Veteran movie critic Pauline Kael transformed the movie industry — and not really for the better — with her championing of films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Last Tango in Paris, but she was also perceptive enough to quickly see through Michael Moore. (Though would she have done so once he became a major institution amongst his fellow one percenters?)
NPR, where Kael’s pioneering bourgeois bohemian worldview is de rigueur, dubs her “A Critic To Remember” in a review of a recent anthology of Kael’s writing:
Many of her opinions about films like Shampoo and The Deer Hunter haven’t weathered the test of time; her hyperbolic language doesn’t always take flight. (Does Vanessa Redgrave in the 1977 film Julia really possess “maybe the most expressive huge hand the screen has ever known?”)
Clunkers like that one, however, are negatively instructive in their own right. They remind us that writing is hard, that even a magician like Kael had to work to make it look easy as she does in the masterpieces included here — like her long essays on Citizen Kane and Cary Grant, the one lusciously entitled, “The Man from Dream City.”
What Kael continues to give readers through her selected essays and reviews is her gutsy and still controversial article of faith that criticism should be rooted in emotion. She told us it was not only OK but a prerequisite that a critic be a fan. Awe, in Kael’s view, was a legitimate critical response. Consider her writing voice at the end of her 1982 review of Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial:
Spielberg has earned the tears that some people in the audience — and not just children — shed. The tears are tokens of gratitude for the spell the picture has put on the audience. Genuinely entrancing movies are almost as rare as extraterrestrial visitors.
Before Kael, no critic worth his whiskey and cigars would be caught dead talking about “tears of gratitude.”
In an excellent 1995 essay that he wrote about Kael for The New York Review of Books, literary critic Louis Menand tells an anecdote about how the eminent public intellectual Dwight Macdonald reviewed Kael’s book I Lost It at the Movies in 1965. In that review, Macdonald asked, in puzzlement, “What did she lose at the movies?” Thanks to Pauline Kael and her liberating legacy, it’s Macdonald’s fussy, over-intellectualized question, not Kael’s erotic confession, that’s the embarrassment.
Actually, we all lost something at the movies thanks to Kael (along with similarly-minded critics of her era): middlebrow culture. Kael loved to champion the sort of pulpy lowbrow culture that Quentin Tarantino has so profitably mined over the last twenty years.
“Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture.”
The story of the Sixties.
Many of the pre-Boomers and Boomers embraced transgression, debased standards, and even anti-Americanism. Deep down they believed that the old culture would somehow survive, so that they could play indefinitely (and safely) at being counter-cultural.
Perhaps we who cling to our faith in the American Experiment and to the liberty that the founders entrusted to us, are now the counter-culture.
The left, and the program to end the American Dream, is counter revolution. If you gage American culture by what you read in the legacy media or by the movies and televsion programing produced by Hollywood, then you can’t escape the fact that they want it all gone.
I prefer the results of the first revolution.
That is a brilliant observation and so well said!
For many years, I’ve been chiding counter-culture types with variations of this question:
“Wasn’t rebellion more fun back when there was still something to rebel against?”
That was a very interesting article to me: I think as long as we are aware of the concept of a ‘guilty pleasure’ when it comes to art, we are on the safe side of the equation.
It is when we have the conceit to think that whatever we like is ‘good’ that the arts may suffer.
One could, I think, lay out a case for a song or movie or book as being ‘good’ as would a lawyer in a courtroom. One cannot lay out a case of what we should like. People will like what they will and that is as it should be nor should we try to ween people off what it is they like, no matter how bad.
What we should do is encourage people to have informed discrimination filters so they know when they are slumming and when they are not.
Beautiful.
For me, the end of the grand film era was the movie Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Following that, there has been precious little to entertain with a good plot and great acting, only shock, special effects, and schlock.
Wow, if I disagreed with the depiction of that made-for-tv quality film any more I’d be living on Mars.
My love affair with film ended suddenly with the film Clockwork Orange.
My 6th grade teacher (???!!!!) offered extra credit for anyone who went and saw this film, and turned in a written report about it.
She thought it was art, and just EVERYONE ought to see it…never mind we were what, 11 or 12 years old at the time?
As an aside, visit Theodore Dalrymple’s essay on Anthony Burgess’s original novel and Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of it over at City Journal. (Winter 2006, “A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece,” here: http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_oh_to_be.html .)
Nicely written and connected to a broad knowledge base. Leaves one wondering, “How did we not see the Occupy [fill in the blank] Movement coming?”
In 1972 Director Sam Peckinpah made his one and only movie in which no one dies.
For a man criticized constantly for the violent content of his films, the movie didn’t do very well at the box office. Yet, Sam said that it was his favorite film. It is also My favorite Peckinpah film.
.
The real problem is that the moviegoing audience can be Fickle at times. They demand less violence in movies, and when provided with such, the don’t go to see it. (Like the High School girl who constantly complains about how Jocks treat her on dates, but won’t go out with anyone but Jocks.)
.
Anyway, there are occasionally good movies that sneak through at times, the kind that uplift and entertain, while giving some creedence to the culture that was; Second Hand Lions comes to mind.
Forgot to mention the title.
Junior Bonner.
I agree with you. And it’s always surprised me (my grandfather tried to get me to play golf. My reply to him was it wasn’t violent enough) that Second Hand Lions is in my 10 most favorite films…and I see a lot (although less these days, in a theater) of them.
Before hi-tech effects, big fat explosions, and lots of other visual (and audio) tricks-of-the-trade, movies, basically patterned on the stage plays that preceded them, were by necessity driven by dialogue, plot and story-line, all of which demand emotional sophistication, actual writing skill and far greater creativity to, well, create.
Who is Pauline Kael and why should I bleeding care?
