Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [236]
CHAPTER THREE
24 “When I was first told, in 1921”: R. P. Blackmur, general introduction to The Wings of the Dove (The Laurel Henry James) (Dell: New York, 1958).
25 “a wonderful movie . . . really the most exciting photography”: Letter from Pauline Kael to Violet Rosenberg, February 10, 1941.
25 “the most sustained in quality”: Ibid.
25 “I’m fairly sure that in the long run it would turn out disastrously”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, March 21, 1941.
26 “fairly dull”: Ibid.
26 “awfully vulgar-funny—really quite something”: Ibid.
26 “not too poor”: Ibid.
26 “the most beautiful shot of Frances Dee”: Ibid.
26 “Communication (orally)”: Ibid.
26 “a rather complex essay”: Ibid.
26 “We’ve been working together just about every waking moment”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, May 9, 1941.
26 “It was tremendous fun”: Interview (April 1989).
27 “trouble with Bob is he feels guilty”: Pauline Kael notes, undated.
28 “I haven’t invested a sou in pleasure clothes”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, February 28, 1942.
28 “look at them all over and feel delighted”: Ibid.
28 “a schlock classic”: Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 536.
28 “special, appealingly schlocky romanticism”: Ibid., 122.
29 “patriotic and shiny-faced”: Studs Terkel, The Good War (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 123.
29 “a heavy confusion of young men”: Ibid.
30 “Pleasing news for a change”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, April 15, 1943.
30 “a modern but not moderne chalet”: John Gruen, Menotti: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 50.
30 “One would have to be an imbecile”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, February 18, 1944.
30 “Bob is terribly sweet to me”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, October 19, 1943.
31 “hurried and a little too chic.”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, November 5, 1944.
31 “I am looking forward to a magazine which will stand for the principles”: Letter from Kael to Dwight Macdonald, December 13, 1943.
31 “who have suffered in modern society persecution, excommunication”: Politics (August 1944).
32 “At least I don’t have a fad for your music”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, undated.
32 “He has pride and vanity at a maximum”: Ibid.
32 “I almost feel as if it had become a layer”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, 1945.
32 “masterpiece art”: Film Comment (May–June 1977).
32 “termite art”: Ibid.
32 “feels its way through walls of particularization”: Ibid.
32 “I can’t see any difference between writing about a porno movie”: Ibid.
33 “an excited audience is never depressed”: David Parkinson, ed., The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories (New York: Applause, 1993), xxii.
33 “amuses but he doesn’t excite”: Ibid., xxix.
33 “Movies are such common and lowly stuff”: The New Republic (December 28, 1938).
33 “the only unaffected trouper in the bunch”: The New Republic (September 20, 1939).
34 “It would have a little more stature as a ‘religious’ film”: The Nation (May 13, 1944).
34 “It seems to me that she is quite limited”: The Nation (April 14, 1945).
35 “funnier, more adventurous, more intelligent”: The Nation (February 5, 1944).
35 “Yet the more I think about the film”: Ibid.
35 “Any critic writing for a large publication”: News Workshop (June 1954).
36 “pictures are a great intellectual exercise”: Ibid.
36 “eastern college people”: Letter from Kael to Rosenberg, November 26, 1945.
36 “they’ll work for almost anything”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FOUR
37 “I don’t think properly on the typewriter”: Letter from Pauline Kael to Violet Rosenberg, undated.
38 “He offered me three gifts”: James Broughton, Coming Unbuttoned (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993), 3–4.
38 “He looked like he was the concept that Marlowe was working on in Doctor Faustus”: Author interview with Ariel Parkinson, November 29, 2009.
39 “adored babies but disliked children”: James Broughton, Coming Unbuttoned (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993), 1.
39 “She deplored little magazines”: Broughton, 68.
39 “She was not sympathetic to avant-garde enterprise