Pauline Kael

[Dan Warburton]

you should start a Kael thread, I keep one of her anthologies in the bathroom for months at a time and find something quotable pretty much every time.

Well, suppose you could have Jon, but I'll take you up on your offer anyway. The book I'm halfway through now, The Age Of Movies, which is a kind of best of culled from I Lost It At The Movies through to Movie Love, is a good read, if a little uneven. But oddly enough, things I remember disliking a few years ago - her take on The French Connection, for example - I find myself agreeing with now. And even if I don't (I thoroughly enjoyed Petulia a couple of weeks ago, but can see why she disliked it so much - and she's got a bee in her bonnet about Kubrick), she was a great writer.
The one area where I think she comes unstuck is trying - well, not trying, actually - to make a distinction between what she calls "trash" and "art" (though I think she's spot on at the beginning of Section X of that piece).
If I can get my nose out of Karagarga I'll try and dig up some choice quotes. Maybe you could too, Jon.

[jon abbey]

yes, I'll definitely add to this thread. my anthology is called "For Keeps" which is a 1300+ page large paperback that looks like it's OOP now, a fifth of everything she ever wrote.

[Dan Warburton]

Yep, that's the one I was looking for - seems to be hard to get, so I splashed out for the other one instead. Anyway, looking forward to some lively discussion on this thread.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

She's probably the only film critic who read Henry James' complete works. I may not remember correctly, but I think it was what got me interested in her books in the first place. Because of Peter Biskind's stupid and biased depiction of her in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, I used to think that she was just a pretentious, dictatorial harridan. What a mistake. I often find myself disagreeing with her, but as I grow tired of being right, or at least, trying to be, I don't have any problems with her reviews being challenging and, also, replete with bad faith and prejudices. She writes well enough.

[Dan Warburton]

I enjoyed reading her piece on Peckinpah's The Killer Elite, except - amusingly - she likes films of his I don't much (Killer Elite in particular) and doesn't seem to care for Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, which I think is a masterpiece (how can anyone not like Warren Oates in that film?... whatever).

[Lao Tsu Ben]

God, is THIS thing long. Here it is, courtesy of me. It's an excerpt, or rather, much of the text. But perhaps you will have to download those books, the links of which I gave you a while ago, because it's too fucking long, even to copy. I left untouched the introductory comments.

The Making of The Group


[ Incredibly, Kael excluded this from For Keeps. It's the best thing she ever wrote. In addition to displaying her compassion, film sense, crap-cutting humor, and literacy, it's a stellar example of "on the set" investigative journalism. She never attempted anything like it again.

Is PK too cruel to Sidney Lumet? She certainly gets her digs in:

 I had asked him [Lumet] during one of our first talks why he had given up acting and he had begun a long explanation about how acting was a faggot's career and how he knew that if he was ever going to give a woman a real human relationship, etc., and I had simply jotted down "too short for acting career."

But she  respects Lumet's professionalism and the fact that he'd made some of the most interesting recent movies, such as Long Day's Journey into Night, although she was horrified that Lumet could laugh at the plight of O'Neill's pathetic characters. She sums up Lumet with a nugget of wisdom Probably what we couldn't accept was the crudeness of his enjoyment - he enjoys playing practical jokes on the set, too - a crudeness which, I think, is integral to his strengths as well as his weaknesses as a director. A great many important people now, and throughout history, would probably, up close, seem very crude to the people who admire them from a distance.

And Kael's verdict on Mary McCarthy applies equally to herself:

She was not only a writer: she was a culture heroine, with pride in intelligence, and wit that cleaned away commonplaces. She was direct, a liberator who brought women's experiences out into the open.]



THOSE who get disgusted with American movies may often be heard asking why America isn't producing great film directors - as if we had a shortage of talent, as if artists were yet to be attracted to the medium. The more relevant question might be: does the American film industry foster mediocrity and make it almost impossible for artists to work?

   What kind of people get to make movies, and what gives a movie its particular shape? I hoped to find some possible answers by observing how Mary McCarthy's novel The Group became the movie The Group.

THE PACKAGE

   By August 28, 1963, when the novel was published, every major American motion picture studio had considered it and turned it down. Charles K. Feldman, an agent turned independent packager of movie properties - a function sometimes described as "executive producer" - bought it for $162,500 (partly in deferred payments) plus 10 percent of the distributor's gross after the break-even point, and proceeded to try to convince the com-panies that had already rejected the book to finance the production. The Group had just reached the bookstores: Feldman hired publicity men to promote it. In addition to the publishers' advertising expenditures, he says he put $50,000 into advertising in the United States, $12,000 in England, and sizable amounts into other countries where the novel was coming out in translation. He claims that it was his money that made the book a best seller. Several reasonably disinterested publishers I have talked with say that The Group would have made it without Feldman's money (though it may have helped in keeping the book so high on the lists for so long). Feldman's principal aim was to increase the value of his property so that he could make an advantageous deal with one of the studios. They would need convincing, of course, that the book which they had not thought would make a movie could be made into a movie. On the Riviera, he arranged with Sidney Buchman, a veteran Hollywood writer, THE PACKAGE

   By August 28, 1963, when the novel was published, every major American motion picture studio had considered it and turned it down. Charles K. Feldman, an agent turned independent packager of movie properties - a function sometimes described as "executive producer" - bought it for $162,500 (partly in deferred payments) plus 10 percent of the distributor's gross after the break-even point, and proceeded to try to convince the com-panies that had already rejected the book to finance the production. The Group had just reached the bookstores: Feldman hired publicity men to promote it. In addition to the publishers' advertising expenditures, he says he put $50,000 into advertising in the United States, $12,000 in England, and sizable amounts into other countries where the novel was coming out in translation. He claims that it was his money that made the book a best seller. Several reasonably disinterested publishers I have talked with say that The Group would have made it without Feldman's money (though it may have helped in keeping the book so high on the lists for so long). Feldman's principal aim was to increase the value of his property so that he could make an advantageous deal with one of the studios. They would need convincing, of course, that the book which they had not thought would make a movie could be made into a movie. On the Riviera, he arranged with Sidney Buchman, a veteran Hollywood writer, THE PACKAGE

