← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 14003 | Posts: 22 | Started: 2004-06-01
2004-06-01 23:01 | User Profile
This was a punch in the heart for me. Pauline Kael was the finest, most uncompromising essayist on movies - she was far more than a mere 'critic' - this country has ever produced. She died a day or two before 9/11 at age 81 and it was for me the passing of an era. Even if you barely pay attention to movies, she's worth reading...maybe more so that way.
Now I spy in a VNN spintro the phrase "jew Kael", which links to a compare/contrast article on two "Jewish female intellectuals", ie, Kael and the odious Susan Sontag. Waitaminnit - "Jewish"? A quick google-search points to two or three similar articles, recent bylines, most snarkily commenting "of course, as a Jew herself..." and dropping leaden hints that Kael always kept her Jewishness well-hidden.
Well, I can vouch for the "well-hidden" part. At no point did she ever even [I]allude [/I] to her background, save that she grew up on a farm in Petaluma. Additionally, what remarks she [I]made [/I] about Jews always made Jews themselves uncomfortable. Her sneeringly derisive pan of SHOAH became a minor scandal - hundreds of outraged Jews cancelled their New Yorker subscriptions in protest and she began to be tarred as an 'anti-Semite'. (Even when she praised something like FIDDLER ON THE ROOF it was in the measured, slightly-distant tones of an educated gentile. But she more often than not found something caustic to say.)
If it sounds like I'm having difficulty accepting this, I suppose I am, a little. I find it suspicious that allovasudden, three years after she's dead, writers she was never associated with are tossing off "of course, as a Jew herself" as an afterthought when they never bothered noting it in the forty years previous. Seeing how JEWHOO missed her altogether, I'd like some definitive verification on this. If it's true, of course, it doesn't affect the value of her work....but it will end her story with an odd punctuation mark.
Here's a sample of [I]how [/I] odd:
[QUOTE][url]http://www.killingthebuddha.com/critical_devotion/lm.htm[/url]
[SIZE3][B]The Long Moan[/B][/SIZE]
What did Pauline Kael really think about Jews on film anyway? by Laurence Klavan
[FONT=Times Roman]In Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (DaCapo Press), by Francis Davis, the famous film critic recalled complaints about her pan of the French Holocaust documentary, Shoah (which she called “a long moan”). “The Holocaust was something that readers of The New Yorker were very sensitive about,” she said, “as they were about Rain Man and other movies about illnesses.”
This somewhat cranky remark suggests Kael felt the responses were just examples of hyper-sensitivity from privileged, politically correct liberals and the Holocaust just one more “issue” over-protected in the arts. But, in her collections over the years, her actual reviews of films with Jewish subjects and stars reveal Kael’s deeper feelings about her own people and culture.
Through her decades-long career, Kael, of course, reviewed lots of movies about Nazism, and her opinions ranged from sort of appreciative (The Pawnbroker is “terrible” yet “wrenches us”) to openly derisive (The Night Porter’s “porno-profundity is humanly and aesthetically offensive”). Beneath much of it was a savvy, sometimes appalled reaction to how (mostly Jewish and male) moviemakers approached the issue. For example, she criticized Ingmar Bergman for exercising typical show-biz self-absorption (The Serpent’s Egg is “a schlocky cry of hopelessness…related to his recent difficulties with the Swedish tax authorities”). More often, though, she thought the problematic relation to the Holocaust stemmed from these filmmakers’ unhealthy need to continually condemn, wallow, and warn.
“The Boys from Brazil,” Kael wrote, “is a cautionary fable -- another one! -- about the ever-present dangers of Nazism.” In Ship of Fools:
[Writer] Abby Mann had a new cops and robbers formula.... The world was divided between Nazis and Jews, and the twist was how you told one from another, because some Gentiles, though they might look like Nazis, risked their lives for Jews and so were as good as Jews, while some Jews might not be proud of being Jews, might even consider themselves Germans (-- or Americans?), which made them dupes for the Nazis.... [Mann and director Stanley Kramer] are the greatest fingerpointing team since [Roy] Cohn and [David] Schine.
And it wasn’t just the Holocaust that occasioned their rubbing one’s nose in awfulness -- the filmmakers clearly presented a an overall acceptance of Jewish victimhood. Sidney Lumet’s Daniel portrays the (thinly-veiled) children of the Rosenbergs in such a way that “feeds strains of public hysteria and fear of anti-Semitism…. Is there any purpose except to make Jewish audiences quake and weep and feel helpless?” In Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I, “the Inquisition is presented as a paranoid fantasy, with Jews as its only victims.”
