448
PARTISAN REVIEW
A reviewer can't be tentative in making judgments without
undermining the prerogatives of what is essentially a self-assumed
authority. Doubts are for the unannointed. Kael has a debater's style
and zeal, a seemingly messianic assurance of the rightness of her
immediate impressions. To make her pronouncements notable, she
tends to flights of hyperbole, in competition with the devalued lan–
guage of media hype. The films and performances that matter produce
world records. Of Jeff Bridges, she writes: "He may be the most natural
and least self-conscious screen actor who ever lived." Of
The Long
Goodbye:
"It's probably the best American movie ever made that
almost didn't open in New York." Of
The God/ather:
"The best
gangster film ever made in this country." Of
Shampoo:
"The most
virtuoso example of sophisticated kaleidoscopic farce that American
moviemakers have ever come up with." Of
Mean Streets:
"[It] has a
thicker textured rot and violence than we have ever had in an American
movie, and a riper sense of evil." Of
The Godfather, Part II:
" ...
may
be the most passionately felt epic ever made in this country." Of
Thieves Like Us:
" ...
so serious and lucid that it is as if William
Faulkner and the young Jean Renoir had collaborated." There is
something ingratiatingly loony in such rhetorical excess. And some–
thing sad as well.
If
no one is listening, says the private voice behind
such prose, you have to scream to be heard.
I am unable to define the nature of the vision that informs these
film essays- an uneasy admission when dealing with such over–
whelming judgments. (The pieces add up, incidentally, to a kind of
autobiography of a temperament.) Kael has high regard for the work of
Robert Altman
(The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us
and
Nashville
but not
Images),
Francis Ford Coppola
(The Godfather,
I and II,
The
Conversation),
Hal Ashby
(Shampoo
more than
The Last Detail),
Jan
Troell
(The Emigrants
and
The New Land),
Bernardo Bertolucci
(Last
Tango in Paris:
"a landmark in movie history"), Louis Malle
(La–
combe, Lucien),
Satyajit Ray
(Days and Nights in the Forest),
Martin
Scorsese
(Mean Streets
and, with grudging reservations,
A lice Doesn't
Live Here Anymore),
Woody Allen
(Sleeper),
Ingmar Bergman
(though not particularly
Cries and Whispers),
Barbra Streisand (a long
piece on the misuse of her in
Funny Lady),
Sam Peckinpah (not
The
Getaway
however), Elaine May
(The Heartbreak Kid)
and Paul Ma–
zursky ("Has there ever been another self-satirist like Mazursky–
humanly understanding and utterly freaked out?").
On the other hand, Kael has little sympathy for the genre films of
Don Siegel, for the middlebrow impersonality of George Roy Hill
(The