   By August 28, 1963, when the novel was published, every major American motion picture studio had considered it and turned it down. Charles K. Feldman, an agent turned independent packager of movie properties - a function sometimes described as "executive producer" - bought it for $162,500 (partly in deferred payments) plus 10 percent of the distributor's gross after the break-even point, and proceeded to try to convince the com-panies that had already rejected the book to finance the production. The Group had just reached the bookstores: Feldman hired publicity men to promote it. In addition to the publishers' advertising expenditures, he says he put $50,000 into advertising in the United States, $12,000 in England, and sizable amounts into other countries where the novel was coming out in translation. He claims that it was his money that made the book a best seller. Several reasonably disinterested publishers I have talked with say that The Group would have made it without Feldman's money (though it may have helped in keeping the book so high on the lists for so long). Feldman's principal aim was to increase the value of his property so that he could make an advantageous deal with one of the studios. They would need convincing, of course, that the book which they had not thought would make a movie could be made into a movie. On the Riviera, he arranged with Sidney Buchman, a veteran Hollywood writer, to adapt the book and serve as producer. Long ago when Buchman had been head of production at Columbia, Feldman had been his agent. Now, Feldman hired Buchman for $180,000, plus a percentage.

   Buchman is almost a one-man history of Hollywood. His first screenplay was for Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross in 1932; his credits as writer or co-writer include such diverse films as If I Had a Million, Theodora Goes Wild, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Holiday, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Talk of the Town, Jolson Sings Again, and A Song to Remember. Buchman's career fell apart during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. He went abroad, made his home at Cannes, and except for the 1961 English film, The Mark, which he produced and co-authored, and perhaps a little bootleg job here or there, he was out of work (in a gentlemanly, comfortable way) for fifteen years. He was sixty-three when he took on the labor of The Group - a very tired and cynical sixty-three, and yet, curiously enough, determined to turn this new movie into some kind of progressive statement.

   It might be asked at this point: why didn't Mary McCarthy adapt her own material for the screen? On the first page of her first book she had used an analogy with movies to describe her writing process, and her fiction - which is reportorial and semi-autobiographical - is peculiarly cinematic. She records characters and relationships from the outside and she details the costumes, furnishings, and locations that give the actions specific meanings. Is there a more completely worked-out scenario in modern fiction than "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt"? It's already a movie. However, there is no indication that she was asked to work on The Group. She told Feldman that she didn't think the novel could work as a movie without a lot of invention. But Buchman stayed very close to the book, hardly even inventing any dialogue, although transposing characters' thoughts into speech. She had not asked to see the screenplay. Buchman sent her a copy, anyway. She did not comment on it. Perhaps his fidelity to her material did not please her any more than infidelity might have; she is, notoriously, a writer given to seeing the faults in any course of action. And in this case it was obvious that neither inventiveness nor fidelity could be completely satisfactory. There were huge structural gaps in the book that in dramatic terms (and in terms of fiction also) cried out for invention; yet Buchman must have known that he could not invent in her style. He played it safe, preferring narrative holes to inadequate invention.

   This was not exactly pleasing to Feldman, who admits publicly that he has no interest in Mary McCarthy's stature as a writer. Feldman's enthusiasm for the project had little to do with the literary qualities or dramatic potential of Miss McCarthy's work, but  the gorgeous possibility of getting options on a group of inexpensive, luscious young nobodies, building them up into stars, and then having them available for his own films and for handsome loan-out deals. He had had a similar intention when he bought What's New, Pussycat? - which he had also intended to cast with unknowns and little-knowns. actions specific meanings. Is there a more completely worked-out scenario in modern fiction than "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt"? It's already a movie. However, there is no indication that she was asked to work on The Group. She told Feldman that she didn't think the novel could work as a movie without a lot of invention. But Buchman stayed very close to the book, hardly even inventing any dialogue, although transposing characters' thoughts into speech. She had not asked to see the screenplay. Buchman sent her a copy, anyway. She did not comment on it. Perhaps his fidelity to her material did not please her any more than infidelity might have; she is, notoriously, a writer given to seeing the faults in any course of action. And in this case it was obvious that neither inventiveness nor fidelity could be completely satisfactory. There were huge structural gaps in the book that in dramatic terms (and in terms of fiction also) cried out for invention; yet Buchman must have known that he could not invent in her style. He played it safe, preferring narrative holes to inadequate invention.

   This was not exactly pleasing to Feldman, who admits publicly that he has no interest in Mary McCarthy's stature as a writer. Feldman's enthusiasm for the project had little to do with the literary qualities or dramatic potential of Miss McCarthy's work, but  the gorgeous possibility of getting options on a group of inexpensive, luscious young nobodies, building them up into stars, and then having them available for his own films and for handsome loan-out deals. He had had a similar intention when he bought What's New, Pussycat? - which he had also intended to cast with unknowns and little-knowns. But somehow things got out of hand, in the way movie financing-casting (a peculiarly linked process) often does, and he had wound up with Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Gapucine, Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, and Paula Prentiss. This time, with a property featuring eight young girls, surely he would, get his own young Capucines and An- dresses; and with a stable of young beauties under option, a modern movie packager-producer could be richer than the greatest whoremasters of history. (There are even directors in Hollywood who make more money from the pieces they own of the stars they gave their first break to than from directing.) Feldman's ideas of casting are rather basic: "You can always teach them to act." He was so confident that this time he would get cheap stars out of the deal that when Buchman had completed a draft of the screenplay, and United Artists became interested, he stipulated as part of the package deal that UA should spend at least $100,000 to exploit the new talent (which he assumed would be his new talent).

There was another special interest that Feldman had in the book: a chance to exploit a lesbian theme. He assumed that the screenplay would center on Lakey's affairs - which would, of course, have to be invented for her. Instead, Buchman held so close to the text that waiting for Lakey to reappear in the movie is about like waiting for Godot. And the whole lesbian theme was handled with such discretion that when the movie was finished the United Artists publicity men threw out the campaign they had prepared to exploit it and prepared a new campaign featuring a true- confessions approach to each of the girls.

