Pauline Kael - I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-65

I LOST IT
AT THE MOVIES

PAULINE KAEL

An Atlantic Monthly Press Book

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY BOSTON TORONTO

COPYRIGHT 1954, 1955, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, BY PAULINE KAEL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW TO BE PRINTED IN A MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 65-10908

FIRST PRINTING

Throwing the Race is reprinted by permission of Moviegoer . The Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: La Notte , La Dolce Vita , Marienbad is reprinted from The Massachusetts Review , 1963, The Massachusetts Review, Inc. The Earrings of Madame de... , The Golden Coach , Smiles of a Summer Night are reprinted by permission of Kulchur . Morality Plays Right and Left, Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?, Fantasies of the Art House Audience, and Salt of the Earth are reprinted by permission of Sight and Sound . Commitment and the Straitjacket, Circles and Squares, Hud , The Innocents , One, Two, Three , Billy Budd , Hemingways Adventures of a Young Man , and Films of the Quarter, note on LAvventura , are reprinted from Film Quarterly , by permission of the Regents of the University of California.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Little, Brown & Company (Canada) Limited

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and its president, Mr. Gordon N. Ray.

I wish to thank Peter Davison and William Abrahams of the Atlantic Monthly Press, and Gary Arnold and Alan Hislop for editorial advice and assistance. And I wish to express my admiration and respect for Dwight Macdonald, who despite my hectoring him in print has, personally, returned good for evil.

Acknowledgment is made to the Atlantic Monthly , Film Quarterly , Partisan Review , Sight and Sound , the Massachusetts Review , Kulchur , Art Film Publications , the Second Coming , Film Culture , and Moviegoer for permission to use material which they originally published.

Contents

Introduction

Zeitgeist and Poltergeist;
Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?

Reflections from the side of the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel

Bring your bathing suit, said the movie producer, who was phoning me to confirm our date for lunch at his hotel, and before I could think of a way to explain that I didnt have one with me, he added, And remember, youre meeting people for cocktails in my suite at six, so just bring your change of clothes. Now I was completely out of my depth: I just said I would join him at 2:30 and hung up. Somehow I didnt want to come right out and say that I didnt have a change of clothes in the evening sense that he meant. Los Angeles dislocates my values, makes me ashamed of not being all the things Im not and dont ordinarily care to be. Each time I get on the jet to return to San Francisco its like turning the time-machine backward and being restored to an old civilization that I understand.

Los Angeles is only 400 miles away from where I live and so close by jet that I can breakfast at home, give a noon lecture at one of the universities in LA, and be back in time to prepare dinner. But its the city of the future, and I am more a stranger there than in a foreign country. In a foreign country people dont expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they dont consider that you might be different because they dont recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.

Feeling rather seedy in the black and brown Italian suit which had seemed quite decent in San Francisco, I arrived at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, sans bathing suit or change of clothes. And as I walked past the recumbent forms to the producer, also recumbent, who was limply waving to me, I remembered Katharine Hepburn as poor Alice Adams in her simple organdy frock among the plushly overdressed rich girls at the party. Only here it was I who was overdressed; they were expensively undressed. They didnt look young, and they didnt act old, these people eating and drinking and sunning themselves around the pool. They seemed to be ageless like crocodiles; and although they werent fat, they were flabby.

Despite the narcissism of their attitudes, and the extraordinary amount of loving care they lavished on their bodies, each giving way to the sun-blessed fantasy of himself, stretching this way and that to catch or avoid the rays, it was impossible to feel superior to them. They could afford to make this spectacle of themselves.

In San Francisco, vulgarity, bad taste, ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that it is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you cant afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety. Big money and its way of life is exciting; the vulgarity of the powerful is ugly, but not boring. This, you begin to feel, is how people behave when theyre strong enough to act out their fantasies of wealth. In this environment, if youre not making it in a big way, youre worse than nothing youre a failure. But if you can still pass for young, maybe theres still time to make it; or, at least, you can delay the desperation and self-contempt that result from accepting these standards that so few can meet. Its easy to reject all this when Im back in San Francisco. But not here. You cant really laugh at the Beverly Hills Hotel and people who pay $63 a day for a suite thats like a schoolboys notions of luxury. Its too impressive. Laughter would stick in the throat like sour grapes.

What sensible people have always regarded as the most preposterous, unreal and fantastic side of life in California the sun palace of Los Angeles and its movie-centered culture is becoming embarrassingly, fantastically actual, not just here but almost anywhere. It embodies the most common, the most widespread dream luxury in the sun, a state of permanent vacation. And as it is what millions of people want and will pay money for, the Hollywood fantasy is economically practical. Across the country, homes become as simple, bare and convenient as simulated motels, and motels are frequently used as residences.

But pioneers suffer from stresses we dont know about, and the people I met in Los Angeles seem to have developed a terrible tic: they cannot stop talking about their cultural explosion. The producer went on and on about it, about their new museums, and their concerts, and their galleries, and their legitimate collegiate theater. It was like my first trip to New York, when I wanted to see skyscrapers and go to shows and hear jazz, and New Yorkers wanted me to admire the flowers blooming in Rockefeller Plaza. I wanted to talk about the Los Angeles that fascinated and disturbed me, and about movies and why there were fewer good movies in 1963 than in any year in my memory. He discussed the finer things in life, trying to convince me and maybe himself that Los Angeles, in its cultural boom, was making phenomenal strides toward becoming like other cities only, of course, more so.