The Pearls of Pauline

When Critic Pauline Kael goes to the movies, she often spends as much time looking at the audience as at the screen. While watching Bonnie and Clyde, she noticed that a woman sitting near by kept insisting rather frantically, "It's a comedy, it's a comedy." That reaction, thought Miss Kael, aptly reflected the film's unsettling mixture of violence, humor and tragedy. Watching The PARIS.MATCH Defiant Ones in an audience composed of whites and Negroes, she noted two reactions when the black convict, Sidney Poitier, sacrifices his own freedom to try to save his white companion, Tony Curtis. The whites accepted the gesture in approving silence; the Negroes hooted derisively.

It is this attention to a film's entire environment "that distinguishes Pauline Kael, 49, from her fellow critics. Movies are no peripheral affair for her but the most interesting fact of her life. "They move so fast into the bloodstream," she says. For this reason, she does not lightly suffer actors who give less than their all. "He seems more eccentric than heroic," she wrote of Marlon Brando's performance in Mutiny on the Bounty. "He's like a short, flabby tenor wandering around the stage and not singing; you wonder what he's doing there." She described Dirk Bogarde in Accident: "He aches all the time all over, like an all-purpose sufferer for a television commercial, locked in with a claustrophobia of his own body and sensibility." And she disposed of Ann-Margret in a remake of Stagecoach: "She does most of her acting inside her mouth."

Ill at Ease. A native Californian, Pauline Kael arrived in New York three years ago and landed a reviewing job on McCall's. She did not stay very long because of her unladylike way of dismissing certain movies with a karate chop of criticism. "I thought I'd last six months," she says. "I lasted five." She moved on to the more congenial New Republic, then switched to The New Yorker last winter. She has brought out two books of collected criticism, Lost It at the Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Though she is now considered one of the country's top movie critics, Miss Kael still feels ill at ease in the East and lacks rapport with fellow intellectuals in Manhattan. Not that she always makes things easy for them. She is even racier in her talk than in her writing, and does not hesitate to correct someone's erroneous ideas about a movie. A chain-smoker, she exhibits that edge of insecurity of the almost emancipated woman. About the only publication she refuses to write for is Playboy, because of its condescending view of women. "For a woman to write for Playboy," she says,"is like a Negro being against civil rights.",

Pauline Kael does not pass judgment aloofly; she puts herself into her reviews, revealing glimpses of her personal life to illustrate points in movies. Any discerning reader will pick up information on her friends, boy friends, ex-husbands (three), her 19-year-old daughter Gina, not to mention her feelings about other critics, which border on the unprintable. In her review of Hud, the footloose, amoral rancher played by Paul Newman, she berated her fellow reviewers for considering Hud a bad sort. To make the point that he was pretty typical, she compared him to her own father, who, she said, also rebelled against authority and committed adultery, yet remained pleasantly "democratic in the Western way that Easterners still don't understand."

For all her derision of U.S. movie moguls and their rampant commercialism, Pauline Kael is not an art-house snob. She prefers genuine American kitsch, if it has style and verve, to such avant-garde films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Red Desert and Last Year at Marienbad ("the snow job in the ice palace"). Among her favorite directors are John Frankenheimer and Orson Welles, who provide "clean, fast pacing without the fancy stuff. It goes better with our national rhythm." A onetime experimental moviemaker in San Francisco, where she grew up and attended the University of California at Berkeley, she finds today's underground film makers too proud of their careless technique. "The movie brutalists, it's all too apparent, are hurting our eyes to save our souls."

Holy Hindsight. In her reviews, Miss Kael usually assembles a wealth of detail from past movies. She detected that footage purporting to show atomic-bomb damage in Hiroshima Mon Amour was not authentic, but had been lifted from an earlier Japanese atrocity film. She is equally discerning with movies that are morally pretentious. With "holy hindsight," she wrote, Screenwriter Abby Mann and Producer Stanley Kramer had used Ship of Fools to heap scorn on Germans and Jews who lacked the prescience to see that Nazism was coming. The film, she asserted, implies too facile an equation between shipboard rudeness and the Final Solution. "Hitlerism," Kael maintained, "was not produced because people don't love each other enough, and it is non-sense to give us dinner-party snubs as the beginnings of the gas chambers. I can easily imagine avoiding Kramer and Mann at a party, but I would not incinerate them. (I wish I could be sure they would treat me the same way.)"

Perhaps the biggest present-day threat to the movies, thinks Pauline Kael, is television. The movie directors who get their start on TV are too careless of detail and too enamored of closeups. The old movies shown on TV are truncated, miniaturized versions of the real thing. Growing up on a diet of TV, she is convinced, has put college kids in the habit of walking in and out of movies "as if they were providing their own commercial breaks." And no one who walks out of a good movie is a friend of Pauline Kael's.

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