   At the point when the deal was made, Charles K. Feldman became The Man in the background, and Sidney Buchman, more or less in charge of the production, began looking for a director. Most of the men interviewed were television directors who had never made a movie. This partly explains why recent movies are so bad: there is almost no way for young movie directors to get experience or make a reputation except on television (which is very different from movie-making, although movie-making is now becoming like television) or in the theatre (which is even more different). But the older movie directors are dying off or are priced out of the market (they work on huge, slow super-epics). So for a production like this, TV and stage directors are considered and may get their first movie experience. Negotiations and discussions were going on with these men when Sidney Lumet, who has the same agent ai Buchman, saw the script and leaped at the job. Lumet had not read the novel; it's doubtful if he'd ever read any Mary McCarthy. What he leaped at, evidently, was Sidney Buchman'i screenplay, a job that would pay him $125,000, and a movie with a longer shooting schedule and a larger budget than he had ever had.

   Why were they about to start on the cumbersome, tedious process of making a movie out of this novel? Why were they going to all the trouble of construction and reproduction to tell a story that had already been told in a simple, efficient, inexpensive way? Sometimes there are people who really want to bring their vision of a particular novel to life. But the filming of The Group was strictly a business proposition. Yet it presented aesthetic problems. In theory, there is little that a novel can do that a movie can't but, practically, American audiences won't sit for the length and detail and complexity of a novel. Almost all the details in this novel - the fads and fashions and chitchat - could be dramatically rendered, but how would the movie re-create the political climate, the sexual morality, the decor of the thirties - the so recent past - for the "large" movie audience? Much distortion and simplification was inevitable; perhaps even more was accidental.

   Sidney Lumet had been getting work directing movies for several years because he was cheap, fast, and reliable; but when he was signed for The Group he had still never had a box-office hit. And the people who put movie packages together are more concerned with box-office results than with the quality of the films. Lumet was known to critics and perhaps to the art-house audience for his first movie, the one-set, low-budget Twelve Angry Men, which, despite critical enthusiasm, hadn't shown a profit; the literate, uneven Stage Struck; the spectacular artistic and commercial disaster, the Brando-Magnani The Fugitive Kind; the ambitious and financially unsuccessful A View from the Bridge; and the superb transcription of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, which had cost less than a half million and still lost money. He had been making some of the most interesting movies coming out of the United States, but without at least one winner he had no standing in the world of big movies, big profits.

   He was part of that earlier television-into-movies new generation of di-rectors, but two other members of that generation, John Frankenheimer and Martin Ritt, had already made it into the big time with hits, and he was still in the young-promising category, i.e., hustling, taking the quick jobs (like Fail-Safe) that bigger directors didn't want. He could get these jobs because of his reputation for staying within budget and maybe even finishing ahead of schedule. Lumet wanted to work and he liked to work fast. He would not try to reshape the scenario or risk holding up production to do something unscheduled; he wouldn't plead for a few extra days to get something right.

   If a director in another country has succeeded financially with an unusual project or approach, he is acclaimed as an artist and the big American companies are anxious to get him, but if a young American director shows any traces of really caring about what he does or how he does it - any signs of artistry - they become uneasy and clamp down on him. Art means risks; to businessmen, taking risks is unprofessional behavior. But by the time a man has made a TV reputation, he knows the score and there's very little he has left of his own to express. He has become a mechanic, and he'll approach making a movie as a job promotion, a step up from television. Businessmen want directors they can trust on the basis of past performance (and this, ironically, may be one of the reasons so many small pictures lose money). Lumet was television-trained; that meant he would do things the obvious ways that producers don't worry about. Or, if he did give them something to worry about, at least it would be something they could understand. And even without any hits on his record, Lumet was trustworthy because, for example, he never considered it a deterrent factor that when he read the novel he hated it. He was no dangerous artist; he was out to do a job.

   Sidney Lumet's background was about as far from Mary McCarthy's Vassar as you can get. The son of an actor from Poland who appeared in the Yiddish theatre in New York (the elder Lumet appears as Mr. Schneider in The Group), he had himself been an infant actor - indeed the infant Jesus in Max Reinhardt's New York production of The Eternal Road. He was Christ again, as a boy, in Maxwell Anderson's Journey to Jerusalem, with Arlene Francis as Mary. He was understudy to one of the Dead End Kids on Broadway, and it is not perhaps stretching the point to suggest that both of these roles are still visible in his behavior. He's messianic and driven, but like an understudy to a Dead End Kid, he's in a hurry to get there. Lumet, in the conventional sense, is probably not very well educated. But, in a way, untutored high intelligence may make a person seem even more "creative," as if it came out of nowhere, was "genius." And in show business people love the idea of "genius": it's so much easier to throw the term about than to try to explain why certain people manage to get somewhere. Lumet, despite his almost ostentatious show-business streetboy's manner, is very well self-educated in terms of what he may be able to use. He reads for a purpose. A standard complaint of his earlier producers is: "Sidney doesn't listen." But he hears what he wants to, not what they want him to. In conversation, he doesn't respond to what doesn't immediately relate to hit own interests, so the subject soon changes, or he simply changes it - as he is likely to be the dominating force anyway. He seems to have almost no intellectual curiosity of a more generalized or objective nature.

   Working on The Group, Lumet was not scholarly - to put it mildly - about Mary McCarthy or about Vassar, but as a life-long actor and an experienced TV and movie director, he showed a professional respect for acting and his job. He and Buchman did the casting together, and, with the exception of Candice Bergen, a beauty glorious and young enough to gladden Feldman's and anyone else's heart, they selected for talent. Candy Bergen was hardly a poor struggling unknown who could be signed up for peanuts and promises and tied up for years of servitude. And the two Sidneys moved so fast in casting and getting underway that by the time Feldman's minions, uncertain and apprehensive about whether Feldman would want the other girls - actresses! - and which of them, got around to framing agreements, the girls were already in the picture and didn't need to sign away their futures in order to get this chance.

THE CASTING

The casting of movies is in some ways more important than the casting of plays: in the theatre a competent actor can make many roles his own, but in movies what an actor knows and can do is often less important than what he simply physically is - the way he looks, how he photographs, what he inadvertently projects. On stage he may be able to become a whole gallery of characters; but the camera exposes the actor as a man of a certain age, with definite physical assets and liabilities. There he is in close-up, huge on the screen, and if he's trying to play something that is physically different from what he is, he looks like a fool, and only if he is a good and subtle actor can he play something that is psychologically very different from how he is. When a movie is derived from a popular novel, the casting is even more complex: the roles have not been written with certain actors in mind; rather, the actors must somehow fit into the novelist's conception, or at least into a conception the public will accept as a reasonable facsimile. At best, in popular, commercial movies they should be like illustrations to the text - whose cover they will probably adorn in the paperback edition that is timed to the release of the film; or so popular in themselves that they will be stronger than the images in the text. All that was obvious from the outside - I knew it as a critic; these were simply the facts of the situation. But sitting in a little office with the producer and director as they interviewed actors and then discussed them, there were factors I had never really considered as a critic.

