Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [11]
I don’t know of any other scene that was so immediately recognizable to women as a certain kind of their truth. It was clear that the man wasn’t a bastard, and that he was doing this out of anxiety and tenderness—out of love, in his terms. Nevertheless, the heroine’s acquiescence destroyed her. There are probably few women who have ever accomplished anything beyond the care of a family who haven’t in one way or another played that scene. Even those who were young girls at the time recognized it, I think, if only in a premonitory sense. It is the intelligent woman’s primal post-coital scene.
Bette Davis’s explosive energy, Pauline felt, made the actress “the embodiment of the sensational side of ’30s movies . . . vibrantly, coarsely there.” In the ’30s Davis’s material didn’t resonate with Pauline the way Hepburn’s did, but she relished Davis’s ability to transcend it with her own audacious style. A ramshackle movie such as Dangerous (1935) was still worthwhile because of the way Davis “hypes it with an intensity that makes you sit up and stare.” A weeper like Dark Victory (1939) might have struck Pauline as “a gooey collection of clichés,” but Davis made it worthwhile by the way she “slams her way through them in her nerviest style.” She felt that Davis, more than any other screen actress, was able to reflect the neuroses that gnawed at Depression-era American women.
There was one movie genre whose appeal eluded Pauline from the beginning. Although she admired John Ford’s influential Stagecoach (1939)—she later wrote that it presented a view of the American past “that made the picture seem almost folk art; we wanted to believe in it even if we didn’t”—most Westerns left her cold. She didn’t buy the male fantasy of the mythical past that the Western sold to the public, and she hated the treatment of the Indians as monsters more appropriate to a horror movie. Isaac was a great lover of movie Westerns, and Pauline later recalled that he always said it didn’t matter if it was any good or not, or if he’d already seen it. “I think I understand what my father meant,” Pauline observed in the mid-1960s. “If you’re going for a Western (the same way you’d sit down to watch a television show), it doesn’t much matter which one you see.”
It might have been expected that Pauline would become an English literature major once she reached college, but she avoided that route, possibly because she worried that she might be pigeonholed into a teaching career. Instead, after graduating from Girls’ High School in the spring of 1936, she enrolled that fall at the University of California at Berkeley as a philosophy major. In view of her excellent high school record, Berkeley awarded her an alumni-sponsored scholarship for her first year.
Founded in 1868, Berkeley had come to be regarded by many as the apotheosis of modern academic freedom. Unlike the Ivy League colleges in the east, Berkeley at the time was anything but exclusive: Proof of a legitimate high school diploma, along with proof of a solid background in the arts, sciences, and humanities and a solid B average, was usually a guarantee of admission. The emphasis was on electives, with a minimal number of required courses.
Along with the relatively enlightened academic atmosphere came the beautiful campus setting. The Greek Theater, the Sather Gate, the Doe Library were all impressive works of architecture free of institutional chill. There were eucalyptus groves, bountiful