Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [64]
On another occasion, Pauline and Crist had both served on a critic’s panel at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. During the discussion, Pauline lit into her favorite bogeyman, Bosley Crowther, and Crist angrily shouted her down, telling her that she should lay off Crowther—that he had his parish and Pauline had hers. Later, Pauline asked Crist to join her for a cup of coffee. “She wanted to explain to me,” recalled Crist, “that when she was running her theater in Berkeley, running the Cinema Guild, she had to put up posters that featured banner reviews by Bosley in big print. She resented that he was the most important critical voice in the country; she’d harbored it for years.” That year Universal Pictures dropped Pauline from its list of complimentary invitational press screenings. The alleged reason was her behavior at a screening of the studio’s new Ross Hunter–produced soap opera, Madame X. The studio felt that Pauline’s derisive hoots and audible comments in the screening room had adversely influenced the other critics. For a time she would have to pay to see Universal’s pictures in a theater—her preferred setting, anyway, as she could then monitor the reactions of the audience.
The movie of 1966 that perplexed Pauline most was Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a study of the fast-paced, empty life of a high-fashion photographer (David Hemmings) in swinging London. It was a strikingly filmed and brilliantly edited murder mystery, and this part of the film she found quite successful. But few things vexed her as much as unearned seriousness, and it was here that she felt Blow-Up went off the rails. The basic idea that Blow-Up seemed to be setting forth—that the photographer’s life represented illusion and the murder reality—struck Pauline as impossibly facile, and she also felt that its implicit message that the mod scene represented the spiritual aridity of the times was nothing but a pompous, moralizing pose. While Antonioni had tapped into the alienation and unresponsiveness of modern youth, he had missed “the fervor and astonishing speed in their rejections of older values; he sees only the emptiness of pop culture.”
In her reviewing career to date, Pauline had shown a powerful gift for defending the great talents she believed had been prevented from doing their best work by Hollywood; Orson Welles’s Falstaff provided her with another such opportunity. After Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’s career had consisted mainly of giving hammy performances in a string of mediocre pictures and trying to amass enough cash to finance a project that might restore his reputation as a director. He had come tantalizingly close with Othello, finally released in 1955 after years of stop-and-start filming, and Touch of Evil, a wholly original thriller set in a Mexican border town, but both films received minimal distribution and flopped.
In the 1960s he had one more chance, with Falstaff (later known as Chimes at Midnight), which he had been shooting in Europe for years. It was an amalgamation of several Shakespeare plays, with the most poignant part of Henry IV, Part I at its center: Prince Hal’s recognition of his destiny and gradual pulling away from Falstaff. Pauline admitted that technically, the movie was a mess, showing many signs of its chaotic filming, but she found “the casting superb and the performance beautiful.” The Battle of Shrewsbury, she felt, ranked with “the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein,