Pauline Kael (15 page)

“Notes on the Auteur Theory” was widely discussed in film-critic circles, and though it met with some skepticism, to be sure, its central premise was enthusiastically received, and would eventually result in Sarris’s developing an elaborately worked-out ranking of directors, which ranged from the “pantheon” (which included John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Josef von Sternberg, F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, and Robert Flaherty) to the bottom rank of “miscellaneous” directors in whose work Sarris could discern no striking personality (a group that numbered such figures as Gordon Douglas, Victor Fleming, Joshua Logan, Richard Quine, and W. S. Van Dyke).

Sarris was a critic whose opinions would vex Pauline for decades to come. She considered him an intelligent man capable of remarkable insight, and anything but negligible. But many of his ideas about movies struck her as absurd.

She found the auteur theory fundamentally unconvincing: It made no sense to give the director total credit for a work that inevitably reflected the personalities of the screenwriter, the cinematographer, and the actors, as well. She liked to use
Casablanca
as an example of the wrongheadedness of the theory, pointing out that if the character of the cynical hero Rick Blaine had been played by Robert Cummings rather than by Humphrey Bogart, it was a fair guess that the result would have been a poor picture. She decided to seize the moment and asked Ernest Callenbach if she could publish a broadside against Sarris and the other auteur critics in
Film Quarterly
. Callenbach, who had admired Sarris’s essay, was somewhat taken aback, but agreed to accept Pauline’s piece, “Circles and Squares,” for the magazine’s Spring 1963 issue.

Her first objection to the auteur theory was that she felt it attempted to elevate relatively minor studio product. In “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” Sarris, as an example of tracking a director’s signature, pointed out a similar storytelling technique in a scene from Raoul Walsh’s 1935 Alice Faye musical
Every Night at Eight
and in one from his 1941 Humphrey Bogart crime drama,
High Sierra
. His conclusion: “If I had not been aware of Walsh in
Every Night at Eight
, the crucial link to
High Sierra
would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys of the auteur theory.”

Pauline thought it ridiculous to bother discussing a comparison between a movie she considered poor (
Every Night at Eight
) with one she considered below-par (
High Sierra
), and she went on to ask why Walsh was to be praised for merely repeating a given technique several years later. Was this really a sign of artistic growth? And why did the auteur theory even have to come into play in such an analysis? “Would Sarris not notice the repetition in the Walsh films without the auteur theory?” she asked. A first-class critic, she argued, didn’t need to lean on a theory of any kind: “The greatness of critics like Bazin in France and Agee in America may have something to do with their using their full range of intelligence and intuition, rather than relying on formulas.”

She admitted that Sarris’s emphasis on “technical competence” sounded reasonable enough on the surface, yet she found it misleading, pointing out that “the greatness of a director like Cocteau has nothing to do with mere technical competence: His greatness is in being able to achieve his own personal expression and style. And just as there were writers like Melville or Dreiser who triumphed over various kinds of technical incompetence, and who were, as artists, incomparably greater than the facile technicians of the day, a new great film director may appear whose very greatness is in his struggling toward grandeur or in massive accumulation of detail. An artist who is not a good technician can indeed create new standards, because standards of technical competence are based on comparisons with work already done.”

Moving on to the next argument—that of “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value”—Pauline shifted into higher gear. “The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?” She was particularly disturbed by the auteur critics’ elevation of Hitchcock, a director whose work had exasperated her over the years. She felt that Sarris was correct about Hitchcock’s personality being readily identifiable, but felt it was not a quality that should necessarily elicit critical praise. Comparing Hitchcock with a director whose work she deeply admired, Carol Reed, Pauline wrote that Hitchcock’s signature was easier to spot than Reed’s “because Hitchcock repeats while Reed tackles new subject matter.” She believed that Hitchcock’s signature was “not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology, that his methods and approach are not those of an artist but a prestidigitator. The auteur critics respond just as Hitchcock expects the gullible to respond. This is not so surprising—often the works auteur critics call masterpieces are ones that seem to reveal the contempt of the director for the audience.”

Pauline then penetrated Sarris’s “inner circle,” with its concentration on “interior meaning,” which by Sarris’s definition was “extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.” Here Pauline’s anger was almost palpable, as she denounced this aspect of the theory as “the opposite of what we have always taken for granted in the arts, that the artist expresses himself in the unity of form and content. What Sarris believes to be ‘the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art’ is what has generally been considered the frustrations of a man working against the given material.” Again, she felt that the theory was conferring virtues on undistinguished studio product that simply weren’t there. “Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that’s handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots. If his ‘style’ is in conflict with the story line or subject matter, so much the better—more chance for tension.”

The end result of all this, she believed, was that some of the least-deserving movies, and directors, were often candidates for the greatest critical praise. She had seldom liked the work of Otto Preminger; with the exception of his stylish early melodramas like
Laura
, she found his films crude and heavy-handed. But Preminger was a hero to the auteur critics, who praised his characteristic use of the tracking camera. Pauline was having none of it: “I suspect that the ‘stylistic consistency’ of say, Preminger, could be a matter of his
limitations
and that the only way you could tell he made some of his movies was that he used the same players so often (Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, et al., gave his movies the Preminger look.)”

In 1964 Pauline and Andrew Sarris first came face to face while she was on her Guggenheim-sponsored stay in New York, when she phoned Sarris and asked if he could meet her for a drink. He was stunned at the invitation from a woman he assumed hated him, and hesitated. But Pauline wouldn’t be put off. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Won’t your lover let you go?” At the time, the word “lover” had specific connotations. At the time, Sarris was living with his mother in Kew Gardens, Queens. Half-fearing that she really would think he was gay if he didn’t turn up, he took the subway into Manhattan and met Pauline, Gina, and Dan Rosenblatt at a midtown restaurant.

