This longer essay can be found in Kael’s collection Going Steady.
Like
those cynical heroes who were idealists before they discovered that the world
was more rotten than they had been led to expect, we’re just about all of us
displaced persons, “a long way from home.” When we feel defeated, when we
imagine we could now perhaps settle for home and what it represents, that home
no longer exists. But there are movie houses. In whatever city we find ourselves
we can duck into a theatre and see on the screen our familiars—our old
“ideals” aging as we are and no longer looking so ideal. Where could we
better stoke the fires of our masochism than at rotten movies in gaudy seedy
picture palaces in cities that run together, movies and anonymity a common
denominator. Movies—a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world—fit the
way we feel. The world doesn’t work the way the schoolbooks said it did and we
are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be. Movies are
our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons. Because we
feel low we sink in the boredom, relax in the irresponsibility, and maybe grin
for a minute when the gunman lines up three men and kills them with a single
bullet, which is no more “real” to us than the nursery-school story of the
brave little tailor.
We don’t have to be told
those are photographs of actors impersonating characters. We know, and we often
know much more about both the actors and the characters they’re impersonating
and about how and why the movie has been made than is consistent with theatrical
illusion. Hitchcock teased us by killing off the one marquee-name star early in
“Psycho,” a gambit which startled us not just because of the suddenness of
the murder or how it was committed but because it broke a box-office convention
and so it was a joke played on what audiences have learned to respect. He broke
the rules of the movie game and our response demonstrated how aware we are of
commercial considerations. When movies are bad (and in the bad parts of good
movies) our awareness of the mechanics and our cynicism about the aims and
values is peculiarly alienating. The audience talks right back to the phony
“outspoken” condescending “The Detective”; there are groans of dejection
at “The Legend of Lylah Clare,” with, now and then, a desperate little
titter. How well we all know that cheap depression that settles on us when our
hopes and expectations are disappointed again. Alienation is the most
common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar
rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to
be surprised out of it—not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind
of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without
self-disgust.
A good movie can take you out of your dull
funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a
good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another
city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If
somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break
through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all
corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and
you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good
line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that
someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit
of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not
react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or
in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or
future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and
encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and,
maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those
stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting
others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course,
and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than
about what you love in bad movies.
There is so much talk
now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most
of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. “The Scalphunters,” for
example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but
skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art—if such terms
are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that
is as crudely made as “Wild in the Streets”—slammed together with spit and
hysteria and opportunism—can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a
classic example of an inartistic movie. What makes these movies—that are not
works of art—enjoyable? “The Scalphunters” was more entertaining than most
Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny
together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made
them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what’s distinctive
about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious
roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an
apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an
actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time.
(George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and
Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in “Viva Maria!”) Somehow the alchemy of
personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis—another powerfully
funny actor of tremendous physical presence—worked, and the director Sydney
Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn’t overdone.
And “Wild in the Streets?” It’s a
blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of
against it because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures
aren’t. It looks like other recent products from American International
Pictures but it’s as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like
the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising
expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There’s
not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there’s
something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it
can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way—as Pop wit. The basic idea is
corny—It Can’t Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed
of fascists—but it’s treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth
(it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is
this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety.
There’s a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters
threatening them—the daily papers merging into “Village of the Damned.”
Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer
Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he’s done it with just
enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of
characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the
plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost
frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).
If you went to “Wild in the Streets”
expecting a good movie, you’d probably be appalled because the directing is
unskilled and the music is banal and many of the ideas in the script are
scarcely even carried out, and almost every detail is messed up (the casting
director has used bit players and extras who are decades too old for their
roles). It’s a paste-up job of cheap movie-making, but it has genuinely funny
performers who seize their opportunities and throw their good lines like
boomerangs—Diane Varsi (like an even more zonked-out Geraldine Page) doing a
perfectly quietly convincing freak-out as if it were truly a put-on of the whole
straight world; Hal Holbrook with his inexpressive actorish face that is opaque
and uninteresting in long shot but in close-up reveals tiny little shifts of
expression, slight tightenings of the features that are like the movement of
thought; and Shelley Winters, of course, and Christopher Jones. It’s not so
terrible—it may even be a relief—for a movie to be without the look of art;
there are much worse things aesthetically than the crude good-natured crumminess,
the undisguised reach for a fast buck, of movies without art. From “I Was a
Teen-Age Werewolf” through the beach parties to “Wild in the Streets” and
“The Savage Seven,” American International Pictures has sold a cheap
commodity, which in its lack of artistry and in its blatant and sometimes funny
way of delivering action serves to remind us that one of the great appeals of
movies is that we don’t have to take them too seriously.
“Wild in the Streets” is a fluke—a
borderline, special case of a movie that is entertaining because some talented
people got a chance to do something at American International that the more
respectable companies were too nervous to try. But though I don’t enjoy a
movie so obvious and badly done as the big American International hit, “The
Wild Angels,” it’s easy to see why kids do and why many people in other
countries do. Their reasons are basically why we all started going to the
movies. After a time, we may want more, but audiences who have been forced to
wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to
get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at “good taste” of cheap movies
that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the
pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a
vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of
burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the
lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That’s what they go to burlesque
for. Personally, I hope for a reasonable minimum of finesse, and movies like
“Planet of the Apes” or “The Scalphunters” or “The Thomas Crown
Affair” seem to me minimal entertainment for a relaxed evening’s pleasure.
These are, to use traditional common-sense language, “good movies” or
“good bad movies”—slick, reasonably inventive, well crafted. They are not
art. But they are almost the maximum of what we’re now getting from American
movies, and not only these but much worse movies are talked about as
“art”—and are beginning to be taken seriously in our schools.
It’s preposterously egocentric to call
anything we enjoy art—as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not;
it’s just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us
into thinking we’re getting art for our money when we haven’t even had a
good time. I did have a good time at “Wild in the Streets,” which is more
than I can say for “Petulia” or “2001” or a lot of other highly praised
pictures. “Wild in the Streets” is not a work of art, but then I don’t
think “Petulia” or “2001” is either, though “Petulia” has that
kaleidoscopic hip look and “2001” that new-techniques look which combined
with “swinging” or “serious” ideas often pass for motion picture art.
Let’s clear away a
few misconceptions. Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well
the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the
writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under
way, by the intention to make money—and the industry judges the film by how
well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the “artist’s
intentions” you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly
to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose.
This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as
distinguished from an artist.
The intention to make money is generally
all too obvious. One of the excruciating comedies of our time is attending the
new classes in cinema at the high schools where the students may quite shrewdly
and accurately interpret the plot developments in a mediocre movie in terms of
manipulation for a desired response while the teacher tries to explain
everything in terms of the creative artist working out his theme—as if the
conditions under which a movie is made and the market for which it is designed
were irrelevant, as if the latest product from Warners or Universal should be
analyzed like a lyric poem.
