Pauline Kael (19 page)

On another occasion, Pauline and Crist had both served on a critic’s panel at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. During the discussion, Pauline lit into her favorite bogeyman, Bosley Crowther, and Crist angrily shouted her down, telling her that she should lay off Crowther—that he had his parish and Pauline had hers. Later, Pauline asked Crist to join her for a cup of coffee. “She wanted to explain to me,” recalled Crist, “that when she was running her theater in Berkeley, running the Cinema Guild, she had to put up posters that featured banner reviews by Bosley in big print. She resented that he was the most important critical voice in the country; she’d harbored it for years.” That year Universal Pictures dropped Pauline from its list of complimentary invitational press screenings. The alleged reason was her behavior at a screening of the studio’s new Ross Hunter–produced soap opera,
Madame X
. The studio felt that Pauline’s derisive hoots and audible comments in the screening room had adversely influenced the other critics. For a time she would have to pay to see Universal’s pictures in a theater—her preferred setting, anyway, as she could then monitor the reactions of the audience.

 

The movie of 1966 that perplexed Pauline most was Antonioni’s
Blow-Up
, a study of the fast-paced, empty life of a high-fashion photographer (David Hemmings) in swinging London. It was a strikingly filmed and brilliantly edited murder mystery, and this part of the film she found quite successful. But few things vexed her as much as unearned seriousness, and it was here that she felt
Blow-Up
went off the rails. The basic idea that
Blow-Up
seemed to be setting forth—that the photographer’s life represented illusion and the murder reality—struck Pauline as impossibly facile, and she also felt that its implicit message that the mod scene represented the spiritual aridity of the times was nothing but a pompous, moralizing pose. While Antonioni had tapped into the alienation and unresponsiveness of modern youth, he had missed “the fervor and astonishing speed in their rejections of older values; he sees only the emptiness of pop culture.”

In her reviewing career to date, Pauline had shown a powerful gift for defending the great talents she believed had been prevented from doing their best work by Hollywood; Orson Welles’s
Falstaff
provided her with another such opportunity. After
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
, Welles’s career had consisted mainly of giving hammy performances in a string of mediocre pictures and trying to amass enough cash to finance a project that might restore his reputation as a director. He had come tantalizingly close with
Othello
, finally released in 1955 after years of stop-and-start filming, and
Touch of Evil
, a wholly original thriller set in a Mexican border town, but both films received minimal distribution and flopped.

In the 1960s he had one more chance, with
Falstaff
(later known as
Chimes at Midnight
), which he had been shooting in Europe for years. It was an amalgamation of several Shakespeare plays, with the most poignant part of
Henry IV, Part I
at its center: Prince Hal’s recognition of his destiny and gradual pulling away from Falstaff. Pauline admitted that technically, the movie was a mess, showing many signs of its chaotic filming, but she found “the casting superb and the performance beautiful.” The Battle of Shrewsbury, she felt, ranked with “the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa—that is, with the best ever done.” And yet its technical defects were preventing it from getting proper distribution. “And Welles—the one great creative force in American films in our time, the man who might have redeemed our movies from the general contempt in which they are (and for the most part, rightly) held—is, ironically, an expatriate director whose work thus reaches only the art-house audience.”

The New Republic
continued to tamper with her copy, and by the summer of 1967 she realized she could not continue for much longer. She resigned her post, using her latest royalty check for
I Lost It at the Movies
to take Gina to Europe for a few weeks. She was not at all sure that another steady reviewing job would present itself.

 

Pauline was distressed that the creative ferment that had burst out of France and Britain at the end of the ’50s seemed to have dried up. It was particularly sad to see what had happened to François Truffaut, who had taken on the ill-advised
Fahrenheit 451
and was now preparing what would turn out to be a hollow parody of his idol, Alfred Hitchcock,
The Bride Wore Black
. One of the few French directors to keep his hold was Jean-Luc Godard, whose
Band of Outsiders
Pauline had admired. She felt that
Breathless
and
Band of Outsiders
derived their spark from the fact that they were “movies made by a generation bred on movies . . . Godard is the Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world, and movies are for the sixties a synthesis of what the arts were for the post–World War I generation—rebellion, romance, a new style of life.” Unfortunately,
Band of Outsiders
failed to intrigue American audiences and played in New York for only a single week in March 1966.

American movies, Pauline believed, were in a shambles. She was certain that she had been right about the dangerous example set by
The Sound of Music
. Big, expensive, self-important pictures seemed to be all that interested the studios. Very seldom did she see anything that reflected the current climate in America in a serious or challenging way, and she had come to fear that perhaps there wasn’t even a public for such movies. Impressed as she had been by Truffaut’s and Godard’s early films, she had stopped short of genuine capitulation to them: that degree of abandon she still reserved for an American movie.

And then, on August 4, 1967,
Bonnie and Clyde
opened at the Montreal Film Festival.

The picture had first gone into development in 1963, when David Newman and Robert Benton, both staff art directors at
Esquire
, had gotten together to write a treatment based on the legendary Depression-era crime sprees of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Like Pauline, Newman and Benton were impatient for the American film to move forward, and their telling of the story of Bonnie and Clyde showed the influence of the French New Wave filmmakers. When it was released, it was clear that the restless, often violent spirit of the’60s pervaded practically every frame of the movie.

