The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael: A Library of America Special Publication

:: Shoeshine

When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, Well I don’t see what was so special about that movie. I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel? My identification with those two lost boys had become so strong that I did not feel simply a mixture of pity and disgust toward this dissatisfied customer but an intensified hopelessness about everything . . . Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.

Shoeshine was not conceived in the patterns of romance or melodrama; it is one of those rare works of art which seem to emerge from the welter of human experience without smoothing away the raw edges, or losing what most movies lose—the sense of confusion and accident in human affairs. James Agee’s immediate response to the film was, "Shoeshine is about as beautiful, moving, and heartening a film as you are ever likely to see. A few months later he retracted his evaluation of it as a work of art and wrote that it was not a completed work of art but the raw or at best the roughed-out materials of art." I think he should have trusted his initial response: the greatness of Shoeshine is in that feeling we get of human emotions that have not been worked-over and worked-into something (a pattern? a structure?) and cannot really be comprised in such a structure. We receive something more naked, something that pours out of the screen.

Orson Welles paid tribute to this quality of the film when he said in 1960, "In handling a camera I feel that I have no peer. But what De Sica can do, that I can’t do. I ran his Shoeshine again recently and the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life . . ."

When Shoeshine came to this country, Life Magazine wrote, New Italian film will shock the world . . . will act on U.S. audiences like a punch in the stomach. But few Americans felt that punch in the stomach. Perhaps like the college girl they need to be hit by an actual fist before they can feel. Or, perhaps, to take a more charitable view of humanity, they feared the pain of the film. Just about everybody has heard of Shoeshine—it is one of the greatest and most famous films of all time—but how many people have actually seen it? They didn’t even go to see it in Italy. As De Sica has said, "Shoeshine was a disaster for the producer. It cost less than a million lire but in Italy few people saw it as it was released at a time when the first American films were reappearing . . ." Perhaps in the U.S. people stayed away because it was advertised as a social protest picture—which is a little like advertising Hamlet as a political study about a struggle for power.

Shoeshine has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in film works that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium—if Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty. Shoeshine, written by Cesare Zavattini, is a social protest film that rises above its purpose. It is a lyric study of how two boys* betrayed by society betray each other and themselves. The two young shoeshine boys who sustain their friendship and dreams amid the apathy of postwar Rome are destroyed by their own weaknesses and desires when sent to prison for black-marketeering. This tragic study of the corruption of innocence is intense, compassionate, and above all, humane.

{KPFA broadcast for revival showing, 1961}

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*Rinaldo Smordoni (Guiseppe) became a baker; Franco Interlenghi (Pasquale) became a film star.

:: Breathless, and the Daisy Miller Doll

Breathless, the most important New Wave film which has reached the United States, is a frightening little chase comedy with no big speeches and no pretensions. Michel, the young Parisian hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo), steals a car, kills a highway patrolman, chases after some money owed him for past thefts, so he and his young American girl friend can get away to Italy. He finances this chase after the money by various other crimes along the way. Meanwhile, the police are chasing him. But both Michel’s flight and the police chase are half-hearted. Michel isn’t desperate to get away—his life doesn’t mean that much to him; and the police (who are reminiscent of Keystone Cops) carry on a routine bumbling manhunt. Part of the stylistic peculiarity of the work—its art—is that while you’re watching it, it’s light and playful, off-the-cuff, even a little silly. It seems accidental that it embodies more of the modern world than other movies.

What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the engagingly coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the impervious, passively butch American girl are as shallow and empty as the shiny young faces you see in sports cars and in suburban supermarkets, and in newspapers after unmotivated, pointless crimes. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it or anything else. The heroine, who has literary interests, quotes Wild Palms, Between grief and nothing, I will take grief. But that’s just an attitude she likes at that moment; at the end she demonstrates that it’s false. The hero states the truth for them both: I’d choose nothing. The characters of Breathless are casual, carefree moral idiots. The European critic, Louis Marcorelles, describes their world as total immorality, lived skin-deep. And possibly because we Americans live among just such people and have come to take them for granted, the film may not, at first, seem quite so startling as it is. And that’s what’s frightening about Breathless: not only are the characters familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive.

If you foolishly depend on the local reviewers to guide you, you may have been put off Breathless. To begin with, where did they get the idea that the title refers to the film’s fast editing? That’s about like suggesting that the title Two-Way Stretch refers to the wide screen. The French title, À Bout de Souffle, means Out of Breath, and it refers to the hero, who keeps going until he’s winded. Their confusion is, however, a tribute to the film’s fast, improvisatory style, the go go go rhythm. The jazz score, the comic technique are perfectly expressive of the lives of the characters; the jump-cuts convey the tempo and quality of the activities of characters who don’t work up to anything but hop from one thing to the next. And as the film seems to explain the people in their own terms, the style has the freshness of objectivity. It does seem breathlessly young, newly created.

If you hold the Chronicle’s review of Breathless up to the light, you may see H-E-L-P shining through it.

Certain scenes are presented with utter candor, lacking in form and impact in their frankness. A long encounter, for instance, in the small room of Jean Seberg, with whom Belmondo claims to be in love, is repetitious—but extremely lifelike. And then young Godard suddenly will present another scene in which a police inspector is tailing Miss Seberg and searching for Belmondo. This is staged so clumsily that one wonders whether parody is what the director intends. But Belmondo’s peril is grave and his reaction to his predicament is sensitive . . . . Always energetic and arrogant, he still suggests both a lost quality and a tender humor. This is his facade to shield his small cynical world from all that he does not understand.