“She was always on the boil,” Sarris observed. “It was a sort of temperamental difference between us. She was a very lively writer, and she was very readable. I give her a lot of credit for what she did. I think that a lot of people who professed to like her were a bit condescending to her. Even her supporters. There was something unthreatening about her as opposed to people like Mary McCarthy, who really knew how to get at you. And Pauline had a way of getting at people, but she didn’t really threaten them.”

That night Pauline was bold, confident and inquisitive, Sarris retiring and uneasy, wanting to be anywhere else but sitting across the table from his critical adversary. “I wasn’t as worldly and aggressive as she was about sex,” Sarris recalled. “About who was gay and who wasn’t. I wasn’t an expert on such things.” There were other matters to discuss, however, than the sexual politics of their film-critic colleagues. “Pauline acted as if I were a great menace of American criticism,” Sarris said. “I wasn’t getting any money for these pieces. I had no sense that I was being read, even. She talked about going to different places and people would say, ‘What about what Andrew Sarris said?’ She provided me with the first indication I had that I was being read.”

However passionately felt and persuasively argued, to what extent was “Circles and Squares” a careerist move? By taking such a hard public line against another respected critic—at the time Sarris was, by his own admission, hardly the widely read critic he later became, but he was one of the darlings of intellectual and academic film circles—Pauline was clearly clamoring for attention. In “Circles and Squares” she believed she was taking the position of good common sense, challenging the auteurists’ dubious claims. In her aggressive, can-you-believe-this? tone, she was practically daring the movie-loving public not to take her side of the argument. At this, she was enormously successful. Sarris himself admitted that Pauline’s “attack on the theory received more publicity than the theory itself.” In the end Pauline’s hostility toward the auteurists was, more than anything, a matter of taste: She could not believe that any thinking person would prefer the work of an erratic filmmaker like Nicholas Ray over that of a proficient, gifted craftsman like John Huston.

One of the misconceptions about “Circles and Squares” was that it engendered a lifelong feud between the two critics. Although Sarris did bring up the disagreement in occasional articles over the next several decades, Pauline put the matter squarely behind her. There was a certain clean detachment in many of her broadsides against other critics, and she was often astonished to learn that the objects of her critical wrath were under the impression that she hated them personally. Again, her behavior betrayed a certain naïveté: She could not always understand why a fellow critic whom she had roundly criticized might feel threatened by her.

Certainly the reading public’s response to her essay—which wouldn’t become fully clear for years to come—would make it clear to both Pauline and Sarris that they had arrived at a greater level of recognition than they had ever had before. Their meeting was historic, in a sense. They had no way of knowing that in the years ahead, their highly individual points of view would line up critics on either side of a dividing line, pro-Kael and pro-Sarris. And that division would become part of one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of movie criticism.

T
he mid-1960s was a good time for Pauline to be coming into her own as a writer: The postwar flourishing of the art-house circuit and the explosion of interest in new foreign films meant that there were now more opportunities for film critics than ever before. Movies were no longer just a great common pastime, like Saturday afternoon baseball games. Now they were playing a more significant role in the culture as people became interested in exploring the connections between cinema and contemporary life. Hit films stayed in theaters longer and were dissected in national magazine cover stories, on television and radio talk shows, and in film studies courses, and movies were well on their way to demonstrating to the world that they really were the liveliest art.

The change had been coming since the 1950s when, in the flush of postwar prosperity, Americans became more inquisitive about the arts. “Growing numbers of middle-class consumers felt it their responsibility to be au courant,” wrote the social historian Todd Gitlin in his book
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
. “They were accumulating coffee-table books, subscribing to
Saturday Review
and the Book-of-the-Month Club, buying records, briefing themselves about art.” By the following decade the national fascination with arts and culture had taken on a decidedly different shade of meaning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the tremendous upheaval wrought by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Young audiences, in particular, wanted more from the movies than mere entertainment. There was still an enormous audience for Walt Disney family pictures and fluffy comedies, but people had also developed an appetite for films that conveyed the anxieties of the times. Movies such as
The Manchurian Candidate
,
Seven Days in May,
and
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
became extremely popular among college students and in intellectual communities. (In the previous decade, many of the most downbeat movies, such as
Sweet Smell of Success
,
Twelve Angry Men
, and
A Face in the Crowd
, had been box-office failures, perhaps because they seemed too dark and pessimistic.) “The rock ’n’ roll generation,” wrote Gitlin, “having grown up on popular culture, took images very seriously indeed; beholding itself magnified in the funhouse mirror, it grew addicted to media which had agendas of their own—celebrity-making, violence-mongering, sensationalism.”

This new climate had its effects even in movie-critic circles. For years many reviewers at major newspapers and magazines had acceded to studio publicists in exchange for access to the biggest movie stories and star interviews. But during the 1960s a number of critics began to speak out and show a much more independent spirit than had previously been the case. In 1963 Judith Crist, then movie critic of
The New York Herald-Tribune
, found herself at the center of a major standoff with a leading studio. When she slammed that year’s Easter attraction at Radio City Music Hall—
Spencer’s Mountain
, a sentimental family drama starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara—in both the daily and Sunday editions of the
Herald-Tribune
, Warner Bros. retaliated the following Monday by withdrawing an invitation to an upcoming screening and, more crucially, by pulling all of its advertising from the paper. Radio City Music Hall followed suit, and because the theater’s advertising provided income for the newspaper seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, the loss was felt immediately. The
Herald-Tribune
’s publisher, Jock Whitney, and editor, Jim Bellows, held firm, running an editorial affirming their support for Crist and her right to say what she thought. “The Associated Press picked up the editorial and transmitted it coast to coast,” Crist remembered, “and it made a nice little fuss.”