Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [9]
And there were the movies. The city was full of grand-scale picture palaces, and Pauline went as often as she could to the Fox, the Roxie, the Castro, and to the Paramount over in Oakland. As a young girl discovering the talkies, she found herself especially drawn to the tough gangster movies that Warner Bros. turned out with the beginning of sound. Of all the studios at the time, Warners seemed most committed to portraying the ways that American life had been altered by the Depression in what were, by Hollywood standards, realistic terms. Its stories were built around hardened gangsters, wised-up chorus girls and dance-hall hostesses, ruthless and enterprising crime bootleggers and syndicate bosses. These down-and-dirty archetypes had great appeal for American audiences, who saw something of their predicament in the lives of the characters onscreen, who, after all, were just caught up in the business of trying to get ahead. With their no-frills settings and uncomplicated lighting, these films were easy and inexpensive to produce, and were turned out by the week during the early ’30s. With her own natural tough-mindedness, Pauline responded to them immediately; years later, when she came to write about them, she was amazed by how much they had stayed with her. The crime drama from this period that meant the most to her was I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), which she would eventually dub “one of the best of the social-protest films—naïve, heavy, artless, but a straightforward, unadorned story with moments that haunted a generation.” As a girl, she was shattered by the moment at the end of the movie when the starving hero, James Allen (Paul Muni), is asked, “How do you live?” His face a study in pure anguish, he replies, “I steal.”
Pauline was most taken with the independent spirit of the smart, fast-talking heroines of screwball comedies and progressive women’s dramas. She later observed that in the 1930s, “The girls we in the audience loved were delivering wisecracks. They were funny and lovely because they were funny. A whole group of them with wonderful frogs in their throats. They could be serious, too. There was a period in the early ’30s when Claudette Colbert, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne and other actresses were running prisons, campaigning for governor or being doctors and lawyers.” Many of these were made prior to the 1934 establishment of the Production Code, devised by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America to ensure that the screen presented a safe and sanitized view of American life.
Pauline’s lifelong love of movie comedy also began in the ’30s. She never liked Chaplin—whom she regarded as a tear-pulling fraud—but soaked up the screwball farces of the first decade of the talkies and fell in love with their quick-witted stars—Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Lee Tracy, and Cary Grant. The change in her own family’s fortunes had helped give her a deep understanding of the ways in which the Depression era had given birth to screwball. She felt that the best comedies of the time “suggested an element of lunacy and confusion in the world; the heroes and heroines rolled with the punches and laughed at disasters. Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized—lovers talked back to each other, and fast. Comedy became the new romance, and trading wisecracks was the new courtship rite. The cheerful, washed-out heroes and heroines had abandoned sanity; they were a little crazy, and that’s what they liked in each other. They were like the wisecracking soldiers in service comedies: if you were swapping quips, you were alive—you hadn’t gone under.” She also developed a great love for the manic, eye-spinning antics of the Ritz Brothers, and she wanted to yelp in pain when her friends failed to perceive their worth. “She was crazy, ga-ga, over my dad,” recalled Harry Ritz’s daughter, Janna Ritz. Pauline loved to ask people she met which performers they liked best, the Ritz