Everybody knows and talks about the state of the theatre; we all know there are few jobs, except in TV, which is now almost all in California, but here was the living evidence - actors trying to get a job. Budgeted at $2,600,000, The Group was the most expensive movie yet made in New York; there were a lot of parts in it, and perhaps half the out-of-work actors in New York at one time or another must have had hopes. As each actor or actress came in for the prearranged interview, the air in the little room was heavy with strain and embarrassment. Many of them had worked with Lumet in his early days in the theatre or in radio, or had been directed by him in early live TV, so there were the tentative reminders of past association - uneasy good wishes to be conveyed to his father, an uncertainty about how far to preu old intimacies with their former associate, now in a job-giving capacity. Powerlessness made them uncertain of how to deal with power; desperation made them transparent. The women in turbaiis or big, tricky hats all seemed to apologize for their hair; one after another explained how their agents had just notified them of the interview. Asked their height, most of the men gave the all-purpose five-eleven - wanting to be considered neither too short nor too tall for whatever the role might be. In fear of being considered wrong, and not knowing what they were being considered for, they tried to pass themselves off as Everyman. They had been preceded, of course, by photographs - large, glossy, glamorous photographs sent in by agents, and as Lumet said, "What's heartbreaking is the pictures versus the people." We saw them as they had looked or could look or had been doctored to look, and then we saw them. It was like people on TV commercials versus people in subways.

   And I was horrified because they were people I knew: I had seen them in my childhood in the theatre in San Francisco, I had seen them touring with Katherine Cornell or acting in New York "hits," I had seen them long ago in the movies as juvenile leads, or in character roles - almost all of them were familiar names in the theatre, people I thought of as established, secure, honored. And here they were trying to get bit parts, eager for a few days' work, for a two-line role, and not knowing whether to conceal their desperation or whether to expose it. You could see them trying to calculate how much "front" they should put on, or whether a naked appeal would be preferable. And they spoke in voices I knew so well, the voices that seemed to belong to their past more than to their present. Some of those familiar faces were aged, others just burnt-out. I think the worst thing to watch - because it was the most human, really - was when they tried uncertainly to play it both ways: to conceal what shape they were in and yet somehow to appeal. In succession, each applicant threw illumination on the others. It became like some terrible TV show in which the great, the famous, the celebrated expose their wrecked careers, their shameful poverty, their knowledge that they're drifting, waiting for a break, and maybe this show is it. It's as if they'd never had the breaks, never been famous, because now they scarcely expect to be remembered. Too many people have obviously forgotten them; they know how little it means in terms of getting jobs that they were once stars or almost-stars, that they're "well known."

   Why do producers and directors begin to play God? Because they do play God.

   I had only a couple of weeks of observing the casting in May: it had been going on since late February. (They had looked at over two hundred "promising" young actresses for the eight leads; I didn't even want to think about what their pitches must have been like, how eager they must have been for a chance to make their names, change their fortunes. How cool they must have tried to appear, perhaps almost as cool ai those who got the roles and then tried to appear indifferent to them. If one believed what they told the papers, several of the girls in the picture really didn't know why they bothered doing it at all.) I found two weeks of it hard to take - like living in a butcher shop with human meat. I had heard plenty of descriptions from actor friends, but I had never seen it from the other side. The casting director had selected the candidates for the meager little roles being cast: mothers or fathers of the girls of The Group, a butler, friends - roles that were later cut or reduced to a glimpse, anyway. And so sometimes it went to the actor who had exposed his need more, and then I couldn't help thinking, "Suppose that other one who came on so prosperous and pleasant was really even more desperate and too proud to show it." Most of the middle-aged performers were being considered for the parent roles, and unfortunately those who did not get the parts could not know - and probably they wouldn't have believed even if they were told - that they weren't picked because they didn't match up right with their "daughters." After a lifetime in the "theatre" they were being picked not for what they could play, but for their physical types and for chance resemblances. And those who did get these small parts were of course really too good for the roles, which required almost no acting, and whenever they had a line they gave it so much full-throated voice and elegant gesture and presence that the lines generally had to be cut, because all that acting was florid and stagey and ridiculous. They were trying to turn movie bits into rich roles, and the results were generally disastrous: nonprofessionals type-cast might have done as well, or better. But then nonprofessionals probably wouldn't have needed the work so much.

   What sustained these people in the most delusionary of all careers - "acting"? There is a great deal written about the rich fantasy life and role playing in the childhood of actors, but actors may have nothing else to sustain them later on, either. Why do they stick with it? Many don't, of course, and I was to meet them shortly. They were the "crew": from the director on down, they were almost all actors who had given up.

THE PLANNING

   Under modern production conditions, the key figures in movie-making, who on this film were the producer-writer and the director, are businessmen who claim the prestige and the latitude of the genius-artist role. Buchman and Lumet were already negotiating for their next projects when this one actually got underway. The crucial work for them seemed to be finished before the shooting started: the "deal" and the planning of the production (which, like running a war, involves an almost incredible amount of detail, ledgers full of plans and calculations, including everything from transporting and feeding the actresses to having thirties cars ready at a certain place at a certain date). Like other businessmen, they were already planning their winter line while turning out the summer product. Buchman said he could hardly wait for this to be over so he could "get on to some real work." Eager to get back into his old harness, he was working on a Howard Fast novel. Lumet, while hoping to line up something that "really excited" him - the production of a John Hersey book - was planning his next job, a John LeCarre spy thriller. But, though priding themselves on being good businessmen - which in movie business is what is usually meant by "professionalism" - they did not necessarily recognize how completely they were businessmen, perhaps because they felt that they really believed, if not in this project, at least in those future hoped-for Howard Fast and John Hersey projects.

