Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [6]
“Chicken ranching? I can’t remember a thing about it. But just ask me about the Mystic Movie Theater in Petaluma.”
In the early 1960s, before New Journalism had really taken hold and it had become acceptable for reporters to impose their own personalities on their work, no one really expected a movie critic to share personal information in a review. So it came as something of a surprise when Pauline did just that in her Film Quarterly review of Martin Ritt’s 1963 Western drama Hud. She felt that the material had been misinterpreted by both those who made it and the critics who reviewed it. To them, the character of Hud, played by Paul Newman at his most virile and attractive, was meant to symbolize the moral decay that had infected the country. Audiences, meanwhile, seemed to react to him—understandably, given the glamour casting of Newman—as “a celebration and glorification of materialism—of the man who looks out for himself.” Pauline agreed with popular sentiment, adding that she appreciated Hud’s accurate depiction of the West—“not the legendary west of myth-making movies like the sluggish Shane but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West . . . The incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr Pepper signs, paperback books—all emphasizing the standardization of culture in the loneliness of vast spaces.” In her analysis of the honest, unromantic way Ritt had depicted life on a western ranch, she offered a very personal memory:
The summer nights are very long on a western ranch. As a child, I could stretch out on a hammock on the porch and read an Oz book from cover to cover while my grandparents and uncles and aunts and parents didn’t stir from their card game. The young men get tired of playing cards. They either think about sex or try to do something about it. There isn’t much else to do—the life doesn’t exactly stimulate the imagination, though it does stimulate the senses.... I remember my father taking me along when he visited our local widow: I played in the new barn which was being constructed by workmen who seemed to take their orders from my father. At six or seven, I was very proud of my father for being the protector of widows.
And later:
My father, who was adulterous, and a Republican who, like Hud, was opposed to any government interference, was in no sense and in no one’s eyes a social predator. He was generous and kind, and democratic in the western way that Easterners still don’t understand: it was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican and Indian ranchhands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived.
It was an unusual point of view for an educated woman to hold in the 1960s: Rather than resenting her father for his infidelity to her mother, Pauline seemed almost to take pride in it. In her adult years, Pauline would be drawn steadily to similarly unapologetic, confident, and self-reliant males—as friends, sometimes as lovers, and often as objects of professional admiration.
By mid-1928 Isaac Kael had reached his peak of prosperity, having built the ranch up to the point where it could accommodate a capacity of twenty-five thousand chickens and having amassed a stock portfolio totaling more than $100,000. But because he had bought the bulk of his securities on margin, they didn’t really belong to him, and he then made a terrible misjudgment in selling short. As the market continued to rise, however, he