People who are just getting “seriously
interested” in film always ask a critic, “Why don’t you talk about
technique and ‘the visuals’ more?” The answer is that American movie
technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn’t very
interesting. Hollywood movies often have the look of the studio that produced
them—they have a studio style. Many current Warner films are noisy and have a
bright look of cheerful ugliness, Universal films the cheap blur of money-saving
processes, and so forth. Sometimes there is even a spirit that seems to
belong to the studio. We can speak of the Paramount comedies of the Thirties or
the Twentieth-Century Fox family entertainment of the Forties and CinemaScope
comedies of the Fifties or the old MGM gloss, pretty much as we speak of
Chevvies or Studebakers. These movies look alike, they move the same way, they
have just about the same engines because of the studio policies and the kind
of material the studio heads bought, the ideas they imposed, the way they had
the films written, directed, photographed, and the labs where the prints were
processed, and, of course, because of the presence of the studio stable of stars
for whom the material was often purchased and shaped and who dominated the
output of the studio. In some cases, as at Paramount in the Thirties, studio
style was plain and rather tacky and the output—those comedies with Mary
Boland and Mae West and Alison Skipworth and W. C. Fields—looks the better for
it now. Those economical comedies weren’t slowed down by a lot of fancy
lighting or the adornments of “production values.” Simply to be enjoyable,
movies don’t need a very high level of craftsmanship: wit, imagination, fresh
subject matter, skillful performers, a good idea—either alone or in any
combination—can more than compensate for lack of technical knowledge or a big
budget.
The craftsmanship that Hollywood has
always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art—the
expressive use of techniques—it probably doesn’t have very much to do with
actual box-office appeal, either. A dull movie like Sidney Furie’s “The
Naked Runner” is technically competent. The appalling “Half a Sixpence” is
technically astonishing. Though the large popular audience has generally been
respectful of expenditure (so much so that a critic who wasn’t impressed by
the money and effort that went into a “Dr. Zhivago” might be sharply
reprimanded by readers), people who like “The President’s Analyst” or
“The Producers” or “The Odd Couple” don’t seem to be bothered by their
technical ineptitude and visual ugliness. And on the other hand, the expensive
slick techniques of ornately empty movies like “A Dandy in Aspic” can
actually work against one’s enjoyment, because such extravagance and waste are
morally ugly. If one compares movies one likes to movies one doesn’t like,
craftsmanship of the big-studio variety is hardly a decisive factor. And if one
compares a movie one likes by a competent director such as John Sturges or
Franklin Schaffner or John Frankenheimer to a movie one doesn’t much like by
the same director, his technique is probably not the decisive factor. After
directing “The Manchurian Candidate” Frankenheimer directed another
political thriller, “Seven Days in May,” which, considered just as a piece
of direction, was considerably more confident. While seeing it, one could take
pleasure in Frankenheimer’s smooth showmanship. But the material (Rod Serling
out of Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II) was like a straight (i.e.,
square) version of “The Manchurian Candidate.” I have to chase around the
corridors of memory to summon up images from “Seven Days in May”; despite
the brilliant technique, all that is clear to mind is the touchingly,
desperately anxious face of Ava Gardner—how when she smiled you couldn’t be
sure if you were seeing dimples or tics. But “The Manchurian Candidate,”
despite Frankenheimer’s uneven, often barely adequate, staging, is still vivid
because of the script. It took off from a political double entendre that
everybody had been thinking of (“Why, if Joe McCarthy were working for the
Communists, he couldn’t be doing them more good!”) and carried it to
startling absurdity, and the extravagances and conceits and conversational non
sequiturs (by George Axelrod out of Richard Condon) were ambivalent and funny in
a way that was trashy yet liberating.
Technique is hardly worth talking about
unless it’s used for something worth doing: that’s why most of the
theorizing about the new art of television commercials is such nonsense. The
effects are impersonal—dexterous, sometimes clever, but empty of art. It’s
because of their emptiness that commercials call so much attention to their
camera angles and quick cutting—which is why people get impressed by “the
art” of it. Movies are now often made in terms of what television viewers have
learned to settle for. Despite a great deal that is spoken and written about
young people responding visually, the influence of TV is to make movies visually
less imaginative and complex. Television is a very noisy medium and viewers
listen, while getting used to a poor quality of visual reproduction, to the
absence of visual detail, to visual obviousness and overemphasis on simple
compositions, and to atrociously simplified and distorted color systems. The
shifting camera styles, the movement, and the fast cutting of a film like
“Finian’s Rainbow”—one of the better big productions—are like the
“visuals” of TV commercials, a disguise for static material, expressive of
nothing so much as the need to keep you from getting bored and leaving. Men are
now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials—which, if
one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the
future of American motion pictures.
I don’t mean to suggest that there is
not such a thing as movie technique or that craftsmanship doesn’t contribute
to the pleasures of movies, but simply that most audiences, if they enjoy the
acting and the “story” or the theme or the funny lines, don’t notice or
care about how well or how badly the movie is made, and because they don’t
care, a hit makes a director a “genius” and everybody talks about his
brilliant technique (i.e., the technique of grabbing an audience). In the brief
history of movies there has probably never been so astonishingly gifted a large
group of directors as the current Italians, and not just the famous ones—or
Pontecorvo (“The Battle of Algiers”) or Francesco Rosi (“The Moment of
Truth”) or the young prodigies, Bertolucci and Bellocchio, but dozens of
others, men like Elio Petri (“We Still Kill the Old Way”) and Carlo Lizzani
(“The Violent Four”). “The Violent Four” shows more understanding of
visual movement and more talent for movie-making than anything that’s been
made in America this year. But could one tell people who are not crazy,
dedicated moviegoers to go see it? I’m not sure, although I enjoyed the film
enormously, because “The Violent Four” is a gangster genre picture. And it
may be a form of aestheticism—losing sight of what people go to movies for,
and particularly what they go to foreign movies for—for a critic to say,
“His handling of crowds and street scenes is superb,” or, “It has a great
semi-documentary chase sequence.” It does, but the movie is basically derived
from our old gangster movies, and beautifully made as it is, one would have a
hard time convincing educated people to go see a movie that features a stunning
performance by Gian Maria Volonte which is based on Paul Muni and James Cagney.
Presumably they want something different from movies than a genre picture that
offers images of modern urban decay and is smashingly directed. If a movie is
interesting primarily in terms of technique then it isn’t worth talking about
except to students who can learn from seeing how a good director works. And to
talk about a movie like “The Graduate” in terms of movie technique is really
a bad joke. Technique at this level is not of any aesthetic importance; it’s
not the ability to achieve what you’re after but the skill to find something
acceptable. One must talk about a film like this in terms of what audiences
enjoy it for or one is talking gibberish—and might as well be analyzing the
“art” of commercials. And for the greatest movie artists where there is a
unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much
because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk about how
Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk
about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can
try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes
of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function,
and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less
important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a
work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important
thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was
made—which is more or less implicit.
