Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [47]
In March of 1964 Pauline wrote to Macdonald thanking him for his assistance: The Guggenheim grant had come through. Immediately she began making plans to travel, for although she had been writing for several years about foreign-language films, she had never visited Europe. That summer she returned to New York for the first time in years. staying with an old friend, the film writer and psychoanalyst Dan Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt had a floor-through apartment on Patchen Place in Greenwich Village, which delighted Pauline with its bohemian character. He was also well connected with the management of the New York Film Festival, which was set to open in the fall of 1963, and suggested that it should include some substantive panel discussion along with all the screenings. The result was an evening at the Donnell Library on East Fifty-third Street, moderated by Rosenblatt and featuring three provocative critics—Pauline, Dwight Macdonald, and John Simon. Pauline respected Simon’s formidable intellect but was wary of him, feeling that many of his opinions were needlessly sadistic and abusive.
For his part Simon was far from an unqualified admirer of Pauline. He recognized her writing ability and respected her sharp wit and her gutsiness as a critic. “She had a style that appealed to a lot of people: those who loved to read, ignorant movie buffs, other critics,” he said. “Even critics who didn’t agree with her had to admit that she had a real style. And not many people have such a style.” But Simon was disturbed by her acceptance of so much that he considered vulgar and lowbrow; he felt that as someone who aspired to be a critic of the first rank, she should hold to a higher aesthetic standard.
Simon also found her problematic on a personal level. “Her main trouble was, of course, that she did want to be a force in the field, an influence, someone you had to reckon with, no matter what,” he observed. “In other words, a kind of arrogance.” Simon was always suspicious of Pauline’s lust to become a powerful player in criticism; to him, this degree of ambition was something that threatened to compromise or even undermine a writer’s critical judgment. For most of their careers Pauline and Simon would keep a careful distance from each other, and she didn’t go out of her way to denounce him in print. “She felt that it would make me more important than I am,” said Simon.
The panel discussion by Pauline, Macdonald, and Simon at the Donnell Library made for a lively and provocative evening, with much of the debate centering on two 1963 releases, Hud and 8½. The discussion of Hud, in particular, pointed up some of the ideas about audience reaction that would intrigue Pauline throughout her career. She felt that the movie had “marvelous ambiguity and split in the content.” The audience, she felt, was completely on the side of the heel-hero, “enjoying Hud’s anarchism, his nihilism, his rejection of the role of the government.” The movie caught her completely by surprise with its ending, in which Hud isn’t redeemed for his coarse, self-centered behavior: Instead of cleaning up his act, as he would have done had the movie been made a few years earlier, he rapes the family housekeeper, Alma (played by Patricia Neal).
Macdonald dismissed her concerns about the division between audience and critical reaction by arguing, “That’s sociology. That’s not criticism.” Simon, for his part, said, “I am worried about Pauline Kael’s position. What she says identifies her in my mind hopelessly not only with the audience, which is bad enough, but with a kind of audience that loves movies so indiscriminately that it is not merely content to accept almost anything that comes its way