“It’s a relief,” she wrote of Barry Levinson’s Avalon, “to have an immigration story that isn’t all pain and hardship.” In fact, her dislike of the nine-hour Shoah had much to do with its insistent, almost obsessive fatalism. “It’s saying ‘We’ve always been oppressed and we’ll be oppressed again.’”
While Kael may have been onto something, she also may have been merely impatient with or squeamish about so many portrayals of pain. The holocaust -- and suffering in general -- were never her best subjects; pleasure was. As anyone who read her criticism knows, the movies both provoked and symbolized sexual excitement for her; her whole career was another kind of “long moan.” And how Jews portrayed this drive in themselves was her real focus.
For Kael, most male Jewish directors and actors had made themselves completely impotent. In Lenny, she condemned Dustin Hoffman’s casting as Lenny Bruce, because “he’s so nonthreatening…his putziness is just what Bruce despised…. Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.” In The Goodbye Girl, Richard Dreyfuss is “playing a good Jewish boy…a cuddly Teddy Bear trying to be sexy, the Jewish boy next door.” In California Suite, “the tall, lean [Walter] Matthau tries to look small and flustered and despairing…confirming comic stereotypes of henpecked, baggy pants Jews.” Jack Lemmon is a Gentile hired by Jews to play Jews because he expresses, among other things, “gutlessness.” And Woody Allen is also “nonthreatening…safe -- the schlump who wins without ever imposing himself.”
Kael also condemned the flip side -- ostentatious displays of vulgarity. Of 1983’s To Be or Not to Be, she dryly noted, “the implication is that Mel Brooks is a Polish Catholic. That’s a first.” She lamented that “Jewish actors playing Jews have a tendency to overdo it, as if they thought they would be taken for Gentiles if they behaved normally.” Her review of Funny Girl noted that once-camoflagued “urban Jewish humor” in Broadway musicals had now lost its “Midwestern mask.” She credited the “experience and tact” of the director William Wyler for keeping the film from becoming “raucous and embarrassing.”
Ultimately, she felt these filmmakers had internalized a perception of Jews as sexless -- or else gruesomely oversexed -- so that, to please America, they had to appear to be either. The underlying motivation was WASP envy.
Woody Allen came in for the lion’s share of criticism for this kind of self-loathing, maybe because Kael thought he compulsively expressed it. The danger signs started in 1973’s Sleeper: “he’s very well organized…he overvalues normality.” By Stardust Memories in 1980, the condition was full-blown: “he wants to be one of them: a stuffy macho WASP.”
This was made manifest in Allen’s -- and other men’s -- withering portraits of Jewish women and their sexual preference for Gentiles. In Interiors, “the two mothers appear to be the two sides of the mythic dominating Jewish matriarch…the first a nightmare of asexual austerity, the second an embarrassment of yielding flesh and middle-class worldliness.” In Stardust Memories, “the only undemanding, unpushy characters -- three women -- are all Gentile.”
In Lumet’s Daniel, the actresses playing Jews “are subjected to brutal long takes in which they expose their cold ungenerous natures.” In Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl, Richard Dreyfuss “gives the shiksa the love and understanding she has always needed…. [H]e says that he fell for her right from the start, as soon as he saw her little snub nose. Of course. That’s the shiksa’s secret weapon -- she wins by a nose.”
By contrast, Kael offered touching defenses of the lushly excessive faces, figures, hair, and manner of Jewish actresses. In Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand is:
much more beautiful than ‘pretty’ people…The banality of mere prettiness is a blight on American movies. Who can tell those faces apart? The Italian actresses, with their big, irregular features, became so popular here because we were starved for a trace of life after all those (usually fake) WASP stereotypes.
In The Way We Were, she admired Streisand’s “large, expressive mouth -- her finest, most sensitive feature.” The Heartbreak Kid’s Jeannie Berlin has “ripe lusciousness.” In Yentl, Amy Irving has “a sleepy, plaintive beauty,” accentuated by her “mass of thick, curly, dark-red hair.” Debra Winger has “thick, long, loose hair,” “puffy lips like a fever blister,” and “it helps that [she’s] kept her own nose; it’s straight with an aquiline hint -- just enough to make her look strong and distinguished.”
In what world would these odd, luscious, carnal creatures find appreciative men? The work of Polish-born Isaac Bashevis Singer -- original author of Yentl and Enemies: A Love Story -- might reveal the answer. “Ornery, mischievous,” with a “dirty mind of genius,” Singer created worlds of “confusing sexual urges” where “sex always gets in the way of finding God” and “good intentions are thwarted by the tingle of the groin.” For Kael (of Polish heritage herself), Enemies brought out the best in director Paul Mazursky: “here he’s warm and sensual without being showy”; and Mandy Patinkin in Yentl: “friendly and warm…[and] also charged up sexually.”
