Pauline Kael: The critic wore cowboy boots
“I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”
Her sentences never stopped, even when she seemed to be done with them. She went on and on, piling up one opinion after another, hoping perhaps to compensate for the limitations of viewing a film only once before writing on it. She was the world’s first real movie critic, though there were several before her who had set the standards for her. Her enthusiasms knew no bounds; that was both her greatest virtue and worst demerit. I didn’t grow up on the movies. I didn’t lose anything at the movies. Reading her, though, it almost seemed that I had. I read about films before I watched them. I read her before I read any other critic. This book is partly dedicated to Pauline Kael, so it’s apt that I write about her.
The world’s first movie critics were journalists and novelists. Both Gorky and Tolstoy wrote on the cinema. When the Vitascope was invented in 1895 and The Great Train Robbery was released in 1904, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer devoted space to them. But these were not exercises in criticism. In the case of the novelists the verdict was clear: movies were entertainment, nothing more. In the case of the journalists the verdict was also clear: movies were an offshoot of photography. Both of them were united by their uncertainty over the direction the cinema was heading. Perhaps the most prescient prediction about it came from Tolstoy: “It is closer to life.” But that was before the movies embraced sound: when movement, not conversation, determined the verisimilitude of the most industrial art the world ever conceived.
In 1941 Time hired their first real film critic, James Agee. Agee had a way with words. He was spare, never one for the purple prose that characterised his successors, and always on the dot when it came to his enthusiasm for, or derision of, particular movies. He had his favourites: Chaplin, the neo-realists, Laurence Olivier. He had his not-so-favourites: pretty much everything that mainstream Hollywood threw up. “In my opinion, his column is the most remarkable regular even in American journalism today,” W. H. Auden once observed. Auden was no cinephile (“I do not care for movies very much”) and he despised the idea of film criticism as a literary genre, but in Agee he saw a rejection of his fears. Agee was a master of the understatement. He was sparer, more comprehensible, when it came to jotting down ideas and suggestions. He cared.
Consequently his wit showed in flashes. Brilliant as ever, he could sum up an entire movie, or for that matter a sequence or scene, in a few sentences. Sometimes this sparseness overran itself until you expected no more than a few words; these were the first few days of movie criticism, after all, and journalists were still very much treated as writers, not critics, when they wrote on what they were hired to write on. Of that 1948 musical comedy You Were Meant for Me, for instance, all he had to say was, “That’s what you think.” He had us laughing and smiling, he chastened us, and all the while, pretty much like Chaplin and Keaton and the other silent era comedians he paid a tribute to in a monumental essay written for Life (“Comedy’s Greatest Era”), he said everything though he hardly said anything at all. Always a stickler for accuracy, he never failed to correct himself.
Agee wrote that essay on the silent comedians in 1948, the year he retired from The Nation. The only real writer movie lovers looked forward to reading in America abandoned journalism to opt for a freelance career, firstly as a reviewer and later as a scriptwriter. The period during which he worked — World War II — reflected his prose, which was as casually dismissive of mainstream Hollywood as it was gloriously overjoyed about the new movements that were springing up elsewhere, outside America: the neo-realists in Italy, Bunuel in Spain, and the new Chaplin, who had directed The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, and Limelight. It’s no surprise that the monopoly that the American cinema had exerted over the rest of the world was, though not completely challenged, certainly changing, if not eroding: the year Agee retired was also the year in which the United States Supreme Court enforced the single most influential judgment against the Hollywood studios, in what became referred to as the Paramount Decree.
It was to say the least an exciting time for American movies, because what had characterised them until that point — the technical mastery, the efficient mechanisation, the star system — were envied the world over. In the fifties the French saw otherwise puerile directors and films from Hollywood as great, undiminished works of art, which is how and why they elevated Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock and of course John Ford to the status of true artists. To consider these French writers, who wrote to the Cahiers du Cinéma and were fathered to a considerable extent by the indefatigable Andre Bazin, as film critics is wrong, however; they were film theorists, and in the various theories they propounded they saw movies, and directors, as embodying both art and entertainment. It was the Cahiers critics who first argued that the director was the auteur.