   For Lumet, planning includes the camera position for each shot, the lens to be used, and just about everything the technicians need to know. The camera will rarely move within a shot; "movement" will be accomplished by the actors moving within the frame and by the rapid juxtaposition of shots. During the actual shooting, the director puts the actors through their paces, trying to get some sense of life - mainly by encouraging the actors to come on strong - into this mechanized plan. The director who has enough training and self-confidence to face an army of technicians and experiment or improvise is rare - and what company wants him if his methods lose time, which is money? Tough, bright men like Sidney Lumet can get their effects, not by what we used to think of as the movie director's art, but by "turning on," i.e., turning loose the actors, and by emphasizing certain powerful "big" scenes - emphatic climaxes, shocks, excessive and thus surprising bits of action. Lumet is not so vulgar as most of the new television-trained movie directors who just keep the actors shouting in close- up. And unlike the pretensious ones among them, he knows that he is just shooting a script, that he is not discovering the possibilities in the material and shaping it. Nevertheless, he enthusiastically invited me to observe how the crew would begin to "intermesh" as the shooting went on, and talked often of "the rhythm" that the footage would reveal when it was edited. After observing a few days of shooting, I knew that if the editing would reveal rhythm in the footage, it would be luck; and luck was only likely in bits of sequences, it couldn't be counted on for the total structure.

   There are movie directors who try to plan out every detail in advance: Hitchcock, for example, conceives the movie visually from the beginning of the script preparation, designing the production like a complicated mousetrap, then building it. His script is a set of plans representing the completed film, including the editing, and if he doesn't need to depart from it, that is because he works for exactly calculated effects of suspense and perversity. He is an ingenious, masterly builder of mousetraps, and more often than not, the audience is caught tight; his techniques, however, probably have more to do with gamesmanship than with art, and they are almost the opposite of the working methods of most great directors for whom making the movie is itself a process of discovery.

   That process of discovery is not part of studio movie-making; in Hollywood even Jean Renoir, whose greatest work has been free and improvisatory, was expected to stick to plan, and his American movies showed what happens to an artist in such conditions. If a director is forced to follow a plan, whether another's or even his own, when, at the time of shooting, he wants to do it some other way - to use an idea that occurs to him when he sees the actors together on the set or sees the possibility of using the landscape in a way he hadn't thought of before - the necessity to do it according to specifications is crippling. It means he can't use his wits, he can't be spontaneous or inventive, he can't think and feel as an artist. This is one of the business practices that makes hacks out of American directors. And if the director knows that his being in a position to make movies at all is dependent on sticking to plan, probably after a while he doesn't even think of how he might like to do it; he just does it. These are the men who, in Hollywood, are considered the true pros. From what I observed, Lumet's planning is based on the hope that he'll come out of the shooting with something he can pull together in the editing room. The precision of his method is illusory: mechanically, the shots are neatly scheduled, but their precise effect in terms of the finished film is not calculated. When he can't match them up properly later, when "the rhythm" isn't revealed, audiences may experience the confusion of not knowing how to react to the action. For example, passages of comedy in The Group were often so awkward when assembled that some audiences thought the humor was inadvertent.

   That tight schedule looks very businesslike on paper; everything seems to be worked out. But when you watch the shooting, as later when you watch the rushes, and finally when you see the movie, you know he operates on a wing and a prayer - and not just in an emergency but every day. For sheer guts, Lumet is awe-inspiring.

   THE NOVEL

   Lumet and Buchman had finished their thinking about The Group; their minds were already turning on the future. At one level, I was more interested in this film than they were: at the level of what it was all about - how they were interpreting the novel. Except for conversations in which I brought up this subject, I never heard it discussed during the production. Nor did anyone ever talk about Mary McCarthy. Several of the girls (and their stand-ins too) were reading The Group during their waiting time at rehearsals - I could not tell whether for the first time. I did not ask because, after some early conversations with Lumet, he requested that I not discuss the author or novel with the actreiies, and I held to this religiously.

   This was astute of him: he sensed some danger in my questioning his interpretations not only with him but with them. The remarks that I had made which led to this restriction were during a discussion with him in which I had demurred from Buchman's view of Mary McCarthy and referred to her autobiographical Memories of a Catholic Girlhood - Lumet did not know the book.

   Whenever the subject of the movie came up among the girls or among the crew it was usually referred to contemptuously as a soap opera - which I gradually came to understand meant not only that they didn't see more to the novel than soap opera but that that was how they referred to something when they felt superior to it, when they considered it commercial rather than artistic. Was it possible that no one around had any notion of Mary McCarthy's position in the literary world? She was not only a writer: she was a culture heroine, with pride in intelligence, and wit that cleaned away commonplaces. She was direct, a liberator who brought women's experiences out into the open. But her smartness carried a threat to conventionality, and she was often penalized for it. Time had expressed what so many felt, that Mary McCarthy is, "quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced." This made her a favorite voodoo doll: anyone who wanted to prove his superiority jabbed at her, and indeed Time did it with the needle of "cleverest" - which, though accurate, is also wounding. Clever so often means "merely" clever, not profound or truly important, certainly not "sincere." In the twenty-odd years since the publication of "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" she was frequently jabbed in the wrong places by the sort of people who say, "So she got laid on a train, does she have to tell about it?" - as if she had violated the gentleman's code. (Those who don't believe in the single standard have no qualms about using it to reinforce their double standard.)

   No one around the movie seemed to connect to this Mary McCarthy or to be aware of how the publication of The Group had altered her position, puzzling her long-time admirers and bringing her a different, a best-seller audience. In The Group she parodies the motives, the aspirations, the styles in ideas of a group of girls who graduated from Vassar in 1933 into the midst of the Depression and the New Deal. Her Vassar girls seemed to be the women as victims so dearly beloved of middle-class fiction. Aggressive, determined Kay ("Kay was a frightful dancer and always tried to lead") goes mad; good sweet Polly gets a dear understanding husband to depend on. It was like a Hollywood movie; the girl who wants "too much" gets nothing, is destroyed; the girl waiting for the right man gets the Best of Everything. She wins an undogmatic psychiatrist - the same role so often filled in movies by a Forward-Looking Architect. This Prince Charming even sets up a test - that she wouldn't send her loony papa to an institution. It seemed as if The Group could almost have been written by a female equivalent of "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt." Mary McCarthy's attitude to her characters had become embarrassingly like his - from his disapproval of the heroine's suitcase with a missing handle to his final plea: "Forget all this red nonsense and remember that you're just your father's little girl at heart." Her earlier troublemaker-heroine had split into impossible Kay and ludicrous Libby, and "father's little girl at heart" - Polly - had now become the heroine.

