Book Review: Conversations with Pauline Kael

(Borrowed from Lincoln Center Public Library) At a current exhibition celebrating the New Yorker magazine at the New York Public Library, there is no mention of Pauline Kael. This is surprising since she was probably their most influential critic and perhaps the most influential American movie critic ever. This collection of profiles and interviews forms a mini-biography and offers several of her insights on the state of the movies--both the art and the business aspects--from the 1960s to the time of her retirement in the 1990s. There is some repetition but numerous interesting observations on the shifting national cultural scene. According to Kael, the 1970s were the real Golden Age of American moviemaking. Blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars ruined the creative landscape created by Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma and Altman. Along with Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael, this volume offers a glimpse of her tastes and how her mind worked. As a result of reading this book, I went back to some of her reviews in my battered paperback editions of Deeper Into Movies and Reeling. I find I can only read a few at a time. Her tastes are not mine. I don't always agree with her, but she always had something arresting to say and expressed it in an off-kilter, intriguing way.

Stream of Consciousness

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga

This morning I was sitting at a table in the Starbucks on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. I had a large Earl Grey tea and after gong through my phone for any hellish news or interesting updates on the cultural scene, I was reading Conversations with Pauline Kael. (Yesterday I went to the 100 Years of the New Yorker exhibit at the Public Library with the lions and there was not a mention of her, one of the magazine's most influential critics and perhaps the most influential film critic ever.) Two guys sat at the next table. They were in work clothes with hard hats and seemed to be killing time. One had his phone out and was listening at full volume to some reality true-crime show about a dog cleverly pretending to play dead and then springing to life in order to save its young mistress from a kidnapper.

The loud video didn't bother me. We were in a public space. Last week, I was furious over a similar but different situation while attending an Off-Broadway theater. The young woman diagonally in front of me was continually taking pictures with her phone of the show which was about Sumo wrestlers. She was snapping a series of pix during a climatic and colorful Sumo match. It was getting distracting. Finally, I leaned way over to my left, tapped her on the shoulder and fiercely whispered, "Would you please stop that?" She put the phone away and it did not appear for the rest of the show. I think that sort of thing is happening more and more. Younger people feel no compunction about whipping out their phones at a movie or play and taking photos. It may be the craze to broadcast that they've been somewhere and want to comment on it or preserve the experience.

After I finished my tea, I moved over to a counter because I wanted to finish one of the interviews with Kael and I didn't want to listen to any more about the brave and clever dog. The Musak was playing a duet between Tony Bennet and Lady Gaga. At least I think it was Lady Gaga. I can't tell who she is. Her voice could be anybody's and her personal style is gowns, make-up and hair in the mode of Hollywood's Golden Era. But it's all exterior. There is no her. Her name is a confection, her exterior is a cartoon. There is no one like Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Amy Winehouse. But Gaga is everyone and therefore she is no one. 

"Lose That Long Face" from A Star Is Born

That made me think about the various iterations of A Star Is Born. Except for the first actress to play the lead, Janet Gaynor, the role was been essayed by the leading musical star of her generation--Garland, Streisand, and Gaga. The Garland version is my favorite, but its original three-hour cut was butchered by Warners Brothers to fit in more screenings so the studio could make back its investment. Some of the cuts made sense and did not hurt the resultant released version. The scenes with James Mason losing track of Judy after he has promised her a job at his studio were ok to go. But the excised segment that kills me is the "Lose That Long Face" number. The point is to contrast an "up" elaborate song full of crowds of tap-dancing extras with Vicki Lester's heart-wrenching despair over her husband's (Mason's) alcoholism. It still works because we only see Judy as Vicki delivering an impassioned speech to the studio boss (Charles Bickford) and then turn on the pizzazz like a light switch for the finale. But the number itself is sheer joy. I love Harold Arlen's bouncy tune and Ira Gershwin's intricate lyrics. I've been watching the extended, restored version on YouTube over and over again. Something just goes through me when Judy gets to the climactic "Don't give in....to that frown/Turn that frown uuuuuupside down!" She and the two kids who tap dance with her are in red to stand out from the pale blue of the set and the costumes of the extras. Everything works.

I finished reading the chapter of Kael interviews and then went to Blink Fitness.

Book Review: Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael

(Taken out of the NYPL for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center) I was browsing the film section and came across this thin volume recording a last interview with legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael conducted by music critic Francis Davis. At only 126 short pages, I finished it in an hour or so. I liked the introduction best, giving an idea of Kael's later years. Suffering from Parkinson's Disease, she retired from writing to Great Barrington, Mass. Davis describes planning a night out at the local cinema including who would give them a ride, Kael's issues with mobility and having pizza with her grandson who was living with her for the summer. A torrential downpour prevents their going out and they wind out watching a DVD of Galaxy Quest and an episode of Sex and the City. (The grandson goes out despite the heavy rain.) There is something sweet and cozy about this evocation of a night at home with a cherished friend.

The conversation is far ranging and not very deep, covering her days at the New Yorker and relationship with editor William Shawn, many movies and TV shows and Kael's disenchantment with the contemporary arts scene. You get a hint of her wit and an idea of her taste (which I often disagree with. She hated Star Wars and finds The English Patient self-important and tedious, for example.) 

I have several of Kael's books of collected reviews, but I have yet to read any of them cover to cover. I usually pick out individual pieces if I've just seen the film under consideration to compare my thoughts with hers. Some day I will have to read these works as a whole rather than dipping into them occasionally so that I can get an idea of the state of cinema for the several decades Kael covered. Afterglow would make a flavorful brief dessert to such a feast.