Just as there are good actors—possibly
potentially great actors—who have never become big stars because they’ve
just never been lucky enough to get the roles they needed (Brian Keith is a
striking example) there are good directors who never got the scripts and the
casts that could make their reputations. The question people ask when they
consider going to a movie is not “How’s it made?” but “What’s it
about?” and that’s a perfectly legitimate question. (The next
question—sometimes the first—is generally, “Who’s in it?” and that’s
a good, honest question, too.) When you’re at a movie, you don’t have to
believe in it to enjoy it but you do have to be interested. (Just as you have to
be interested in the human material, too. Why should you go see another
picture with James Stewart?) I don’t want to see another samurai epic in
exactly the same way I never want to read “Kristin Lavransdatter.” Though
it’s conceivable that a truly great movie director could make any subject
interesting, there are few such artists working in movies and if they did work
on unpromising subjects I’m not sure we’d really enjoy the results even if
we did admire their artistry. (I recognize the greatness of sequences in
several films by Eisenstein but it’s a rather cold admiration.) The many
brilliant Italian directors who are working within a commercial framework on
crime and action movies are obviously not going to be of any great interest
unless they get a chance to work on a subject we care about. Ironically the
Czech successes here (“The Shop on Main Street,” “Loves of a Blonde,”
“Closely Watched Trains”) are acclaimed for their techniques, which are
fairly simple and rather limited, when it’s obviously their human concern and
the basic modesty and decency of their attitudes plus a little barnyard humor
which audiences respond to. They may even respond partly because of the simplicity
of the techniques.
When we are children,
though there are categories of films we don’t like—documentaries generally
(they’re too much like education) and, of course, movies especially designed
for children—by the time we can go on our own we have learned to avoid them.
Children are often put down by adults when the children say they enjoyed a
particular movie; adults who are short on empathy are quick to point out aspects
of the plot or theme that the child didn’t understand, and it’s easy to
humiliate a child in this way. But it is one of the glories of eclectic arts
like opera and movies that they include so many possible kinds and combinations
of pleasure. One may be enthralled by Leontyne Price in “La Forza del Destino”
even if one hasn’t boned up on the libretto, or entranced by “The Magic
Flute” even if one has boned up on the libretto, and a movie may be enjoyed
for many reasons that have little to do with the story or the subtleties (if
any) of theme or character. Unlike “pure” arts which are often defined in
terms of what only they can do, movies are open and unlimited. Probably
everything that can be done in movies can be done some other way, but—and this
is what’s so miraculous and so expedient about them—they can do almost
anything any other art can do (alone or in combination) and they can take on
some of the functions of exploration, of journalism, of anthropology, of almost
any branch of knowledge as well. We go to the movies for the variety of what
they can provide, and for their marvelous ability to give us easily and
inexpensively (and usually painlessly) what we can get from other arts also.
They are a wonderfully convenient art.
Movies are used by cultures where they are
foreign films in a much more primitive way than in their own; they may be
enjoyed as travelogues or as initiations into how others live or in ways we
might not even guess. The sophisticated and knowledge able moviegoer is likely
to forget how new and how amazing the different worlds up there once seemed to
him, and to forget how much a child reacts to, how many elements he is taking
in, often for the first time. And even adults who have seen many movies may
think a movie is “great” if it introduces them to unfamiliar subject matter;
thus many moviegoers react as naïvely as children to “Portrait of Jason” or
“The Queen.” They think they’re wonderful. The oldest plots and corniest
comedy bits can be full of wonder for a child, just as the freeway traffic in a
grade Z melodrama can be magical to a villager who has never seen a car. A child
may enjoy even a movie like “Jules and Jim” for its sense of fun, without
comprehending it as his parents do, just as we may enjoy an Italian movie as a
sex comedy although in Italy it is considered social criticism or political
satire. Jean-Luc Godard liked the movie of “Pal Joey,” and I suppose that a
miserable American movie musical like “Pal Joey” might look good in France
because I can’t think of a single good dance number performed by French
dancers in a French movie. The French enjoy what they’re unable to do and we
enjoy the French studies of the pangs of adolescent love that would be corny if
made in Hollywood. A movie like “The Young Girls of Rochefort” demonstrates
how even a gifted Frenchman who adores American musicals misunderstands their
conventions. Yet it would be as stupid to say that the director Jacques Demy
couldn’t love American musicals because he doesn’t understand their
conventions as to tell a child he couldn’t have liked “Planet of the Apes”
because he didn’t get the jokey references to the Scopes trial.
Every once in a while I see an
anthropologist’s report on how some preliterate tribe reacts to movies; they
may, for example, be disturbed about where the actor has gone when he leaves the
movie frame, or they may respond with enthusiasm to the noise and congestion of
big-city life which in the film story are meant to show the depths of
depersonalization to which we are sinking, but which they find funny or very
jolly indeed. Different cultures have their own ways of enjoying movies. A few
years ago the new “tribalists” here responded to the gaudy fantasies of
“Juliet of the Spirits” by using the movie to turn on. A few had already
made a trip of “8½” but “Juliet,” which was, conveniently and perhaps
not entirely accidentally, in electric, psychedelic color, caught on because of
it. (The color was awful, like in bad MGM musicals—one may wonder about the
quality of the trips.)
The new tribalism in the age of the media
is not necessarily the enemy of commercialism; it is a direct outgrowth of
commercialism and its ally, perhaps even its instrument. If a movie has enough
clout, reviewers and columnists who were bored are likely to give it another
chance, until on the second or third viewing, they discover that it affects them
“viscerally”—and a big expensive movie is likely to do just that.
“2001” is said to have caught on with youth (which can make it happen); and
it’s said that the movie will stone you—which is meant to be a
recommendation. Despite a few dissident voices—I’ve heard it said, for
example, that “2001” “gives you a bad trip because the visuals don’t go
with the music”—the promotion has been remarkably effective with students.
“The tribes” tune in so fast that college students thousands of miles apart
“have heard” what a great trip “2001” is before it has even reached
their city.
Using movies to go on a trip has about as
much connection with the art of the film as using one of those Doris Day-Rock
Hudson jobs for ideas on how to redecorate your home—an earlier way of stoning
yourself. But it is relevant to an understanding of movies to try to separate
out, for purposes of discussion at least, how we may personally use a
film—to learn how to dress or how to speak more elegantly or how to make a
grand entrance or even what kind of coffee maker we wish to purchase, or to take
off from the movie into a romantic fantasy or a trip—from what makes it a good
movie or a poor one, because, of course, we can use poor films as easily
as good ones, perhaps more easily for such non-aesthetic purposes as
shopping guides or aids to tripping.
We generally become
interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has
little to do with what we think of as art. The movies we respond to, even in
childhood, don’t have the same values as the official culture supported at
school and in the middle-class home. At the movies we get low life and high
life, while David Susskind and the moralistic reviewers chastise us for not
patronizing what they think we should, “realistic” movies that would be good
for us—like “A Raisin in the Sun,” where we could learn the lesson that a
Negro family can be as dreary as a white family. Movie audiences will take a lot
of garbage, but it’s pretty hard to make us queue up for pedagogy. At the
movies we want a different kind of truth, something that surprises us and
registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly
beautiful. We get little things even in mediocre and terrible movies—José
Ferrer sipping his booze through a straw in “Enter Laughing,” Scott
Wilson’s hard scary all-American-boy-you-can’t-reach face cutting through
the pretensions of “In Cold Blood” with all its fancy bleak cinematography.
