for bringing films to the Bay Area. One of her favorite targets was the San Francisco Film Festival, launched in 1956 by Irving M. Levin, who came from a family of San Francisco theater owners. Pauline considered Levin and his wife, Irma, to be the most ill-equipped people imaginable to run a festival, an opinion shared by many in San Francisco’s arts community, who viewed them as using the Film Festival to secure a niche for themselves among San Francisco’s cultural elite. Pauline believed that the festival was crippled by its self-congratulatory atmosphere, and its tendency to confer genius upon anyone with any connection to the world of film. The truth, she said in her broadcast of November 22, 1961, was that those who had paid $2.50, expecting to see a movie of quality, emerged from the festival “sleepy and bored, asking, how could they have picked that movie?”

She admired the technical skill behind the year’s biggest film, David Lean’s
Lawrence of Arabia
, and also admired Peter O’Toole’s performance in it, though she felt that the complex political situation the movie attempted to set forth—British relations with the Arabs and Turks during World War I—was never adequately sorted out so the audience really could understand what was going on; she also was temperamentally indisposed to like such a big, square spectacle, with every detail carefully calculated and put in its proper place. She felt that one of 1962’s most revered pictures,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, was too dutiful and not imaginative enough in its dramatization of Harper Lee’s prizewinning novel about racial tensions in the south, with Gregory Peck’s heralded performance as the scrupulously fair-minded lawyer Atticus Finch on the whole typical of what she had found him to be back in the 1940s—a plodding, hardworking, uninspired actor.

One picture of 1962 that she immediately loved but didn’t write about was the Western
Ride the High Country
, which not many people saw on its initial, poorly managed release. It was important to Pauline, however, because it was directed by the gifted, rebellious Sam Peckinpah, who came to films after several years of working in television.
Ride the High Country
was an intriguingly self-referential reunion of two veteran stars—in this case, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott—playing two aging ex-lawmen hired to transport a gold shipment through dangerous mountain territory. But it was the director’s contribution that made Pauline sit up and take notice. Always on the march against pretense, Pauline believed that the Western, especially under the influence of John Ford and George Stevens, had become increasingly pompous and self-important throughout the 1950s.
Ride the High Country
impressed her with its honesty and as an example of beautiful and imaginative filmmaking. She would later call it “the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns.” MGM’s neglect of the film only made Pauline get behind the picture all the more. She was beginning what would be a career-long advocacy for directors she considered misunderstood and mistreated, and Peckinpah was one whom she would champion with especially intense devotion.

 

The early 1960s continued to be arduous years for Pauline. She was now a woman in her forties with a child to support, and she seemed no closer to figuring out how to earn a living than she had been when she was in her early twenties, just out of Berkeley. There was an increasing number of assignments from
Film Quarterly
,
Sight and Sound
, and
The Partisan Review
, but while they kept her name alive in film-criticism circles, none of them paid more than a pittance.

At KPFA, tensions between Pauline and management continued to build, and on December 8, 1962, she vented her feelings about the station’s programming. She craved provocative, intense political discussions rather than what she termed KPFA’s preference for “interviews with Quakers and Unitarians”: