America's best film critic
Mark Amory
TAKING IT ALL IN by Pauline Kael
Marion Boyars, £18.95
e only reads the reviews', people often say accusingly, 'not the books them- selves.' My position precisely and why not? Many are the subjects — Nye Bevan, Conservation, even Marcus Aurelius — on which I am eager to read one page but not 300. In fact I look at reviews precisely of books I am not intending to read, other- wise they invariably tell me more than I want to know. There is a further reason: if I am told what to think it is not always clear to me whether I do think it in my own right, whether I would have thought it if it had not been suggested. With fiction parti- cularly, I like to start with no idea of the contents. When I know that I shall read a novel I keep the reviws to lok at after- wards.
All this applies with a slightly neurotic intensity to films. Friends are rudely halted in mid-flow if they are about to recount amusing incidents. There is a tantalising moment of decision when watching a trail- er in which I have to make a lightning assessment as to whether it is the film or the trailer I wish to see; if the film, it is necessary not only to shut your eyes but to put your fingers in your ears and wiggle them about to block out the sound track. I have on occasion reached my stall without knowing even the title of the film. Behind this wall of ignorance and struggling to get through there is intense curiosity, usually with some nugget of information to feed on. For instance as I write there is a film about to come on called Stand By Me; I have a feeling it has done well in America, still less of a guarantee of enjoyment than it used to be, but something. Is the title a patriotic call to arms or an appeal from a marine still captive in Vietnam, threaten- ing one of those offspring of Rambo which manage to be disgusting and dreary at the same time? I doubt it. A sidelong glance at a poster in the tube, hastily retracted, seemed to suggest a flat landscape with no name above the title. Probably not Sissy Spacek, then, battling courageously to save her Texan homestead and appealing to her children, to us all, to support her, as she would be up there in large letters surely. No, I think the title comes from a Sixties (?) pop-song, sung perhaps by the Drifters, excellent in itself but suggesting that we may be going back to the future yet again with vacuous if comely American teen- agers called Rob and Fran. The enjoy- ment, of course is in being wrong, in being surprised. Something enigmatically called Time after Time started in the milieu of one of my least favourite characters, Jack the Ripper; how my spirits soared with the hero when he suddenly got into a time (ah) machine and landed in modern San Fran- cisco. You see a lot of trash my way but you see it fresh.
So 500 pages of recent film reviews by Pauline Kael are just what I like. She appears in the New Yorker which is fine as far as tone is concerned but bad in that every single piece is too long; I was left gasping for less. The only relief comes when two or three are grouped and share out the over-generous space. Kael is best on American work where the energy of her style can match the energy of the product. She can be brilliant on what an actor brings to a role, vivid when conjuring up the feel of a film and, with a slightly less certain touch, succinct and witty. She hates the lifelessness of most art films, the self- consciousness of most stage or British acting and she can be brutal; but you do not have to go along with her prejudices to enjoy being taken through favourite films with more coherent thoughts than you managed at the time, borne along on a wave of informed passion. It is not demanding, it is not a high pleasure but it is a real one.
The blurbs are coy about her age but I have read about 1500 pages in her previous collections and she must have held her present position for 30 years. From this vantage point she has established herself as probably the best and certainly the best- known American film critic; but there are two strikes aginst her: in 1978 reviewing the immensely successful Heaven Can Wait, produced, directed, starring and written by Warren Beatty, she found: 'It's so timid and pleated and smoothed that it's sliding right off the screen. This little smudge of a movie . . . doesn't represent movie-making — it's pifflemaking. Warren Beatty moves through it looking fleecy and dazed, murmuring his lines in a disassoci- ated, muffled manner.' So he hired her (!?) as they say in chess notation. She was wafted off to Los Angeles to develop projects with a difficult director, James Tobak. It did not work out; she returned. This proves nothing — not that she might not be a great asset in production, certainly not that her criticism is in any way invalid; but it may have discomposed her.
The second strike was in 1980. Renata Adler, reviewing one of her collections, wrote page after page of abuse in the New York Review of Books, which has very large pages. Kael was said to be vulgar, spiteful, authoritarian, hysterical about sex and violence and unable to write decent English. Words she repeated were counted to show the paucity of her vocabulary and so of her thought. Adler said that she had not meant to write anything like this whirlwind attack but that once she had started she could not stop. It caused one of those sensations in New York literary circles but again proves little. If she was good before, she was still good; but it may have shaken her confidence.
So I approached the latest volume as that of an old friend but apprehensive that she might have fallen on slightly evil days. There is indeed rather less to enjoy than before but we both put this down to films being worse between 1980-83. There is perhaps something, even quite a lot, in what Adler says. I did notice certain words recurring. Against that I enjoy knowing my critic, guessing how she will react. The French Lieutenant's Woman for instance never had a chance and is duly found to be `so controlled that everything seems to be happening punctually, yet it's bewildering . . . just ostentatious about its supposed intelligence. It's pedantic.' She hates con- trol but then finds Gielgud in Arthur 'the most poised and confident funnyman you'll ever see. Gielgud can steal a scene by simply wearing a hat; it's so crisply angled that you can't take your eyes off him you want to applaud that perfect hat.' She goes wildly over the top about the variable John Travolta, 'the kind of film acting that made generations of filmgoers revere Brando' but over and over again spots burgeoning talent: John Lithgow's trans- vestite in The World According to Garp `has more life in him/her than anyone else in the movie . . . a bulkier Joyce Grenfell but with a faraway look in his eyes.' Mickey Rourke in Diner `could become a major actor, he has an edge and dynamism and a sweet pure smile that surprises you He seems to be acting to you and no one else.' Her put-downs can be sharp: Blake Edwards, director of Victor/Victoria, is `careful; he doesn't take any real chances. (That's what some people must mean when they say he's "a professional".)' In Looker `To the rescue of civilisation as we know it comes Albert Finney, like a lame tortoise . . the laziest performance by a star ever . . . the only part of him still alert is his wiry hair.' So what does this supporter of energy feel about dear little E.T.? She adored it, 'genuinely entrancing movies are almost as rare as extraterrestrial visitors'.
Though she could not like Reds, she is generous to Beatty. Unpredictable, in- formed, entertaining, sometimes striving a little too hard for these qualities, she is the only writer with books covering the cinema since the war and we are lucky to have her.
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