Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [24]
This appreciation of the decline of early gifts—gifts that come so much more easily before actors and directors become officially sanctioned stars—was a theme that Pauline would return to often once she began her own reviewing career.
But perhaps Agee’s greatest gift as a critic was an ability to wrestle with his feelings about a movie in a way that involved the reader. Covering Preston Sturges’s 1944 farce The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, he admitted that he found the movie “funnier, more adventurous, more intelligent, and more encouraging than anything that has been made in Hollywood in years.” But he went on to say:
Yet the more I think about the film, the less I liked it. There are too many things that Sturges, once he had won all the victories and set all the things moving which he managed to here, should have achieved unhindered, purely as a good artist; and he has not even attempted them. He is a great broken-field runner; once the field is clear he sits down and laughs. The whole tone of the dialogue, funny and bright as it often is, rests too safely within the pseudo-cute, pseudo-authentic, patronizing diction perfected by Booth Tarkington. And in the stylization of action as well as language it seems to me clear that Sturges holds his characters, and the people they comically represent, and their predicament, and his audience, and the best potentialities of his own work, essentially in contempt. His emotions, his intelligence, his aesthetic ability never fully commit themselves; all the playfulness becomes rather an avoidance of commitment than an extension of means for it.
It was this ability to dig deep beneath the surface of the movie, to take into account the audience’s role in the picture, and to examine what the director’s particular style might mean in the context of what was happening in contemporary life, that Pauline most loved about Agee’s criticism. There were points, however, at which she parted company with him. She took issue with his fondness for plain, bare-bones, unadorned drama without a trace of vulgarity or over-the-top flair. He wanted movies to be “cleansed” of excess, but Pauline couldn’t help but feel that this “virtue may have been his worst critical vice.”
The critic who most consistently irritated Pauline was the country’s most powerful one: The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther. He had come to the Times in 1940, taking over as screen editor and chief movie critic from Frank Nugent, who had gone to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Crowther’s writing style was ponderous and schoolmasterish, lacking in any real wit. He was constantly on the march against vulgarity and sensationalism, two qualities that Pauline believed could make for hugely entertaining movies. Crowther sought to maintain a certain numbingly correct objectivity. “Any critic writing for a large publication cannot be extremely personalized,” he once stated. “He must realize that other persons have their own opinions.” Pauline dismissed this as “saphead objectivity” and found some of Crowther’s opinions—such as his belief that the best actors are the ones who maintain the most consistent popularity—downright loopy. In his high-minded insistence that “pictures are a great intellectual exercise and have great power to influence people in their thinking,” Pauline felt that Crowther completely missed the fun and vitality that movies were capable of bringing to audiences. She also resented his power and influence; because he was generally hailed as America’s most powerful critic, his Times reviews could affect whether people elsewhere in the country saw a film. In her denunciation of Crowther, she was once again squaring off against the East Coast establishment.
Pauline found her situation in New York increasingly untenable: She couldn’t live on her unemployment insurance, and she found herself waiting until a check—from Vi or Bob Horan or Robert Duncan, or from one of her