The hero of the film understands all that he wants to, but the critic isn’t cynical enough to see the basic fact about these characters: they just don’t give a damn. And that’s what the movie is about. The Examiner’s critic lamented that Breathless was a hodge-podge and complained that he couldn’t warm up to the characters—which is a bit like not being able to warm up to the four Mission District kids who went out looking for homosexuals to beat up, and managed to cause the death of a young schoolteacher. For sheer not-getting-the-point, it recalls the remark recently overheard from a well-groomed, blue-rinse-on-the-hair type elderly lady: That poor Eichmann! I don’t think he’s got a Chinaman’s chance.

How do we connect with people who don’t give a damn? Well, is it really so difficult? Even if they weren’t all around us, they’d still be (to quote Double Indemnity) closer than that.

They are as detached as a foreign colony, as uncommitted as visitors from another planet, yet the youth of several countries seem, to one degree or another, to share the same characteristics. They’re not consciously against society: they have no ideologies at all, they’re not even rebels without a cause. They’re not rebelling against anything—they don’t pay that much attention to what doesn’t please or amuse them. There is nothing they really want to do, and there’s nothing they won’t do. Not that they’re perverse or deliberately cruel: they have charm and intelligence—but they live on impulse.

The codes of civilized living presuppose that people have an inner life and outer aims, but this new race lives for the moment, because that is all that they care about. And the standards of judgment we might bring to bear on them don’t touch them and don’t interest them. They have the narcissism of youth, and we are out of it, we are bores. These are the youthful representatives of mass society. They seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form that mass society takes: indifference to human values.

Godard has used this, as it were, documentary background for a gangster story. In the traditional American gangster films, we would have been cued for the gangster’s fall: he would have shown the one vanity or sentimental weakness or misjudgment that would prove fatal. But Breathless has removed the movie gangster from his melodramatic trappings of gangs and power: this gangster is Bogart apotheosized and he is romantic in a modern sense just because he doesn’t care about anything but the pleasures of love and fast cars. There is not even the American gangster’s hatred of cops and squealers. Michel likes cops because they’re cops. This gangster is post-L’Etranger and he isn’t interested in motives: it’s all simple to him, Killers kill, squealers squeal. Nobody cares if Michel lives or dies, and he doesn’t worry about it much either.

Yet Godard has too much affection for Michel to make him a squealer: a killer yes, a squealer no. Despite the unrest and anarchy in the moral atmosphere, Michel is as romantic as Pépé Le Moko and as true to love (and his death scene is just as operatic and satisfying). A murderer and a girl with artistic pretensions. She asks him what he thinks of a reproduction she is trying on the wall, and he answers, Not bad. This doesn’t show that he’s sufficiently impressed and she reprimands him with, Renoir was a very great painter. In disgust he replies, I said ‘Not bad.’ There’s no doubt which of them responds more. He’s honest and likable, though socially classifiable as a psychopath; she’s a psychopath, too, but the non-classifiable sort—socially acceptable but a sad, sweet, affectless doll.

There are more ironies than can be sorted out in Patricia-Jean Seberg from Iowa, selected by Otto Preminger from among thousands of American girls to play the French national heroine, Joan of Arc, and now the national heroine of France—as the representative American girl abroad. Patricia, a naive, assured, bland and boyish creature, is like a new Daisy Miller—but not quite as envisioned by Henry James. She has the independence, but not the moral qualms or the Puritan conscience or the high aspirations that James saw as the special qualities of the American girl. She is, indeed, the heiress of the ages—but in a more sinister sense than James imagined: she is so free that she has no sense of responsibility or guilt. She seems to be playing at existence, at a career, at love; she’s trying them on. But that’s all she’s capable of in the way of experience. She doesn’t want to be bothered; when her lover becomes an inconvenience, she turns him in to the police.

Shot down and dying, the young man gallantly tries to amuse her, and then looks up at her and remarks—without judgment or reproach, but rather, descriptively, as a grudging compliment: You really are a bitch. (The actual word he uses is considerably stronger.) And in her flat, little-girl, cornbelt voice, she says, I don’t know what the word means. If she does know, she doesn’t care to see how it applies to her. More likely, she really doesn’t know, and it wouldn’t bother her much anyway. The codes of love and loyalty, in which, if you betray a lover you’re a bitch, depend on stronger emotions than her idle attachment to this lover—one among many. They depend on emotions, and she is innocent of them. As she had observed earlier, When we look into each other’s eyes, we get nowhere. An updated version of the betraying blonde bitches who destroyed so many movie gangsters, she is innocent even of guilt. As Jean Seberg plays her—and that’s exquisitely—Patricia is the most terrifyingly simple muse-goddess-bitch of modern movies. Next to her, the scheming Stanwyck of Double Indemnity is as archaic as Theda Bara in A Fool There Was.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the hood, is probably the most exciting new presence on the screen since the appearance of Brando; nobody holds the screen this way without enormous reserves of talent. At twenty-six, he has already appeared in nine plays and nine movies; he may be, as Peter Brook says, the best young actor in Europe today. In minor parts, the Alfred Hitchcock personal-appearance bit is compounded, and Truffaut (The 400 Blows), Chabrol (Le Beau Serge, The Cousins), and Godard himself flit through. Truffaut supplied the news item on which Godard based the script; Chabrol lent his name as supervising producer. But it is Godard’s picture, and he has pointed out how he works: The cinema is not a trade. It isn’t teamwork. One is always alone while shooting, as though facing a blank page. His movie is dedicated to Monogram Pictures—who were, of course, the producers of cheap American gangster-chase movies, generally shot in city locations. (Breathless was made for $90,000.) Another important director appears in the film—Jean-Pierre Melville—who a few years ago performed one of the most amazing feats on film: he entered into Jean Cocteau’s universe and directed, with almost no funds, the brilliant film version of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, sometimes known as The Strange Ones. He is regarded as a sort of spiritual father to the New Wave; he appears in the movie as a celebrity being interviewed. (The true celebrity and progenitor of the movement is, of course, Cocteau.) Asked by Patricia, What is your ambition? the celebrity teases her with a pseudo-profundity: To become immortal, and then to die.