Singer’s folktale earthiness leads one to Kael’s revealing, impassioned rave of 1971’s Fiddler on the Roof. Rhapsodizing about its star, Topol, she wrote:
[H]e’s a rough presence, masculine, with burly, raw strength, but also sensual and warm. He’s a poor man, but he’s not a little man.... [He’s] an actor with a heroic presence, a man’s man, an actor with male authority…his brute vitality makes Tevye a force of nature.... Perhaps because Topol is an Israeli Jew, not an American Jew, he plays with a strength closer to peasant strength than to an American urban Jewish image.
All her relevant themes were repeated in this review. She praised the restraint of the (in this case, Gentile) director and castigated other performers for their broadness: “[Norman] Jewison does not permit the Jewish performers to be too ‘Jewish’: that is, to become familiar with the audience with that degrading mixture of self-hatred and self-infatuation that corrupts so much Jewish comedy.... Why do Jewish performers like Molly Picon love to overdo being Jewish when they play Jews? What do they think they are the rest of the time?”
She applauded how the movie eschews a self-aggrandizing wallow in suffering:
Younger members of the audience -- particularly if they are Jewish -- may be put off the movie if their parents and grandparents have gone on believing in a special status with God long after their oppression was over, and have tried to prop up their authority over their children with boring stories about early toil and hardship.... Too many people have used their early suffering as a platitudinous weapon and so have made it all seem fake.
And finally: “It is an anomaly of American entertainment, in which Jews have played so major a role, that it is not the Gentiles but the Jews who have created the Jewish stereotypes, and not to satisfy any need in the Gentiles but to satisfy the mixed-up masochism of Jewish audiences.”
For Kael, Topol was unassimilated and so neither obediently weak nor vulgar, and he loved his own women: He was sexy. Kael’s longing was for the ancestral father figure and his sexual image before the Jews came over and caved in; hers was an idealized, erotic dream of the old country (or, in the case of Israel, new and old.)
It was an absurd, plaintive, impossible dream, of course; but, as she might have asked, why wouldn’t it be? Echoing her admiration for the Singer stories -- and summing up a major part of her worldview -- she wrote in her review of the 1973 French film, Going Places:
[S]ex screws us up, we get nicked in the groin or jumped from behind; idiots make out better than we do, and some people are so twisted that no matter what we try to do for them they wreck everything. And sex between men and women is insanely mixed up with men’s infantile longings and women’s maternal passions. Sexually, life is a Keystone comedy, and completely amoral -- we have no control over who or what excites us.
In other words, Kael’s feelings about Jews and sex were as full of craziness and contradiction as the movies she reviewed.
Pauline Kael retired from The New Yorker in 1991 and died ten years later. Provocative and pathetic portaits of Jewish sexuality still occur, without her insights. She never reviewed Schindler’s List, with its virile Aryan superhero, rodentish Jewish subordinates, beautiful naked Jewish death camp victims, and S&M Nazi romance. (In Afterglow, she tellingly called it “heavy-handed.”) The career of Adam Sandler, overtly Jewish and sexually moronic, was also past her time. (“I don’t get Adam Sandler at all,” she said in this last interview.) She never saw the sexy Israeli tragicomedy Late Marriage.
She wrote about movies from the fifties through the early nineties, a rich time in which Jewish entertainers revealed themselves, expressed themselves, then largely submerged their identities again in another wave of assimilation (from Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld). It was a period in which Jewish stars were replaced by WASPs and then by computer graphics (from Dustin Hoffman to William Hurt to Roger Rabbit). In movie terms, this time is in itself an old country, for which one can feel -- reading Pauline Kael -- irrational nostalgia and deep, dizzying, and ridiculous desire.[/FONT]
[COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]Bibliography:
The Pawnbroker (1965, Sidney Lumet, dir.) and Ship of Fools (1965, Stanley Kramer) reviewed in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Funny Girl (1968, William Wyler) reviewed in Going Steady
Fiddler on the Roof (1971, Norman Jewison) reviewed in Deeper into Movies
The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May), The Way We Were (1973, Sydney Pollack), Sleeper (1973, Woody Allen), Lenny (1974, Bob Fosse) and The Night Porter (1974, Lilliana Cavani) reviewed in Reeling
Going Places (1973, Bertrand Blier), The Boys from Brazil (1976, Franklin Schaffner), The Goodbye Girl (1977, Herbert Ross), California Suite (1978, Herbert Ross) and The Serpent’s Egg (1978, Ingmar Bergman) reviewed in When the Lights Go Down
Stardust Memories (1980, Woody Allen) and History of the World: Part I (1981, Mel Brooks) reviewed in Taking it All In
Daniel (1983, Sidney Lumet), To Be or Not to Be (1983, Alan Johnson) and Yentl (1983, Barbra Streisand) reviewed in State of the Art
Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann) reviewed in Hooked
Enemies: A Love Story (1989, Paul Mazursky) and Avalon (1990, Barry Levinson) reviewed in Movie Love[/COLOR]
[I]Laurence Klavan is a novelist and playwright living in New York City. His novel, The Cutting Room, will be published by Ballantine Books. His last piece for KtB was “My Bar Mitvah: A True Story.” [/I] [/QUOTE]
2004-06-02 14:19 | User Profile
I was never a particular fan of hers but she didn't come up on Jewhoo.
2004-06-02 23:11 | User Profile
As a film student back then I always despised her and her smug, uppity and pompous reviews. Her whole manner screamed kike. And who but a kike could muster the monumental vulgarity to pen that unintentionally hilarious...or should I say nauseating? piece on the 'inner' beauty of Barbara Streisand? And could there be anything lower or more despicable than her sneering pan of [B]The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance[/B]?
2004-06-02 23:42 | User Profile
What a [I]vile [/I] comment to make on a serious writer and thinker!
I don't always agree with you, Gott, but you're [U]way[/U] off here. I thought she was right on the money with her VALENCE review, but that's immaterial: you don't judge a body of work by how often it parallels your own thinking.
At no point did anything she wrote [I]scream kike[/I]. The reviews she wrote between '63 and '77 or so are among the best criticism anyone's written in the past half-century. As a movie reviewer, the rest of the punditry wasn't even in the same class as her. Obviously, nothing I say here is gonna turn you around, but - just as obviously - I totally disagree with your take.
2004-06-03 00:10 | User Profile
I know absolutely nothing about PK except that George Lucas seemed not to have a crush on her; he named after her the evil General Kael in the movie Willow. He commands the Evil Army which tries to kill the Holy Baby or something.
"The man who had spoken was mounted on an enormous black stallion. The crimson ensign of the Nockmaar commander fluttered from the staff of his standard-bearer. A purple cape drifted from his shoulders. Black plate and chain mail covered his thick torso and his huge arms and legs. Splashes of blood stained his sword and gauntlet. But the most terrifying aspect of this man was not his size. Where a human head should have rested there rose a massive skull, a thing with glowering sockets and an immense, protruding jaw ringed with fangs. A scrap of rank black hair clung to it. A pair of iron horns arced from its forehead. As Willow stared, the rider lifted off this terrible helmet to reveal a face almost as terrible -- a face thickened and brutalized by savagery. A face scarred and broken. A face beyond all pity." [url]http://www.freewebs.com/willow_freak212/generalkael.html[/url]
"In general, Kael had a taste for movies that violate taboos involving sex and violence,..." [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael[/url] Hmmmm. :unsure:
2004-06-03 00:33 | User Profile
The article at the top of the thread collates every comment she made re Jews in a [I]forty-year [/I] career. If it seems Jew-heavy or Ziocentric, well, it was compiled that way. By another writer.
If the Wikipedia entry was even near-correct, none of her books would be out of print. Instead, they all are, save her most unrepresentative. Not even her death prompted reissues.
I suggest trying to pick up one of her collections second-hand - REELING or WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN are two of the best - and judge for yourself. Or see if you can locate her review of SHOAH. It nearly ended her tenure at The New Yorker, so loud were the cries of 'anti-Semitism!' that followed it.
2004-06-03 02:06 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Or see if you can locate her review of SHOAH. It nearly ended her tenure at The New Yorker, so loud were the cries of 'anti-Semitism!' that followed it.[/QUOTE]
I think I see where you're going with this--you're positing that she's an "outlier," sort of in the same sense as Israel Shahak, who exposed the machinations of the Jews in his Jewish History, Jewish Religion.
2004-06-03 02:11 | User Profile
The below might not ease your pain, but I like the image Blount's description creates. I liked her, and still do despite this "discovery":
[url]http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/1995-01-05/film.html[/url]
"Kael was a farm girl from Northern California who just couldn't resist making trouble. As her longtime friend, humorist Roy Blount, Jr., recalled in a recent Atlantic Monthly article, "she cut short her own violin-prodigy career by getting up before a synagogue audience, whose expressions of fond expectancy rubbed her the wrong way, and swinging into 'Onward Christian Soldiers.'" She grew to adore Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, the poems of Rilke, and the music of Mahler and Bruckner--all artists who prized passion over caution and precision."
2004-06-03 02:41 | User Profile
Thanks, 'Brot; I needed that.
2004-06-04 00:57 | User Profile
What can I say? Obviously, we're going to have to agree to disagree here.
2004-06-04 01:08 | User Profile
I have no idea who that Kael is/was, but Gott's rant was beautiful.
2004-06-04 13:55 | User Profile
Sorry I'm such a vile person, but that's the way it is. If my angelic Italian mother had married another Italian as she was supposed to...well, I would not be me. She married a German, and that explains it all:)
I'm sorry they deleted my post (because of the B word? the M word (frog for excrement...or is 'excrement' banned too? or the generally vile tone???) as I didn't think to keep a copy and the point was, I think, worth making.
I chatted once with a young jewess who was genuinely disconcerted by my attitude towards criticism in general. We discussed a really good von Sternberg movie ([B]Blonde Venus [/B] - the philosophy of which I much disagree with: men are evil critters who do nothing but use their power to persecute women and such). It is good because it makes it's jew point extraordinarily well and because it does so with maximum utilization of the artistic potential of the cinema. What von Sternberg didn't know about behavioral style, cutting - and particularly mise en scene and lighting, just didn't (and doesn't) exist. She was ready, willing and eager, this jewess, to gleefully attack and mock the movie (after all, it was von Sternberg's films which prompted the other jewess 'B' lady - Sontag - to write her disgusting 'camp' piece). I told her that civilized persons were those with good taste and discernment, and that an artist of von Sternberg's obviously titanic stature was far, far above such criticisms - that his work earned him RESPECT. All we mere mortals could or should do is try to understand and appreciate. Criticism is of course warranted when offered with whatever respect and humility might be appropriate.
Kael's mockery of Ford's [B]Liberty Valance [/B] (which is of course flawed as Ford was old, tired, human, and thus imperfect. There are very few perfect movies anyway) made her position clear to me. She mocks and pulls down with the utmost sneering disdain the work of a man who had long since earned the right to be at least respected, while at the same time extoling whatever PC garbage happens to appeal to her own monumental bad taste and vulgarity - interestingly enough, mostly movies that push the jew deconstruction agenda.
Mocking and pulling down are the central tenets of the jew critique system that has made my world the nightmare it is.
2004-06-04 14:45 | User Profile
[COLOR=Blue] - "We discussed a really good von Sternberg movie (Blonde Venus - the philosophy of which I much disagree with: men are evil critters who do nothing but use their power to persecute women and such)." [/COLOR]
Are you aware, Gott, that Sternberg was a Jew himself?
Jewhoo says about him:
[COLOR=Red]"His given name was either Stern or Sternberg. "Von" was added to his name, over his protest, to give him an aristocratic panache."[/COLOR]
Petr
2004-06-04 17:27 | User Profile
So, sadly, were Von Stroheim and Otto Preminger. We're still holding out hope for Sig Rumann....
2004-06-04 18:41 | User Profile
Yes, I know that von Sternberg was jewish (or part jewish anyway). I am fanatically anti-jewish because of what they have done to my culture and country - for logical (I think) reasons. I hate them as I hate rats or ticks and I'm honest about my hatred and the reasons for it. If they did good, I would not hate them.
In this one art, they have fairly often done good, at least formally. Von Sternberg's films are probably the most militant feminist movies ever made in which men are usually monsters and oh how those pooooooooooooor women suffer, suffer and SUFFER because of us. But, he does interesting, loopy things with his rabid, genocidal jew message about men, making many of them quirky and interesting and not infrequently even sympathetic in some ways. Of course he is very good at making women not only beautiful but sympathetic. I think he was a masocist and knocked guys more to knock himself than because of an agenda. But, the message is still the typical jew poison - straight white men are bad. So, as von Sternberg is fantastically talented with the medium and can make it do anything he wants it to (no other film maker has ever even come close to what that guy could do with light - the principle ingredient in film making) I'm just being honest in calling him a great artist. We Aryans are honest, and jews lie. See Martin Luther's The Jews and Their Lies:)
As Il Ragno says, Preminger and von Stroheim (as dubious a von too) were also jews. As were George Cukor, John M. Stahl, the DeMille brothers (half anyway, according to their disgusting neice Agnes). And for the second stringers, more still; Curtiz, Dassan, Karlson, Litvak...and probably 50 others with names.