Just as it was an exciting time for Hollywood, therefore, it was also a depressing time. Television had arrived. The old classics of the Chaplins and the Garbos and the Keatons were being telecast. The exciting and depressing time had at the same time become nostalgic (here I quote David Denby: “Nostalgia is history altered through sentiment”). But with Agee gone there was no one to restore film criticism to the country that had fermented it: America, the Land of the Free, where anyone could come in and direct a movie if he or she had the capital and the talent to fine-tune that capital with. And although Hollywood was a country within a country, the fifties had somehow returned the cinema to its original creators, the French. The dichotomy between High and Low Art, once thought unnecessary in the medium, quickly materialised in the movies. On the one hand you had the auteurs: Bresson, Resnais, Bunuel. On the other hand you had directors who worked not as auteurs but as entertainers but were still venerated as auteurs by the Europeans: Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford. This dichotomy, plainly put, needed someone, anyone, to be done away with. That someone and anyone was Pauline Kael.
Agee was born 10 years before Pauline, and Agee died 10 years before Pauline published her first collection of reviews, I Lost it At The Movies. The differences between the two couldn’t have been more apparent, because Agee was the first real voice of American criticism in the 20th century and had done more, much more, for his age (he was rather young when he died, at 55) than Kael ever would. (He also revered Chaplin, while she did not: “He made me cry, and I didn’t want maudlin feelings at the movies.”) “I waited a very long time in my life to get paid for my writing,” she admitted at a writer’s workshop, and it’s true: she was all of 45 when I Lost it At the Movies was published, whereas Agee was 33 when he began writing to The Nation. It took a great many more years, even with her long tenure at the most widely read magazine in America, the New Yorker, for her style to be accepted. She was not really a “voice” that Agee had been. Which was for the better, I should think: to consider her a “voice” would mean judging her on the standards that everyone had created before her. She simply transcended those standards. She wrote like a cowboy, so much so that one of the readers who wrote to her contended that she trampled through the magazine pages with boots covered with dung.
But those cowboy boots did their job, and soon Kael became arguably the most widely movie critic in America. There are writers who stick to a particular theory, make veneration and adulation part of their overarching style, and therefore become consistent in what they write. Pauline Kael was neither consistent nor overarching in that sense; she made you read her reviews less for the movies they were about than for the fact that they were, even at their worst, written in her inimitable tone. And she diverged wildly, moving from the good to the bad to the downright ugly while not caring for the fact that, all in all, she never saw a film more than once. Her rationale, that when you go to the theatre over and over again you tend to see more of the flaws and the mechanics rather than the intrinsic workings and texture of a film, was not exactly off-the-mark, but it helps explain why nearly all her reviews are so brash, so holier-than-thou, that superficially at least they leave no room for doubt. That was her greatest virtue: she was simply irresistible. And in being irresistible, she voiced opinions not many shared, much less admired.
In 1980 Renata Adler wrote a review of Kael’s sixth collection of articles and essays, When the Light Go Down, and penned down the following extraordinary words: “it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Worthless was hardly a term you used when talking about what Kael wrote. But Adler had a point: she was notorious for her voice, which derided objectivity and sought to make its own standard its own vindication, its own fall. You either loved it (as I did) or hated it (as Adler did). She separated her preferences from those directors she disliked with probably the only principle that guided her: if you liked a movie, and liked it so damn well, you never ever wrote about its defects. Not every critic and reader would have liked that, and not everyone did. But for every Adler, there were plenty of readers who did.
I would suggest that this issue, which is really a problem to many budding reviewers and academics, goes into the heart of the medium it revolves around. Movies are like aphrodisiacs at times, because they are so connected with our instincts. At one point they almost became the synthesis of literature and theatre: the latter for its live sense of exhilaration, the former for its veneer of high-flown elegance and sophistication.
As the world’s youngest art form, the cinema was hence unparalleled in its ability to pick and choose, to play on the prejudices and the sentiments of entire collectives. Griffith may or may not have shared the views of the Ku Klux Klan but many people who watched, and cheered, The Birth of a Nation had. So when the critics came marching in, creating their own standards, their own benchmarks, they had one excuse to give for their free-flowing styles: the movies were young, so their relationship with culture was sufficiently young for them to arbitrarily praise, censure, and offer comment. It goes without saying, then, that no other art, before it, had emboldened critics so much. 124 years after The Great Train Robbery, film critics are still bold, brash, young, and free as ever.