{KPFA broadcast, 1961}

:: West Side Story

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider. I have premonitions of the beginning of the end when a man who seems charming or at least remotely possible starts talking about movies. When he says, I saw a great picture a couple years ago—I wonder what you thought of it? I start looking for the nearest exit. His great picture generally turns out to be He Who Must Die or something else that I detested—frequently a socially conscious problem picture of the Stanley Kramer variety. Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness).

It’s experiences like this that drive women into the arms of truckdrivers—and, as this is America, the truckdrivers all too often come up with the same kind of status-seeking tastes: they want to know what you thought of Black Orpheus or Never on Sunday or something else you’d much rather forget.

When a really attractive Easterner said to me, "I don’t generally like musicals, but have you seen West Side Story? It’s really great," I felt a kind of gnawing discomfort. I love musicals and so I couldn’t help being suspicious of the greatness of a musical that would be so overwhelming to somebody who didn’t like musicals. The gentleman’s remark correlated with other expressions of taste—the various encounters in offices and on trains and planes with men who would put on solemn faces as they said, "I don’t ordinarily go for poetry but have you read This Is My Beloved?"

I had an uneasy feeling that maybe it would be better if I didn’t go to see West Side Story—but, if you’re driven to seek the truth, you’re driven. I had to learn if this man and I were really as close as he suggested or as far apart as I feared. Well, it’s a great musical for people who don’t like musicals.

You will notice that nobody says West Side Story is a good movie; they say it’s great—they accept the terms on which it is presented. It aims to be so much more than a mere musical like Singin’ in the Rain (just about the best Hollywood musical of all time) that it is concerned with nothing so basic to the form as lightness, grace, proportion, diversion, comedy. It is not concerned with the musical form as a showcase for star performers in their best routines; it aspires to present the ballet of our times—our conflicts presented in music and dance. And, according to most of the critics, it succeeds. My anxiety as I entered the theater was not allayed by a huge blow-up of Bosley Crowther’s review proclaiming the film a cinematic masterpiece.

West Side Story begins with a blast of stereophonic music that had me clutching my head. Is the audience so impressed by science and technique, and by the highly advertised new developments that they accept this jolting series of distorted sounds gratefully—on the assumption, perhaps, that because it’s so unlike ordinary sound, it must be better? Everything about West Side Story is supposed to stun you with its newness, its size, the wonders of its photography, editing, choreography, music. It’s nothing so simple as a musical, it’s a piece of cinematic technology.

Consider the feat: first you take Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and remove all that cumbersome poetry; then you make the Montagues and Capulets really important and modern by turning them into rival street gangs of native-born and Puerto Ricans. (You get rid of the parents, of course; America is a young country—and who wants to be bothered by the squabbles of older people?) There is Jerome Robbins to convert the street rumbles into modern ballet—though he turns out to be too slow and painstaking for high-powered moviemaking and the co-director Robert Wise takes over. (May I remind you of some of Robert Wise’s previous credits—the names may be construed as symbolic. So Big, Executive Suite, Somebody Up There Likes Me, I Want to Live!) The writers include Arthur Laurents, Ernest Lehman, and, for the lyrics, Stephen Sondheim. The music is said to be by Leonard Bernstein. (Bernstein’s father at a recent banquet honoring his seventieth birthday: You don’t expect your child to be a Moses, a Maimonides, a Leonard Bernstein. No, indeed, nor when you criticize Bernstein’s music do you expect people to jump in outrage as if you were demeaning Moses or Maimonides.) Surely, only Saul Bass could provide the titles for such a production, as the credits include more consultants and assistants, production designers, sound men, editors, special effects men, and so forth than you might believe possible—until you see the result. Is it his much-vaunted ingeniousness or a hidden streak of cynicism—a neat comment on all this technology—that he turns the credits into graffiti?

The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don’t really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms—for whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert. There’s even a heavenly choir. When the fruity, toothsome Romeo-Tony meets his Juliet-Maria, everything becomes gauzy and dreamy and he murmurs, Have we met before? That’s my favorite piece of synthetic mysticism since the great exchange in Black Orpheus: My name is Orpheus. My name is Eurydice. Then we must be in love. When Tony, floating on the clouds of romance (Richard Beymer unfortunately doesn’t look as if he could walk) is asked, What have you been taking tonight? he answers, A trip to the moon. Match that for lyric eloquence! (You’d have to go back to Golden Boy.)

