The Library of America’s new selection of film critic Pauline Kael’s writings showcases her liberalism; in it, we have her castigation of Clint Eastwood’s “Magnum Force” (“the liberalized ideology is just window dressing”), while praising “Julia,” a film based on Stalinist Lillian Hellman’s memoirs and starring fist-clencher Jane Fonda.

This, coupled with Kael’s oft-quoted confusion about President Nixon winning re-election in 1972 because “everyone I know voted for McGovern” gives us the impression of a limousine radical.

But what was omitted from “The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael” would have balanced this portrait; it might even have showed some conservative sentiments on Kael’s part. The omission of her celebrated essay on “Citizen Kane” – done so because of suspicions it was plagiarized – would have revealed her to be in the Ninotchka (a 1939 film that hit Stalinism where it was weakest: in the funny bone) school of anti-communism.

In the essay, she argues that it was the joyless jargon merchants of American Stalinism that destroyed the screwball genre (“the Algonquin group’s own style was lost as their voice blended into the preachy, self-righteous chorus”).

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CONFIRMED: ‘DARK KNIGHT RISES’ PROLOGUE TO PLAY BEFORE IMAX ‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE’

Truly a piece of genius marketing. Expect more of this.

I’m well aware I’m calling this idea a success before the results are in, but it’s a no-brainer.

LINDSAY LOHAN TO POSE NUDE IN PLAYBOY

The only thing worse than the Hollywood gossip media that feasts off the slow-motion train wreck of human beings who also happen to be celebrities is the infrastructure in place to capitalize on the train wrecks many stops along the way. The clubs, the dealers, the hangers-on, the elite rehabs, and of course Playboy. Instead of rallying to protect this young woman from herself, Playboy will exploit her need for money and addiction to attention.

Hell can never be hot enough. (more…)

When I first started film school, it was frustrating to see specific movies vaunted for political reasons and others ignored because they didn’t adhere to that professor’s political agenda. Even films that weren’t overly political were avoided for other’s that had a specific (generally radical) political message. I recall sitting through films like Bamboozled in a course on writing about film where we were also told to emulate Pauline Kael (I didn’t want to adopt her condescending view towards cinema). The sanctimonious view of Spike Lee, Bob Rafelson and Robert Altman got old when I wanted to learn about John Ford, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock (oh you know – those guys who pioneered cinema as we know it).

Luckily, my experience in graduate school is a different story. My professors have been more concerned with historical relevancy and less about turning a film lecture into a civics lesson. One professor who does the field a favor by putting together a fair assessment is Drew Casper, the Alma and Alfred Hitchcock Chair of American Film at USC, with his latest book, Hollywood Film 1963-1976: Years of Revolution and Reaction. Casper takes on a time period of filmmaking very dear to him that he feels has been unfairly dominated by leftist praise that purposely ignores certain films. Exposing his frustrations, Casper says that “predictably, the [scholarly] discussions are rather obsessive, focusing on the same films time and again that fit the critically beloved template” (xvi). This is exactly what I went through as an undergraduate. Extra studying on my part had to be done to get a well-rounded view of film history.

This common template favors liberals, constantly overhyping films like The Graduate, Mash, and Five Easy Pieces with praise that is more suited for something like The Godfather. Casper’s problem is that in the usual  film history text, a film like the leftist McCabe and Mrs. Miller will take up an entire chapter while the conservative and more iconic True Grit (1969 version) goes overlooked. The pious view of some films like Dr. Strangelove will force the ignorance of an equally important film (even those with similar political leanings). This fidelity to the most radical films will create a predictable view of others, “sometimes a conservative film is noted, only to be vilified for its politics, such aspersion clouding any thoughts about its aesthetic merits” (xvii). This is the case with Dirty Harry, where the left loves to hold this film up as fascist (Casper describes the “self-righteous” vitriol spewed by Pualine Kael about this film).

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When Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane first appeared in France, the translator did a curious thing: he snuck Brandon De Wilde’s famous movie line “Shane! Come back!” into the text. That bit, of course, never appeared in the novel. But the fact that the unethical (aw heck, let’s be generous and downgrade the charge to “impish”) translator felt obliged to include it, either by himself or on orders from his editors, speaks volumes about the power of George Stevens’ cinematic version of the tale.

