Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [45]
In addition to her film criticism on KPFA, Pauline also attacked some of the institutions responsible for bringing films to the Bay Area. One of her favorite targets was the San Francisco Film Festival, launched in 1956 by Irving M. Levin, who came from a family of San Francisco theater owners. Pauline considered Levin and his wife, Irma, to be the most ill-equipped people imaginable to run a festival, an opinion shared by many in San Francisco’s arts community, who viewed them as using the Film Festival to secure a niche for themselves among San Francisco’s cultural elite. Pauline believed that the festival was crippled by its self-congratulatory atmosphere, and its tendency to confer genius upon anyone with any connection to the world of film. The truth, she said in her broadcast of November 22, 1961, was that those who had paid $2.50, expecting to see a movie of quality, emerged from the festival “sleepy and bored, asking, how could they have picked that movie?”
She admired the technical skill behind the year’s biggest film, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, and also admired Peter O’Toole’s performance in it, though she felt that the complex political situation the movie attempted to set forth—British relations with the Arabs and Turks during World War I—was never adequately sorted out so the audience really could understand what was going on; she also was temperamentally indisposed to like such a big, square spectacle, with every detail carefully calculated and put in its proper place. She felt that one of 1962’s most revered pictures, To Kill a Mockingbird, was too dutiful and not imaginative enough in its dramatization of Harper Lee’s prizewinning novel about racial tensions in the south, with Gregory Peck’s heralded performance as the scrupulously fair-minded lawyer Atticus Finch on the whole typical of what she had found him to be back in the 1940s—a plodding, hardworking, uninspired actor.
One picture of 1962 that she immediately loved but didn’t write about was the Western Ride the High Country, which not many people saw on its initial, poorly managed release. It was important to Pauline, however, because it was directed by the gifted, rebellious Sam Peckinpah, who came to films after several years of working in television. Ride the High Country was an intriguingly self-referential reunion of two veteran stars—in this case, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott—playing two aging ex-lawmen hired to transport a gold shipment through dangerous mountain territory. But it was the director’s contribution that made Pauline sit up and take notice. Always on the march against pretense, Pauline believed that the Western, especially under the influence of John Ford and George Stevens, had become increasingly pompous and self-important throughout the 1950s. Ride the High Country impressed her with its honesty and as an example of beautiful and imaginative filmmaking. She would later call it “the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns.” MGM’s neglect of the film only made Pauline get behind the picture all the more. She was beginning what would be a career-long advocacy for directors she considered misunderstood and mistreated, and Peckinpah was one whom she would champion with especially intense devotion.
The early 1960s continued to be arduous years for Pauline. She was now a woman in her forties with a child to support, and she seemed no closer to figuring out how to earn a living than she had been when she was in her early twenties, just out of Berkeley. There was an increasing number of assignments from Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and The Partisan Review, but while they kept her name alive in film-criticism circles, none of them paid more than a pittance.
At KPFA, tensions between Pauline and management continued to build, and on December 8, 1962, she vented her feelings about the station’s programming. She craved provocative, intense political