   Although pieces of the novel had appeared in print almost a decade before book publication, the direction it took was a surprise, and many of her former admirers thought the girls of The Group as cold and calculating, and as irrational and defenseless and inept, as if conceived by an anti-feminist male writer. It was depressing to find the book praised by those who thought it showed what happened to girls who "insist on meeting life free from parental protection or guidance" - as if a Victorian training in domestic skills might have equipped them better than their Vassar education and kept them home and out of trouble. This way of reading the book - though naive - was common, and it was the usual best-seller/Hollywood view of women. And this view, mixed with the idea that it was also a sensational book - "dirty" in places - seemed to be prevalent around the studio.

THE PRODUCER-WRITER

   As a screenwriter, Sidney Buchman is known as a good man at "con-struction" - i.e., clearing through the underbrush of a novel to locate or design a simplified, neat screenplay. This was hardly possible with The Group; still, he reduced it without undue vulgarization. But what he had thought or hoped to do was something very different - and rather bewildering.

   On our first meeting, Sidney Buchman, courtly and urbane, told me that after his third reading of the novel and after discussion with Granville Hicks, he and Hicks agreed that the theme of The Group was: "Higher education does not fit women for life." Not being used to the role of an observer (I never did get used to it), I shot back, "What does? Does higher education fit men for life?" He didn't reply and was taken up with another matter: accepting congratulations from someone who had just recently seen The Mark in revival and told him how great it was, that there was "not a false note in it." When Buchman had finished shaking hands on this, he turned back to me with a rather belligerent stance and asked, "Just what did you have against The Mark?" (He had apparently heard that I had written a less than favorable review but he had not read it). Before I could reply, he went on, "AH I was trying to do was get people to feel compassion for the mentally ill." I said, "But what sort of compassion is necessary when they know that the man is innocent of any wrongdoing?"

   "Well," he said, "in the actual case it was based on, the man did rape a child, but if I told the truth, I wouldn't have any movie, I couldn't get people to feel compassion for him."

   I didn't want to tell him that that was almost a definition of the artist's task, so I just let it drop. But it occurred to me that this preposterous mixture of wanting to do good and yet evading the real problems - not even telling the simple truth if it might prejudice your case - was the basic cheat of Hollywood message movies.

   Asked why he'd got involved in this particular project, Buchman said, "I have been interested in the education of the young for many years." And he had been: he'd been on the board of Sarah Lawrence when his daughter was there. But I'd have been more reassured if he said he'd been interested in Mary McCarthy's writing for many years; or just said it was a job. He talked a tremendous amount about the problem of contraception; he had somehow convinced himself that the movie would make some sort of contribution to progress and enlightenment. Listening to him, you'd think you were going to get a contraceptive and a birth control pamphlet with your movie ticket. A few days after my abrupt "Does higher education fit men for life?", he came over to me and said he'd been giving it a great deal of thought (God knows why!) and that, no, it didn't. Still, he went on and on during the production about his favorite theme of education, and how the movie was "about these foolish, shallow girls having their lives wasted." So I put it to him again, a little differently:"Would it have been different for men?" And a few days later, he said he'd thought it over, and "Yes, it could be eight men. You know, Pauline, I don't know what the damn thing's about."

   I said that I didn't think Mary McCarthy could resist her impulse to ridicule, that she was driven by the same kind of wicked logic whether she was dealing with the anarchists and socialists of The Oasis or the professors of The Groves of Academe or the girls of The Group, and that I didn't think her concentration on women this time was intended as an attack on education for women - that she herself was a triumphant demonstration that women can and do think without parroting men. He dropped the edu- cation-for-women line when we were alone, but I still heard it brought out for public occasions. I would hear him talking about "does not fit women properly" and I would think, is it education or contraception this time? He still wanted the movie to prove something. It wasn't enough for him just to tell a story. He felt guilty that he wasn't doing something worthwhile, like getting compassion for the innocent.

   I first heard of his next solution to the problem of how he would give the movie "depth" when Lumet announced it to the girls. The girls nodded gravely as he explained it, and indeed, it was one of those superficially plausible ideas that young kids would think was brilliant. The idea was that while the girls were going on about their affairs, there would be Depression details in the background - pickets, soup kitchens, apple sellers - and the girls would never even notice them. This is just the sort of easy irony that the theatre and movies are full of, those fancy little effects - the products of theatrical training - that are considered "moving" or "deep." Surely anyone who thought about Mary McCarthy's Group would realize that social consciousness was just what Vassar had given them. The novel is not about a bunch of rich girls who don't even notice the Depression; it's about a group of girls who come out of college full of awareness and idealism (mixed with priggishness and pride), and the ways in which their weaknesses and entrapment in ordinary human problems destroy their plans. I said most of this to Buchman and I told him, too, that I was damned tired of movies that made the audience feel so much smarter than the characters. "Gee, look, they didn't even notice that poor apple seller. If I'd been there, I would have." After all, what could you do except buy an apple? The irony they planned would be particularly grotesque, since the novel had satirized the political activities of the girls, and although the script eliminated much of this, it retained the structure so that the ones who are outside or above it all, the ones who don't get into the political movements of their time come off best - Lakey, Dr. Ridgeley, Polly. Lumet often stressed that Lakey and Polly were "the only ones of the Group who completed themselves. The others are all wrecked by trying to be something else, something they're not."
Later on, I was happy to observe that the "ironic" use of the Depression details was minimized. But the author's curious ambivalence to her material was reflected in these confusions. Although Lumet was delighted with Polly and Lakey for just going on about their own affairs, I don't think he recognized that Mary McCarthy was satirizing the social consciousness of the other girls, not their lack of it. I rather doubt that the author herself intended to do that when she started the book. But in ten years it's all too easy to become an uninvolved, amused aesthete toward even one's own past.

