Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Kellow Brian

Author:Kellow, Brian [Kellow, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2011-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

While Pauline was hardly alone in enjoying friendships with filmmakers—Richard Schickel and Judith Crist, among others, fraternized with directors and stars, though they maintained their reputations as tough, honest critics—her relationships were more problematic. Because her praise could be more passionate than that of any other critic, it was all the more traumatic for the artists when she turned on them with that same degree of passion.

A particularly complicated case arose with Woody Allen. She had enjoyed two of his recent comedies, Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, feeling that he had come a long way from the facile unevenness of his first solo directorial feature, Take the Money and Run. To Pauline, Allen’s recent work suggested he was “an erratic comic genius,” and she admired the fact that Allen had “found a nonaggressive way of dealing with urban pressures. He stays nice; he’s not insulting, like most New York comedians, and he delivers his zingers without turning into a cynic.” For Pauline, Allen’s “essential sanity” was “the base from which he takes flight.”

Pauline thought that Allen’s new picture, Sleeper, a comedy set in 2173, was the most stable and most sustained of his films, “without the lapses that had found their way into his earlier work.” In it, Allen starred as the thirty-five-year-old owner of the Happy Carrot health food restaurant in Greenwich Village, who is admitted to the hospital for a peptic ulcer and wakes up two hundred years later. Allen had written to Pauline late in 1972 that Sleeper was a Buster Keaton–type comedy, though not in the pure Keaton spirit because of the intrusion of sound. Allen and Pauline had a friendly, long-running argument about the impact of sound on comedy, with Allen taking the position that sound prevented the great comics from achieving total reality. While Pauline found Sleeper consistently funny, something was missing: She felt that “Allen’s new sense of control over the medium and over his own material seems to level out the abrasive energy. You can be with it all the way, and yet it doesn’t impose itself on your imagination—it dissolves when it’s finished.”

Pauline saw deeply into the appeal Allen had for the 1970s movie audience: He was the brainy, nerdy kid who had always been beaten up on the school grounds but had managed to triumph because of his brains and wit, which, despite layers of insecurity and paranoia, he always believed in. Allen was the smart, irreverent observer of the social revolution that had been shaking up America since the ’60s, but although this brand of comedy was popular with young people—his script for Sleeper took gentle jabs at the NRA and the Nixon administration—he was anything but subversive. Quite the opposite: He was too much of a misfit to be a genuine hero of the youth movement, and he was a nostalgist with a deep love for traditional pop culture. Pauline was probably right when she judged that Allen had a misguided attraction to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.