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Reeling

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This is the 5th collection of Pauline Kael's film reviews from the New Yorker magazine covering the period September 1972 to May 1975. In her forward, Kael mentions this time as an opportunity reviewers dream of with the work of "expansionist" directors like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who provide audiences with the "mind-swaying sensation of experiencing several arts - at their highest - combined. We come out reeling". The book covers the end of the Nixon era where titles like Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, and Nashville have a "new openminded interest in examining American experience, an interest at once skeptical, disenchanted, despairing and lyrical". This book features 2 controversial items - her long prophetic analytical essay that stirred up a storm of contention, On The Future of Movies; and her infamous review of Last Tango in Paris, where she compared the first screening to the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed. This latter claim would make Kael's detractors salivate at their perception of her pretention, but it also confirms her passion for her craft. The collection's raves, apart from the previously mentioned Mean Streets, Godfather II, and Nashville, include Sounder, The Heartbreak Kid, Images, The Way We Were, The Long Goodbye, Don't Look Now, Thieves Like Us, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and Shampoo. Her pans include Sleuth, Lost Horizon, Papillon, The Day of the Dolphin, Mame, Lenny, and Funny Lady. The collection also includes reviews of Arlene Croce's The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, Norman Mailer's Marilyn, and her essay After Innocence on the Vietnamisation of American movies. Some of Ms Kael's quips: What could be more soul-curdling than a Broadway folk operetta featuring the founding fathers, and double entendres, and national tragedy? The movie version (1776). You can't call Clint Eastwood a bad actor since he'd have to do something before you could consider him bad at it. The Night Porter was directed by a woman, Liliana Cavani, which proves that women can make junk just as well as men. And, in Airport 1975, Karen Black is so archaically helpless as the stewardess who must take over the controls of the plane, that Chalton Heston on the radio telling her what to do, keeps congratulating her if she manages to keep her hand on a lever without hysterics.

Here are the movies Pauline Kael wrote about in her book REELING:

Sounder + The Emigrants,
Chloe In The Afternoon + Bad Company,
Young Winston + Two English Girls,
A Sense Of Loss + Fellini's ROMA,
Last Tango In Paris,
Lady Sings The Blues,
The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie + Play It As It Lays, Savage Messiah,
1776 + The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book,
Black Girl + Farewell Uncle Tom,
The Heartbreak Kid + The Poseidon Adventure + Child's Play + Traffic,
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man In The Moon Marigolds + Sleuth + Man Of La Mancha + The Getaway + Images,
Up The Sandbox + Pete n Tillie + Jeremiah Johnson,
Cries and Whispers,
Cesar and Rosalie
Travels With My Aunt + The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,
The First Circle,
Limbo
Lady Caroline Lamb + Trick Baby + Under Milk Wood,
Save the Tiger + Steelyard Blues + If I Had A Gun,
Payday + The Harder They Come,
Ten from Your Show of Shows,
Slither + The Thief Who Came To Dinner,
Lost Horizon + Days and Nights In The Forest,
Ludwig + Two People,
Marilyn -- A Biography By Norman Mailer,
The Last American Hero,
Mean Streets,
The Way We Were + Day For Night + The New Land,
The Long Goodbye,
The Paper Chase + Sisters,
The Iceman Cometh + The Inheritor,
England Made Me + Charley Varrick,
The French Conspiracy + Executive Action,
WestWorld + Triple Echo + The HomeComing + The All-American Boy + Some Call It Loving,
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams
Serpico,
Don't Look Now + Papillon,
Sleeper + The Sting + The Day Of The Dolphin + The Glass Menagerie,
The Exorcist,
Magnum Force,
Alfredo Alfredo + Cinderella Liberty + The Laughing Policeman + Bone,
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,
Thieves Like Us,
The Last Detail + McQ,
Zardoz + Blazing Saddles,
Walking Tall,
The Mother and The Whore,
Conrack + Mame,
The Sugarland Express + Badlands,
The Night Porter + The Abdication + Juggernaut,
The Gambler + The Longest Yard,
Law & Disorder + Gold + 11 Harrowhouse,
Le Fantome de la Liberte + Airport 1975 + The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three,
Phantom Of The Paradise,
Lenny,
On the Future Of Movies,
The Trial of Billy Jack + The Savage is Loose + The Groove Tube,
Earthquake + The Little Prince,
Murder On The Orient Express + A Woman Under the Influence,
The Godfather Part II,
Young Frankenstein + The Towering Inferno,
Alice Don't Live Here Anymore,
Stavisky, Les Vilons Du Bal,
The Front Page,
Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins + Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York,
Report to the Commissioner,
Shampoo,
The Stepford Wives,
Nashville + A Brief Vacation,
The Prisoner of Second Avenue,
Funny Lady,
At Long Last Love + The Great Waldo Pepper + The Yakuza,
The Day of The Locust

I read this book as much as a gauge to how much my own views of cinema have evolved, from the days when I would have read it and shouted: "Right-on Pauline.". I still find many things, to which I can agree...but also, as my understanding of the Golden Age of Hollywood's achievement increased, I find myself, surprisingly to myself, much in disagreement too. I found the 70s to be a turning away from the earlier more ideal...though imperfect, and certainly tougher...conception of human nature, in favor of a much reduced....and I would add, much more cynical and troubling view, as unrealistic as any earlier over idealization. Perhaps we need both...the light and the dark, the sweet and sour.. together...as Hitchcock has demonstrated. Though Hitchcock, was decidedly NOT to Kael's liking.

