Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [51]
Pauline then penetrated Sarris’s “inner circle,” with its concentration on “interior meaning,” which by Sarris’s definition was “extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.” Here Pauline’s anger was almost palpable, as she denounced this aspect of the theory as “the opposite of what we have always taken for granted in the arts, that the artist expresses himself in the unity of form and content. What Sarris believes to be ‘the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art’ is what has generally been considered the frustrations of a man working against the given material.” Again, she felt that the theory was conferring virtues on undistinguished studio product that simply weren’t there. “Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that’s handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots. If his ‘style’ is in conflict with the story line or subject matter, so much the better—more chance for tension.”
The end result of all this, she believed, was that some of the least-deserving movies, and directors, were often candidates for the greatest critical praise. She had seldom liked the work of Otto Preminger; with the exception of his stylish early melodramas like Laura, she found his films crude and heavy-handed. But Preminger was a hero to the auteur critics, who praised his characteristic use of the tracking camera. Pauline was having none of it: “I suspect that the ‘stylistic consistency’ of say, Preminger, could be a matter of his limitations and that the only way you could tell he made some of his movies was that he used the same players so often (Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, et al., gave his movies the Preminger look.)”
In 1964 Pauline and Andrew Sarris first came face to face while she was on her Guggenheim-sponsored stay in New York, when she phoned Sarris and asked if he could meet her for a drink. He was stunned at the invitation from a woman he assumed hated him, and hesitated. But Pauline wouldn’t be put off. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Won’t your lover let you go?” At the time, the word “lover” had specific connotations. At the time, Sarris was living with his mother in Kew Gardens, Queens. Half-fearing that she really would think he was gay if he didn’t turn up, he took the subway into Manhattan and met Pauline, Gina, and Dan Rosenblatt at a midtown restaurant.
“She was always on the boil,” Sarris observed. “It was a sort of temperamental difference between us. She was a very lively writer, and she was very readable. I give her a lot of credit for what she did. I think that a lot of people who professed to like her were a bit condescending to her. Even her supporters. There was something unthreatening about her as opposed to people like Mary McCarthy, who really knew how to get at you. And Pauline had a way of getting at people, but she didn’t really threaten them.”
That night Pauline was bold, confident and inquisitive, Sarris retiring and uneasy, wanting to be anywhere else but sitting across the table from his critical adversary. “I wasn’t as worldly and aggressive as she was about sex,” Sarris recalled. “About who was gay and who wasn’t. I wasn’t an expert on such things.” There were other matters to discuss, however, than the sexual politics of their film-critic colleagues. “Pauline acted as if I were a great menace of American criticism,” Sarris said. “I wasn’t getting any money for these pieces. I had no sense that I was being read, even. She talked about going to different places and people would say, ‘What about what Andrew Sarris said?’ She provided me with the first indication I had that I was being read.”
However passionately felt and persuasively argued, to what extent was “Circles and