When Tony stabs Maria’s brother and your mind fills in with O, I am fortune’s fool, the expensive scriptwriters come up with a brilliant exclamation for him. Maria! he cries. Do not let this exquisite simplicity mislead you—for they do not call the name Maria lightly. She is no mere girl like Juliet—she has the wisdom of all women, she is the mother of us all. And that is why, no doubt, they depart from Shakespeare’s plot at the end: suffering Maria survives. And, of course, the appeal to the Catholic audience—which might otherwise become uneasy as both gangs are probably Catholic—is thereby assured. West Side Story plays the game in every conceivable way: it makes a strong appeal to youth by expressing the exuberant, frustrated desires of youth in the ugly, constricted city life, but it finally betrays this youth by representing the good characters as innocent and sweet, and making the others seem rather comic and foolish. They’re like Dead End Kids dancing—and without much improvement in the humor of the Dead End Kids.

How can so many critics have fallen for all this frenzied hokum—about as original as, say, South Pacific at home—and with a score so derivative that, as we left the theater, and overheard some young man exclaiming I could listen to that music forever, my little daughter answered "We have been listening to it forever. (At his father’s banquet, Bernstein recalled that at his debut when he was thirteen he had played variations of a song in the manner of Chopin, Liszt and Gershwin. Now I will play it in the manner of Bernstein." How, I wonder?) Perhaps the clue is in the bigness, and in the pretensions that are part of the bigness. Arthur Knight in the Saturday Review called it A triumphant work of art; Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic says:

The best film musical ever made . . . . When the film begins, and the Jets move down the streets of the West Side (studio settings faultlessly blended with location shots), as they mold swagger into ballet, we know that we are not seeing dance numbers, we are seeing street gangs for the first time as they really are—only we have not been able to perceive it for ourselves . . . . It is Robbins’ vision—of city life expressed in stylized movement that sometimes flowers into dance and song—that lifts this picture high. If a time-capsule is about to be buried anywhere, this film ought to be included, so that possible future generations can know how an artist of ours made our most congenial theatrical form respond to some of the beauty in our time and to the humanity in some of its ugliness.

A candidate for a time-capsule is surely no ordinary multi-million-dollar spectacle. Hasn’t Kauffmann, along with a lot of other people, fallen victim to the show of grandeur and importance? If there is anything great in the American musical tradition—and I think there is—it’s in the light satire, the high spirits, the giddy romance, the low comedy, and the unpretentiously stylized dancing of men like Fred Astaire and the younger Gene Kelly. There’s more beauty there—and a lot more humanity—than in all this jet-propelled ballet. Nothing in West Side Story gave me the pleasure of an honest routine like Donald O’Connor’s Make ’Em Laugh number in Singin’ in the Rain or almost any old Astaire and Rogers movie.

Despite Kauffmann’s feeling that "we are seeing street gangs for the first time as they really are," I wonder how the actual street gangs feel about the racial composition of the movie’s gangs. For, of course, the Puerto Ricans are not Puerto Ricans and the only real difference between these two gangs of what I am tempted to call ballerinas—is that one group has faces and hair darkened, and the other group has gone wild for glittering yellow hair dye; and their stale exuberance, though magnified by the camera to epic proportions, suggests no social tensions more world shaking than the desperation of young dancers to get ahead—even at the risk of physical injury. They’re about as human as the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Maria, the sweet virgin fresh from Puerto Rico, is the most machine-tooled of Hollywood ingenues—clever little Natalie Wood. Like the new Princess telephone, so ingeniously constructed that it transcends its function and makes communication superfluous (it seems to be designed so that teen-agers can read advertising slogans at each other), Natalie Wood is the newly-constructed love-goddess—so perfectly banal she destroys all thoughts of love. In his great silent film Metropolis, Fritz Lang had a robot woman named the false Maria: she had more spontaneity than Natalie Wood’s Maria.

I had a sense of foreboding when I saw that Friar Lawrence had become a kindly old Jewish pharmacist called Doc, but I was hardly prepared for his ultimate wisdom—You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop? These words Bosley Crowther tells us should be heard by thoughtful people—sympathetic people—all over the land. Why, I wonder? What is there in this message that has anything to do with thought? These message movies dealing with Negro and white, or Puerto Rican and white, like to get a little extra increment of virtue—unearned—by tossing in a sweet, kindly, harmless old Jew full of prophetic cant. (Presumably, Jews should not be discriminated against because they are so philosophic and impotent.) The film makers wouldn’t dream of having a young, pushing, aggressive Jew in the film—just as they don’t dare to differentiate or characterize the racial backgrounds of the white gang. (Only sweet, reformed Tony can be identified as a Pole.) Yet this is a movie that pretends to deal with racial tensions. The lyrics keep telling us this is what it’s about and the critics seem to accept the authors’ word for it.