Movies are the only art in which jews have ever excelled. Maybe it is the intense collaborative atmosphere and the requirement for very hard communal group work. Maybe it's because movies are the ideal conduit for the jew's thing about fantasy being so much better than reality that they finally insist the fantasy is the reality.
Whatever the reason, there are virtually no great jew musicians (I almost said the k word) or painters and only a few writers but lots of really major movie directors. There have always been lots of great jew interpretive artists from the great days of bel canto singing (Pasta was a jew) through most 19th and 20th century theater to the movies. Lots of jew movie stars from way back - some even had talent!
There are, however, way more great Aryan movie makers than there are jew movie makers - John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage to name a few. And this even though jews have totally controlled the American movie making system since they stole it in 1916 or so.
88 y'all
2004-06-04 19:08 | User Profile
I like von Sternberg's stuff, principally because of the photography. I don't think he ever gave a damn about the script save that they be appropriate window-dressing for his star-of-choice, Dietrich.
Prior to his teaming up with her, he was best known for his silent crime/gangster fims like UNDERWORLD and THE DRAGNET. Which feature set-ups as visually striking as his Dietrich films.
Re your comment
[QUOTE]Movies are the only art in which jews have ever excelled. Maybe it is the intense collaborative atmosphere and the requirement for very hard communal group work. Maybe it's because movies are the ideal conduit for the jew's thing about fantasy being so much better than reality that they finally insist the fantasy is the reality. There are, however, way more great Aryan movie makers than there are jew movie makers - John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage to name a few. [/QUOTE]
I don't think it's that clear-cut a division of labor. Any feature film is usually going to feature a Jew/gentile mix of some sort between the cast and crew, so that it becomes problematic for me to think of, say, a Curtiz-directed film as a [I]Jew movie[/I], or a Hawks-directed film as an Aryan one. I mean, the vast majority of decisions made in shooting anbd cutting and shaping a picture are technical and not ethnic ones. For another thing, too much emphasis has been placed...after the fact....on the all-importance of the director (beginning with your good buddy Frank Capra, Gott). During the halcyon days of moviemaking, there really wasn't an Auteur cult to speak of, and maybe it was better that way. Not that the producers (Jews to a man) should have been hogging the laurels, but ever since Andrew Sarris (a far squishier and mealy-mouthed shabbas goy-leftist than you want to give him credit for, btw) imported the Auteur Theory, scenarists, cameramen, set designers and film editors have gotten even less recognition than they did 50 years ago.
I also think that the early Jews excelled in pictures because it afforded them the opportunity to lose their separatist identity, at least for a time. For every hard-core Zionist there's a Jew who wishes he were somebody else altogether, but can't be. So the movie business, I think, provided many of them with a venue to temporarily become the types of people their name-changes wanted you to think they were all along.
But I also believe one turning point that doesn't get near enough attention was the infiltration of the Group Theater in Hollywood during the war years, along with their fellow-travelers in the motion-picture trade unions. He gets a lot of plaudits these days for his change of heart, and some of it is warranted, but in the end, Elia Kazan turned out to be as destructive as the Polonskys and Trumbos - if only because he was allowed to work to his heart's content, pumping his pretentious Jew-influenced liberal twaddle to the masses and picking up the slack the others had left.
2004-06-04 19:36 | User Profile
I loathe Capra. And I like Sarris because he was right in what he said. He kissed jew ass and was (and probably is) a good little liberal? Yes, I'm sure you are totally right. But he was totally right about Welles, Ford, LaCava, Borzage, Cukor, etc. while Kael was totally wrong about just about everything:) Like giving credit where it is due - even if to a jew - is just being honest...so too here.
Collaborative? Yes, but at the same time, Howard Hawks rarely made a movie where he himself wasn't actually in control of the script either by picking and working with (uncredited) the writers or by what was dropped and added during shooting. Where ever that is not the case is where you will find the weak Hawks, or Ford, or Borzage movies. Hacks and B directors work from assigned scripts (and can sometimes transform them through style) but men at the top don't get assigned to projects - they shape them. Then, anyway. Von Sternberg had a very big hand in his own scripts, by the way. Hecht wrote the [B]Underworld [/B] script (his first) and wanted his name removed (till the movie went on to be a smash hit) because von Sternberg had totally rewritten it so that it reflected his views. [B]Blonde Venus [/B] was from von Sternberg's own story.
