The Perils of Pauline

By echoing the title of Pauline Kael’s last collection (“Movie Love,” published in 1991), James Harvey makes his bias clear. In his disheveled “Movie Love in the Fifties,” Harvey refers to Kael admiringly, and his critical strategy derives from her, too. But if his intent is to discuss something we might well care about--about those movies that actually defined a period and a popular culture that remains enigmatic even to those of us who were formed by it--he falls short, telling us instead something we care nothing about, his own loopy taste in old movies.

Harvey’s problems begin with the theory that underlies his work. Here the contrast with Kael is most telling. Her critical values were really quite simple. She believed that the vitality of American movies derived from their “trashiness,” from their eagerness to exploit the low, even vulgar, tastes and emotions of their audience and their makers. She equally despised the arid pretentiousness of “good” movies: those that offered heart-warming humanistic uplift to the middle-class audience or those that other critics prissily approved.

This standard was, of course, no standard at all; it merely licensed her peculiar malices and enthusiasms, but the rationalization of personal taste is finally what reviewing is all about. Kael at least put into words what a lot of us had for a long time inarticulately known about the way movies work (and don’t work). And she spritzed those words at us in a breathless, comic style: reviewing as a form of performance art. Her mannerisms (and many of her opinions, which often favored filmmakers who had buttered her up) have not worn well, and her habit of setting a party line for her younger reviewing acolytes was always unattractive.

There is no way of knowing if Harvey is a fully accredited “Paulette” but, as a historian, his task is different from a reviewer’s. His task is to seek patterns and to relate them to broader social and cultural trends.

It is here that Harvey stumbles disastrously, for his theory of what constitutes good and bad movies is narrow and limiting. He is opposed to the psychological probings--the stress on self--that Method actors (Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean) and directors (notably Elia Kazan) brought to the movies of the ‘50s. He thinks this solipsistic emphasis erodes “the aesthetic distance between us and the movie screen

Some of them--”Out of the Past,” “In a Lonely Place,” “Vertigo,” “Touch of Evil” among others--although commercial and critical failures at the time, are justifiably admired by later generations of cineastes. Harvey prates on about them. But his larger task is to call attention to the runts of the historical litter, movies that we still have not taken home to cuddle and adore. His problem with these works begins (but does not end) with the joyless, dutiful quality of his prose and mind. The reader will find himself plowing through endless shot-by-shot analyses of key sequences in obscure movies such as Nicholas Ray’s “Bitter Victory” (which, as Harvey himself observes, was so often re-cut by various distributors that no definitive version exists) or Robert Siodmak’s “Christmas Holiday” (a failed attempt to give Deanna Durbin a grown-up film noir role) or Max Ophuls’ “The Reckless Moment” (which, based on last summer’s excellent remake, “The Deep End,” one is prepared to believe is as important as Harvey claims).

But significant as I think all the directors of these films (especially the last two) are, pleased as I am to see them taken seriously, there is yet something disproportionate in Harvey’s treatment. He devotes 19 dogged pages to the first of these films, 17 to the second, 21 to the last but persuades us of nothing except his own grim enthusiasm.

Harvey keeps circling back on his few favorites and, even more curious, more than 20% of his book is given over to Douglas Sirk, who directed commercially successful weepies such as “All That Heaven Allows,” “Magnificent Obsession,” “Imitation of Life” and “Written on the Wind,” movies that lurk constantly in the absurdist reaches of late-night television. Harvey, like many other cinephiles, appreciates the triumph of Sirk’s fluid style over the banalities of his stories and performances. But Sirk belongs more to camp than to classicism. His films are over-lit in the house manner of Universal at the time, and his performances, though often pitched toward hysteria, are prevented from achieving anything emotionally persuasive by the stolid incompetence of his players (Robert Stack, Lana Turner, Jane Wyman and, most frequently, Rock Hudson). These are movies that, contra Harvey, keep pushing you away with their stylizations rather than pulling you in, and you sometimes find yourself longing for a Method actor to ground their prevailing falseness in felt reality.

Harvey would argue that he’s not in the historical survey business, that he’s entitled to go anywhere his wayward enthusiasms lead him. I concede the point but think he’s looking for movie love in all the wrong places. For instance, the two most vital genres of the 1950s--westerns and science fiction--are nearly ignored in his book. The former comes up occasionally, if a star or a director Harvey’s interested in indulged in one, but those who did the best work in this genre at that time (Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, John Sturges) are not seriously considered. Sci-fi is not mentioned at all. Yet the conventional limits of these genres assured them of exactly the kind of presentational acting and distancing effects that Harvey treasures.

But his theory is basically all wet. He sets up a false opposition between the search for behavioral “truth” pursued by the Method followers and the more traditional approaches of actors used by Sirk. All movies offer highly stylized representations of reality, and it makes no difference by what means the best of them transcend that reality. Their trick--their glory--is sometimes to induce in us (forgive the cliche) the willing suspension of disbelief. Or, better still, to encourage our belief in improbable romance or heroism or whatever. That’s why they’re so much fun. And why, when the transgressive mood is upon them, they are (rightly) perceived to be dangerous by our moralists.

Everyone is entitled to his own form of “movie love”--or dementia. But Harvey needs to be more balanced and conscientious an historian. He needs to do more than merely allude to two Kazan movies, “A Face in the Crowd” and “Baby Doll,” that were as brilliantly distancing (and infinitely better-acted) than anything of Sirk’s. He needs to pay attention to pictures such as “White Heat” or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the scabrous “Sweet Smell of Success” or Sam Fuller’s snarling, sentimental “Pickup on South Street.” Some of these movies contained Method actors, most did not--it really doesn’t matter--but all were capable of peeling back the bland and chipper surfaces of ‘50s American life to reveal the termites gnawing away at its foundations. Indeed, that’s exactly what critic Manny Farber called such movies: “termite art,” art that “goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaving nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” It is low class, heedless, thoughtless (and, when it lurches toward the thoughtful, ridiculous). It is not written on the wind; it is scribbled in the dirt. But it is the place to begin any worthwhile study of American film in the sanctimonious ‘50s. *