The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (216 page)

In the first year of war, Jouvet planned to film another of his stage hits, Moliere’s
L’Ecole des Femmes
, with Max Ophuls in Switzerland. It fell through and, instead, he played Mosca in
Volpone
(40, Maurice Tourneur) and
Untel Père et Fils
(40, Duvivier). He spent most of the war years in South America, but returned in 1946 and filmed steadily if without much distinction until his death:
Revenant
(46, Christian-Jaque);
Les Chouans
(46, Henri Calef); as the detective in
Quai des Orfèvres
(47, Henri-Georges Clouzot);
Entre Onze Heures et Minuit
(48, Henri Decoin); in the “Retour de Jean” episode from
Retour à la Vie
(49, Clouzot);
Lady Paname
(49, Henri Jeanson); and
Miquette et Sa Mère
(50, Clouzot).

Raul Julia
(1940–94), b. San Juan, Puerto Rico
A clever and interesting stage actor, Julia made plenty of films (some of them from strange corners and circumstances), but not enough that did him justice. He was seldom a convincing villain—comedy was a much more fruitful way of using him. He had worked ten years on the stage before he ever got into movies:
The Panic in Needle Park
(71, Jerry Schatzberg);
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
(71, Jeffrey Young);
The Organization
(71, Don Medford); very funny (and Italian) in
The Gumball Rally
(76, Chuck Bail);
Eyes of Laura Mars
(78, Irvin Kershner);
Strong Medicine
(79, Richard Foreman);
One from the Heart
(82, Francis Coppola);
The Escape Artist
(82, Caleb Deschanel);
Tempest
(82, Paul Mazursky); in his biggest role, opposite William Hurt, in
Kiss of the Spider Woman
(85, Hector Babenco);
Compromising Positions
(85, Frank Perry);
The Morning After
(86, Sidney Lumet);
Trading Hearts
(88, Neil Leifer);
La Gran Fiesta
(88, Marcos Zurinaga), set in San Juan in 1942;
Tango Bar
(88, Zurinaga);
The Penitent
(88, Cliff Osmond);
Moon Over Parador
(88, Mazursky);
Tequila Sunrise
(88, Robert Towne); as Archbishop Oscar Romero in
Romero
(89, John Duigan); playing Macheath, one of his stage successes, in
Mack the Knife
(89, Menahem Golan);
Presumed Innocent
(90, Alan J. Pakula);
Frankenstein Unbound
(90, Roger Corman);
The Rookie
(90, Clint Eastwood); without credit in
Havana
(90, Sydney Pollack).

After all this, his first unequivocal hit was as Gomez in
The Addams Family
(91, Barry Sonnenfeld);
The Plague
(91, Luis Puenzo);
Addams Family Values
(93, Sonnenfeld);
Street Fighter
(94, Steven E. de Souza). He was looking unwell, and in 1994 he died from a sudden stroke.

K

Pauline Kael
(1919–2001), b. Petaluma, California
Pauline Kael gave up writing about “our” movies in 1991. I suspect there were several reasons for that. Her health had declined—she had Parkinson’s disease and heart problems—and there was every chance that it would worsen. The journey to New York screening rooms from her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was an increasing burden. And Kael was never happy with videotapes. She was a sensationalist, and I suspect she grieved that so many screening rooms were on the small side. She was passionate about being overwhelmed—you can hear it in the happy, flagrant sexual innuendo of the titles to so many of her collections:
I Lost It at the Movies; Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; Reeling;
and so on. Being unsteady was her forte.

But there was another reason for retiring, and in a way it was the worst: the pictures weren’t worth talking about. No, not all of them, but the defining majority. She relied on her own excitement, and for at least ten vital years so did we, and so did the elusive art of film in America. But never forget how long she had to wait, for that begins to explain her zest, her anger, and her impatience.

