To the Editor: Sorry to be a spoilsport, but Pauline Kael's review of ''The Sound of Music'' in McCall's was not what cost her the job [''All Together Now: The Hills Are Still Alive . Kael says the picture plays with violence in a seductive way with absolutely no depth and that Kubrick’s use of composition and classic music are “ponderous techniques” (416). More Pauline Kael in the July 2019 issue of Sight & Sound Mission critical. Why not, indeed, as audiences and the Academy took little note of those negative notices. This documentary about Pauline Kael hits all the expected beats: Limelight, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Sound of Music, Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, "Raising Kane," Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Shoah, and Casualties of War.Her disgraceful review of Shoah is quoted at length, and the film's defense boils down to: "No movie is sacrosanct, and hey, at least she was honest, right?" The film pivots on Julie Andrews’s inarguably excellent performance as Maria – she not only sings with great skill and charm, but no doubt also brought lots of audience goodwill and a useful aura of maternal efficiency from her performance in Mary Poppins the previous year. She was one of the most influential American film critics of her era. Is it a musical classic or is it “cheap,” “self-indulgent” and “embarrassing?”, Tags: “To be able to play an Austrian with impeccable English vowels, to make us concerned for her because she’s the politest rebel in all cinema, to be able to make singing sound exciting whilst never giving the impression it is anything but radiantly enjoyable, above all to challenge Audrey Hepburn in the tomboy stakes.” Just like Captain Von Trapp himself, we may start out sceptical but soon find ourselves to warming to plucky Maria and her guitar. ‘A useful aura of maternal efficiency’ … Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. It’s as though they decided to position themselves in contrast to the virtuous ideal that Julie Andrews’ Maria represents. Kael was known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, her opinions often contrary to those of her contemporaries. Take a bow, Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Rodgers and Hammerstein, director Robert Wise, all the warbling Von Trapp children and even that saucy, if wooden. At the same time, Kael was building her own reputation as a film critic. She got her start in the advertising department and moved up to writing captions. In a letter to the editor sent to the New York Times in 2000, Stein attempted to set the record straight: “I was the magazine’s editor at the time and rather liked her trashing it as ‘The Sound of Money’. Kael was a firm enemy of wholesome corn-fed movies: The River, Witness, On Golden Pond. Take a bow, Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Rodgers and Hammerstein, director Robert Wise, all the warbling Von Trapp children and even that saucy, if wooden, yodelling goatherd – you created a movie that is inordinately beloved. Viewing it as a dramatisation of a true story from the Anschluss is not the best approach. “She is the phenomenon,” he says. “It’s so overt and it even has a critic character who can’t appreciate the show because he can’t appreciate joy.” The Sound of Music does something similar. .'' She took particular issue with the film’s artificiality and wholesomeness, calling it a narcotic for the masses. Joan Didion Menu. These women, who by this point had built up a comfortable rivalry, were temporarily bonded by their mutual hatred of Robert Wise’s Oscar-sweeping musical. On the film’s first release in 1965, the answer from most critics was a flat no. the recent success of The Greatest Showman. (which Peter Bradshaw called a “soulless panto”), tell us critics and audiences want very different things from a musical. She approached movies emotionally, with a strongly colloquial writing style. “Its recognition of how ridiculous it is, is part of the pleasure of it,” argues Shearer. Right at the beginning of the film the nuns debate the question: how do you solve a problem like Maria? Just look at Mamma Mia! We shouldn’t forget that even Kael herself was susceptible. The wife of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was the real-life model for Lois Lane. In fact, perhaps the recent success of The Greatest Showman, as well as other fan favourites such as Mamma Mia! he cinemas are alive with The Sound of Music once more as the classic musical returns to the big screen. Most famously, Pauline Kael called it “the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat ... and this is the attitude that makes a critic feel that maybe it’s all hopeless. Knowing the rural life, she wasn't seduced with dreams of how pure farm living is. On the contrary, The Sound of Music delivers exactly the responses it promises: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll be humming My Favourite Things for weeks afterwards. It was dismissed as a ‘sugar-coated lie’ by Pauline Kael – but The Sound of Music’s enduring success suggests audiences enjoy being manipulated. In fact, famed critic Pauline Kael was fired for daring to write a bad review of it when it first came out. Her initial assessment of the movie, in an unsigned note for the New Yorker, admitted she was not immune to its contrivances and charms and praised Plummer’s “sinister, archly decadent performance”. For Brand, Andrews alone is worth the price of admission. But it certainly is possible that the less opinionated Vogue was growing tired of Didion’s flouting of the status quo. Dr Martha Shearer, a musicals expert at King’s College London, takes issue with the critics: “There’s some kind of implication that the audience for this film is either too stupid to pick up on how bad it is. Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews. In Conversation. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. Alternatively you can wallow in the film’s toothsome charms as the last gasp of the family-friendly studio musical before the climate changed and the genre went in darker directions. Or that they’ve been tricked.”