Cinema Guild’s staff for several years. “When we first showed Gold Diggers of 1933 , there wasn’t anyone walking out, but I think there was a lot of puzzlement as to why this was thought to be fun. She started that whole revival of American musicals having a place in the canon. They were willing to accept things like Casablanca and so on, but... There was nothing quite so hidebound and stuffy as a Berkeley intellectual at that time. They were inhibited by European values and philosophy that she no longer had any use for. She wanted to open the windows and let in some air.”
Many of the double bills were delightfully unexpected: Ingmar Bergman’s medieval allegory The Seventh Seal was paired with the Beatrice Lillie comedy On Approval , Clouzot’s thriller Diabolique with Frank Capra’s comedy Arsenic and Old Lace , Laurence Olivier’s 1953 The Beggar’s Opera with René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris , which Pauline described in her notes as “one of the first imaginative approaches to the musical as a film form.” Sometimes there was a thematic connection, as with the English comedies The Man in the White Suit and Lucky Jim , or Pauline’s “corruption-in-Mexico” double bill of John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados . Frequently Pauline’s notes were hilariously personal and direct: when the Guild showed Howard Hawks’s Red River , she wrote that the film was “not really so ‘great’ as its devotees claim (what Western is?) but it’s certainly more fun and superior in every way to that message movie The Gunfighter , which Dwight Macdonald, in the November Esquire , puts forward as ‘the best Western’ because it showed ‘movie types behaving realistically instead of in the usual terms of romantic cliché.’”
Pauline was not deeply enamored of much of the pre- and postwar British cinema, but she had a great fondness for some of the great Ealing comedies, such as The Happiest Days of Your Life , as well as Laurence Olivier’s stirring 1955 version of Richard III, and she saw to it that they all got generous exhibition. With her exceptional taste, as well as the rapidly growing popularity of her program notes, hers began to become the voice of the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Audiences picked up, and the Friday and Saturday night showings often had lines down Telegraph. Audience members were almost giddy with a sense of discovery of so many hard-to-locate movies. Carol van Strum, who became a friend of Pauline’s in these years, remembered the thrill of receiving her movie education at the Cinema Guild. “My parents hardly ever went to the movies,” said van Strum. “Part of it was me: they took me to see Drums Along the Mohawk, and I got so scared I never wanted to go back. I missed The Third Man , Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields—and it was magic finding them at the Guild.” The exhibitors who supplied the prints began to notice the Guild’s success and began to talk about changing the way they were going to charge. “They were doing it on a nightly rental basis,” said Stephen Kresge. “Then they found out that many weekends, the Cinema Guild was grossing the highest of any of the theaters in Berkeley.”
It was becoming well known around the Bay Area that Pauline was the prime mover responsible for putting the Cinema Guild on the map. Friendly, gregarious, and bawdy, she was becoming something of a local character. She dressed down—with her finances in the shape they were in, it was impossible to do anything else—and locals grew accustomed to seeing her up on a ladder changing the Guild’s marquee, a hip flask filled with Wild Turkey dangling from a belt loop. Landberg, on the other hand, struck people as cold and diffident. “Landberg was very remote,” recalled Ariel Parkinson, widow of the poet and Berkeley English professor Thomas Parkinson. “He almost cultivated the image of the faceless man. The theater was a fully cooperative
Many of the double bills were delightfully unexpected: Ingmar Bergman’s medieval allegory The Seventh Seal was paired with the Beatrice Lillie comedy On Approval , Clouzot’s thriller Diabolique with Frank Capra’s comedy Arsenic and Old Lace , Laurence Olivier’s 1953 The Beggar’s Opera with René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris , which Pauline described in her notes as “one of the first imaginative approaches to the musical as a film form.” Sometimes there was a thematic connection, as with the English comedies The Man in the White Suit and Lucky Jim , or Pauline’s “corruption-in-Mexico” double bill of John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados . Frequently Pauline’s notes were hilariously personal and direct: when the Guild showed Howard Hawks’s Red River , she wrote that the film was “not really so ‘great’ as its devotees claim (what Western is?) but it’s certainly more fun and superior in every way to that message movie The Gunfighter , which Dwight Macdonald, in the November Esquire , puts forward as ‘the best Western’ because it showed ‘movie types behaving realistically instead of in the usual terms of romantic cliché.’”
Pauline was not deeply enamored of much of the pre- and postwar British cinema, but she had a great fondness for some of the great Ealing comedies, such as The Happiest Days of Your Life , as well as Laurence Olivier’s stirring 1955 version of Richard III, and she saw to it that they all got generous exhibition. With her exceptional taste, as well as the rapidly growing popularity of her program notes, hers began to become the voice of the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Audiences picked up, and the Friday and Saturday night showings often had lines down Telegraph. Audience members were almost giddy with a sense of discovery of so many hard-to-locate movies. Carol van Strum, who became a friend of Pauline’s in these years, remembered the thrill of receiving her movie education at the Cinema Guild. “My parents hardly ever went to the movies,” said van Strum. “Part of it was me: they took me to see Drums Along the Mohawk, and I got so scared I never wanted to go back. I missed The Third Man , Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields—and it was magic finding them at the Guild.” The exhibitors who supplied the prints began to notice the Guild’s success and began to talk about changing the way they were going to charge. “They were doing it on a nightly rental basis,” said Stephen Kresge. “Then they found out that many weekends, the Cinema Guild was grossing the highest of any of the theaters in Berkeley.”
It was becoming well known around the Bay Area that Pauline was the prime mover responsible for putting the Cinema Guild on the map. Friendly, gregarious, and bawdy, she was becoming something of a local character. She dressed down—with her finances in the shape they were in, it was impossible to do anything else—and locals grew accustomed to seeing her up on a ladder changing the Guild’s marquee, a hip flask filled with Wild Turkey dangling from a belt loop. Landberg, on the other hand, struck people as cold and diffident. “Landberg was very remote,” recalled Ariel Parkinson, widow of the poet and Berkeley English professor Thomas Parkinson. “He almost cultivated the image of the faceless man. The theater was a fully cooperative
Similar Books