We got, and still have embedded in memory, Tony Randall’s surprising depth of
feeling in “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao,” Keenan Wynn and Moyna Macgill in
the lunch-counter sequence of “The Clock,” John W. Bubbles on the dance
floor in “Cabin in the Sky,” the inflection Gene Kelly gave to the line,
“I’m a rising young man” in “DuBarry Was a Lady,” Tony Curtis saying
“avidly” in “Sweet Smell of Success.” Though the director may have been
responsible for releasing it, it’s the human material we react to most and
remember longest. The art of the performers stays fresh for us, their beauty as
beautiful as ever. There are so many kinds of things we get—the hangover
sequence wittily designed for the CinemaScope screen in “The Tender Trap,”
the atmosphere of the newspaper offices in “The Luck of Ginger Coffey,” the
automat gone mad in “Easy Living.” Do we need to lie and shift things to
false terms—like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if
her acting had made her a star? Wouldn’t we rather watch her than
better actresses because she’s so incredibly charming and because she’s
probably the greatest model the world has ever known? There are great
moments—Angela Lansbury singing “Little Yellow Bird” in “Dorian Gray.”
(I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend who didn’t also treasure that girl
and that song.) And there are absurdly right little moments—in “Saratoga
Trunk” when Curt Bois says to Ingrid Bergman, “You’re very beautiful,”
and she says, “Yes, isn’t it lucky?” And those things have closer
relationships to art than what the schoolteachers told us was true and
beautiful. Not that the works we studied in school weren’t often great (as we
discovered later) but that what the teachers told us to admire them for
(and if current texts are any indication, are still telling students to admire
them for) was generally so false and prettified and moralistic that what might
have been moments of pleasure in them, and what might have been cleansing in
them, and subversive, too, had been coated over.
Because of the photographic nature of the
medium and the cheap admission prices, movies took their impetus not from the
desiccated imitation European high culture, but from the peep show, the Wild
West show, the music hall, the comic strip—from what was coarse and common.
The early Chaplin two-reelers still look surprisingly lewd, with bathroom jokes
and drunkenness and hatred of work and proprieties. And the Western shoot-’em-ups
certainly weren’t the schoolteachers’ notions of art—which in my school
days, ran more to didactic poetry and “perfectly proportioned” statues and
which over the years have progressed through nice stories to “good taste”
and “excellence”—which may be more poisonous than homilies and dainty
figurines because then you had a clearer idea of what you were up against and it
was easier to fight. And this, of course, is what we were running away from when
we went to the movies. All week we longed for Saturday afternoon and
sanctuary—the anonymity and impersonality of sitting in a theatre, just
enjoying ourselves, not having to be responsible, not having to be “good.”
Maybe you just want to look at people on the screen and know they’re not
looking back at you, that they’re not going to turn on you and criticize you.
Perhaps the single most intense pleasure
of moviegoing is this non-aesthetic one of escaping from the responsibilities of
having the proper responses required of us in our official (school) culture. And
yet this is probably the best and most common basis for developing an aesthetic
sense because responsibility to pay attention and to appreciate is anti-art, it
makes us too anxious for pleasure, too bored for response. Far from supervision
and official culture, in the darkness at the movies where nothing is asked of us
and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to
develop our own aesthetic responses. Unsupervised enjoyment is probably not the
only kind there is but it may feel like the only kind. Irresponsibility is part
of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize. I
don’t like to buy “hard tickets” for a “road show” movie because I
hate treating a movie as an occasion. I don’t want to be pinned down days in
advance; I enjoy the casualness of moviegoing—of going in when I feel like it,
when I’m in the mood for a movie. It’s the feeling of freedom from
respectability we have always enjoyed at the movies that is carried to an
extreme by American International Pictures and the Clint Eastwood Italian
Westerns; they are stripped of cultural values. We may want more from movies
than this negative virtue but we know the feeling from childhood moviegoing when
we loved the gamblers and pimps and the cons’ suggestions of muttered
obscenities as the guards walked by. The appeal of movies was in the details of
crime and high living and wicked cities and in the language of toughs and
urchins; it was in the dirty smile of the city girl who lured the hero away from
Janet Gaynor. What draws us to movies in the first place, the opening into
other, forbidden or surprising, kinds of experience, and the vitality and
corruption and irreverence of that experience are so direct and immediate and
have so little connection with what we have been taught is art that many people
feel more secure, feel that their tastes are becoming more cultivated when they
begin to appreciate foreign films. One foundation executive told me that
he was quite upset that his teen-agers had chosen to go to “Bonnie and
Clyde” rather than with him to “Closely Watched Trains.” He took it as a
sign of lack of maturity. I think his kids made an honest choice, and not only
because “Bonnie and Clyde” is the better movie, but because it is closer to
us, it has some of the qualities of direct involvement that make us care about
movies. But it’s understandable that it’s easier for us, as Americans, to
see art in foreign films than in our own, because of how we, as
Americans, think of art. Art is still what teachers and ladies and foundations
believe in, it’s civilized and refined, cultivated and serious, cultural,
beautiful, European, Oriental: it’s what America isn’t, and it’s
especially what American movies are not. Still, if those kids had chosen “Wild
in the Streets” over “Closely Watched Trains” I would think that was a
sound and honest choice, too, even though “Wild in the Streets” is in most
ways a terrible picture. It connects with their lives in an immediate even if a
grossly frivolous way, and if we don’t go to movies for excitement, if, even
as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so
little drive that we accept “good taste,” then we will probably never really
begin to care about movies at all. We will become like those people who “may
go to American movies sometimes to relax” but when they want “a little
more” from a movie, are delighted by how colorful and artistic Franco
Zeffirelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew” is, just as a couple of decades ago
they were impressed by “The Red Shoes,” made by Powell and Pressburger, the
Zeffirellis of their day. Or, if they like the cozy feeling of uplift to be had
from mildly whimsical movies about timid people, there’s generally a “Hot
Millions” or something musty and faintly boring from Eastern Europe—one of
those movies set in World War II but so remote from our ways of thinking that it
seems to be set in World War I. Afterward, the moviegoer can feel as decent and
virtuous as if he’d spent an evening visiting a deaf old friend of the family.
It’s a way of taking movies back into the approved culture of the
schoolroom—into gentility—and the voices of schoolteachers and reviewers
rise up to ask why America can’t make such movies.
If we go back and think over the movies
we’ve enjoyed—even the ones we knew were terrible movies while we enjoyed
them—what we enjoyed in them, the little part that was good, had, in some
rudimentary way, some freshness, some hint of style, some trace of beauty, some
audacity, some craziness. It’s there in the interplay between Burt Lancaster
and Ossie Davis, or, in “Wild in the Streets,” in Diane Varsi rattling her
tambourine, in Hal Holbrook’s faint twitch when he smells trouble, in a few of
Robert Thom’s lines; and they have some relation to art though they don’t
look like what we’ve been taught is “quality.” They have the joy of
playfulness. In a mediocre or rotten movie, the good things may give the
impression that they come out of nowhere; the better the movie, the more they
seem to belong to the world of the movie. Without this kind of playfulness and
the pleasure we take from it, art isn’t art at all, it’s something
punishing, as it so often is in school where even artists’ little jokes
become leaden from explanation.