   Buchman had another big problem with the material - a central problem. I had been startled to discover on the first day that, according to the producer-writer, "Mary McCarthy is poison. . . . she's competitive." With whom, I wondered? Not Buchman, surely. Although Lumet seemed to share in this view of the author and had frequently said to the press that he would not have done the picture if he'd read the book before seeing the script (which he may have believed, though I didn't), in his case it seemed to be not so much grounded in any specific knowledge as in a general feeling about the kind of woman she was. As I got to know him, I concluded that, for Lumet, a woman shouldn't have any problems a real man can't take care of. If she does, she's sick. (Kay wanted to be a director . . .) With Buchman, I felt, it was different. Mary McCarthy, the anti-Communist intellectual, seemed to be a threat he had to fight. He referred to "her vicious attack on Simone de Beauvoir" as something "he would never forgive," as if it were going on right this minute. It was, somehow, as if she were the enemy. Neither Buchman nor Lumet was comfortable on the subject of Kay, and not just because of the miscasting of a charming giddy blonde who was emotionally too light for the role. The publicity stories all said Lakey was the leader of the group, and even in group photos, the actress who plays Kay seemed to fade away. I think the role was miscast partly because of their discomfort. The discomfort probably went very deep and although they didn't consciously relate Kay to Mary McCarthy, they used the same terms about both. Buchman (who felt that Truffaut's films Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim wejre both betrayals of the social point of view for which he had admired Truffaut's first feature, The 400 Blows) used exactly the same rancorous terms to describe Catherine of Jules and Jim. On this subject, this extraordinarily sophisticated man sounded like a cabdriver or shopgirl - denouncing the movie because he hated the heroine. The cast took the cue: Kay was referred to as "messy and scatterbrained," "a disorderly, disorganized nothing." And when I admired one of Kay's thirties suits, the actress stared in surprise and said, "Of course, Kay was such a schlunk she didn't have any taste." Buchman looked blank at my comment that perhaps Kay could use a little of the self-destructive force that Jeanne Moreau had brought to Catherine. "They were both," he said, "just silly, self-deceived women."

   The first day of rehearsals the girls sat around a table - serious, quiet, attentive faces - as Lumet talked. He gave them a little orientation course, not about the screenplay or its point of view or how it was to be interpreted, but about the Depression and Roosevelt and the banks closing and all. He went into his own life during that period as if The Group were about The Group Theatre. Then he took up the characters of Gus LeRoy and Mr. Schneider and the antagonism between the Stalinists and Trotskyites. He ended with a description of his only YCL meeting at the age of fourteen, where he asserted that "Soviet artists were a privileged class so the Soviet Union wasn't a classless society" and "I got thrown out."

   Buchman spoke up, "You got thrown out? I wasn't. That was my tragedy."

   Then he turned and said just to me, qualifying it a bit, "It's not true. I wasn't young enough to be in the YCL."

   For the girls, 1933 was obviously as strange as fifth century Rome: they hadn't been born yet.

   SIDNEY LUMET, DIRECTOR

   Though Sidney Lumet was, at the beginning of The Group project, still known as the director producers settled for when they couldn't get the one they wanted - everybody's second choice, the driving little guy who talked himself into jobs and then finished them before the producers even got to know him - by the time The Group was finished everybody knew he was going to be a big director. Two pictures he had slammed through opened in New York while he was working on The Group: in late April, The Pawnbroker; in October, The Hill. The Pawnbroker, which ranked high on many best-of-the-year lists, was not only a controversial film (it secured a Production Code Seal only after a group of directors, led by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, put up a fight for it and is still causing embarrassment to the Catholics who proscribed it), it even made some money. The Hill, his brutal study of an English military prison camp, made abroad, created considerable excitement before it arrived when word got out that Rex Harrison, on the Cannes Film Festival jury, had wired the Queen about the danger of its getting the grand prize. Lumet was talked about in reviews, even in the not too enthusiastic ones, in a way he hadn't been before.

   And yet he is still, in his methods of work, basically a TV director - and it is possible that in the next few years television will wreck movies, not, as was thought possible earlier, by taking the audience away, but by its simplified methods and by killing B movies, which were the training ground for directors, and then inflicting its TV-trained directors on movies. Now that television executives have realized that people prefer old movies to television shows and are going to produce movies for later use on television, this dominance of the TV director may actually convert movies into TV shows, rather than the hoped-for reverse. The difference between the two media is becoming a matter of budget, not technique. The television play type of movie just uses the camera as a recording device for staged action. The director follows a script like a general carrying out a plan who shoots hoping to hit something: he moves the people or the camera around to get some "movement" and hammers some simple points home. And you are cued to react, you're kept so busy reacting you may not even notice that there's nothing on the screen for your eye to linger on, no distances, no action in the background, no sense of life or landscape mingling with the foreground action. It's all in the foreground, put there for you to grasp at once. It's all on the surface, it's jumping out of the frame at you. If they want you to notice something, the actor shouts or holds a double-take, and the music accents it further. You don't have to do a thing. You hardly need to look. And if you were deaf, they'd probably shovel it onto your lap.

   Lumet, after nine movies - and he is one of the best and most flexible of the TV-trained movie directors - still directs one-dimenslonally. He cannot use crowds or details to convey the illusion of life. His backgrounds are always just an empty space; he doesn't even know how to make the principals stand out of a crowd. If he moves the camera, it's just a form of conspicuous expenditure - to prove he can do it. He has only TV foreground action - without intrusions even, and, of course, although this looks fine when the movies later turn up on TV, it basically represents a loss of the whole illusionary delight of movies. When The Group was finished, Lumet told me about some of his plans, and one in particular for a difficult, epic subject, and I said, "But Sidney, you can't do that - you can hardly handle more than two people on camera. I saw what happened to the party scenes in The Group - they had to be cut down to nothing because nothing was going on in them."

   And Lumet, with that surprising boyish honesty which is one of his most engaging qualities, said sheepishly, "I know, but I can learn. I just have to give it some time."

