Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [23]
Another critic Pauline admired enormously was Otis Ferguson, who wrote for The New Republic beginning in 1930. Ferguson possessed a keen appreciation of the director’s contribution, but he also understood that movies were mostly the product of a factory system. “Movies are such common and lowly stuff,” he once wrote, “that in intellectual circles we often find ourselves leaping, like trout for flies, after something in a new offering that promises to set it off from the average run, something of special interest or fame, in short any branch of art certified to have nothing to do with that of making pictures.” Ferguson was anything but predictable. He could easily overlook the studied and self-conscious artiness of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, which he considered a masterpiece, yet he raised loud objections to the knowing machinations of The Wizard of Oz, in which he found Frank Morgan, as the Wizard, “the only unaffected trouper in the bunch; the rest either try too hard or are Judy Garland. It isn’t that this little slip of a miss spoils the fantasy so much as that her thumping, overgrown gambols are characteristic of its treatment here: when she is merry the house shakes, and everybody gets wet when she is lorn.”
But the reviewer whose work Pauline admired most was James Agee, who was on the staff of Time from 1941 to 1948; during most of this period he also reviewed for The Nation. Agee was a superb prose stylist, and although he could be sharp, he was never strident and seemed to speak with the voice of reason. He was capable of dismissing a big sentimental hit in a few sentences, as in his evaluation of Leo McCarey’s Academy Award–winning story of two priests, Going My Way: “It would have a little more stature as a ‘religious’ film if it dared suggest that evil is anything worse than a bad cold and that lack of self-knowledge can be not merely cute and inconvenient but also dangerous to oneself and to others.” He could accomplish more in a limited space than any other movie critic, and his adeptness at seeing right through an actor’s performance was unparalleled. He was stunningly prescient about the turn that Bette Davis’s career was in the process of taking by the mid-1940s. In his essay on her 1945 release, The Corn Is Green, in which she played a dedicated schoolteacher in a Welsh coal-mining town, Agee saw all too clearly that the spontaneity and raw grasp of realism that had made many of Davis’s earlier performances so magical had begun to elude her as her importance within the movie industry grew:
It seems to me that she is quite limited, which may be no sin but is a pity; and that she is limiting herself beyond her rights by becoming more and more set, official, and first-ladyish in mannerism and spirit, which is perhaps a sin as well as a pity. In any case, very little about her performance seemed to me to come to life, in spite of a lot of experienced striving which often kept in touch with life as if through a thick sheet of glass. To be sure, the role is not a deeply perceived or well-written one, and the whole play seems stolid and weak. I have a feeling that Miss Davis must have a great deal of trouble finding films which seem appropriate, feasible, and worth doing, and I wish that I, or anyone else, could be of use to her in that. For very few people in her position in films mean, or could do, so well. But I doubt that anything