Keeping in mind that simple, good
distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art, it
might be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a work
of art and you don’t enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it’s probably in
the movie. Because of the money and advertising pressures involved, many
reviewers discover a fresh masterpiece every week, and there’s that cultural
snobbery, that hunger for respectability that determines the selection of the
even bigger annual masterpieces. In foreign movies what is most often mistaken
for “quality” is an imitation of earlier movie art or a derivation from
respectable, approved work in the other arts—like the demented, suffering
painter-hero of “Hour of the Wolf” smearing his lipstick in a facsimile of
expressionist anguish. Kicked in the ribs, the press says “art” when
“ouch” would be more appropriate. When a director is said to be an artist
(generally on the basis of earlier work which the press failed to recognize) and
especially when he picks artistic subjects like the pain of creation, there is a
tendency to acclaim his new bad work. This way the press, in trying to make up
for its past mistakes, manages to be wrong all the time. And so a
revenge-of-a-sour-virgin movie like Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black” is
treated respectfully as if it somehow revealed an artist’s sensibility in
every frame. Reviewers who would laugh at Lana Turner going through her femme
fatale act in another Ross Hunter movie swoon when Jeanne Moreau casts
significant blank looks for Truffaut.
In American movies what is most often
mistaken for artistic quality is box-office success, especially if it’s
combined with a genuflection to importance; then you have “a movie the
industry can be proud of” like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or such Academy
Award winners as “West Side Story,” “My Fair Lady,” or “A Man for All
Seasons.” Fred Zinnemann made a fine modern variant of a Western, “The
Sundowners,” and hardly anybody saw it until it got on television; but “A
Man for All Seasons” had the look of prestige and the press felt honored to
praise it. I’m not sure most movie reviewers consider what they honestly enjoy
as being central to criticism. Some at least appear to think that that would be
relying too much on their own tastes, being too personal instead of being
“objective”—relying on the ready-made terms of cultural respectability and
on consensus judgment (which, to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by
publicists creating a climate of importance around a movie). Just as movie
directors, as they age, hunger for what was meant by respectability in their
youth, and aspire to prestigious cultural properties, so, too, the movie press
longs to be elevated in terms of the cultural values of their old high schools.
And so they, along with the industry, applaud ghastly “tour-de-force”
performances, movies based on “distinguished” stage successes or
prize-winning novels, or movies that are “worthwhile,” that make a
“contribution”—“serious” messagy movies. This often involves praise of
bad movies, of dull movies, or even the praise in good movies of what was worst
in them.
This last mechanism can be seen in the
honors bestowed on “In the Heat of the Night.” The best thing in the movie
is that high comic moment when Poitier says, “I’m a police officer,”
because it’s a reversal of audience expectations and we laugh in delighted
relief that the movie is not going to be another self-righteous,
self-congratulatory exercise in the gloomy old Stanley Kramer tradition. At that
point the audience sparks to life. The movie is fun largely because of the
amusing central idea of a black Sherlock Holmes in a Tom and Jerry cartoon of
reversals. Poitier’s color is used for comedy instead of for that extra
dimension of irony and pathos that made movies like “To Sir, with Love”
unbearably sentimental. He doesn’t really play the super sleuth very well:
he’s much too straight even when spouting the kind of higher scientific
nonsense about right-handedness and left-handedness that would have kept Basil
Rathbone in an ecstasy of clipped diction, blinking eyes and raised eyebrows.
Like Bogart in “Beat the Devil” Poitier doesn’t seem to be in on the joke.
But Rod Steiger compensated with a comic performance that was even funnier for
being so unexpected—not only from Steiger’s career which had been going in
other directions, but after the apparently serious opening of the film. The
movie was, however, praised by the press as if it had been exactly the kind of
picture that the audience was so relieved to discover it wasn’t going to be
(except in its routine melodramatic sequences full of fake courage and the
climaxes such as Poitier slapping a rich white Southerner or being attacked by
white thugs; except that is, in its worst parts). When I saw it, the audience,
both black and white, enjoyed the joke of the fast-witted, hyper-educated black
detective explaining matters to the backward, blundering
Southern-chief-of-police slob. This racial poke is far more open and inoffensive
than the usual “irony” of Poitier being so good and so black. For once
it’s funny (instead of embarrassing) that he’s so superior to
everybody.
“In the Heat of the Night” isn’t in
itself a particularly important movie; amazingly alive photographically, it’s
an entertaining, somewhat messed-up comedy-thriller. The director Norman Jewison
destroys the final joke when Steiger plays redcap to Poitier by infusing it with
tender feeling, so it comes out sickly sweet, and it’s too bad that a whodunit
in which the whole point is the demonstration of the Negro detective’s ability
to unravel what the white man can’t, is never clearly unraveled. Maybe it
needed a Negro super director. (The picture might have been more than just a
lively whodunit if the detective had proceeded to solve the crime not by
“Scientific” means but by an understanding of relationships in the South
that the white chief of police didn’t have.) What makes it interesting for my
purposes here is that the audience enjoyed the movie for the vitality of its
surprising playfulness, while the industry congratulated itself because the film
was “hard-hitting”—that is to say, it flirted with seriousness and spouted
warm, worthwhile ideas.
Those who can accept “In the Heat of the
Night” as the socially conscious movie that the industry pointed to with pride
probably also go along with the way the press attacked Jewison’s subsequent
film, “The Thomas Crown Affair,” as trash and a failure. One could even play
the same game that was played on “In the Heat of the Night” and convert the
“Crown” trifle into a sub-fascist exercise because, of course, Crown, the
superman, who turns to crime out of boredom, is the crooked son of “The
Fountainhead,” out of Raffles. But that’s talking glossy summer-evening
fantasies much too seriously: we haven’t had a junior executives fantasy-life
movie for a long time and to attack this return of the worldly gentlemen-thieves
genre of Ronald Colman and William Powell politically is to fail to have
a sense of humor about the little romantic-adolescent fascist lurking in most of
us. Part of the fun of movies is that they allow us to see how silly many of our
fantasies are and how widely they’re shared. A light romantic entertainment
like “The Thomas Crown Affair,” trash undisguised, is the kind of chic
crappy movie which (one would have thought) nobody could be fooled into thinking
was art. Seeing it is like lying in the sun flicking through fashion magazines
and, as we used to say, feeling rich and beautiful beyond your wildest dreams.
But it isn’t easy to come to terms with
what one enjoys in films, and if an older generation was persuaded to dismiss
trash, now a younger generation, with the press and the schools in hot pursuit,
has begun to talk about trash as if it were really very serious art. College
newspapers and the new press all across the country are full of a hilarious new
form of scholasticism, with students using their education to cook up impressive
reasons for enjoying very simple, traditional dishes. Here is a communication
from Cambridge to a Boston paper:
To the Editor:
“The Thomas Crown Affair” is fundamentally a film about faith between
people. In many ways, it reminds me of a kind of updated old fable, or tale,
about an ultimate test of faith. It is a film about a love affair (note the
title), with a subplot of a bank robbery, rather than the reverse. The subtlety
of the film is in the way the external plot is used as a matrix to develop
serious motifs, much in the same way that the “Heat of the Night”
functioned.