But, counter the enthusiasts for the film, surely you must admit the dancing is great. No, it isn’t—it’s trying so hard to be great it isn’t even good. Those impressive, widely admired opening shots of New York from the air overload the story with values and importance—technological and sociological. The Romeo and Juliet story could, of course, be set anywhere, but West Side Story wrings the last drop of spurious importance out of the setting, which dominates the enfeebled love story. The dancing is also designed to be urgent and important: it is supposed to be the lyric poetry of the streets, with all the jagged rhythms of modern tensions. The bigger the leap the more, I suppose, the dancer is expressing—on the theory that America is a big, athletic country. Who would have thought that Busby Berkeley’s amusing old geometric patterns and aerial views would come back this way? Add social ideas to geometry, and you have the new West Side Story concept of dance. And just as the American middle classes thought they were being daring and accepting jazz when they listened to the adaptations and arrangements of big orchestras that gave jazz themes the familiar thick, sweet sludge of bad symphonic music, and thought that jazz was being elevated and honored as an art when Louis Armstrong played with the lagging, dragging New York Philharmonic (under Leonard Bernstein), they now think that American dancing is elevated to the status of art by all this arranging and exaggerating—by being turned into the familiar high art of ballet. The movements are so huge and sudden, so portentously alive they’re always near explosion point. The dancing is obviously trying to say something, to glorify certain kinds of movement. And looking at all those boys in blue jeans doing their calisthenic choreography, Americans say, Why it’s like ballet . . . it’s art, it’s really great! What is lost is not merely the rhythm, the feel, the unpretentious movements of American dancing at its best—but its basic emotion, which, as in jazz music, is the contempt for respectability. The possibilities of dance as an expressive medium are not expanded in West Side Story; they’re contracted. I would guess that in a few decades the dances in West Side Story will look as much like hilariously limited, dated period pieces as Busby Berkeley’s Remember the Forgotten Man number in Gold Diggers of 1933.

After West Side Story was deluged with Academy Awards as the best movie of 1961, Murray Schumach reported in the New York Times that there seemed to be general agreement that one reason it won was that its choreography, music, and direction were devoted to the serious theme of the brotherhood of man. A few weeks ago, in a talk with a Hollywood director, when I expressed surprise at the historical novel he had undertaken to film, he explained that the idea of the book appealed to him because it was really about the brotherhood of man. I averted my eyes in embarrassment and hoped that my face wasn’t breaking into a crooked grin. It’s a great conversation closer—the brotherhood of man. Some suggested new serious themes for big movies: the sisterhood of women, no man is an island, the inevitability of death, the continuity of man and nature, God Is All.

Sometimes, when I read film critics, I think I can do without brothers.

{KPFA broadcast, 1961; Film Quarterly, Summer 1962}

:: Lolita

The ads asked "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita for persons over 18 years of age? A few days later the question mark was moved, and the ads asked How did they ever make a movie of Lolita? and after that, the caution: for persons over 18 years of age. Either way, the suggestion was planted that the movie had licked" the book, and that Lolita had been turned into the usual kind of sexy movie. The advertising has been slanted to the mass audience, so the art-house audience isn’t going. A sizable part of the mass audience doesn’t like the movie (their rejection is being interpreted as a vote for wholesomeness, which according to Variety is about to stage a comeback) and the art-house audience is missing out on one of the few American films it might enjoy.

Recommend the film to friends and they reply, "Oh I’ve had it with Lolita." It turns out (now that Lolita can be purchased for fifty cents and so is in the category of ordinary popular books) that they never thought much of it; but even though they didn’t really like the book, they don’t want to see the movie because of all the changes that have been made in the book. (One person informed me that he wouldn’t go to see the movie because he’d heard they’d turned it into a comedy.) Others had heard so much about the book, they thought reading it superfluous (they had as good as read it—they were tired of it); and if the book was too much talked about to necessitate a reading, surely going to the film was really de trop?

Besides, wasn’t the girl who played Lolita practically a matron? The New York Times had said, She looks to be a good seventeen, and the rest of the press seemed to concur in this peculiarly inexpert judgment. Time opened its review with Wind up the Lolita doll and it goes to Hollywood and commits nymphanticide and closed with "Lolita is the saddest and most important victim of the current reckless adaptation fad . . ." In the Observer the premiere of the film was described under the heading Lolita fiasco and the writer concluded that the novel had been turned into a film about this poor English guy who is being given the runaround by this sly young broad. In the New Republic Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "It is clear that Nabokov respects the novel. It is equally clear that he does not respect the film—at least as it is used in America . . . He has given to films the Lolita that, presumably, he thinks the medium deserves . . ." After all this, who would expect anything from the film?

The surprise of Lolita is how enjoyable it is: it’s the first new American comedy since those great days in the forties when Preston Sturges recreated comedy with verbal slapstick. Lolita is black slapstick and at times it’s so far out that you gasp as you laugh. An inspired Peter Sellers creates a new comic pattern—a crazy quilt of psychological, sociological commentary so hip it’s surrealist. It doesn’t cover everything: there are structural weaknesses, the film falls apart, and there’s even a forced and humiliating attempt to explain the plot. But when the wit is galloping who’s going to look a gift horse in the mouth? Critics, who feel decay in their bones.

