Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [43]
The New Wave movies were considered by KPFA to be ideal editorial content for its listening audience, and Pauline continued to cover them in her broadcasts. One of her favorites was Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which she felt was easily the best film of 1961. Yet her review of it revealed a certain weakness in some of her writing about European movies. She seemed to have a bit more trouble hitting the bull’s-eye with some of the new French and Italian films than she did when dealing with American product. Her assessment for KPFA of L’Avventura is a case in point; it’s a bit fuzzy, lacking a strong central point. In fact, when she called it “a study of the human condition at the higher social and economic levels, a study of adjusted, compromising man—afflicted by short memory, thin remorse, easy betrayal,” she sounded perilously close to the mealy pomposity of Bosley Crowther and other critics she had been railing against for years.
When it came to reviewing Hollywood product, however, she was in full command. One of her most provocative broadcasts was the one in which she took on West Side Story, which was released in December of 1961 and went on to sweep that year’s Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Robert Wise). Pauline considered the movie perfect fodder for her KPFA show: Here was a blatantly commercial movie trying equally blatantly to achieve some level of “artistry” through its dramatic cinematography, gimmicky editing, crashing stereophonic sound, and its relentless attempt to make some relevant statement about street gangs and the folly of modern youth. The combination worked magic with nearly all the major critics. In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther hailed the movie as a “cinematic masterpiece”; in The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann called it “the best musical film ever made.” West Side Story might have been made just so Pauline could knock it off its pedestal. She loved classic, comedy-driven movie musicals such as Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon, but she thought West Side Story was, in both conception and execution, a big, loud, pretentious bore:
The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don’t really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms—for whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. . . . If there is anything great in the American musical tradition—and I think there is—it’s in the light satire, the high spirits, the giddy romance, the low comedy, and the unpretentiously stylized dancing of men like Fred Astaire and the younger Gene Kelly. There’s more beauty there—and a lot more humanity—than in all this jet-propelled ballet.
A specific leitmotif had begun to emerge in Pauline’s reviews of this period: scorn for critics who heaped praise on movies that she felt in no way deserved it. Pauline took to regularly clipping reviews from The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and other publications and quoting them derisively in her own pieces. In her KPFA review of Billy Wilder’s 1961 comedy One, Two, Three, which she found “overwrought, tasteless, and offensive—a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine,” she took Show’s Arthur Schlesinger to task for calling the film an “irresistible evocation of the mood of Mark Twain”; in the same review, she also took swipes at Stanley Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, and The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill. In her review of The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, she dug into Crowther and the London Observer’s Penelope Gilliatt for misinterpreting the aims of the movie.
Crowther was a prime target when she wrote about the creative explosion in British cinema, which