Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [80]
The genuine movie-lover knew in his gut that what movies had to offer was not an academic study in perfect artistic unity. “At the movies we want a different kind of truth,” Pauline wrote, “something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful,” whether that was a line, a scene, a performance that somehow had resonance. Audiences needed to understand that a low-grade picture like Wild in the Streets “connects with their lives in an immediate, even if a grossly frivolous way, and if we don’t go to movies for excitement, if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little drive that we accept ‘good taste,’ then we will probably never really begin to care about movies at all.”
Pauline’s championing of the lowbrow—the good, vital lowbrow—was really a plea for some degree of emotional honesty on the part of the audience. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies,” she confessed. “I don’t trust any of the tastes of people who were born with such good taste that they didn’t need to find their way through trash.”
This was not a unique point of view among movie critics. Joseph Morgenstern shared it, as did Judith Crist, who often used the phrase “trash—but delicious,” to get through to her students at Columbia University. But Pauline took it in a new direction by pointing to the folly of the reverse perspective: the attempt to identify “art” in movies that were merely a smokescreen of directorial manipulation. She focused on some notable recent examples: Petulia , The Graduate, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—all critically acclaimed box-office hits. She regarded Petulia as a pitiful attempt to take advantage of the pessimism and alienation that Americans had come to feel in the turmoil of the 1960s, and dismissed it as “obscenely self-important.” Kubrick’s 2001, with its view of the blissful potential of space, where anything was possible, rendering the petty existence of life on Earth irrelevant, was “a celebration of cop-out” and fundamentally an expression of the oversize ego of its creator. She felt that, like many directors, Kubrick had fallen into the trap of the Big Idea, and along the way, he had abandoned his early promise (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and had come “to think of himself as a myth-maker.” The ultimate, redeeming value of trash, she argued in her summing up, was that it leaves us wanting, hoping for more—“Trash has given us an appetite for art.”
In October 1968 she had had an opportunity to test these theories when Twentieth Century–Fox sneaked into release a little movie called Pretty Poison , a psychological thriller about a bizarre loner (Anthony Perkins) who impresses a young girl (Tuesday Weld) by telling her that he’s a CIA agent; the twist is that the girl is much more disturbed than he is. Pretty Poison showed some of the influence of Bonnie and Clyde. (The tag line for the movie was “She’s such a sweet girl. He’s such a nice boy. They’ll scare the hell out of you.”) Fox hated the film and wanted to cut it drastically. But Richard Zanuck, who had taken over from his father as head of the studio, pointed out that if Pretty Poison was cut much further, it wouldn’t be possible to sell it to television, because it wouldn’t fit a standard time slot. So Fox opened it in New York at the out-of-the-way Riverside Theatre at Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway.
On a gray, chilly day, Pauline telephoned Joseph Morgenstern at Newsweek and asked if he had heard anything about the film. Morgenstern hadn’t, so the two of them headed for the Riverside, where there were only three other people in the audience. They both loved the movie and rushed back to their respective desks to write about it. In particular, it gave Pauline an opportunity to indulge in one of her favorite pastimes