Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Pauline Kael

Author:Pauline Kael
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 1968-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Orson Welles’s Falstaff came and went so fast there was hardly time to tell people about it, but it should be back (it should be around forever) and it should be seen. It’s blighted by economics and it will never reach the audience Welles might have and should have reached, because there just ain’t no way. So many people — and with such complacent satisfaction, almost, one would say, delight — talk of how Welles has disappointed them, as if he had willfully thrown away his talent through that “lack of discipline” which is always brought in to explain failure. There is a widespread notion that a man who accomplishes a great deal is thus a “genius” who should be able to cut through all obstacles; and if he can’t (and who can?), what he does is too far beneath what he should have done to be worth consideration. On the contrary, I think that the more gifted and imaginative a director, the greater the obstacles. It is the less imaginative director who has always flourished in the business world of movies — the “adaptable,” reliable fellow who is more concerned to get the movie done than to do it his way, who, indeed, after a while has no way of his own, who is as anonymous as the director of Prince of Foxes. And the more determined a man is to do it his way or a new way, the more likelihood that this man (quickly labeled a “troublemaker” or “a difficult person” or “self-destructive” or “a man who makes problems for himself” — standard Hollywoodese for an artist and, of course, always true at some level, and the greater the artist, the more true it’s likely to become) won’t get the support he needs to complete the work his way. In the atmosphere of anxiety surrounding him, the producers may decide to “save” the project by removing him or adding to or subtracting from his work, or finally dumping the film without publicity or press screenings, consigning it to the lower half of double bills.

All these things have happened to Welles (Citizen Kane was not big enough at the box office and it caused trouble; he was not allowed to finish his next picture, The Magnificent Ambersons). Treatment of this sort, which usually marks the end of great movie careers, was for Welles the beginning. Most of these things have happened to men as pacific as Jean Renoir, whom few could accuse of being “undisciplined.” (Renoir turned to writing a novel, his first, in 1966, when he could not raise money to make a movie, though the budget he required was less than half that allotted to movies made to be premiered on television.) And they are still happening to men in Hollywood like Sam Peckinpah. Such men are always blamed for the eventual failure of whatever remains of their work, while men who try for less have the successes (and are forgiven their routine failures because they didn’t attempt anything the producers didn’t understand).

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