Pauline Kael (10 page)

This eruption of new poetry was only one part of the San Francisco renaissance. Jazz clubs, avant-garde performance spaces, and small, experimental presses were plentiful. In 1953, Peter D. Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights bookstore, devoted exclusively to selling paperbound books. (Previously, paperbacks had been available mostly on racks in drugstores and groceries; City Lights gave them a new respectability and became a magnet for local artists in the process.) Ferlinghetti went on to launch City Lights Publishers, which brought out “Howl” in 1956.

Across the bay, Berkeley was enjoying a renaissance of its own. The leading bookstores included U.C. Corners, where all the international newspapers and film magazines could be found; Cody’s; the Circle, where the literary quarterly
Circle
magazine was published in the back; and Moe’s, a magnet for secondhand-book hounds. Telegraph Avenue and Channing Way were dotted with first-rate classical record stores staffed by well-informed clerks. What had been a relatively bucolic town with all the conventional trappings of university life was in the process of transforming itself into a lively arts and intellectual center.

Pauline was about to become a significant player in this world. Her review of
Limelight
in
City Lights
had attracted some positive attention from literary figures of note, among them Mary McCarthy. With her first real encouragement, she worked on several pieces on spec through 1954, one of which, “Morality Plays Right and Left,” was a lengthy discursive essay. (She had already come to recognize that her love of jazz was revealing itself in her own writing: She was fond of riffs, as she came to think of them—the extended, brilliant, sidetracking discussions that veered off from the main crux of her argument but always reconnected to it in the end.) Ostensibly her topic was Twentieth Century–Fox’s 1954 Cold War thriller
Night People
, starring Gregory Peck, about the effort to rescue a U.S. soldier who has been kidnapped in Berlin. Pauline found the film to be a reflection of the U.S. government’s love affair with its own image and disapproved of its oversimplification of complex issues. Her wide-ranging discussion probed the dangers of pandering to the public, something studios were aggressively doing with the popular wide-screen technology, designed to help people forget about television and get back into the theaters:

Members of the U.S. government were also guilty of pandering, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-Communist attacks were about on the level with the sentiments expressed in
Night People
:

“Morality Plays Right and Left” was initially accepted by one of the publications Pauline most revered,
The Partisan Review
, but was eventually taken by the British film journal
Sight and Sound
in 1954
. Sight and Sound
’s editor, Penelope Houston, wrote that the section on
Night People
was “the type of thing I have been trying to get hold of for a long time; it is so much better for these things to be written by an American than by a journalist on our side.” The cofounding editor of
The Partisan Review
, Philip Rahv, responded enthusiastically to Pauline’s lively critical voice, but he was consistently troubled by the length of her pieces and always urged that they be cut.

1955 was a pivotal year for Pauline. She had become friends by then with Weldon Kees, one denizen of the Bay Area who genuinely deserved to be called a Renaissance man. Kees was a native of Nebraska who had enjoyed early success publishing short fiction in a string of distinguished literary quarterlies. During World War II, he moved to New York City, where he did a fairly good job of taking the town by storm. He published his first book of poems,
The Last Man
, in 1943 and went on to write for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including
The New York Times
. He also became a highly skilled abstract painter and a gifted jazz pianist. In 1950 he left New York for San Francisco, where he became part of the circle that included Pauline and James Broughton; he provided the musical score for Broughton’s film
The Adventures of Jimmy.
Kees and Pauline had many passions in common, including the movies and New Orleans jazz, which Kees performed locally every chance he got.

Kees was also a fixture on Berkeley’s KPFA-FM, the first listener-supported radio station in the United States, which aimed to provide its audience with a respite from America’s commercially dominated pop culture and to spread liberal ideas beyond the confines of academia—to reach out to the common citizen and bring him into a discussion of art, politics, and ideas. The ultimate, idealistic goal was to create a more enlightened society—a particularly urgent objective in the age of McCarthyism.

One of KPFA’s popular programs was a weekly show featuring Kees called
Behind the Movie Camera
. Seeing in Pauline a kindred movie-lover, he invited her to be a guest on his program several times, as he enjoyed her scorching directness and her provocative views about what was going on in the movie industry.

Unfortunately, Kees was a deeply troubled man, given to fierce mood swings and prolonged feelings of desolation. One day he asked Pauline sadly, “What keeps
you
going?” For years, she blamed herself for failing to perceive the depth of his emotional state. On July 19, 1955, his Plymouth Savoy was found just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. No suicide note was found, and his body was never recovered.

In the aftershock of Kees’s disappearance, KPFA asked Pauline to step in as a semiregular film critic. The station manager made it clear that they would not be able to pay her for her broadcasts, but she judged that the exposure and the chance to hold forth for a regular audience would be hugely beneficial. She was broadcasting to a subscription audience of more than four thousand, whose educational background and income level were well above the norm. She was also surrounded by other broadcasters who shared many of her ideas about the regrettable division between classical and contemporary music. Among them was Alan Rich, KPFA’s music director, who joyously combined Mozart and Bach with Schoenberg and David Diamond. She was also delighted to find KPFA such a strong proponent of jazz, notably by way of Phil Elwood’s highly informative regular program.

Pauline was a natural on the radio, firing off her opinions of the latest movies in crisp diction, even occasionally saying “rah-ther” and almost consistently pronouncing “movies” as “myoovies.” She could sound almost cultivated, an occasional affectation that her friend Donald Gutierrez teasingly called her “Mrs. Lamont of the Air” voice. But her radio pieces, almost always carefully written out beforehand, were notable for their wit, drive, and guts, and slowly, she began building a loyal, growing band of listeners.