We have always disagreed on this. The studios were run by jews and they decided what was allowed and what was not. Some times, filmmakers could get around it but only within certain parameters. Sometimes Aryan filmmakers actively resisted (check out Hawks' [B]Air Force[/B]...the Nazi Youth take to the sky - you won't find a more Aryan looking bunch of officers outside a Riefenstahl movie). Most Aryan directors shared the same values as their cosmopolitan internationalist jew bosses, but were not out to destroy their own culture - they bought into the propaganda about love and brotherhood and all the rest of it. But, only the jew directors were actively out to subvert and destroy - like Curtiz for instance. As he is nowhere near as talented as major guys like von Stroheim, von Sternberg, Preminger or Cukor he is hardly worth bothering about though. A great technician but terrible with characters in that they never go beyond cardboard cutouts ([B]Mildred Pierce[/B], [B]Casablanca[/B], etc.) I've mentioned before I think, that his [B]Janie [/B] is a movie in which for whatever reason, the mask drops and you can see the real attitude of the jew movie makers towards the animals and useful idiots out there in the theater.
I think it comes down to what is 'assimilate' to you is 'stealth-jew' to me.
2004-06-04 20:15 | User Profile
[QUOTE]We have always disagreed on this. The studios were run by jews and they decided what was allowed and what was not. [/QUOTE]
Well, we do and we don't. No question Jews held the purse-strings and made final decisions on technical matters (budgets, reshoots, release dates, etc). But they weren't making decisions on content without looking two and three times before crossing the street. Otherwise, we'd've had far fewer Mantan Morelands and far more Sidney Poitiers back then. None of the Jew moguls really wanted to go near GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT. Nor did we see hateful depictions of the American South until the post-WW2 cultural domination of the Group-Theater styled zhid.
There were few Jews as personally loathsome as Louis B Mayer, yet he despised the idea of the echt-Jewish 'message picture' - he wanted to go with musicals and family comedies right to the end - and his intransigence cost him his empire.
[QUOTE]I like Sarris because he was right in what he said. He kissed jew ass and was (and probably is) a good little liberal? Yes, I'm sure you are totally right. But he was totally right about Welles, Ford, LaCava, Borzage, Cukor, etc. while Kael was totally wrong about just about everything[/QUOTE]
I don't wanna exhume the Kael part of the argument, but you should read YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET, Sarris' most recent work on the pre-1950 feature film. While he has some valuable insights, he cannot stop himself from viewing everything though a Marxist/Socialist prism....something Kael [I]never[/I] did. And your comment makes it seem that Kael dismissed the directors you name, which was not the case. In fact, your own comment
[QUOTE]Where ever that is not the case is where you will find the weak Hawks, or Ford, or Borzage movies. [/QUOTE]
indicates that there [I]are [/I] such things as weak Ford/Hawks films - as such, they are fair game for criticism. One's take on, say, a John Ford film is going to be [I]very [/I] different if you're looking back on it as a jigsaw-piece belonging to an entire body of work - as you and I are doing - than if you're seeing his films contemporaneously, as Kael and Sarris were. (Kael was 81 when she died, and Sarris is 80 now.)
By the way, I quite enjoy bumping heads with you on these topics; it's nice to discuss films with someone knowledgable who's not tiresomely plugged into the Eternal Now, and has an appreciation for vintage film. Sooner or later we're bound to agree on something 100%, Gott; it's just a matter of time.
2004-06-04 22:41 | User Profile
Oh, we agree on plenty, and I too very much enjoy discussing movies with you. Sarris is married (if he still is) to that professional feminist Molly Haskill (sp.?) and that might have something to do with his slant, but it could well be he was always like that. One nice thing about him is that he has/had sharp enough vision to see, for instance, what Douglas Sirk was really about while a modern professional liberal/feminist/commie like Hobermann of the Village Voice cannot. Sarris has great insight - whatever his own politics, he's usually right about the qualities and value of the filmmakers he writes about, the old ones anyway. And he specialized in writing about the great, old directors while Kael wrote with relish about whatever trendy PC BS was current.
When Margaret Sullavan was working on Borzage's [B]The Mortal Storm[/B] in 1940 (probably Hollywood's classiest anti German movie) she slammed into Mayer's office demanding that the poor persecuted characters in that movie be called 'jews' rather than 'non Aryans' and he stood up to her (very few did) saying they could be 'nice' but they could not be jews. You probably see that as assimilation (also the musicals) while I see it as stealth-jew.