The “finest” movies are ones where the characters roll around in the gutter because the elites don’t have to.
At one time I loved Junior Bonner. For all his personal failings, Steve McQueen was a wonderful actor.
The Amphitheater vs The Colosseum.
As the .30-06 holes from the police officer’s Browning Automatic Rifle did their slow-motion stitching across the door of Bonnie & Clyde’s Ford, I felt a lot of relief. They killed any employee who blocked their way to loot and it was good to see their business was ended. But I heard around me in the theater, “Ooooh,” and “Nooo!” What was this? I looked behind me and saw a field of faces in the flickering which were struck with the pain of sympathy. Yikes! When did killing for fun & profit become an admirable life path? We saw the movie when it came out and played in the big theater in Baltimore. The audience reaction was replicated on TV news that night as they interviewed departees. Of course this is the same audience pool that believed “The Exorcist” to portray accurate events.
It’s always hazardous when hollywood does a “docu-drama”. Heck the term itself is an oxymoron. It is neither documentary nor real drama…or perhaps more the latter than the former. The producers and directors take “creative license” to manipulate facts to suit their needs and tell a more “compelling” story.
The fact is that Bonnie Parker was an OWS member before the term became popular. That is, married to a convict at 16, robbing banks at 22. She was a good student in school but went off the tracks somewhere along the way; Perhaps due to emotional immaturity. Not a criticism or an excuse but young females in Texas in the 20′s and 30′s still held the notion that they needed a man to survive.
That’s part of the context, you see. Something that movies don’t really do a good job of providing, unless it’s to suit the “white, evil male” meme they like to espouse.
But hook up with Clyde Barrow she did. In fact she helped him escape out of jail. He was there serving a two-year term for robbing a grocery store.
She made bad choices and then, the lid was off and they decided they liked having money by stealing it and killing people rather than walking the straight and narrow, an admittedly hard thing to do during the depression years…but most people did.
If you take the two of them and update the context to 2011, I doubt you would find many people sympathetic to them. If they did the things today that they did in the ’30′s, and got caught, it is very unlikely that most people would gasp to find out they were gunned down in a shootout on some lonely road.
Other than, of course, the media painting them as victims and “struggling…just trying to make ends meet”. The law, then as now, was serious business. Authorities, then as now, are dedicated to catching bad people like that.
It’s really a shame when the movies conveniently don’t describe the characters they portray in order to paint them as they like. Clyde Barrow was raped in prison and it quite possibly destroyed him emotionally and might have been the root of his violent ability to gun down people. The psychological aspects can (and have been)be examined endlessly. But he was a killer.
I think that the sympathy for Bonnie & Clyde was simple: Beatty and Dunaway were beautiful, and had the audience’s sympathy on that visceral basis. If it had been ugly actors, the reaction would have been very different.
Pauline Kael didn’t like John Ford’s “The Searchers” which is universally considered a masterpiece of world cinema.
http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_top100films.htm
I loved Kael’s take-down of Roger and Me. Bonnie and Clyde is a great film and was bound to be an influential trend-setter whether Kael championed it or not. Although I’m big fan of both John Ford and John Wayne, I didn’t like The Searchers either. (I don’t care for the well-loved, much-lauded It’s a Wonderful Life either. I don’t know how Ms. Kael felt about that one.)
The omnipresence of violence in the movies is to a degree, an affirmation of conservative principles, at least as often espoused here. There are evil, violent people everywhere, who must be dealt with violently, rather than the touchy-feely concept that deep down, we are all good and decent people. The conservative view is more entertaining, than the liberal one, hence the popularity of righty talk radio and Fox. Politics as a blood sport.
But the sordid violence may eventually make conservatives uncomfortable, because they also want to believe that there is a decent patriotic and “good” cohort of folks out there, probably in the Tea Party, around whom we can build. Are there really “good” people, who have to kill regularly, or are armed and dangerous, just waiting for some bad guy to mess with them, but remain “good” rather than being tainted and scarred by the violent word in which they live?
In “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” they finesse the question by making the shooter Tom Donovan-John Wayne, still a good guy, but just one whose gunning time has passed. The liberal, political Jimmy Stewart is the man of the future.
As for “the Searchers” it seems to me unsatisfying that John Wayne’s main “growth” is simply that he does not kill his own niece, because she has been “polluted” by the Indians. Red River and the Shootist work better for me.
The bottom line is that there are no free rides for righties or lefties. You can find the best and the worst on both sides, and you’d always better be aware of the agendas of either. PJM would lead you to believe that the bad guys are all clustered on the left, but I don’t beleeeeve that they have a monopoly on human malice and evil.
Leftwing author/JournoList member Rick Perlstein told Reason while he was promoting Nixonland, his look back at the era that led to the 37th president: “My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left:”
What are your thoughts on making heroes out of bank robbers?
There is a whole genre of robbery movies from Topkapi (sp) on. It is seen as cool to get away with stealing millions, although not so cool to kill people. That said, I enjoyed “Public Enemy” as a noir movie. One knew what was coming, but I still sympathized with Dillinger, because of course, the director and Johnny Depp ush you in that direction.
But you pose a serious moral question for which I do not have a good answer. From Robin Hood on, we have had this sort of story in many different forms. We have lost the old fashioned movie where the good guys, were the good-looking straight arrow, Sargeant Yorks. Many folks here apparently miss that. We are such a mix of the good and the bad. Therefore, it is easy to over-simplify, or over-complicate, who the “good guys” are. Many settle for believing that the other side contains the bad guys. Well, there will be no shortage of them there, that’s for sure, but a hard look at the folks on your own side is usually sobering, so most avoid it.
“a hard look at the folks on your own side is usually sobering, so most avoid it.”
Which describes monolithic Hollywood rather well.