The greatest damage inflicted on the movies and their critics was the creation of a dichotomy between art and entertainment. This dichotomy, as I pointed out before, was inadvertently conceived by the French, especially Bazin and his disciple, Alexandre Astruc. Pauline was responsible for doing away with this artificial rift, and along the way was responsible also for the elevation of kitsch, or rubbish as academics were wont to call it. The question we might have asked here would be, “Is entertainment art?” The question Kael would have asked, on the other hand, was, “Is art entertainment?” Which meant, naturally, that more than half those arty pictures that the French critics and their American emulators (among them Andrew Sarris, with whom she had a lifelong tussle on print) admired were, in her opinion, pretentiously soggy. She admired L’Avventura (which she considered the best film of 1961, the year that saw La Dolce Vita, West Side Story, and Judgment at Nuremberg, all of which she disliked), but hated Antonioni’s other work. They didn’t entertain; they bored.
Experts tend to disparage Kael’s reviews on the basis of their appeal to emotion over reason, their at-times baseless denigration of non-American directors, and their frequent inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies. But in conflating such inaccuracies (of which there were plenty, as I will point out in a while) with what they felt to be her inabilities they got everything muddled up about her. Pauline Kael disparaged High Art and elevated kitsch for the same reason that Walter Benjamin had decades before her: that unlike the former, the latter was so instinctively made that it did not critically distance the objet d’art from its audience. In other words there was no rift between the creation and the consumption of art, a rift that Marxist critics love to talk about (because it does exist). Kael was no Marxist, but she was uncompromisingly plebeian in her views on kitsch.
She did not necessarily pander to the notion that the cinema didn’t need to be serious, but she was critical of directors who believed that they had to be. So out of her window went Frank Capra, Stanley Kramer, the later Costa Gavras, and of course Charlie Chaplin. Instead she revered the wild ones — the directors of the screwball comedies, including Hawks and Preston Sturges, along with Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, and later, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, and the early Spielberg and Bertolucci. I particularly love her take on Kramer (“The Intentions of Stanley Kramer”), where she demolishes, word to word, the myth of the man as the embodiment of Hollywood’s conscience. Kramer wanted to be known as a filmmaker who depicted and condemned countries and men and women that put expedience above ideals, and yet, as Kael points out, he was committing the same crime in the arts by resorting to a pathetic balancing act between controversial themes and the drawing power of big stars.
In the American cinema there has always been a gap between production values and aesthetic merit. In other countries too such a gap exists, but the purveyors of Hollywood were quick to deny it in their world. Movie techniques in the hands of the continental directors of the sixties — Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini — usually weren’t interesting to Kael, and it is a testament to her integrity that they weren’t interesting even when they were in films from her own country.
The lush extravagance of a sixties musical (West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and of course her most hated movie of all time, The Sound of Music) tends to confuse technique for craftsmanship and craftsmanship for imaginativeness. “The success of a movie like The Sound of Music makes it difficult for anyone to try to do anything worth doing, anything relevant to the modern world, anything inventive or expressive,” she wrote in 1965 (that sentence was enough to kick-start the second phase of her career to the New Yorker), and to a considerable extent she was correct. We adulated the epics of David Lean and DeMille and William Wyler as children; she had grown up faster than any of us because she found a reason for adulation in the clumsier but more honest forays of De Palma and Altman.
But just as America was the one country where the rift between technique and imagination could be sustained while pretending that there wasn’t such a rift in the first place, it was also the one country in the world where an individual critic could come in and demolish that attitude of pretension. America was never really the Land of the Free, but in the arts it was the freest of all lands, so when one standard and set of prejudices got demolished, and when the Goldwyns and the Mayers and the big studio bosses drowned in the wake of television and the Paramount Decree, another set of standards and prejudices were heralded and got rooted. Kael was no exception to this, which is where I get to the Kael I didn’t like very much: who seemed to think, and believe, that the American cinema was greater in every respect (based on her standards, that is) than the cinema of other countries. She was no bigot, but she was shallow.