The reviews are a comedy of gray matter. Doubts may have remained after Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, ex cathedra judgment that Lolita is willful, cynical and repellent . . . It is not only inhuman; it is anti-human. I am reluctantly glad that it was made, but I trust it will have no imitators. Then, "for a learned and independent point of view, Show invited Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned theologian, to a screening in New York and asked him for an appraisal. The higher primate discovered that the theme of this triangular relationship exposes the unwholesome attitudes of mother, daughter, and lover to a mature observer. (Ripeness is all . . . but is it enough?) This mature observer does however find some few saving moral insights—though he thinks the film obscures them—such as the lesson of Lolita’s essential redemption in a happy marriage." (Had any peripheral redemptions lately?) If you’re still hot on the trail of insights, don’t overlook the New Republic’s steamy revelation that the temper of the original might . . . have been tastefully preserved if Humbert had narrated the film. The general tone could have been: ‘Yes, this is what I did then and thought lovely. Dreadful, wasn’t it? Still . . . it has its funny side, no?’ It has its funny side, oui oui.

The movie adaptation tries something so far beyond the simple narrator that a number of the reviewers have complained: Bosley Crowther, who can always be counted on to miss the point, writes that Mr. Kubrick inclines to dwell too long over scenes that have slight purpose, such as scenes in which Mr. Sellers does various comical impersonations as the sneaky villain who dogs Mr. Mason’s trail. These scenes that have slight purpose are, of course, just what make Lolita new, these are the scenes that make it, for all its slackness of pace and clumsy editing, a more exciting comedy than the last American comedy, Some Like It Hot. Quilty, the success, the writer of scenarios and school plays, the policeman, the psychologist; Quilty the genius, the man whom Lolita loves, Humbert’s brother and tormenter and parodist; Quilty the man of the world is a conception to talk about alongside Melville’s The Confidence Man. Are you with someone? Humbert asks the policeman. And Quilty the policeman replies, I’m not with someone. I’m with you.

The Quilty monologues are worked out almost like the routines of silent comedy—they not only carry the action forward, they comment on it, and this comment is the new action of the film. There has been much critical condescension toward Sellers, who’s alleged to be an impersonator rather than an actor, a man with many masks but no character. Now Sellers does a turn with the critics’ terms: his Quilty is a character employing masks, an actor with a merciless talent for impersonation. He is indeed the sneaky villain who dogs Mr. Mason’s trail—and he digs up every bone that Mr. Mason ineptly tries to bury, and presents them to him. Humbert can conceal nothing. It is a little like the scene in Victor Sjöström’s magnificent The Wind, in which Lillian Gish digs a grave for the man she has murdered and then, from her window, watches in horror as the windstorm uncovers the body. But in Lolita our horror is split by laughter: Humbert has it coming—not because he’s having relations with a minor, but because, in order to conceal his sexual predilections, he has put on the most obsequious and mealy-minded of masks. Like the homosexual professors who are rising fast in American academia because they are so cautious about protecting their unconventional sex lives that they can be trusted not to be troublesome to the college administrations on any important issues (a convoluted form of blackmail), Humbert is a worm and Quilty knows it.

Peter Sellers works with miserable physical equipment, yet he has some-how managed to turn his lumbering, wide-hipped body into an advantage by acting to perfection the man without physical assets. The soft, slow-moving, paper-pushing middle-class man is his special self-effacing type; and though only in his mid-thirties he all too easily incarnates sly, smug middle-aged man. Even his facial muscles are kept flaccid, so that he always looks weary, too tired and cynical for much of a response. The rather frightening strength of his Quilty (who has enormous—almost sinister—reserves of energy) is peculiarly effective just because of his ordinary, normal look. He does something that seems impossible: he makes unattractiveness magnetic.

Quilty—rightly, in terms of the film as distinguished from the novel—dominates Lolita (which could use much more of him) and James Mason’s Humbert, who makes attractiveness tired and exhausted and impotent, is a remarkable counterpart. Quilty who doesn’t care, who wins Lolita and throws her out, Quilty the homewrecker is a winner; Humbert, slavishly, painfully in love, absurdly suffering, the lover of the ages who degrades himself, who cares about nothing but Lolita, is the classic loser. Mason is better than (and different from) what almost anyone could have expected. Mason’s career has been so mottled: a beautiful Odd Man Out, a dull Brutus, an uneven, often brilliant Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, a good Captain Nemo, and then in 1960 the beginnings of comic style as the English naval commander who pretends to have gone over to the Russians in A Touch of Larceny. And now, in Lolita he’s really in command of a comic style: the handsome face gloats in a rotting smile. Mason seems to need someone strong to play against. He’s very good in the scenes with Charlotte and with her friends, and especially good in the bathtub scene (which Niebuhr thinks may arouse both the laughter and the distaste of the audience—imagine being so drained of reactions that you have to be aroused to distaste!) but his scenes with Lolita, when he must dominate the action, fall rather flat.