. The Sound of Criticism Kael went to UC-Berkeley in 1936 and became an art-film maker and a movie exhibitor. In an edited selection from a previously unpublished transcript of the event, she explains why good films make her … Pauline Kael Reviews A-Z. Didion’s review implies a lesbian dalliance between Mother Superior and Maria, while also suggesting the kind of anesthetising historical take. That line about the “sugar-coated lie” refers to The Sound of Music all right, but it comes from an aside in a review of a later film, The Singing Nun, for McCall’s. Penning a bad review of the The Sound of Music changed one writer’s career. At her best, Pauline Kael was everything a film critic should be: passionate, knowledgable, in love with the movies and writing about them, willing to defend her reviews, and vicious. Those who lived during Pauline Kael’s time remember her as a brash and sharp-tongued critic for The New Yorker whose distinctly personal voice was acutely observational and highly provocative.. Captain Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) and his family. It takes all sorts … The Greatest Showman proved a fan favourite. There are 2,846 in all, ranging from early silents to the early 1990s, when Kael retired. It’s even possible to enjoy being manipulated. “Whom could it offend?” she wrote. Pauline Kael, A new version of The Magnificent Ambersons restores Welles’ vision, It’s time to rethink the established film canon, How we filmed Pieces of a Woman’s one-shot birth scene, Why a David Bowie biopic will always be doomed to fail. For a brief period during the 1930s, this unlikely idol became part of Hollywood’s glamorous elite. “Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how self-indulgent and cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.”, Didion’s review isn’t quite laced with same venom, but it is snide and caustic. While both women were particularly resistant to the idea of being a part of the woman’s movement, as critics, they appeared purposeful in resisting Maria as a romantic model. Others took exception not just to its sweetness but its distortion of history. The Greatest Showman, argues Shearer, triumphs because from its opening number on, it tells audiences to sit back and enjoy the spectacle. She was known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated, and sharply focused" movie reviews. Before long, she was writing cover articles and briefly became Vogue’s film critic. Last modified on Thu 26 Mar 2020 08.31 EDT. O ne of the great legends of 20th century film criticism is that both Joan Didion and Pauline Kael were fired from their respective jobs for trashing The Sound of Music. It remains unclear what exactly inspired them to butt heads. While Kael was boisterous and Didion diminutive, it was said they spoke the same central California language, or “valley talk,” as John Dunne wrote in a diary entry. That Western background served her well during the Reagan years. And Kael did not hold back on her opinions and analytical arguments. The film has only grown in prominence over the years, yet at the time of its release, the critical consensus was far from glowing. Some have said it was a matter of logistics; Didion was tired of writing film reviews and, having moved to California, she and Vogue simply parted ways. Did their scathing reviews of the hit musical costs these revered female film critics their jobs? In Vogue, Joan Didion lambasted “its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind”. However, the question many word-perfect fans may not want to ask is this: is The Sound of Music actually any good? Describing their brief meeting at a New York Oscar party, he described them as “two tough little numbers with the instincts of a mongoose and an amiable contempt for each other’s work.”, When The Sound of Music was released in 1965, it was an instant sensation, topping box offices around the world. We believe in Truth & Movies. Why not just send the director, Robert Wise, a wire: ‘You win, I give up’?”. On 25 July 1982, at London’s National Film Theatre, Pauline Kael invited questions from the audience. It was dismissed as a ‘sugar-coated lie’ by Pauline Kael – but The Sound of Music’s enduring success suggests audiences enjoy being manipulated. By Nathan Helle r. October 14, 2011 Save this story for later. With five Oscars under its belt, legions of devoted fans including those prone to dressing up and singing along, and having taken so much box-office cash that it is in the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time, The Sound of Music is comfortably, and indisputably, a resounding hit. The Sound of Music The Sound of Music reviewed: 'a slick job' - archive, 1965 26 March 1965 Will Guardian readers appreciate a sentimental film … Each link contains between 20-30 reviews. What is really fascinating is how Didion and Kael latched on to this legend. The cinemas are alive with The Sound of Music once more as the classic musical returns to the big screen. In the UK, Monthly Film Bulletin called the three-hour tale of a gamine postulate who gives seven precocious children and their uptight widowed father the gift of music and affection “an exceedingly sugary experience” whipped up from ingredients “that might have been bearable if the songs had been better”. It was a classic mismatch, and she was fired for panning The Sound of Music (1965) and other popular films. Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. She was fired from the women’s magazine McCall’s in 1965 for panning too many commercial hits in a row – The Sound of Music, Dr Zhivago, A … Movies That Pauline Kael Really Liked. Kael thought that The Sound of Music fit the bill, predicting it would prove “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies for the next few years.” If Didion took issue with the film’s historical dishonesty, Kael spoke of a general “luxuriant falseness,” finding the combined effect of the wholesome story and high production value to be emotional manipulation. In 1965, New York’s critics were in agreement about the merits of Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music. I gave up months later after she kept panning every commercial movie from Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago to The Pawnbroker and A Hard Day’s Night.”. This documentary about Pauline Kael hits all the expected beats: Limelight, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Sound of Music, Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, "Raising Kane," Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Shoah, and Casualties of War. She said of the film that it was, “more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.”, Both women lost their jobs shortly after, and it’s commonly thought that it was because of their negative takes, though this has been disputed over the years. Movies. Julie Andrews sure worked her mojo on that one. Era conocida por sus reseñas "ingeniosas, mordaces, muy obstinadas y fuertemente enfocadas"; [1] sus opiniones a menudo eran contrarias a las de sus contemporáneos. Where critics see manipulation, audiences applaud what composer and broadcaster Neil Brand calls “Hollywood professionalism of the highest order”. Many, people, including academic Stacy Wolf, read androgynous Maria as radiating “delicious queerness”. These women, who by this point had built up a comfortable rivalry, were temporarily bonded by their mutual hatred of Robert Wise’s Oscar-sweeping musical. Didion and Kael would spar in alternating issues. interviews We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.” Did Kael exit the cinema singing Edelweiss? “Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.
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