   But it's more than just a matter of taking a few weeks or a few months (which I'm convinced he won't do anyway); it's a matter of a different approach to how movies are made, learning to see and compose differently, opening up a movie - in a way that TV just doesn't open up. Lumet can admit this limitation of his technique because he does not recognize its seriousness. It's no accident that he works well with plays; they don't have the texture of novels - so difficult to create on the screen. It makes sense that he preferred the screenplay of The Group to the book. That saved him from worrying about problems he didn't want to concern himself with. He'll go on faking it, I think, using the abilities he has to cover up what he doesn't know; he'll go on using space as stage space hyped up with a few tricks, treating movies as just a bigger canvas than TV. For even his honesty about his limitations is probably the result of his not really thinking they are limitations. Tb" only movie director trained specifically in TV who has at times tran-scended this limitation has done it in a singular way. Frankenheimer (Tht Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May) has converted TV technique into a new look, a new kind of movie style. Lumet's course is a different one. By temperament, he likes the TV speed and the slapdash intensity. He has the temperament to make this system of production work successfully for him because it doesn't frustrate him - he doesn't really want to work any other way. Personally, he's charged. He will take the easiest way to get a powerful effect; in some conventional, terribly obvious way he will be "daring." Chances are, he'll get by with it: he's fearless and dogged, he has a phenomenal memory, and he has an instinct. Lumet surpasses most of the new TV-into-movie directors because he genuinely is not interested in making ordinary movies and because of his energy, his feeling, and, principally, his excesses. What he thinks is emotion Is excess. He goes a little farther than others do. Because Lumet can believe in coarse effects, he can bring them off. Sidney Lumet may be one of the next big directors because of a basic emotional vulgarity in his work that audiences may respond to. This is a very uncommon man with a common touch. Lumet is a man with a bad ear for dialogue and no eye. Genius? Yes, the genius necessary to convince people he's a genius. Or, to put it more favorably, the determination to convince whoever needs convincing that, whatever it is, he can do it. And that is genius, of a kind. You don't get to do much in this world without it. There are a great many sensitive, talented people around who will never do anything but treasure the superiority they feel to people like Lumet, who has pragmatic genius: he'll get it done. It won't be exquisite, it won't be perfect, but it will reflect the energetic, "vulgar" confidence he put into it: it will have some charge or energy which may in some crazy way be more important than perfection anyway.

[Dan Warburton]

You da man, Ben! Mille mercis mon ami

[Lao Tsu Ben]

entertainment - and that's not the right word to use for this

there is something I find very funny (in a deeply depressing kind of way) in the xxxxxxxxxxxY structure that seems to pop up frequently in Danish art that I (most likely mistakenly) take to be the cultural sense of humor.

Funny that you should say that. It reminds me, god knows why, of this hilarious comment that Kael made on The Emigrants by Jan Troell.

Initially, for a long stretch, the film gave me some trouble: those crabbed, morose Swedes. They seemed to be living in the Dark Ages. they were so monotonously stolid they didn't even talk to each other; the closeups of sealed faces made me impatient, and I began to think the Swedes should leave Sweden just to get away from the other Swedes though, of course, when they got here, they stuck pretty close together). The contrast between the Swedish response to adversity and the tenderness and humor of the family life in Sounder could not be more t^licine. the Swedish family life is cheerless, and the thick, doomy Protestantism austere. I once had a conversation, with a man I know, ghoul whether there really were people we might be uneasy to see our children marry — were there cultures that felt so alien to us that we would never quite be in tune with a person from them? I said maybe someone from India, and he said a Swede. After due reflection on The Emigrants, I think I agree with him. It was the experience of flight to a dreamland the characters took part in that began to catch me up, and It wasn't until they were packed together on the ship, a degraded, It lightened hunch of people trying to hang on to some trace of their identities, that they began to matter as individuals and I wanted to know what was going to happen to them. However, as the picture develops we can forget how temperamentally alien they are to us because of something else that's alien, something that Swedish artists often have: earth spirit, earth poetry.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Searching for "Geneviève Bujold" entries in 5001 at the Movies:

Geneviève Bujold, in one of those passionate, spiritual jobs about a girl who is "different." The heroine sings the solo with the church choir; she suffers while singing in a nightclub; she even-God help us-makes love with an Augustinian monk (in the unlikely, affable person of Donald Sutherland) at the front of the altar. After hours of fire symbolism, she finally pours kerosene on herself to create a new sacrifice for a world that has forgotten Jesus; by then you're ready to toss her a match. This Canadian film was written and directed by Paul Almond (Bujold's husband at the time) who goes for obsessions and fatalities and an elliptical style, and is very high on portents. Bujold has some lovely bits, but the masochistic feminine-fantasy material forces her to fall back on the old fragile, incandescent child-woman shtick.

about Act of the Heart by Paul Almond.

THAT was funny.

[Dan Warburton]

Here are a few quotes just picked at random from 5001 Nights At The Movies, zooming through the pdf and reading the first review that came up:

On The American Friend:
"Wenders is attracted to the idea of telling a story, but he can't quite keep his mind on it."
On The Last Movie:
"The movie grinds to a painful halt right at the start; it is visually beautiful, but the editing is so self-destructive
that it's as if Hopper had slashed his own canvases."
On Juliet of the Spirits:
"Fellini looks at a mousy wife's fantasy life; her unconscious seems to be stuffed with leftover decor from MGM musicals."
On Persona:
"He gives us a movie within a movie, but he seems hardly to have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner one."
On Rosemary's Baby:
"probably more fun for women who are past their childbearing years."
On (De Palma's) Scarface:
"the only action picture that turns into an allegory of impotence."

[leroysghost]

Here are a few quotes just picked at random from 5001 Nights At The Movies, zooming through the pdf and reading the first review that came up:

On The American Friend:
"Wenders is attracted to the idea of telling a story, but he can't quite keep his mind on it."
On The Last Movie:
"The movie grinds to a painful halt right at the start; it is visually beautiful, but the editing is so self-destructive
that it's as if Hopper had slashed his own canvases."
On Juliet of the Spirits:
"Fellini looks at a mousy wife's fantasy life; her unconscious seems to be stuffed with leftover decor from MGM musicals."
On Persona:
"He gives us a movie within a movie, but he seems hardly to have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner one."

this is my problem with Kael. She is fine doing a takedown of some hollywood bullshit, but whenever she encounters something interesting, she shuts down in the most boring way possible.

[Dan Warburton]

Sure - frustrating, maybe, but you don't have to agree with a review to enjoy reading it.