Versions of the story of Bonnie and Clyde had reached the screen many times before—in Fritz Lang’s
You Only Live Twice
(1937) and Joseph H. Lewis’s
Gun Crazy
(1950), among others—but never with such complexity, such wit, such unexpected shifts of tone, the wild, jaunty scenes of the early part of the picture leading seamlessly into the more violent and disturbing second half. Warren Beatty’s Clyde and Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie were so vital and attractive that it was easy for those watching the movie to accept them as folk heroes; the film seemed to embrace them as stand-ins for all those disenfranchised by the worst economic disaster in U.S. history, and the audience wanted them to get away with everything. There was a remarkable scene midway through the picture in which Bonnie and Clyde shoot up a house that has been repossessed by the bank—and, with the fervor of a student protester, the owner joins them in shooting out the windows and the bank’s sign. In the horrifying finale the couple dies in a shower of bullets—agonizingly and yet, somehow, beautifully—in a staggering orgy of violence. This was tough stuff for audiences at the time, but the director, Arthur Penn, and Beatty gambled that contemporary moviegoers would connect with what was happening on the screen.

At first it appeared that their gamble might fizzle. Warners opened
Bonnie and Clyde
in a string of mostly undistinguished theaters in mid-August 1967. Some of the reviews—from Judith Crist and a few others—were positive, but many of the most important ones were not, and the most important one of all was, of course, written by Pauline’s bête noire, Bosley Crowther, in
The New York Times
. Long known for his abhorrence of violence, Crowther found the portrayal of Bonnie and Clyde nothing less than an act of moral repugnance. He denounced the film as “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredation of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in
Thoroughly Modern Millie
.”

From the moment she saw
Bonnie and Clyde
, Pauline was one of the film’s most enthusiastic champions. It excited her as no movie had in years. If a picture as thrillingly bold and original as
Bonnie and Clyde
could come out of a climate that was desperate to create another
Sound of Music
or
Doctor Zhivago
, there might yet be amazing possibilities in store for American movies. The trouble was, she had not had an opportunity to write about it. She had submitted a lengthy essay to
The New Republic
during the month that she departed from the magazine, but the editors considered it overlong and refused to run it.

There was one place where length would not be an issue:
The New Yorker
. The magazine had already featured Penelope Gilliatt’s very favorable notice, but Pauline knew that the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, had been following her work for some years. Shawn was a serious moviegoer and he had been particularly intrigued by Pauline’s writings on Godard in
The New Republic
. She had already made her
New Yorker
debut in the June 3, 1967, issue with an article titled “Movies on Television,” in which she discussed the mixed blessing of reencountering old films on the small screen. Robert Mills now called William Shawn with an offer: Would he be interested in publishing a 7,000-word essay on why
Bonnie and Clyde
represented a moment of enormous importance in America’s pop culture?

In terms of the impact it would have on her career, it was the most important essay Pauline would ever write. It ran in
The New Yorker
’s issue of October 21, 1967, and it opened on a strong note of defiance, in one of her favorite devices, the rhetorical question:

She felt that the screenwriters had tapped into something very important in that “they were able to use the knowledge that, like many of our other famous outlaws and gangsters, the real Bonnie and Clyde seemed to others to be acting out forbidden roles and to relish their roles. In contrast with secret criminals—the furtive embezzlers and other crooks who lead seemingly honest lives—the known outlaws capture the public imagination, because they take chances, and because, often, they enjoy dramatizing their lives.”

She could tell from the vibe in the theater that “
Bonnie and Clyde
keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance—holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces. To be put on is to be put on the spot, made the stooge in a comedy act. People in the audience at
Bonnie and Clyde
are laughing, demonstrating that they’re not stooges—that they appreciate the joke—when they catch the first bullet right in the face.” In a sense
Bonnie and Clyde
played the audience in a way that wasn’t unlike the way Hitchcock had been playing them for years. But it did so with a cleanness and open-heartedness that Hitchcock could never come near. Part of the genius of Penn’s direction had such sleight of hand; he was driving the vehicle, but both hands weren’t clenched fiercely on the steering wheel. “Audiences at
Bonnie and Clyde
are not given a simple, secure basis for identification,” Pauline wrote; “they are made to feel but are not told
how
to feel.”

One of the many ways that
Bonnie and Clyde
ushered in a new era in American moviemaking was with its stunningly direct portrayal of violence and its effect on our lives. Accusing the film of romanticizing crime and promoting violence was an easy, facile way of attacking it, and many critics and columnists had taken it. Arthur Penn objected to this in a
New York Times
interview that appeared a few weeks after the movie’s release. “The trouble with the violence in most films,” he said, “is that it is not violent enough. A war film that doesn’t show the real horrors of war—bodies being torn apart and arms being shot off—really glorifies war.” Pauline agreed, writing that “the whole point of
Bonnie and Clyde
is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing. The dirty reality of death—not suggestions but blood and holes—is necessary....
Bonnie and Clyde
needs violence; violence is its meaning.” And she cautioned against people who saw “
Bonnie and Clyde
as a danger to public morality; they think an audience goes to a play or a movie and takes the actions in it as examples for imitation. They look at the world and blame the movies.”
Bonnie and Clyde
had done contemporary audiences a favor, she felt, because “it has put the sting back into death.” At last, it seemed that the American film might be on its way to growing up, as she had longed for it to do for decades. The ultimate cinematic seduction she had dreamed of for so long might now actually be on the verge of happening.