Five by Kael

 

The Golden Coach

• Jean Renoir in this ironic comedy found beauty in our being human. Such a status brings to us, via Renoir, illusion vs. reality and theater vs. life and confusion in role-playing of our identity.
• Anna Magnani gave her greatest screen performance.
• The film ended in loneliness and before the end, the viewer needed to have experienced the "feel" of the film. This entails feeling with A. Magnani the deep sense of the ridiculous, her deep roots that she can pull out, shake them in the face of pretension and convention, go back down, and be stronger. She laughs cosmically and cries "Mama Mia!"

Shoeshine

• Kael saw it alone in 1947. It was seen after a terrible lover's quarrel. She was crying and in incomprehensible despair.
• After the showing, a college girl said it wasn't special. How could this be? How could one not feel what the movie offered? Some needed a fist to hit them to provide the feeling.
• The movie came out of a welter of experience. It provided the truth about confusion and accident in our affairs.
• The boys had their dreams betrayed. Their weaknesses and desires were exploited.

Breathless

• She proclaimed this film to be the most important New Wave film to arrive in the U.S. It was a frightening chase comedy.
• What appears to happen was accidental. The two principals of the film were a horrible possible new race of chaos-embracing, casual, and carefree moral idiots. They were of a terrifying mass society that has its members indifferent to human values.
• The girl was an impervious, passively butch American. Not giving a damn, she was a sad, sweet, and affectless doll. Existence for her was to experiment with roles. She was in the most terrifyingly style a muse and a bitch and a goddess.

West Side Story

• Kael thought the movie was an attempt to be more than a musical. It blasted stereophonic music and otherwise was attempting to stun you.
• The movie was a frenzied hokum pretending to deal with racial tensions.
• The dancing lost the feel of the best of American dance. It did not have the rhythm of unpretentious movement.
• The ultimate wisdom the movie imparted was "You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop?"

Jules and Jim

• It is, said Kael, one of the most beautiful films ever made. Truffant was showing his love of life as completely as he could.
• The Legion of Decency stated the film was "in a context alien to Christian and traditional natural morality." "If the director has a definite moral viewpoint to express, it is so obscure that the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant..."
• Kael found it to be "exquisitely and impeccably moral - as a work of art, though she found Catherine to be morally insane.
• Catherine was super-white à la "Negroes now" being so sensitive about their rights that equality was not on the table.