Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [114]
She also stepped apart from the crowd with her review of the film version of the spectacular Broadway hit musical Fiddler on the Roof. Despite the handsomeness and vigor of its big-screen translation, Fiddler received very mixed notices. Because of Pauline’s deep love of musicals, she often felt betrayed by what happened to them once they were transferred to the screen, but Fiddler on the Roof surprised her. After acknowledging that the musical comedy was “primarily an American Jewish contribution” to the theater, she called it “probably the only successful attempt to use this theatrical form on the subject of its own sources—that is on the heritage that the Jewish immigrants brought to this country.” She thought part of the reason the film worked well was because it was directed by someone she was careful to point out was a gentile, Norman Jewison. She implied that he avoided the pitfalls a Jewish director might have fallen into by laying on the ethnic sentiment too thick. Jewison presented “the Jews as an oppressed people—no better, no worse than others,” side-stepping the “self-hatred and self-infatuation that corrupts so much Jewish comedy.” Her review demonstrated, once again, her remarkably unsentimental attitude toward her own Jewish heritage:
Younger members of the audience—particularly if they are Jewish—may be put off by the movie if their parents and grandparents have gone on believing in a special status with God long after the oppression was over, and have tried to prop up their authority over their children with boring stories about early toil and hardship.... Too many people have used their early suffering as a platitudinous weapon and so have made it all seem fake. And I suppose that Fiddler on the Roof has been such a phenomenal stage success partly because it can be used in this same self-congratulatory way—as a public certificate of past suffering.
Her review moved Norman Jewison to write to her: “Thank you for your in depth critique.... As Sholem Aleichem would simply say—(in his square way)—go in peace—and God be with you!”
One of Pauline’s pet theories was that a director’s finest work was nearly always done early on; she believed that as most directors aged and became wealthier and more famous, they became concerned with making grander and grander artistic statements, at which point they usually fell flat. And no director of the time was more concerned with the Big Idea than Stanley Kubrick, whose new film, A Clockwork Orange, opened at the end of 1971.
Based on the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange was set in the not-too-distant future, where Britain has degenerated into a completely mechanized, brutal, soulless society. The perfect representative of this moral vacuum is the character Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a callous teenaged punk and head of his “droogs,” a gang that steals, tortures, and rapes just for the sheer pleasure of it. Eventually he is arrested and undergoes a brainwashing that neutralizes him, robbing him of his individuality. It was the type of grandiose topic with all the attendant portentousness that typically made Pauline wince. Prior to the film’s release, Kubrick held forth on the film’s significance in numerous interviews. He told The New York Times that Alex symbolized “man in his natural state, the way he would be if society did not impose its ‘civilizing’ process upon him. What we respond to subconsciously is Alex’s guiltless sense of freedom to kill and rape, and to be our savage natural selves, and it is in this glimpse of the true nature of man that the power of the story derives.”
Many in the press felt that Kubrick had turned out a genuinely great film, but there were a few dissenters: Richard