Although Thomas Crown is an attractive and fascinating character, Vicki
is the protagonist. Crown is consistent, predictable: he courts personal danger
to feel superior to the system of which he is a part, and to make his otherwise
overly comfortable life more interesting. Vicki is caught between two opposing
elements within her, which, for convenience, I would call masculine and
feminine. In spite of her glamour, at the outset she is basically masculine, in
a man’s type of job, ruthless, after prestige and wealth. But Crown looses the
female in her. His test is a test of her femininity. The masculine responds to
the challenge. Therein lies the pathos of her final revelation. Her egocentrism
had not yielded to his.
In this psychic context, the possibility of establishing faith is explored. The
movement of the film is towards Vicki’s final enigma. Her ambivalence is
commensurate with the increasing danger to Crown. The suspense lies in how she
will respond to her dilemma, rather than whether Crown will escape.
I find “The Thomas Crown Affair” to be a unique and haunting film, superb in
its visual and technical design, and fascinating for the allegorical problem of
human faith.
“The Thomas Crown Affair” is
pretty good trash, but we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false
terms derived from our study of the other arts. That’s being false to
what we enjoy. If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be
ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular
entertainment, it’s even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so
proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash
within the acceptable academic tradition. What the Cambridge boy is doing is a
more devious form of that elevating and falsifying of people who talk about
Loren as a great actress instead of as a gorgeous, funny woman. Trash doesn’t
belong to the academic tradition, and that’s part of the fun of
trash—that you know (or should know) that you don’t have to take it
seriously, that it was never meant to be anymore than frivolous and trifling and
entertaining.
It’s appalling to read solemn academic
studies of Hitchcock or von Sternberg by people who seem to have lost sight of
the primary reason for seeing films like “Notorious” or
“Morocco”—which is that they were not intended solemnly, that they were
playful and inventive and faintly (often deliberately) absurd. And what’s good
in them, what relates them to art, is that playfulness and absence of solemnity.
There is talk now about von Sternberg’s technique—his use of light and décor
and detail—and he is, of course, a kitsch master in these areas, a master of
studied artfulness and pretty excess. Unfortunately, some students take this
technique as proof that his films are works of art, once again, I think,
falsifying what they really respond to—the satisfying romantic glamour of his
very pretty trash. “Morocco” is great trash, and movies are so rarely great
art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason
to be interested in them. The kitsch of an earlier era—even the best
kitsch—does not become art, though it may become camp. Von Sternberg’s
movies became camp even while he was still making them, because as the romantic
feeling went out of his trash—when he became so enamored of his own pretty
effects that he turned his human-material into blank, affectless pieces of décor—his
absurd trashy style was all there was. We are now told in respectable museum
publications that in 1932 a movie like “Shanghai Express” “was completely
misunderstood as a mindless adventure” when indeed it was completely understood
as a mindless adventure. And enjoyed as a mindless adventure. It’s a peculiar
form of movie madness crossed with academicism, this lowbrowism masquerading as
highbrowism, eating a candy bar and cleaning an “allegorical problem of human
faith” out of your teeth. If we always wanted works of complexity and depth we
wouldn’t be going to movies about glamorous thieves and seductive women who
sing in cheap cafés, and if we loved “Shanghai Express” it wasn’t for its
mind but for the glorious sinfulness of Dietrich informing Clive Brook that,
“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily” and for the
villainous Oriental chieftain (Warner Oland) delivering the classic howler,
“The white woman stays with me.”
If we don’t deny the pleasures to be had
from certain kinds of trash and accept “The Thomas Crown Affair” as a pretty
fair example of entertaining trash, then we may ask if a piece of trash like
this has any relationship to art. And I think it does. Steve McQueen gives
probably his most glamorous, fashionable performance yet, but even enjoying him
as much as I do, I wouldn’t call his performance art. It’s artful, though,
which is exactly what is required in this kind of vehicle. If he had been
luckier, if the script had provided what it so embarrassingly lacks, the kind of
sophisticated dialogue—the sexy shoptalk—that such writers as Jules Furthman
and William Faulkner provided for Bogart, and if the director Norman Jewison had
Lubitsch’s lightness of touch, McQueen might be acclaimed as a suave,
“polished” artist. Even in this flawed setting, there’s a self-awareness
in his performance that makes his elegance funny. And Haskell Weller, the
cinematographer, lets go with a whole bag of tricks, flooding the screen with
his delight in beauty, shooting all over the place, and sending up the material.
And Pablo Ferro’s games with the split screen at the beginning are such
conscious, clever games designed to draw us in to watch intently what is of no
great interest. What gives this trash a lift, what makes it entertaining is
clearly that some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on
a silly shallow script and a movie that wasn’t about anything of consequence,
used the chance to have a good time with it. If the director, Norman Jewison,
could have built a movie instead of putting together a patchwork of sequences,
“Crown” might have had a chance to be considered a movie in the class and
genre of Lubitsch’s “Trouble in Paradise.” It doesn’t come near that
because to transform this kind of kitsch, to make art of it, one needs that
unifying grace, that formality and charm that a Lubitsch could sometimes
provide. Still, even in this movie we get a few grace notes in McQueen’s
playfulness, and from Wexler and Perro. Working on trash, feeling free to play,
can loosen up the actors and craftsmen just as seeing trash can liberate the
spectator. And as we don’t get this playful quality of art much in movies
except in trash, we might as well relax and enjoy it freely for what it is. I
don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed
trashy American movies; I don’t trust any of the tastes of people who
were born with such good taste that they didn’t need to find their way through
trash.
There is a moment in “Children of
Paradise” when the rich nobleman (Louis Salou) turns on his mistress, the
pearly plebeian Garance (Arletty). He complains that in all their years together
he has never had her love, and she replies, “You’ve got to leave something
for the poor.” We don’t ask much from movies, just a little something that
we can call our own. Who at some point hasn’t set out dutifully for that fine
foreign film and then ducked into the nearest piece of American trash? We’re
not only educated people of taste, we’re also common people with common
feelings. And our common feelings are not all bad. You hoped for some
aliveness in that trash that you were pretty sure you wouldn’t get from the
respected “art film.” You had long since discovered that you wouldn’t get
it from certain kinds of American movies, either. The industry now is taking a
neo-Victorian tone, priding itself on its (few) “good, clean” movies—which
are always its worst movies because almost nothing can break through the smug
surfaces, and even performers’ talents become cute and cloying. The lowest
action trash is preferable to wholesome family entertainment. When you clean
them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of
their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.
If there’s a little art in good trash
and sometimes even in poor trash, there may be more trash than is generally
recognized in some of the most acclaimed “art” movies. Such movies as
“Petulia” and “2001” may be no more than trash in the latest,
up-to-the-minute guises, using “artistic techniques” to give trash the look
of art. The serious art look may be the latest fashion in expensive
trash. All that “art” may be what prevents pictures like these from being enjoyable
trash; they’re not honestly crummy, they’re very fancy and they take their
crummy ideas seriously.