One of them was Edward Landberg, who operated a revival theater located at 2436 Telegraph Avenue. A physician’s son who had been born in Vienna in 1920, Landberg had come to New York City at the age of nine. He had ambitions to become an author, and after graduating from the University of Iowa’s prestigious writers’ program, he slaved away at scattered teaching jobs at Berkeley, at Ithaca College, and in France. Eventually he wound up in Mexico City, teaching Shakespeare and writing movie reviews for an English-language newspaper,
The Mexico City News
, a job that ended when his opinions inflamed some of the advertisers. Thinking that he might be better off showing movies than writing about them, Landberg leased a screening room in Mexico City and was soon making a decent amount of money exhibiting films on a weekly basis. He had pleasant memories of his time in Berkeley, so moved back there, found a defunct market on Telegraph Avenue, and rented and renovated it. There were columns dividing about two-thirds of it, so he had the idea of turning the space into two separate theaters. The result was the Berkeley Cinema Guild, which Landberg opened in 1951 and always claimed was the first twin art house in the United States. (At times, he claimed it was the first in the world.)

Most of the time movies were shown simultaneously in the two theaters. The larger one, the Cinema Guild, had two hundred seats and was reasonably long and narrow, with the screen positioned somewhat high, meaning that the best place to sit was in the back. The smaller theater, holding around one hundred seats, was the Studio. It was wider and shorter than the Guild and offered better general seating. Landberg began programming according to his own taste, which mostly ran toward European film.

One evening Ed Landberg heard Pauline broadcasting on KPFA, and after telephoning to compliment her on the program, they arranged to meet. “She was the closest thing to somebody who had my kind of vision about movies,” Landberg recalled. “Not that she did have. But she was more intelligent than most people who had anything to do with movies. One day, when I was over at her place, I happened to graze her breast with my hand, and she kind of looked up at me and said, ‘What have you got to lose?’”

Landberg and Pauline had not been romantically involved for very long when Pauline made it known that she would like to write program notes for the Cinema Guild. “I hadn’t written notes,” said Landberg, “because I wasn’t into audience manipulation. But she wrote some notes, and one thing led to another.” The Cinema Guild was doing well enough, but almost immediately Pauline saw that it could be made into a bigger attraction than it was, and she decided that she was the person to make that happen. Her notes, written on fold-out programs, were available at the theater, mailed out to local moviegoers, and distributed to some of the neighborhood businesses, and they caught on almost immediately. Although the programs were very carefully printed, with thoughtfully selected photographs and Pauline’s incisive descriptions of the movies, plus the monthly calendar running down the center, they were anything but public relations fluff. Pauline didn’t hesitate to poke fun at some of the films being shown at the Guild, but even when she was taking swipes at them, her energetic critical tone seemed only to make people all the more determined to turn up to see them.

Soon enough she was taking an aggressive hand in programming as well, pressing Landberg to show more vintage American movies from the 1930s and ’40s—screwball comedies, gangster dramas, film noir, musicals. “There was a little resistance to the notion that there was something good to be said about American musicals,” recalled Stephen Kresge, who worked on the Cinema Guild’s staff for several years. “When we first showed
Gold Diggers of 1933
, there wasn’t anyone walking out, but I think there was a lot of puzzlement as to why this was thought to be fun. She started that whole revival of American musicals having a place in the canon. They were willing to accept things like
Casablanca
and so on, but... There was nothing quite so hidebound and stuffy as a Berkeley intellectual at that time. They were inhibited by European values and philosophy that she no longer had any use for. She wanted to open the windows and let in some air.”

Many of the double bills were delightfully unexpected: Ingmar Bergman’s medieval allegory
The Seventh Seal
was paired with the Beatrice Lillie comedy
On Approval
, Clouzot’s thriller
Diabolique
with Frank Capra’s comedy
Arsenic and Old Lace
, Laurence Olivier’s 1953
The Beggar’s Opera
with René Clair’s
Sous les toits de Paris
, which Pauline described in her notes as “one of the first imaginative approaches to the musical as a film form.” Sometimes there was a thematic connection, as with the English comedies
The Man in the White Suit
and
Lucky Jim
, or Pauline’s “corruption-in-Mexico” double bill of John Huston’s
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
and Luis Buñuel’s
Los Olvidados
. Frequently Pauline’s notes were hilariously personal and direct: when the Guild showed Howard Hawks’s
Red River
, she wrote that the film was “not really so ‘great’ as its devotees claim (what Western is?) but it’s certainly more fun and superior in every way to that message movie
The Gunfighter
, which Dwight Macdonald, in the November
Esquire
, puts forward as ‘the best Western’ because it showed ‘movie types behaving realistically instead of in the usual terms of romantic cliché.’”

Pauline was not deeply enamored of much of the pre- and postwar British cinema, but she had a great fondness for some of the great Ealing comedies, such as
The Happiest Days of Your Life
, as well as Laurence Olivier’s stirring 1955 version of
Richard III,
and she saw to it that they all got generous exhibition. With her exceptional taste, as well as the rapidly growing popularity of her program notes, hers began to become the voice of the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Audiences picked up, and the Friday and Saturday night showings often had lines down Telegraph. Audience members were almost giddy with a sense of discovery of so many hard-to-locate movies. Carol van Strum, who became a friend of Pauline’s in these years, remembered the thrill of receiving her movie education at the Cinema Guild. “My parents hardly ever went to the movies,” said van Strum. “Part of it was me: they took me to see
Drums Along the Mohawk,
and I got so scared I never wanted to go back. I missed
The Third Man
, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields—and it was magic finding them at the Guild.” The exhibitors who supplied the prints began to notice the Guild’s success and began to talk about changing the way they were going to charge. “They were doing it on a nightly rental basis,” said Stephen Kresge. “Then they found out that many weekends, the Cinema Guild was grossing the highest of any of the theaters in Berkeley.”