Perhaps the reviewers have been finding so many faults with Lolita because this is such an easy way to show off some fake kind of erudition: even newspaper reviewers can demonstrate that they’ve read a book by complaining about how different the movie is from the novel. The movie is different but not that different, and if you can get over the reviewers’ preoccupation with the sacredness of the novel (they don’t complain this much about Hollywood’s changes in biblical stories) you’ll probably find that even the characters that are different (Charlotte Haze, especially, who has become the culture-vulture rampant) are successful in terms of the film. Shelley Winters’s Charlotte is a triumphant caricature, so overdone it recalls Blake’s You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

Sue Lyon is perhaps a little less than enough—but not because she looks seventeen. (Have the reviewers looked at the schoolgirls of America lately? The classmates of my fourteen-year-old daughter are not merely nubile: some of them look badly used.) Rather it is because her role is insufficiently written. Sue Lyon herself is good (at times her face is amusingly suggestive of a miniature Elvis Presley) though physically too young to be convincing in her last scenes. (I don’t mean that to sound paradoxical but merely descriptive.) Kubrick and company have been attacked most for the area in which they have been simply accurate: they could have done up Sue Lyon in childish schoolgirl clothes, but the facts of American life are that adolescents and even pre-adolescents wear nylons and make-up and two-piece strapless bathing suits and have figures.

Lolita isn’t a consistently good movie but that’s almost beside the point: excitement is sustained by a brilliant idea, a new variant on the classic chase theme—Quilty as Humbert’s walking paranoia, the madness that chases Humbert and is chased by him, over what should be the delusionary landscape of the actual United States. This panoramic confusion of normal and mad that can be experienced traveling around the country is, unfortunately, lost: the film badly needs the towns and motels and highways of the U.S. It suffers not only from the genteel English landscapes, but possibly also from the photographic style of Oswald Morris—perhaps justly famous, but subtly wrong (and too tasteful) for Lolita. It may seem like a dreadfully uncinematic idea, but I rather wish that Kubrick, when he realized that he couldn’t shoot in the U.S. (the reasons must have been economic), had experimented with stylized sets.

There is a paradox involved in the film Lolita. Stanley Kubrick shows talents in new areas (theme and dialogue and comedy), and is at his worst at what he’s famous for. The Killing was a simple-minded suspense film about a racetrack robbery, but he structured it brilliantly with each facet shining in place; Paths of Glory was a simple-minded pacifist film, but he gave it nervous rhythm and a sense of urgency. Lolita is so clumsily structured that you begin to wonder what was shot and then cut out, why other pieces were left in, and whether the beginning was intended to be the end; and it is edited in so dilatory a fashion that after the first hour, almost every scene seems to go on too long. It’s as if Kubrick lost his nerve. If he did, it’s no wonder; the wonder is, that with all the pressures on American moviemakers—the pressures to evade, to conceal, to compromise, and to explain everything for the literal-minded—he had the nerve to transform this satire on the myths of love into the medium that has become consecrated to the myths. Lolita is a wilder comedy for being, now, family entertainment. Movie theaters belong to the same world as the highways and motels: in first-run theaters, for persons over 18 years of age does not mean that children are prohibited but simply that there are no reduced prices for children. In second-run neighborhood theaters, for persons over 18 years of age is amended by unless accompanied by a member of the family. That befits the story of Humbert Humbert.

{KPFA broadcast, 1962; Partisan Review, Fall 1962}

:: Jules and Jim

When the Legion of Decency condemned Jules and Jim, the statement read: the story has been developed in a context alien to Christian and traditional natural morality. It certainly has. The Legion went on to say: If the director has a definite moral viewpoint to express, it is so obscure that the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant and consequently pose a serious problem for a mass medium of entertainment. It would be possible to make a fraudulent case for the film’s morality by pointing out that the adulterous individuals suffer and die, but this is so specious and so irrelevant to the meanings and qualities of the work that surely the Legion, expert in these matters, would recognize that it was casuistry. The Legion isn’t wrong about the visual amorality either, and yet, Jules and Jim is not only one of the most beautiful films ever made, and the greatest motion picture of recent years, it is also, viewed as a work of art, exquisitely and impeccably moral. Truffaut does not have a definite moral viewpoint to express and he does not use the screen for messages or special pleading or to sell sex for money; he uses the film medium to express his love and knowledge of life as completely as he can.

The film is adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché’s autobiographical novel, written when he was seventy-four, with some additional material from his even later work, Deux Anglaises et le Continent. If some of us have heard of Roché, it’s probably just the scrap of information that he was the man who introduced Gertrude Stein to Picasso—but this scrap shouldn’t be discarded, because both Stein and Picasso are relevant to the characters and period of Jules and Jim. Roché is now dead, but the model for Catherine, the Jeanne Moreau role, is a German literary woman who is still alive; it was she who translated Lolita into German. Truffaut has indicated, also, that some of the material which he improvised on location was suggested by Apollinaire’s letters to Madeleine—a girl whom he had met for a half-hour on a train.

The film begins in Paris before the First World War. Jules the Austrian (Oskar Werner) and Jim the Frenchman (Henri Serre) are Mutt and Jeff, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, devoted friends, contentedly arguing about life and letters. Catherine enters their lives, and Jules and Jim try to have both the calm of their friendship and the excitement of her imperious, magical presence. She marries Jules who can’t hold her, and in despair he encourages Jim’s interest in her—"That way she’ll still be ours." But Catherine can’t subjugate Jim: he is too independent to be dominated by her whims. Not completely captivated, Jim fails to believe in her love when she most desperately offers it. She kills herself and him.