She was the child of Polish immigrants, and in particular of an intellectual chicken farmer, born and raised about an hour north of San Francisco, until the late 1920s, when the family had to sell up and move to the city. So she was San Franciscan all through the 1930s, at seventeen entering the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in philosophy. She was radical, petite but fierce, opinionated and Bohemian, and while she loved movies she was more deeply into sex and getting around. In the years between graduation and her beginnings as a film critic—the time from 1940 to about 1955 (from twenty to thirty-five—in so many people, the real age for falling for the movies), she shared her life between New York and the Bay Area. She married and divorced three times. She had a daughter. She was involved with several artistic men—like poet Robert Horan and experimental filmmaker James Broughton.

I don’t know whether she thought she was waiting, or simply reckoned that she was living life to the full. She moved in arty circles, and it’s likely that that sharpened her later disdain for highbrow or self-consciously artistic films. But she wasn’t doing anything about it, not even in the forties she later adored. Maybe she just devoured the films the way people have to eat. Forever afterwards, despite her own powerful position, she was uneasy about film as an art: she called it a shallow art; she always poked wicked fun at solemnity; and she warned repeatedly of what might happen to film if it ever fell into the hands of academe.

In the mid–1950s, she stirred. She wrote for
City Lights
, a San Francisco literary magazine—it was there she called
Limelight
“Slimelight.” She began to contribute essays to
Sight and Sound
, and then she got a radio column on KPFA and took over the Berkeley Cinema Guild Theatre, for which she wrote pungent program notes. And people began collecting them. Again, it’s worth stressing her businesslike position. She watched the films, but she watched audiences, too, and she loved what happens in the dark.

In 1964, she published a collection,
I Lost It at the Movies
, which served notice that no other voice was as serious or as funny about movies. It led to magazine commissions, and there may have been a real campaign—though I’m not sure she could bring herself to be that organized. But she moved to New York, and after she had offended
Redbook
by loathing
The Sound of Music
, she began to write for
The New Yorker
. The thing there that identified her early on was a rapturous rereview of
Bonnie and Clyde
, a paean that helped in the rescue act of that film, and which placed Kael in the camp of the new, the American, the sexy, and the violent. And, of course, she was right about a film that had bewildered many other critics.

Here was the wondrous serendipity: that she and a very bright age of film coincided. Thus Kael was there to greet not just Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty, but Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Altman, Peckinpah, and Bernardo Bertolucci. She wrote so well that she made herself central to
The New Yorker
(they resisted by having another film critic, too, Penelope Gilliatt) and to the surging culture of film as evident in the new rage for film classes in colleges and universities (note: she was a great impromptu lecturer, but she never took up a teaching post).

How good was she? Very, very good, because she was a terrific journalist who took immense pains to seem spontaneous, who believed that it ought to be possible to write about entertainments in ways that made them more stimulating for thousands of people. Her luck was in having such good films. But that worked both ways too, for she formed odd, dangerous ties with some filmmakers, where her early word (or tone) may have influenced the films they were making. That led, in 1979, to her accepting Warren Beatty’s invitation to be a kind of producer—helping James Toback on
Love and Money
—at Paramount, in Hollywood itself. That experiment didn’t work, and she was mocked for it as she withdrew to
The New Yorker
again. But it showed her urge; she might have been a Hollywood person.

Hers was a heady time—it was America in the seventies, as well!—and she was thrilled and aroused by her own power. There were problems with that. Her writing could turn bullying. And as she grew older, I think she yielded to a younger, tougher style. She let herself become the godmother and career broker for too many young critics (the Paulettes), and she did not always see her own vanity or sharp edges. But I’m hardly the one to criticize her too much for that. I loved her work, but did not like her much as a person—and I think many felt that way.

She was too fierce, sometimes: she rather neglected foreign films; she hurt De Palma and Walter Hill, at least, by making too much of them; she seemed to make a perverse case out of attacking Orson Welles and
Citizen Kane
(for the sake of being provocative) when both were so much her kind of thing (shallow masterpieces). She made a cult out of seeing a film just once, and so she tended to stifle reflection. She was obstinately anti-auteurist, because she fell into a stupid New York feud with Andrew Sarris (and because he’d made that key point first). And she didn’t often enough let her intelligence explore more general or profound issues. I can see her sneering at that even now.

