Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [44]
Pauline was incensed by Crowther’s fatuous dismissal of Jimmy as “a conventional weakling, a routine cry-baby, who cannot quite cope with the problems of a tough environment, and so, vents his spleen in nasty words.” For Look Back in Anger was “about the failures of men and women to give each other what they need, with the result that love becomes infected. And it is about class resentments, the moral vacuity of those in power, the absence of courage. It’s about humanity as a lost cause—it’s about human defeat.” She found it exhilarating that filmmakers such as Richardson had the courage to confront the bleakness of modern British life onscreen. She had admired Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top for its uncompromising portrayal of Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey), an aggressive young Yorkshire man trying to get ahead. The picture had an intimacy and candor that the British cinema hadn’t gone near—it was as new as the black-and-white photography of Freddie Francis, depicting the stifling British cityscapes with their bleak row houses and factories spewing soot from their chimneys.
Those who didn’t like Pauline’s work objected to her caustic tone and what they perceived as her superior, even slightly condescending, attitude, and they often used her bashing of fellow critics as evidence against her, claiming that her lack of collegiality bordered on the unprofessional. But to Pauline, it was essential to draw attention to the ways in which she felt critics had strayed from the path. She believed that they wielded enormous power with the public, and it pained her to see them guiding their readers to what she considered the wrong kind of movies and not giving a fair shake to the ones she felt deserved to be widely seen. Even though she was unpaid, she increasingly approached her reviewing job with a missionary zeal.
She also shook up KPFA by making comments that, decades later, would be viewed as downright callous. From 1960 on, the once-inviolable Production Code had been diluted, and it was now easier for frank subject matter to make it to the screen in some form or another. One of the more controversial movies of 1961 was William Wyler’s version of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, a groundbreaking success when it premiered on Broadway in 1934. It deals with a pupil in a girl’s school who circulates the malicious lie that her two women teachers are having an affair, causing one of the women to confront her long-repressed lesbianism. The play had been filmed by Wyler in 1936 as These Three, but the strictness of the Code meant that it dealt with a conventional heterosexual triangle. By 1961 the play’s original content could be played out onscreen, even if the producers covered themselves by casting two enormous box-office stars, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, in the leads. Pauline, however, found the movie stodgy and labored. “Aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for these girls because they’re so hard-working and because, after all, they don’t do anything—the lesbianism is all in the mind. (I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy—that there isn’t much they can do.)” It was a careless remark, an example of Pauline the Entertainer, going for an easy laugh.