The Pleasures of Re-Reading Pauline

This was the year I watched a stage revival of Funny Girl, listened again to the original cast recording, and then re-visited the 1968 Funny Girl film adaptation that won Barbra Streisand her Oscar. Honestly, I am not among those who adore Streisand as a singer: her choice of material is always terrific, but for me she has a tendency to work too hard at opera-worthy climaxes that would be better served by gentler treatment. Still, I find myself more and more impressed by her acting smarts. I know her original aim was to be an actress, not a singer, and in revisiting several of her old films I see a real superstar talent at work.

 Which made it fun for me to open this week’s New Yorker and discover it was an archival issue, featuring reviews and articles from years gone by. Naturally, I turned right to the Current Cinema section, and discovered that “current” applied to the year 1968, when Pauline Kael was the movie reviewer in residence. Kael was always worth reading, even when you didn’t agree with her.. A journalistic powerhouse, she loved movies so fervently that she could make you love them too. (It didn’t always work: On the strength of her lively prose, I actually went to see mediocre movies like the 1976 King Kong, in which a giant ape curiously checks out the bosom of a very young Jessica Lange.) Perhaps Kael’s greatest coup was convincing the American public that Bonnie and Clyde was a full-fledged masterpiece. Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern, on the strength of her recommendation, watched the film a second time, then wrote a rave that fully rescinded his previous dismissal of it as a minor gangster flick. I’m sure he was not the only critic persuaded by Kael to rethink a dismissive review.

 The Kael review that sits open on my desk is from September 28, 1968, and it’s wholly devoted to the film version of Funny Girl. Like me, Kael is blown away not by Streisand’s singing but by her acting chops. She starts by assessing the whole meaning of stardom: “There’s hardly a star in American movies today, and if we’ve got so used to the absence of stars that we no longer think about it much, we’ve also lost one of the great pleasures of moviegoing: watching incandescent people up there, more intense and dazzling than people we ordinarily encounter in life, and far more charming than the extraordinary people we encounter, because the ones on the screen are objects of pure contemplation . . .”  (The thought goes on for several more lines; I don’t think anyone else can conquer the run-on sentence the way Kael can.)

 Kael emphatically places Streisand among those “wisecracking heroines, the clever funny girls” who once brightened the screen in the thirties and forties. Among them she mentions Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carol Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Myrna Loy, “and all the others who could be counted on to be sassy and sane.” By the same token, she discovers in Streisand (during the movie’s lugubrious second act) “an aptitude for suffering” that those clever actresses lacked: “Where they became sanctimonious and noble, thereby violating everything we had loved them for, she simply drips as unself-consciously and impersonally as a true tragic muse.”

 If Kael loves Streisand, she unequivocally hates the rest of the film, especially Omar Shariff as her love interest, gambler Nicky Arnstein. As she points out, “If shady gamblers are not going to be flashy and entertaining, what good are they as musical-comedy heroes?” Good question, Pauline!