But she established for a while something that had not been true since the impact of television—that the movies were “ours,” that they spoke to and for a society and were the most telling, deeply felt impression of who we were and might be. That may never come again. And I think she had foreseen that. For the movies needed an America like that of the thirties and the forties, where passion was respectable and being moved was an everyday thing. In which case, as time passes, so I suspect she will seem more remarkable, more useful as a measure of her time, and more sexy. I suspect she would have given it all up if she could have had one scene in one film—like Dorothy Malone with Bogart in
The Big Sleep
.

Garson Kanin
(1912–99), b. Rochester, New York
1938:
A Man to Remember; Next Time I Marry
. 1939:
The Great Man Votes; Bachelor Mother
.
1940:
My Favorite Wife; They Knew What They Wanted
. 1941:
Tom, Dick and Harry
. 1942:
Ring of Steel
(d);
Salut à la France
(codirected with Jean Renoir) (d). 1945:
The True Glory
(codirected with Carol Reed). 1969:
Where It’s At; Some Kind of a Nut
.

Kanin passed through the film world in an unusual direction, from director to writer, enjoying the reputation of perverse smartness. At his best in sophisticated comedy based on thorough character studies and unashamed of staginess, Kanin never concealed his liking for a witty élite scheming against the grain of a fatuous industry. His record vindicated that approach and if this account of the making of
Adam’s Rib
seems cozy, it should be remembered that comedies of sexual antagonism do not come much better:

The original script was bought by Metro for I think the highest price they had ever paid for an original: they paid $175,000. Then all sorts of things happened, like getting the supporting players together, and it was really us, as a little unit, doing everything. We worked on the script with Dore Schary and Kate and Spence; we got Orry Kelley in on the clothes; Kate went out and got Cole Porter to write the song. Ruth [R. Gordon, Kanin’s wife] and I went to work with the designer, Cedric Gibbons, and one day he looked up at us and said, “You know, this is an historic day. I’ve been at the studio twenty-five years, and this is the first time writers have ever been in my office …”

It was because the work of the writer and director was so often at the mercy of insensitive front office scissors that Kanin lost heart for directing. But he could argue that, as a writer, he had a greater effect upon finished films because of his ability to slip a project past the blind side of men like Harry Cohn. He had begun in the theatre, working with George Abbott, and then joined Samuel Goldwyn in a vague but humiliating role—“he called me Thalberg all the time.” He left and went to RKO, where he directed his prewar films. Although he never took any script credit, they show his growing skill at satirical, domestic comedy:
The Great Man Votes
was one of the more worthwhile pictures John Barrymore made as he sank into alcohol;
Bachelor Mother
is a good Norman Krasna script with David Niven and Ginger Rogers; while
My Favorite Wife
, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, was directed by Kanin after Leo McCarey had been involved in a road accident. Not as boisterous as McCarey or as dry as Hawks, it is still enjoyable and a touchstone for Kanin’s own work.

During the war he went to Europe, worked with Carol Reed on
The True Glory
, and at the same time wrote the play
Born Yesterday
. Its Broadway success and
Adam’s Rib
(49, George Cukor) capitalized on his first script (written with Ruth Gordon):
A Double Life
(48, Cukor). Perhaps the Broadway success, and his harmony with Tracy and Hepburn, explained the influence he had at this time. He and Gordon appear to have been instrumental in devising the Judy Holliday character, and in seeing that Holliday herself should bring it to life. They scripted Cukor’s film of
Born Yesterday
(50),
The Marrying Kind
(52, Cukor), and
Pat and Mike
(52, Cukor). After that, and without Ruth Gordon, he scripted
It Should Happen to You
(54, Cukor);
The Girl Can’t Help It
(56, Frank Tashlin);
High Time
(59, Blake Edwards); and
The Rat Race
(60, Robert Mulligan).