Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [61]
Appreciation courses have paralyzed reactions to modern music, painting, poetry and even novels, but movies, ignored by teachers as a Saturday afternoon vice, are one of the few arts (along with jazz and popular music) Americans can respond to without cultural anxieties.
This, unfortunately, is beginning to change. At art houses and film festivals, audiences are beginning to show the same kind of paralysis. They seem to think that a highly praised movie or a movie selected for a festival must be art, and if they don’t respond to it, they are uncomfortable about saying so. They no longer trust themselves. Ultimately, if this fear of authority develops even in movie audiences, our responses will contract, movies will join the paralyzed high arts. There are already signs of this. At a recent opening, I said to the manager, “It was wonderful, but I was puzzled. I couldn’t tell whether the audience liked it or not.” He answered, “They’re waiting for the reviews.”
Initially the editors of McCall’s seemed pleased with her tough, smart writing, and in the March issue she covered a number of new releases, including the movie that would turn out to be John Ford’s last, Seven Women, starring Anne Bancroft as the head of a group of women missionaries in 1930s China. Pauline observed that sitting through Seven Women was “rather like watching an old movie on TV and thinking, ‘No, no, they’re not really going to do that next’—but they do, they do, and superior as you feel to it, you’re so fascinated by the astounding, confident senselessness of it all that you can’t take your eyes off it.” In the same column, she lamented that Laurence Olivier’s magnificent Othello had been preserved only in a cheap filmed version of the play, not in a proper screen transcription with the full arsenal of technical possibilities at his disposal.
In the April issue, however, she ventured into more controversial territory with her review of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. This mammoth, meticulously detailed screen version of Boris Pasternak’s 1958 bestseller about the Russian Revolution had long been anticipated as one of the big movie events of the year, and it was already on its way to becoming one of the top-grossing films of all time. Pauline loathed the hype for the picture as much as she loathed Lean’s meticulously detailed and worked-out style of moviemaking, with every response carefully calculated, every shade of meaning put properly in place. She dismissed it as “stately, respectable and dead” and likened it to “watching a gigantic task of stone masonry executed by unmoved movers. It’s not art, it’s heavy labor—which, of course, many people respect more than art.” She went on to predict that it would further accelerate the race for superspectacles “that will probably have to bankrupt several studios before a halt is called.”
Pauline always claimed that none of the McCall’s editors attempted to dictate to her how to review a particular movie. It was one thing for her to dismiss a run-of-the-mill film that either made or lost a little money, and quite another for her to attack such a prestigious picture that had found its cultural niche so quickly. Still, the editors at the magazine gave her the benefit of the doubt for the moment.
Dwarfing even Zhivago, however, was The Sound of Music, which had been released in March of that year and would soon surpass Gone With the Wind as the top-grossing film of all time. A big, handsome film, shot in spectacular Technicolor in Austria, brimming with wholesomeness, The Sound of Music confirmed what Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady had shown the year before: that the movie musical wasn’t dead at all; provided it was big and splashy and colorful enough, it could be box-office gold. The Sound of Music also single-handedly rescued its studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, where production had slowed to a trickle after the devastating failure of the astronomically expensive Cleopatra. The Sound of Music’s soundtrack album was an enormous success;