As an illustration...and "taking the bull by the horns", here's a focus upon just one of my disagreements: Kael's discussion of the dance musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in her review of Arlene Croce's masterful: "The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book". I first detected contradiction, when Kael, the film critic, accuses Croce, the dance critic, of "swooning romanticism", while simultaneously, praising her precise, crisp descriptions and understandings of the dances.

Kael reacts to Croce's praise of Rogers's dancing...as incapable of the appearance of "clumsiness or toil"...by writing that Rogers, on the contrary, was fully capable of "clumsiness", and as well, could be seen as "working hard". This is absolutely ridiculous. I thought in light of what I knew to be true about Astaire/Rogers, how could anyone think that Fred would accept the appearance of "clumsiness" and "working hard"? Astaire, the perfectionist, would have just required another take. In the end, it's a significant aesthetic disagreement I have with her. She just didn't get what's fundamentally important....to simply agree, with someone, who she essentially agrees. Or does she? Kael's was a confusing reaction to me....at first.

Then, surprisingly, she proposes a quasi snobbish, out of context, personal attack concerning Rogers's alleged "broad streak of commonness". Both Rogers and Astaire did not have fine university training. They both learned by doing, in Vaudeville and the theater. Fred as such, avoided public conversation...mainly because, other than a few subjects....he had limited broader knowledge. Rogers embarked upon a decade long travel, and international career, to fill some of the voids in her admitted sheltered Hollywood life. So what? Their performances together, both acting and dancing...and many of Rogers's individual 30s and 40s dramatic and comedy performances, are of genuine quality....and, in fact, her musicals with Fred are unselfconscious HIGH ART. A pretty fine achievement, for two highly talented, but common people.

Finally, Kael adds the standard critique of the fragile plots of the innovative Astaire/Rogers dance musicals....which to some extent I can understand. But, whereas Croce states flatly that these are the "greatest courtship rituals ever put on film"....full of superb acting and conceits, comedy, wit, and cleverness....Kael, and to be fair, other critics...rather flippantly subscribe to the prior thesis...while literally millions continue to enjoy them as great art and entertainment. Have not Kael, and these critics, ever experienced the comedy of youthful behavior..vulnerability, and immaturity themselves? I came feel today that Kael has a problem with the concept of delightfulness...for this is what these great films are...pure delight.

In the end, Kael reveals herself, in her ever-edgy attitudes to film (as in her own life), as a type of Bourgeois/Bohemian...a kind of early shock-jock, a cinema fashionista, ever-ready to pounce upon popular tastes, no matter the merit. Astaire was a modernist also...but he possessed...and demanded of those who collaborated with him to have one quality not recognized in much of Kael's thinking....SKILL....and the commitment and determination that go with creating, with Ginger Rogers, a very high quality of work....of great beauty, elegance, energy, discipline; filled with expressions mutual support and respect, humor, and grace...all polished and synthesized into top-flight performance. Unlike all too many of Kael's favorite films, Fred and Ginger's work RAISED the level popular culture.

These considerations are at the core of her negativity to a certain body of work, that reflects the popularity of film...and their contemptible commercial success....even including the fine work of Alfred Hitchcock! This book helped me to discover that I no longer share such opinions.

In fact, typical of Kael's extremist view of cinema, is her review of "The Last Tango in Paris"...as something that filled the theater with "hypnotic excitement". In fact, it is a work of dark nihilism, failure, sexual confusion, and brutality. She so praises Brando's performance, the sex of course...so ultra-hip and revolutionary then...but also a key scene, in which he literally bumbles, in character, across the dance floor. Now, this time, it is clumsiness put to good use...but, in pursuit of what? Is there supposed to be a message here? In fact, this film is a deliberate mockery, not only of the joy and happiness of dancing....but of joy and happiness in life itself...to what end, no one knows for sure. The film is one of those works that critics tell us we are supposed to like...but most do not. Kael can find no room in her thinking for the great American dance-musicals...can so glibly find fault with Ginger Rogers's dancing...but, for Brando and his "Last Tango in Paris"..."nearer to heaven", is not an overstatement. It is Kael in fact, who "swoons"...every bit as much as Arlene Croce...but, it's only about this kind of pointless nihilism.

So to sum up, in this too long review, I found myself still attracted to the sharpness of Kael's writing, and still agree with her sometimes...but also, I have grown to become appalled at the dullness of some her perceptions...which used to be my own. Perceptions on human nature, I no longer share. Most people are human enough, and smart enough, to avoid films of such debasement and reduction of human potential.

Listen to me! I said to myself. Yet, this is what I truly feel...the wool removed from my eyes. In one key sense, I found this book to be valuable as an historical document...and, I found, as a touchstone, to my own growth in understanding. That's what criticism is intended to accomplish. And Pauline Kael succeeds in that general purpose. In fact, I do recommend it on this basis.