I have rarely seen a more disagreeable, a
more dislikable (or a bloodier) movie than “Petulia” and I would guess that
its commercial success represents a triumph of publicity—and not the simple
kind of just taking ads. It’s a very strange movie and people may, of course,
like it for all sorts of reasons, but I think many may dislike it as I do and
still feel they should be impressed by it; the educated and privileged may now
be more susceptible to the mass media than the larger public—they’re
certainly easier to reach. The publicity about Richard Lester as an artist has
been gaining extraordinary momentum ever since “A Hard Day’s Night.” A
critical success that is also a hit makes the director a genius; he’s a
magician who made money out of art. The media are in ravenous competition for
ever bigger stories, for “trend” pieces and editorial essays, because once
the Process starts it’s considered news. If Lester is “making the scene” a
magazine that hasn’t helped to build him up feels it’s been scooped.
“Petulia” is the come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America-party and in the
opening sequence the guests arrive—rich victims of highway accidents in their
casts and wheel chairs, like the spirit of ’76 coming to opening night at the
opera. It’s science-horror fiction—a garish new world with charity balls at
which you’re invited to “Shake for Highway Safety.
Lester picked San Francisco for his attack
on America just as in “How I Won the War” he picked World War II to attack
war. That is, it looks like a real frontal attack on war itself if you attack
the war that many people consider a just war. But then he concentrated not on
the issues of that war but on the class hatreds of British officers and
men—who were not engaged in defending London or bombing Germany but in
building a cricket pitch in Africa. In “Petulia,” his hate letter to
America, he relocates the novel, shifting the locale from Los Angeles to San
Francisco, presumably, again, to face the big challenge by showing that even the
best the country has to offer is rotten. But then he ducks the challenge he sets
for himself by making San Francisco look like Los Angeles. And if he must put
carnival barkers in Golden Gate Park and invent Sunday excursions for children
to Alcatraz, if he must invent such caricatures of epicene expenditure and
commercialism as bizarrely automated motels and dummy television sets, if he
must provide his own ugliness and hysteria and lunacy and use filters to destroy
the city’s beautiful light, if, in short, he must falsify America in order to
make it appear hateful, what is it he really hates? He’s like a crooked cop
framing a suspect with trumped-up evidence. We never find out why: he’s
too interested in making a flashy case to examine what he’s doing. And
reviewers seem unwilling to ask questions which might expose them to the charge
that they’re still looking for meaning instead of, in the new cant,
just reacting to images—such questions as why does the movie keep juxtaposing
shots of bloody surgery with shots of rock groups like the Grateful Dead or Big
Brother and the Holding Company and shots of the war in Vietnam. What are these
little montages supposed to do to us—make us feel that even the hero (a
hardworking life-saving surgeon) is implicated in the war and that somehow
contemporary popular music is also allied to destruction and death? (I thought
only the moralists of the Soviet Union believed that.) The images of
“Petulia” don’t make valid connections, they’re joined together for
shock and excitement, and I don’t believe in the brilliance of a method which
equates hippies, war, surgery, wealth, Southern decadents, bullfights, etc.
Lester’s mix is almost as fraudulent as “Mondo Cane”; “Petulia”
exploits any shocking material it can throw together to give false importance to
a story about Holly Golightly and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The jagged
glittering mosaic style of “Petulia” is an armor protecting Lester from an
artist’s task; this kind of “style” no longer fools people so much in
writing but it knocks them silly in films.
Movie directors in trouble fall back on
what they love to call “personal style”—though how impersonal it often is
can be illustrated by “Petulia”—which is not edited in the rhythmic,
modulations-of-graphics style associated with Lester (and seen most
distinctively in his best-edited, though not necessarily best film, “Help!”)
but in the style of the movie surgeon, Anthony Gibbs, who acted as chopper on
it, and who gave it the same kind of scissoring which he had used on “The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and in his rescue operation on “Tom
Jones.” This is, in much of “Petulia,” the most insanely obvious method of
cutting film ever devised; keep the audience jumping with cuts, juxtapose
startling images, anything for effectiveness, just make it brilliant—with
the director taking, apparently, no responsibility for the implied
connections. (The editing style is derived from Alain Resnais, and though it’s
a debatable style in his films, he uses it responsibly not just
opportunistically.)
Richard Lester, the director of “Petulia,”
is a shrill scold in Mod clothes. Consider a sequence like the one in which the
beaten-to-a-gruesome-pulp heroine is taken out to an ambulance, to the
accompaniment of hippies making stupid, unfeeling remarks. It is embarrassingly
reminiscent of the older people’s comments about the youthful sub-pre-hippies
of “The Knack.” Lester has simply shifted villains. Is he saying that
America is so rotten that even our hippies are malignant? I rather suspect he
is, but why? Lester has taken a fashionably easy way to attack America, and
because of the war in Vietnam some people are willing to accept the bloody
montages that make them feel we’re all guilty, we’re rich, we’re violent,
we’re spoiled, we can’t relate to each other, etc. Probably the director who
made three celebrations of youth and freedom (“A Hard Day’s Night,” “The
Knack,” and “Help!”) is now desperate to expand his range and become a
“serious” director, and this is the new look in seriousness.
It’s easy to make fun of the familiar
ingredients of trash—the kook heroine who steals a tuba (that’s not like the
best of Carole Lombard but like the worst of Irene Dunne), the vaguely impotent,
meaninglessly handsome rotter husband, Richard Chamberlain (back to the rich,
spineless weaklings of David Manners), and Joseph Cotten as one more insanely
vicious decadent Southerner spewing out villainous lines. (Even Victor Jory in
“The Fugitive Kind” wasn’t much meaner.) What’s terrible is not so much
this feeble conventional trash as the director’s attempts to turn it all into
scintillating art and burning comment; what is really awful is the trash of his
ideas and artistic effects.
Is there any art in this obscenely
self-important movie? Yes, but in a format like this the few good ideas don’t
really shine as they do in simpler trash; we have to go through so much
unpleasantness and showing-off to get to them. Lester should trust himself more
as a director and stop the cinemagician stuff because there’s good, tense
direction in a few sequences. He got a good performance from George C. Scott and
a sequence of post-marital discord between Scott and Shirley Knight that,
although overwrought, is not so glaringly overwrought as the rest of the
picture. It begins to suggest something interesting that the picture might have
been about. (Shirley Knight should, however, stop fondling her hair like a miser
with a golden hoard; it’s time for her to get another prop.) And Julie
Christie is extraordinary just to look at—lewd and anxious, expressive and
empty, brilliantly faceted but with something central missing, almost as if
there’s no woman inside.
There was a little pre-title sequence in
“You Only Live Twice” with an astronaut out in space that was in a looser,
more free style than “2001”—a daring little moment that I think was more
fun than all of “2001.” It had an element of the unexpected, of the shock of
finding death in space lyrical. Kubrick is carried away by the idea. The
secondary title of “Dr. Strangelove,” which we took to be satiric, “How I
learned to stop worrying and love the bomb,” was not, it now appears,
altogether satiric for Kubrick. “2001” celebrates the invention of tools of
death, as an evolutionary route to a higher order of non-human life.