The music, the camera and editing movement, the rhythm of the film carry us along without pauses for reflection. Truffaut doesn’t linger; nothing is held too long, nothing is overstated or even stated. Perhaps that’s why others besides the Legion of Decency have complained: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic says that Jules and Jim loses sight of purposes . . . It is a confusion of the sheer happiness of being in the studio . . . with the reason for being there. Truffaut, the most youthfully alive and abundant of all the major film directors, needs a reason for making movies about as much as Picasso needs a reason for picking up a brush or a lump of clay. And of what film maker could a reference to a studio be less apt? He works everywhere and with anything at hand. Kauffmann says of Jules and Jim, There is a lot less here than meets the eye, and Dwight Macdonald, who considers Kauffmann his only peer, is reassured: one doesn’t want to be the only square, he writes. If it gives him comfort to know there are two of them . . .

What is the film about? It’s a celebration of life in a great historical period, a period of ferment and extraordinary achievement in painting and music and literature. Together Jules and Jim have a peaceful friendship (and Jim has a quiet love affair with Gilberte) but when Jules and Jim are with Catherine they feel alive. Anything may happen—she’s the catalyst, the troublemaker, the source of despair as well as the source of joy. She is the enchantress who makes art out of life.

At the end, Jules, who has always given in to everything in order to keep Catherine, experiences relief at her death, although he has always delighted in the splendor she conferred on his existence. (Don’t we all experience this sort of relief when we say goodbye to a particularly brilliant house-guest?) The dullness in Jules, the bourgeois under the Bohemian, the passivity is made clear from the outset: it is why the girls don’t fall in love with him. At the end, the excitements and the humiliations are over. He will have peace, and after a lifetime with Catherine he has earned it.

Catherine is, of course, a little crazy, but that’s not too surprising. Pioneers can easily become fanatics, maniacs. And Catherine is part of a new breed—the independent, intellectual modern woman, so determined to live as freely as a man that while claiming equality she uses every feminine wile to gain extra advantages, to demonstrate her superiority, and to increase her power position. She is the emerging twentieth-century woman satirized by Strindberg, who also adored her; she is the woman with rights and responsibilities who entered Western literature after the turn of the century and has almost always been seen by the male authors as demanding the rights but refusing the responsibilities. This is the traditional male view of the feminist, and the film’s view is not different. Don’t we now hear complaints that Negroes are so sensitive about their rights that you can’t treat them casually and equally as you would anybody else, you can’t disagree on a job or question their judgment, you have to defer to their sensitivities and treat them as if they were super-whites—always in the right? So it is with Catherine.

Catherine, in her way, compensates for the homage she demands. She has, despite her need to intrude and to dominate, the gift for life. She holds nothing in reserve; she lives out her desires; when she can’t control the situation, she destroys it. Catherine may be wrong-headed, as those who aspire to be free spirits often are (and they make this wrongness more visible than pliable, amiable people do), but she is devoid of hypocrisy and she doesn’t lie. In one of the most upsetting and odd little scenes in the film she takes out a bottle which she says is vitriol for lying eyes—and Jim doesn’t react any more than if it were aspirin. Catherine the free spirit has the insanity of many free spirits—she believes that she knows truth from lies, right from wrong. Her absolutism is fascinating, but it is also rather clearly morally insane. She punishes Jim because he has not broken with Gilberte, though she has not broken with Jules. Only the relationships she sets and dominates are right. Catherine suffers from the fatal ambivalence of the free and equal woman toward sex: she can leave men, but if they leave her, she is as abandoned and desolate, as destroyed and helpless as any clinging vine (perhaps more destroyed—she cannot even ask for sympathy). Jules and Jim is about the impossibility of freedom, as it is about the many losses of innocence.

All these elements are elliptical in the film—you catch them out of the corner of your eye and mind. So much happens in the span of an hour and three quarters that even if you don’t take more than a fraction of the possible meanings from the material, you still get far more than if you examined almost any other current film, frame by frame, under a microscope. Jules and Jim is as full of character and wit and radiance as Marienbad is empty, and the performance by Jeanne Moreau is so vivid that the bored, alienated wife of La Notte is a faded monochrome. In Jules and Jim alienation is just one aspect of her character and we see how Catherine got there: she becomes alienated when she can’t get her own way, when she is blocked. It is not a universal condition as in La Notte (neither Jules nor Jim shares in it): it is her developing insanity as she is cut off from what she wants and no longer takes pleasure in life.

Jules and Jim are portraits of artists as young men, but they are the kind of artists who grow up into something else—they become specialists in some field, or journalists; and the dedication to art of their youth becomes the civilizing influence in their lives. The war blasts the images of Bohemian life; both Jules and Jim are changed, but not Catherine. She is the unreconstructed Bohemian who does not settle down. She needed more strength, more will than they to live the artist’s life—and this determination is the uncivilizing factor. Bohemianism has made her, underneath all the graces, a moral barbarian: freedom has come to mean whatever she says it is. And when she loses what she believes to be freedom—when she can no longer dictate the terms on which Jim will live—she is lost, isolated. She no longer makes art out of life: she makes life hell.

She chooses death, and she calls on Jules to observe her choice, the last demonstration of her power over life and death, because Jules by a lifetime of yielding his own freedom to her has become, to her, a witness. He can only observe grand gestures; he cannot make them. In the last moment in the car, when self-destruction is completely determined, she smiles the smile of the statue: this was the mystery that drew them to her—the smile that looks so easy and natural but which is self-contained and