Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [50]
She found the auteur theory fundamentally unconvincing: It made no sense to give the director total credit for a work that inevitably reflected the personalities of the screenwriter, the cinematographer, and the actors, as well. She liked to use Casablanca as an example of the wrongheadedness of the theory, pointing out that if the character of the cynical hero Rick Blaine had been played by Robert Cummings rather than by Humphrey Bogart, it was a fair guess that the result would have been a poor picture. She decided to seize the moment and asked Ernest Callenbach if she could publish a broadside against Sarris and the other auteur critics in Film Quarterly. Callenbach, who had admired Sarris’s essay, was somewhat taken aback, but agreed to accept Pauline’s piece, “Circles and Squares,” for the magazine’s Spring 1963 issue.
Her first objection to the auteur theory was that she felt it attempted to elevate relatively minor studio product. In “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” Sarris, as an example of tracking a director’s signature, pointed out a similar storytelling technique in a scene from Raoul Walsh’s 1935 Alice Faye musical Every Night at Eight and in one from his 1941 Humphrey Bogart crime drama, High Sierra. His conclusion: “If I had not been aware of Walsh in Every Night at Eight, the crucial link to High Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys of the auteur theory.”
Pauline thought it ridiculous to bother discussing a comparison between a movie she considered poor (Every Night at Eight) with one she considered below-par (High Sierra), and she went on to ask why Walsh was to be praised for merely repeating a given technique several years later. Was this really a sign of artistic growth? And why did the auteur theory even have to come into play in such an analysis? “Would Sarris not notice the repetition in the Walsh films without the auteur theory?” she asked. A first-class critic, she argued, didn’t need to lean on a theory of any kind: “The greatness of critics like Bazin in France and Agee in America may have something to do with their using their full range of intelligence and intuition, rather than relying on formulas.”
She admitted that Sarris’s emphasis on “technical competence” sounded reasonable enough on the surface, yet she found it misleading, pointing out that “the greatness of a director like Cocteau has nothing to do with mere technical competence: His greatness is in being able to achieve his own personal expression and style. And just as there were writers like Melville or Dreiser who triumphed over various kinds of technical incompetence, and who were, as artists, incomparably greater than the facile technicians of the day, a new great film director may appear whose very greatness is in his struggling toward grandeur or in massive accumulation of detail. An artist who is not a good technician can indeed create new standards, because standards of technical competence are based on comparisons with work already done.”
Moving on to the next argument—that of “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value”—Pauline shifted into higher gear. “The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?” She was particularly disturbed by the auteur critics’ elevation of Hitchcock, a director whose work had exasperated her over the years. She felt that Sarris was correct about Hitchcock’s personality being readily identifiable, but felt it was not a quality that should necessarily elicit critical praise. Comparing Hitchcock with a director whose work she deeply admired, Carol Reed, Pauline wrote that Hitchcock’s signature was easier to spot than Reed’s “because Hitchcock repeats while Reed tackles new subject matter.” She believed that Hitchcock’s signature was “not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology, that his methods and approach are