Pauline Kael on creators who won’t risk giving offense
No one likes to be criticized
The long-time and very influential movie critic, especially in the years (1968 to 1991), she reviewed movies for The New Yorker after making her name in other magazines, Pauline Kael championed new American directors like Martin Scorcese and Robert Altman, and international directors like Bergman, Kurosawa, and Godard. She could be very critical of popular movies and often examined the movies as expressions of the culture. This is taken from her essay “Movies, the Desperate Art,” the introduction to her book The Age of Movies, which she wrote in 1956 and revised in 1959.
[F]ilm becomes increasingly subject to pressure. That Rogue Cop has been banned in some states, at the insistence of police departments who argue that the crooked cop of the film might give some juvenile delinquents the wrong idea about policemen, suggests that there is almost no subject matter left for the mass-audience film.
When everybody knows that there is widespread police corruption, the movies are not supposed to show even one cop who isn’t a model (the police have good reason to be so sensitive). Obviously if one made a film about an incompetent teacher’s effect upon a child, or dramatized the results of a doctor’s mistaken diagnosis, one would be in trouble. (Artists, on the other hand, may be pictured as pathological cowards, cheats and murderers — they’re not organized.)
Every group wants glorification, but even glorification carries risks (audiences can be derisive about the discrepancies between film and fact), so perhaps it is safer to leave all subjects untouched. This feat is virtually accomplished in films like White Christmas and The Long Gray Line.
Fear of offending someone —anyone—may help to account for the death of American film comedy. Films like Roxze Hart, His Girl Friday, A Letter to Three Wives, and the Preston Sturges comedies didn’t seem so important when we had them; in retrospect, after a Sabrina, they acquire new luster. While serious drama is smothered by moral restrictions and the preordained ending (characters must get their “just deserts”), the verve and zest of comedy dribble away when you're half afraid to make a joke of anything.
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