Pauline Kael quotes - page 2
The happiest screen collaboration of Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton - they're both wonderful - is in this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, "The Vessel of Wrath." It's set on an island in the Pacific, which Maugham calls Baru, and it's concerned with the efforts of the prim missionary (Lanchester) to reform the carnal, ribald beachcomber (Laughton). The situation is the reverse of that in Maugham's Sadie Thompson story, but with a light, comic tone. The Hepburn-Bogart "African Queen" probably took a few notions from it.
Pauline Kael
[T]his film offers a nightmare image: the "Black Rebels," an outlaw motorcycle gang - a leather-jacketed pack who resemble storm troopers - terrorize a town. Their emblem is a death's head and crossed pistons and rods, and Marlon Brando, in his magnetic, soft-eyed youth, is their moody leader. The picture seemed to be frightened of its subject - the young nihilists who say "no" to American blandness and conformity - and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl (Mary Murphy), but the audience savored the possibilities, and this clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.
Pauline Kael
One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history - probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension - a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.
Pauline Kael
Earlier generations went to see what was forbidden in life and developed a real excitement about the movies. Today's rating system keeps kids out of the good ones. I wouldn't want them to see movies like Natural Born Killers, but my tendency is you're better off seeing things than not. That glazed indifference kids develop can be worse than over-excitement.
Pauline Kael
The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it's one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet - one doesn't expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn't go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.
Pauline Kael
Apparently, Lillian Hellman couldn't shake off the predatory Hubbards after "The Little Foxes"; she wrote this play about the same family, setting it back 30 years earlier in their dark history. The Hubbards, who are supposed to be rising Southern capitalists, are the greatest collection of ghouls since "The Old Dark House" of 1932. Hellman must combine witchcraft with stagecraft - who else could keep a plot in motion with lost documents, wills, poisonings, and pistols, and still be considered a social thinker?
Pauline Kael
And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn't need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn't want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn't want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn't need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made - which is more or less implicit.
Pauline Kael
I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.
Pauline Kael
Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser's delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it - not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.
Pauline Kael