Musicals are very nice when they are very nice, but they are also mindless and idiotic and one would be better advised to read Luther's The Jews and Their Lies or The International Jew or an essay by Cicero rather than watch even something as good as [B]The Bandwagon [/B] or [B]Strike Up the Band[/B]. Movie watching is so totally passive unless you are talking about one of the more interactive directors like Hitchcock, Welles or Verhoeven, or one who was radically original and philosophical like Borzage. Mostly it's sit there, zone out and let the movie do your thinking for you. Very, VERY bad for the long term health of any culture unless that culture has taken the necessary provisions to see to it that only benign forces control the medium in question.
They are 'non-Aryans' in [B]The Mortal Storm [/B] not because of assimilation, but because of propaganda - not the jews vs. Germany which is what it really was, but good vs. bad and right vs. wrong - they could be nice, but not jews. And he liked family entertainments because of the passivity they encouraged and because those nice, bland all-American movies got the viewer to eventually go along with the new common assumptions that they stealthily fostered. They had Stepin Fetchit because jews hold [I]negroes [/I] (hahahaha) in complete contempt and enjoyed being able to flaunt it when it was socially acceptable to do so. But those same [I]negroes [/I] usually were shown to be the people whose common sense (the Hattie McDaniel type) kept inane white folk in clean clothes and eating properly. The idea (wry negro keeping the silly white folk buttoned up) was floated and sold - usually in comic form as you can get away with way more in a comedy. After that was accepted and became a new common assumption, the jews ratcheted things up the next knotch and thus we go step by step from Fetchit to Poitier (my candidate for one of the worst, most affected actors ever in the same way that Leontine Price was an incredibly overrated soprano. Famous because the jews need blacks for those slots and so made famous by jew hype). That is how I see the entire process working. Try something subtly...push it home over and over again and then when it's accepted as 'reality' push on to the next step in the degradation of our culture and value system till we are where we are today.
2004-06-05 20:04 | User Profile
I don't want to get into the "Was she or wasn't she?" argument. That will take up space on my end, and then have more and more folks chiming in, which will take up more and more space on a topic that probably isn't deserving of such bandwidth.
To work your way up to the position of MAJOR movie critic usually requires several things, one of these is being Jewish. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, but the exceptions to the rule usually follow Hyman's instructions to the letter. There are also folks who move up because the zhids THINK they are jewish, due to their name and/or appearance. Happens all the time in other areas of the media, with folks like Tom Snyder, Jay Thomas, David Letterman, the list goes on... Hyman finds out they aren't jewish, but they've gone this far ... Many jews even thought - early on - that Roger Ebert was jewish. Much of the public seemingly assumes it.
I can appreciate Kael's work, whether or not I agree with it. I always thought that the George Lucas incident (him naming a character after Kael) was because he didn't like her, and was taking a swipe at her. That's something I'll have to look into for the hell of it.
As to Kael's remarks on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence ... old man Ford did not have one of his best outings with that effort. But Kael did seem to be gunning for the jugular - was their some type of personal incident or feelings surrounding this episode? If anyone knows, chime in.
There are critics whose work I respect, but I always, always, take their word with a grain of salt until I have personally seen the work in question. That goes double if they are jewish, because I always find myself looking to see how they are going to help or relate to the 'agenda'.
2004-06-12 05:59 | User Profile
Iââ¬â¢ve always found movie criticism to be a very jew-ish profession. It's just another way for enemies (and yes, that includes race-traitor Whites like [url=http://www.filmthreat.com/UploadImages/000007366_rogerchaz1X.jpg]Roger Ebert[/url]) of The Race to exert their influence on the gullible masses: "Oy vey! Listen to us! We we tell you what films to watch! [u]To Kill A Mockingbird[/u] -- a triumph! [u]Do The Right Thing[/u] -- brilliant! [u]A Time To Kill[/u] -- powerful! [u]Schindler's List[/u] -- a masterpiece!ââ¬Â ... and so and so on... Well, you listen up, zhids. You're not going to tell this White man what he can and can not see, so take your anti-White propaganda and shove it. The only movie reviews that seem to interest me anymore are racialist ones, (like the ones at VNN, not that I always agree with them). I also sometimes enjoy the reviews of [url=http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviews.asp]James Bowman[/url], mostly because he seems to hate everything (and, though his reviews arenââ¬â¢t racialist, he sometimes comes close). I liked his review of the awful, anti-White, [url=http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=1522]The Day After Tomorrow[/url] (or as I call it, The Day After 75 ââ¬â 90% of the White Race Gets Exterminated). With White people like Roland ââ¬ÅIndependence Dayââ¬Â Emmerich making anti-White movies, who needs jews?
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2004-06-15 16:38 | User Profile
I thought Emmerich was a jew? He speaks with a German accent too.