In the arts, philistinism is often venerated as the surest sign of the rebel. But philistinism can only be vindicated if the values which the philistine rebel seeks to flay are the same ones he or she refuses to project. With respect to Kael I think the reviews she wrote violated this principle. She refused to subscribe to the auteur theory, for instance, yet her admiration for De Palma, Altman, and the early Spielberg bordered on that same theory. Worse, she not only violated such principles, she also violated the critic’s fidelity to accuracy and clarity. Where she was at her ostensibly most journalistic, therefore, she was at her worst. In her review of Jeremiah Johnson, for instance, she observed that Robert Redford returns an Indian’s salute with his middle finger. She didn’t do her homework: he doesn’t give him the finger, he returns that salute. Such inconsistencies were bad.
And none of those inconsistencies, all of which revealed not just her at-times insufferable disregard for the truth but also her shallow, narrow political prejudices, showed more clearly than in her review of 1954’s Salt of the Earth. Directed by Herbert Biberman, written by Michael Wilson, and produced by Paul Jarrico, it was perhaps the first and only independent American film made completely by blacklisted artists (even Jarrico had been a victim of the Hollywood purge), and it depicted a dramatic retelling of the 1951 strike against a mining company in New Mexico.
Kael would have known of the blacklist, the crude irrationalities it propagated, and the many talents and lives it threw away, needlessly, to the dust. (The blacklist was primarily a conflict between the big actors and directors on the one hand and the intellectuals and writers on the other; the former were endowed with force, the latter with intelligence.) She would have known that many of those blacklisted were barely communists; they were, by the time they were ordered to testify, lapsed socialists. She would also have known of the anti-unionism that prevailed in the fifties, the poor who were being denied their rights by their employers.
And yet, she did not mince her words: “If American working people seek an image of their attitudes and beliefs they will find it in Hollywood films — they have helped to put it there. Though a Hollywood version glamorises their lives, it does justice to their dreams. If they did go to see Salt it is not likely that more than a small proportion would see anything that struck home, and that perhaps would be only as a reminder of depression days.” For her at least, Salt was for the “liberals and progressives” whose thinking never went beyond the thirties, which was not true. As untrue and inaccurate were the dialogues from the film she referred to, because seven of them appeared in a newspaper, and not in the movie. Jarrico was spot on when he rebuked her, hence: “I do not question Kael’s right to dislike Salt, and to give it a negative review. My reaction is subjective, admittedly, but what she seems to have lost at the movies was not her innocence but her honour.” Years later George Roy Hill would make roughly the same remark after she noted that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been shot indoors, when it was actually shot outdoors.
It’s easy to see how Pauline Kael reigned despite these limitations. For one thing, she started writing on the movies at probably the most exciting juncture in the history of the American cinema: the juncture where Peckinpah, De Palma, Coppola, and Spielberg came out. And although it’s ridiculous to suggest that the films of these directors were the most exciting things to happen to Hollywood, they were certainly products of their time, which happened to be filled with exhilaration and joyous, almost casual rebellion. Who doesn’t watch Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and see in them a sort of zeitgeist, a summing up of the period in which they were set and directed (which, in the case of Bonnie and Clyde, were not the same)?
It’s easy to trivialise a director like De Palma now, and easy to think that Kael inflated his reputation. But that was when movies mattered. Today, as David Denby (who had his own run-ins with Kael, as an ardent follower and then a spurned student) has pointed out in his essay “Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?”, the richness of imagination that characterised the American cinema has now all but completely drowned in the richness of technology. We presently live in an era of superheroes and super-villains fighting against each other and even against and amongst themselves. The future of the industry is, hence, nowhere.
I decided to dedicate this book to Pauline Kael not because I admire her completely, nor because I think she was the only writer who mattered to me, but because she was the first critic I came across. As an adolescent my tastes were neither here nor there. I followed whatever tastes my elders and friends set for me and I accepted them as the only ones of their kind there were. And then I read I Lost it At the Movies, and the rest of her reviews and collections, as they came along to me. They were not the best thing to happen to film criticism, but they came close.
Today we seem to have regressed; we rely on what stiff academics on the one hand and inelegant amateurs on the other hand say and write and do. We’ve lost that feeling of sensuousness that comes with writing. Pauline never did. That was her single greatest virtue, and single biggest flaw. It’s a flaw we ought to have, a flaw we all do have — before we grow up.
From my book “Fragments and Figments: A Collection of Cultural Essays”