Kubrick literally learned to stop worrying and love the bomb; he’s become his
own butt—the Herman Kahn of extraterrestrial games theory. The ponderous
blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of
this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by
superior godlike minds, where the hero is reborn as an angelic baby. It has the
dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven. “2001”
is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway
to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands
anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny
from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up.
It’s a bad, bad sign when a movie
director begins to think of himself as a myth-maker, and this limp myth of a
grand plan that justifies slaughter and ends with resurrection has been around
before. Kubrick’s story line—accounting for evolution by an extraterrestrial
intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time. And
although his intentions may have been different, “2001” celebrates the end
of man; those beautiful mushroom clouds at the end of “Strangelove” were
no accident. In “2001, A Space Odyssey,” death and life are all the same: no
point is made in the movie of Gary Lockwood’s death—the moment isn’t even
defined—and the hero doesn’t discover that the hibernating scientists have
become corpses. That’s unimportant in a movie about the beauties of
resurrection. Trip off to join the cosmic intelligence and come back a better
mind. And as the trip in the movie is the usual psychedelic light shows the
audience doesn’t even have to worry about getting to Jupiter. They can go to
heaven in Cinerama.
It isn’t accidental that we don’t care
if the characters live or die; if Kubrick has made his people so uninteresting,
it is partly because characters and individual fates just aren’t big enough
for certain kinds of big movie directors. Big movie directors become generals in
the arts; and they want subjects to match their new importance. Kubrick has
announced that his next project is “Napoleon”—which, for a movie director,
is the equivalent of Joan of Arc for an actress. Lester’s “savage”
comments about affluence and malaise, Kubrick’s inspirational banality about
how we will become as gods through machinery, are big-shot show-business deep
thinking. This isn’t a new show-business phenomenon; it belongs to the genius
tradition of the theatre. Big entrepreneurs, producers, and directors who stage
big spectacular shows, even designers of large sets have traditionally begun to
play the role of visionaries and thinkers and men with answers. They get too big
for art. Is a work of art possible if pseudoscience and the technology of
movie-making become more important to the “artist” than man? This is central
to the failure of “2001.” It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick,
with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control
panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects—though straight
from the drawing board—are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed.
There’s a little more that’s good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn’t take
himself too seriously—like the comic moment when the gliding space vehicles
begin their Johann Strauss walk; that is to say, when the director shows a bit
of a sense of proportion about what he’s doing, and sees things momentarily as
comic when the movie doesn’t take itself with such idiot solemnity. The
light-show trip is of no great distinction; compared to the work of experimental
filmmakers like Jordan Belson, it’s third-rate. If big film directors are to
get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years
with no money, just because they’ve put it on a big screen, then businessmen
are greater than poets and theft is art.
An analyst tells me that when his patients
are not talking about their personal hangups and their immediate problems they
talk about the situations and characters in movies like “The Graduate” or
“Belle de Jour” and they talk about them with as much personal involvement
as about their immediate problems. I have elsewhere suggested that this way of
reacting to movies as psychodrama used to be considered a pre-literate way of
reacting but that now those considered “post-literate” are reacting like
pre-literates. The high school and college students identifying with Georgy Girl
or Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin are not that different from the stenographer who
used to live and breathe with the Joan Crawford-working girl and worry about
whether that rich boy would really make her happy—and considered her pictures
“great.” They don’t see the movie as a movie but as part of the soap opera
of their lives. The fan magazines used to encourage this kind of identification;
now the advanced mass media encourage it, and those who want to sell to
youth use the language of “just let it flow over you.” The person who
responds this way does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully
than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a
movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his
senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.
Still, we care about what other people
care about—sometimes because we want to know how far we’ve gotten from
common responses—and if a movie is important to other people we’re
interested in it because of what it means to them, even if it doesn’t mean
much to us. The small triumph of “The Graduate” was to have domesticated
alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is
alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he
has nothing to communicate—which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for
the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience
would probably hate him. “The Graduate” isn’t a bad movie, it’s
entertaining, though in a fairly slick way (the audience is just about
programmed for laughs). What’s surprising is that so many people take it so
seriously. What’s funny about the movie are the laughs on that dumb sincere
boy who wants to talk about art in bed when the woman just wants to fornicate.
But then the movie begins to pander to youthful narcissism, glorifying his
innocence, and making the predatory (and now crazy) woman the villainess.
Commercially this works: the inarticulate dull boy becomes a romantic hero for
the audience to project into with all those squishy and now conventional
feelings of look, his parents don’t communicate with him; look, he wants truth
not sham, and so on. But the movie betrays itself and its own expertise, sells
out its comic moments that click along with the rhythm of a hit Broadway show,
to make the oldest movie pitch of them all—asking the audience to identify
with the simpleton who is the latest version of the misunderstood teen-ager and
the pure-in-heart boy next door. It’s almost painful to tell kids who have
gone to see “The Graduate” eight times that once was enough for you because
you’ve already seen it eighty times with Charles Ray and Robert Harron and
Richard Barthelmess and Richard Cromwell and Charles Farrell. How could you
convince them that a movie that sells innocence is a very commercial piece of
work when they’re so clearly in the market to buy innocence? When “The
Graduate” shifts to the tender awakenings of love, it’s just the latest
version of “David and Lisa.” “The Graduate” only wants to succeed and
that’s fundamentally what’s the matter with it. There is a pause for a laugh
after the mention of “Berkeley” that is an unmistakable sign of hunger for
success; this kind of movie-making shifts values, shifts focus, shifts emphasis,
shifts everything for a sure-fire response. Mike Nichols’ “gift” is that
be lets the audience direct him; this is demagoguery in the arts.
Even the cross-generation fornication is
standard for the genre. It goes back to Pauline Frederick in “Smouldering
Fires,” and Clara Bow was at it with mama Alice Joyce’s boyfriend in “Our
Dancing Mothers,” and in the Forties it was “Mildred Pierce.” Even the
terms are not different: in these movies the seducing adults are customarily
sophisticated, worldly, and corrupt, the kids basically innocent, though not so
humorless and blank as Benjamin. In its basic attitudes “The Graduate” is
corny American; it takes us back to before “The Game of Love” with Edwige
Feuillère as the sympathetic older woman and “A Cold Wind in August” with
the sympathetic Lola Albright performance.
What’s interesting about the success of
“The Graduate” is sociological: the revelation of how emotionally accessible
modern youth is to the same old manipulation. The recurrence of certain themes
in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new
terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that
they can answer this need. And yet, and yet—one doesn’t expect an educated
generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the
past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in
fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly
become an art, and their art.
One’s moviegoing tastes and habits
change—I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I
really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out
stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something,
desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge
of how people live—for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business
detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies
we’re tired of.
But the big change is in our habits.
If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to
run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the
movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle
for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home
is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true
moviegoers—those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the
losers—depress us. Listening to them—and they are often more audible than
the sound track—as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share
their disaffection, but it’s not enough to keep us interested in cops and
robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn’t enough. If we’ve grown up at the
movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable
tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the
subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an
appetite for art.
Harper's, February 1969