Funny girl
Benny Green
Reeling Pauline (Marion Boyars £9.95) Double Takes Alexander Walker (Elm Tree Books £5.95)
The traditional attitude has always been that the cinema review is too transient an affair to justify preservation between hard covers. Not only is this comically untrue, but the Precise opposite applies; the best writing about cinema is far more memorable than the productions which originally inspired it. On whom shall we waste our precious time, the critics with lucid brains and readable Styles, or that fell conspiracy of plumbers, fishmongers and poseurs who deign to give US our cinematic diet? Who better deserve the last places in the lifeboat, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, the Three Stooges of pre-war genteel reverie, or C. A. Lejeune, Dilys Powell and the late Richard Winnington? From whom would you prefer to buy a second-hand scenario, Louis B. Mayer, who specialised in them, or that Man whose name, I think was Moffatt, who used to disembowel movies years ago in Esquire, and who encleared himself to me for all time by observing about some idiotic charade about a mature woman posturing as a teenager, 'Ginger Rogers is about as near to her first ball as Joe Di Maggio' ? It may well be that the literature of the cinema is a polysyllabic mess, but the journalism of the pictures is in a healthy enough state, and there is no reason why its wittier manifestations should .not be made available to readers who no longer feel inclined to see the films for themselves.
Of contemporary critics, there is no ques-. tion that the most prolific, the most obsessed
with the medium, is Pauline Kael of The New Yorker. Reading several of her reviews consecutively so stimulates the brain cells that I !lave made it a rule not to try it late at night, °eeause the adrenalin starts bubbling up to the detriment of sleep. The trouble is that very often one is tempted to turn to her for guidance immediately after having been Cozened by some item or other of cinematic One on TV. A year or so ago I remember sitting there watching the awful antics of ley Shoot Horses, Don't They ? and wonOering to myself how such stuff had ever received the accolades of reasoning adults. I then turned to Miss Kael and found that her accolade was not among them; on the contrary she had danced all over the picture's Silly face and I was reassured. The only trouble was that I went on reading the next revie`A', and the one after that, and the one jter that, and before you could say Marie kiusPenskaya it was tomorrow and the birds were singing. . If Miss Kael has a serious fault it is perhaps verbosity. If her editor were to cut her available number of column inches by half she would read all the better for it. As it is she tends to labour points long after we have digested them. Funny Lady, for instance, a farrago so abysmal as hardly to merit any serious discussion at all, drew six pages of small print from Kael; a blown raspberry would have been better. In every other way Miss Kael is a brave and honourable custodian of the cinematic right, whose frame of mind is best conveyed through a remark she makes two-thirds through her vast anthology : 'I often come out of a movie now feeling wiped out, desolate . . and I think I feel that way because of the nihilism in the atmosphere. It isn't intentional or philosophic nihilism; it's the kind one sometimes feels at a porn show—the way everything is turned to dung, Oneself included.'
If Miss Kael's problem sometimes appears to be to find the complexity of debate to fill the space, Alexander Walker's in the Evening Standard is the opposite. I am only guessing, of course, but I sense from reading the items in his collection that, were he to have twice the space, then he would say more than twice as much. His reflections are concentrated where Miss Kael's are protracted, and it is also discernible that he is writing for a less intense readership than she is. Even so, Walker can convince you, within the space of a few hundred words, that he is a proper writer. In a funny kind of way I think that he is less easily duped than Miss Kael, whose very dedication sometimes renders her prone to the perils of describing the wardrobes of kings with no clothes on. She reluctantly concedes that Ryan's Daughter just about 'gets by.' Walker knows perfectly well that it doesn't and tells us so, splendidly refusing to take' David Lean seriously as a great artist. Walker says he thinks it cruel to describe Ryan's Daughter as 'fourteen million dollarsworth of bad weather magnificently photographed,' but he says it all the same, and we applaud him for it.
There is another emotion stimulated by these two highly civilised and readable books —astonishment. I 'am astonished at the sheer patience and good manners of Miss Kael and Mr Walker and, being in the same line of business myself, I have to say I possess little of their forbearance. There we sit, week after week, exposed to the garbage of producers and distributors, numbed by the interminable vanities of catchpenny players, and yet some of us, especially Miss Kael and Mr Walker, somehow contrive to preserve the placidity of adult debate. Miss Kael gives us the reviews neat, but Walker has imposed a thematic design on his, with an occasional commentary between sections. Read his good-humoured account of a televised contretemps between him and Ken Russell and perceive the revealing truth that whereas Russell, with excessive foolishness it seemed to me at the time, refuses to see any merit in Walker's reviews at all, Walker is too shrewd a critic not to recognise that Russell does possess a certain limited gift,
and is too honest a man not to say so. As for Miss Kael, I think she takes, let us say, Ingmar Bergman with far more seriousness than is good either for her soul or Mr Bergman's. But I will not forget in a hurry her bon mot, of 1973, 'To lambaste a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge.'
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