Pauline Kael’s most famous work for The New Yorker, her celebrated review of “Bonnie and Clyde,” from October, 1967, was the second piece she ever wrote for the magazine. The first, from June of that year, didn’t make a comparable splash but had a much wider reach, encompassing a subject that’s as central to the world of film now as it was then. Titled “Movies on Television,” it chronicles Kael’s experience of watching movies at home, on cable TV, before the advent of VCRs and videotape rentals. It also goes beyond her own viewing to consider, mainly with pessimism, the phenomenon of home-movie viewing in general. Though full of sharp observations about the world of movies and her own relationship to it, the piece is also conservative and nostalgic, with a backward-looking incuriosity regarding a younger generation’s way of relating to films. For all its keen insights and far-reaching observations, “Movies on Television” suggests why Kael remains a vexing influence in the history of cinema more than a half century later.
Since long before the rise of home video, in the nineteen-eighties, most people have seen many more films at home than in a movie theatre. Movies have been a prime form of domestic entertainment starting from the fifties, when they became mainstays of TV’s early boom times. Stations had lots of broadcast hours to fill, and movie studios had plenty of back-catalogue titles sitting in vaults. Thus, as Kael emphasizes in “Movies on Television,” the films shown on TV were “old”—all of the ones she cites in her 1967 piece were made at least a decade earlier, and most were from the thirties and forties. She considers the effect of the TV medium on the experience of the art, and her judgments aren’t surprising: she thinks that dialogue-heavy movies (including ones by Preston Sturges and Joseph L. Mankiewicz) do well on TV, as do horror films, whereas large-scale action movies or visually detailed films (those by Max Ophüls and Josef von Sternberg, for instance, or the “lyricism” of Satyajit Ray) don’t. She also reckons with the mutilation of films’ dimensions to fit the nearly square format of the era’s TV screens, the cuts to run times often inflicted to fit them into procrustean time slots, and the interruptions caused by commercials. (Kael wasn’t alone in this last complaint: Otto Preminger filed a lawsuit over commercial interruptions to broadcasts of his 1959 film “Anatomy of a Murder,” and the suit became the basis for a remarkable New Yorker Profile of Preminger by Lillian Ross.)
What’s most striking about Kael’s piece is her description of her own lifetime of moviegoing habits and passions, and how they intersect with the range of movies chosen for broadcast. For the most part, studios sold movies to TV networks and stations in large package deals. Except for a handful of prestige showcases, movies weren’t programmed for TV selectively on the basis of merit but bought and sold by the batch. TV channels thus offered a seemingly random sampling of films that reminded Kael how few deserved to endure, to be showcased, and to be rewatched or even watched for the first time—she recalls broadcasts of certain movies that “audiences walked out on thirty years ago.”
According to the Times television listings on the date of the issue in which Kael’s piece was published (a Saturday: The New Yorker’s issue dates didn’t switch to Mondays until the issue of July 2, 1973), the six major commercial channels broadcast twenty-three movies ranging in release date from 1934 to 1960. Some were outstanding—Raoul Walsh’s “Gentleman Jim,” Billy Wilder’s “Sabrina,” and Leo McCarey’s comedy “Six of a Kind,” featuring W. C. Fields. There was an early (and dubbed) film by Ingmar Bergman; there was the hard-nosed melodrama “The Best of Everything,” and such late-night-chiller fare as “Tarantula,” a childhood favorite of mine, but the calendar was dominated by obscure films by journeyman filmmakers or erstwhile franchise films (such as Tarzan or Charlie Chan). What troubled Kael about these daily grab bags was that they decontextualized the films featured. Kael was forty-seven when her piece was published, and she sharply distinguished between what it was like to watch movies when they were new and what it was like to watch them belatedly, which is to say, out of their social settings. Even the “garbage” movies of her youth mattered greatly, she argued, in that they were “what formed our tastes and shaped our experiences.” But, she went on, “now these movies are there for new generations, to whom they cannot possibly have the same impact or meaning, because they are all jumbled together, out of historical sequence.”
This is obviously, if superficially, true: discovering a work from the past is different from experiencing it firsthand at the time it was released. But Kael exploits this distinction to assert the primacy of her own critical authority regarding “old” movies solely on the basis of her age and experience. I recently revisited Kael’s extraordinary 1971 manifesto-like article “Notes on Heart and Mind,” and discovered that she had made a similar argument there, affirming her own negative judgment of current movies by contrasting her first-run viewing of older ones with what she deemed the dulled “Pop” sensibility of the young generation. In doing so, Kael was defending her position at The New Yorker (where, by then, she’d been on staff for three years) against ageist calls by studio executives for younger critics who would, presumably, share the tastes of youthful audiences.
At the time she wrote “Movies on Television,” Kael (then writing regularly for The New Republic) wasn’t taking aim at ageism. Rather, she was implicitly defending her own critical perspective against a theory of cinema that, to her dismay, was then gaining strength: the idea of directors as auteurs, referencing the French word for “authors”—the prime creators of the movies they make. This notion was advanced by young French critic-filmmakers of the fifties, principally at the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and gained international force through the movies that they produced, in the late fifties and the sixties, as part of what was known as the French New Wave. In the United States, the auteurist idea gained force through the criticism of Andrew Sarris (in the Village Voice) and Eugene Archer (in the Times), as well as through the programming and writing of the young Peter Bogdanovich, who, in his early twenties, organized MOMA retrospectives of the films of Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In 1963, Kael published an essay, “Circles and Squares,” in which she inveighed against what Sarris called “the auteur theory” as a distorting lens between movies and experience. Claiming that “aesthetics is indeed a branch of ethnography,” she trusted the judgments of “movie-going kids” regarding popular films over those of “the auteur critics.” Nevertheless, by the time she wrote “Movies on Television,” the auteur idea had taken root, at least among younger moviegoers. Since January, 1966, Cahiers du Cinéma had a New York-based, English-language edition; Susan Sontag, in her 1966 book “Against Interpretation,” declared that “Like the novel, the cinema presents us with a view of an action which is absolutely under the control of the director (writer) at every moment.” In liberating Hollywood movies from the social context, younger viewers also liberated them from their commercial roots, from the very notion of popularity, which was central to Kael’s understanding of the art of movies. She loved the demotic quality of Hollywood, writing, in “Movies on Television,” “This trash—and most of it was, and is, trash—probably taught us more about the world, and even about values, than our ‘education’ did. Movies broke down barriers of all kinds, opened up the world, helped to make us aware.”
Just as her 1971 essay would target the straw person of a young “Pop” acolyte, “Movies on Television” found a bête noire in the film nerd who stayed home and watched movies on television. “He’s different from the moviegoer,” Kael wrote. “For one thing, he’s housebound, inactive, solitary. Unlike a moviegoer, he seems to have no need to discuss what he sees.” Sociability and discussion were inseparable from Kael’s critical activity. She surrounded herself with sharp, young movie fanatics—collectively nicknamed “Paulettes”—and fostered the careers of many, including David Denby, another film critic for this magazine. For Kael, the early experience of cinema was a form of social integration; talking about movies, a basic part of mainstream culture, provided cliquish unity. Her frequent use of “we” in her writing is less royal than clubby—in “Notes on Heart and Mind,” she refers to the primacy of watching movies with others and sharing like-minded judgments with friends. In “Movies on Television,” she writes, “If we stay up half the night to watch old movies and can’t face the next day, it’s partly, at least, because of the fascination of our own movie past.” In contrast, she argues, the solitary young watchers of movies on TV “live in a past they never had.”
