Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [32]
Pauline was about to become a significant player in this world. Her review of Limelight in City Lights had attracted some positive attention from literary figures of note, among them Mary McCarthy. With her first real encouragement, she worked on several pieces on spec through 1954, one of which, “Morality Plays Right and Left,” was a lengthy discursive essay. (She had already come to recognize that her love of jazz was revealing itself in her own writing: She was fond of riffs, as she came to think of them—the extended, brilliant, sidetracking discussions that veered off from the main crux of her argument but always reconnected to it in the end.) Ostensibly her topic was Twentieth Century–Fox’s 1954 Cold War thriller Night People, starring Gregory Peck, about the effort to rescue a U.S. soldier who has been kidnapped in Berlin. Pauline found the film to be a reflection of the U.S. government’s love affair with its own image and disapproved of its oversimplification of complex issues. Her wide-ranging discussion probed the dangers of pandering to the public, something studios were aggressively doing with the popular wide-screen technology, designed to help people forget about television and get back into the theaters:
The new wide screen surrounds us and sounds converge upon us. Just one thing is lost: the essence of film “magic” which lay in our imaginative absorption, our entering into the film (as we might enter into the world of a Dostoyevsky novel or Middlemarch). Now the film can come to us—one more consummation of the efforts to diminish the labor (and the joy) of imaginative participation.
Members of the U.S. government were also guilty of pandering, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-Communist attacks were about on the level with the sentiments expressed in Night People:
When Senator McCarthy identifies himself with right and identifies anyone who opposes him with the Communist conspiracy, he carries the political morality play to its paranoid conclusion—a reductio ad absurdum in which right and wrong, and political good and evil, dissolve into: are you for me or against me? But the question may be asked, are not this morality and this politics fundamentally just as absurd and just as dangerous when practiced on a national scale in our commercial culture? The world is not divided into good and evil, enemies are not all alike. Communists are not just Nazis with a different accent; and it is precisely the task of political analysis (and the incidental function of literature and drama) to help us understand the nature of our enemies and the nature of our opposition to them. A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts.
“Morality Plays Right and Left” was initially accepted by one of the publications Pauline most revered, The Partisan Review, but was eventually taken by the British film journal Sight and Sound in 1954. Sight and Sound’s editor, Penelope Houston, wrote that the section on Night People was “the type of thing I have been trying to get hold of for a long time; it is so much better for these things to be written by an American than by a journalist on our side.” The cofounding editor of The Partisan Review, Philip Rahv, responded enthusiastically to Pauline’s lively critical voice, but he was consistently troubled by the length of her pieces and always urged that they be cut.
1955 was a pivotal