“As far as the favorites of my own films,” George Stevens said late in life, “I have a warm spot in my heart for Shane. It was enormously satisfactory to me from many standpoints. . . We were attempting something on more than one level, more than just the surface level. That’s where a film gets most interesting to me, with those aspects of it that are somewhat hidden, the secondary and third levels of interest.”

Shane is a myth, with all the grandeur and thematic sweep that the term demands. It revealed itself as such even at the beginning, back when it was just a pulp story written by a harried newspaperman who had never been out west. It became even more so when re-interpreted by a Hollywood director haunted by memories of the Holocaust, who was himself aided by a group of actors with a variety of talents and backgrounds, a cinematographer with thirty years in the Tinseltown trenches, and a musician taught in Europe by men who themselves had sat at the feet of Tchaikovsky. All of these people came together to craft a tale that digs deep into our collective psyches, stirring up ghosts from ancient layers of cultural sediment. This was clearly apparent to movie reviewers in 1953. “A homeless cowboy St. George slays the homesteaders’ evil dragon,” said Look magazine when Shane appeared, while Life titled its review “Galahad of the West.” (more…)

By Christmas of 1964, nowhere was safe for thirty-four-year-old Sean Connery.

It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

“The whole damn thing took over,” said his then-wife, the Academy-Award nominated actress Diane Cilento. “He really didn’t know who he was. People would call over to him things like, ‘Hey, Bondy, where’re you off to next?’ or ‘See any Soviet agents lately?’ It became impossible to have any sort of life. . . .It got madder and madder with each film.”

Every time it looked as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they did. In Tokyo (where they greeted him with screams of  “Bondo!”) Connery was using a bathroom urinal when he heard a quiet click. Startled, he glanced up to see a Japanese photographer peeking around his shoulder with a Nikon. On another occasion, after graciously signing his name for an elderly lady at the airport, she reacted with a look of horror. “No, no!” she said, “I wanted James Bond.” Director Terence Young, who was with Connery, remembers that “Sean sort of crumpled. It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being, he was a symbol.” (more…)

After seeing video trailers for Mike Judge’s new show The Goode Family online last week, I was looking forward to seeing the show. Who couldn’t appreciate jabs being taken at a vegan family who wanted to adopt an African baby to show how much they “care” but end up with a white South African baby and name him Ubuntu? (There’s an inside joke in there for computer geeks, which my husband got but I didn’t.) Whose poor dog, Che, also on a vegan diet, is so desperate for meat that he eats all the small animals in the neighborhood he can get his paws on? Who wonder “What would Al Gore do?” when Ubuntu wants his driver’s license even though driving cars and burning fuel is evil? It helped too that I liked Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill.

My interest was piqued even more after reading John Nolte’s post about the New York Times review of the show. Apparently, reviewer Ginia Bellafante had a hard time appreciating the foibles of a family who try so hard to be perfect in how they live and how they relate to their black neighbors that their lives become highly stressful.  To quote The Times: (more…)

The sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.” (more…)

American Movie Classics is marking the 35th anniversary of the release of Death Wish, the controversial and highly influential 1974 film featuring Charles Bronson as a liberal architect in New York City who becomes a vigilante after a group of thugs murder his wife and rape his daughter.

The film was highly successful with audiences, making Bronson a big star and inspiring several sequels. Critics hated it.

Both reactions were caused by the same thing: the film’s uncompromising truthfulness. Death Wish marked the death of liberal illusions about crime and punishment: the idea that crime is caused by disadvantageous social environments and that the solution is to pour even more taxpayer money into bad neighborhoods in an attempt to buy submission from the poorer elements of society.

Death Wish showed that process to be an absurd sham. The film, based on a novel by Brian Garfield, clearly showed that giving in to such political extortion was making social conditions worse and exacerbating the nation’s already terrible crime problem.

Death Wish and its sequels refused to sugarcoat the villainy of the criminals the architect Paul Kersey pursues, nor did it state that he was justified in what he was doing. It simply showed the characters doing what they were inclined to do, making their choices and following the consequences. Such truth was impossible for Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and other elitist critics of the time to stomach.

As direct and truthful as Death Wish is, it is not simplistic or political, despite the ravings of critics at the time. It is a story that was all too plausible, and the characterizations and situations were accurately and insightfully portrayed.

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