Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [74]
It was the most potent comment on the decay of modern French society that any filmmaker had dared to make, and Godard’s touch throughout was sure, brazen, and perpetually unexpected. Pauline felt that he had become one of the few directors who had really done what a great artist was supposed to do: He had enlarged the way in which his public saw the world around it.
In the spring of 1968 Penelope Gilliatt took over for Pauline, as planned. Pauline took advantage of her first layoff to get ready for the big event of the year—the publication of her second book by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Its working title had initially been Movie Watching, then All About Movies, both of which Pauline had rejected as being too tame. She finally settled on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, words she had once seen on an Italian movie poster. She considered the phrase “perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of the movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.”
Robert Mills had sold Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to the Atlantic Monthly Press for an advance against royalties of $8,500. In the end it included reviews from The New Republic and McCall’s, as well as “The Making of The Group,” which at last would appear in its entirety. The most attention-getting feature of the book was “Notes on 280 Movies: From Adam’s Rib to Zazie.” Taking up the book’s final 143 pages, “Notes” was quite a surprising feature in those days before such general movie guides as Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Hound; several of the pieces were slightly reworked versions of the notes she had written for the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Despite the occasional peculiar observation (“Katharine Hepburn is probably the greatest actress of the sound era”), the “Notes” were pithy and highly original. There was also a last-minute inclusion, Pauline’s New Yorker essay on Bonnie and Clyde, and because the book was already in page proofs, she was charged $306 for inserting the piece in the late stage of production. Pauline also did her own index, compiling some two thousand index cards.
The Atlantic Monthly Press brought out Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as one of its big releases in the spring of 1968, and again the reviews were excellent. In Newsweek her friend Joseph Morgenstern proclaimed her a “she-Shaw of the movies” and pronounced Kiss Kiss Bang Bang “blessedly brilliant.” Walter Kerr, the esteemed drama critic of The New York Times, reviewed the book for his newspaper’s Sunday Book Review:
If Miss Kael has a particular bent as a film critic, it is in the direction of social psychology. Almost always she wants to know what a film means to the people who make and see it, how it squares with—or falsifies—their lives, how it functions as truth or untruth in the immediate environment....
When you disagree with Miss Kael, you do not become irritable or want to tell her to shut up. You see—in the candor with which she records her own case history, in the intense curiosity she brings to the implications of what she is seeing and responding to—that she has earned her right to her hardheadedness, her decisiveness. She went to the movie with us, and as we walk home gesticulating, she can say anything she pleases. That’s why we’re walking home—to discuss the damn thing.
In June, William Abrahams wrote to Robert Mills that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was “going great guns at the moment,” and that Atlantic was so encouraged that it was expanding the book’s advertising campaign. By late August it had earned back its advance, and Pauline was collecting royalties. Peter Davison was pleased to be able to send Robert Mills a check for $2,684.90 for royalties on both of Pauline’s books. And a substantial paperback sale had been made to Bantam Books, with a release set for the spring of 1969.
One of the book’s most ardent admirers was Louise Brooks, the silent-era actress who had established new levels