Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [37]
But a parallel universe was rising in 1950s Hollywood, and it was a place where none of the new dramatic content had much currency. The wide-screen spectacle had grown out of the movie studios’ desperation to compete with the onslaught of television. To Pauline, big-screen romances such as Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and biblical spectacles like The Robe (1953) and The Egyptian (1954) had set moviemaking back decades. “Like a public building designed to satisfy the widest public’s concept of grandeur,” Pauline wrote in “Movies, the Desperate Art,” “the big production loses the flair, the spontaneity, the rhythm of an artist working to satisfy his own conception. The more expensive the picture, the bigger the audience it must draw, and the fewer risks it can take.” She was not impressed with the so-called visual splendor made possible by the wide-screen process; she deemed it “about as magical as a Fitzpatrick travelogue.”
The new breed of stars—Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Esther Williams—likewise disheartened her, because they were not “protagonists in any meaningful sense; they represent the voice of adjustment, the caution against individuality, independence, emotionality, art, ambition, personal vision. They represent the antidrama of American life.” And with this assembly line of movies designed not to threaten anyone, to please as wide an audience as possible, she could see that newspaper critics were bound to praise the popular and pan the problematic until they lost their way entirely.
This was Pauline in one of her most accomplished roles: the Cassandra of film criticism, predicting nothing less than a cultural holocaust if the movies continued to go down the same, self-defeating path. And the blight, she warned, had already infected critics everywhere, who had “been quick to object to a film with a difficult theme, a small camera range, or a markedly verbal content (they object even when the words are worth listening to). Because action can be extended over a wide area on the screen, they think it must be—or what they’re seeing isn’t really a movie at all.”
Overall, the essay was a thrilling demonstration of Pauline’s credo that a critic’s voice should never be objective. It was only through subjective means that a critic could convey what was in her heart and mind to the reader. “Movies, the Desperate Art” was a milestone in Pauline’s early career. Only three years after she had published her first review, she had found her voice and what would become her greatest subject and the continuing passion of her life: the confluence of what happened onscreen and what happened in life.
With the house on Oregon Street, Pauline at last had a real workspace where she could spread out and be genuinely productive. Where the two front rooms divided, she set up a movie screen and constantly ran 16 mm films on a giant projector. She wrote at a drafting table, often standing up, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Wild Turkey in the other, with her favorite Bessie Smith records playing. She stayed up late at night, reading obsessively and scribbling articles to submit to The Partisan Review.
The house became a gathering place for local movie-lovers, writers, poets, musicians. She fussed over what they were reading. She became upset with her friend