February 9, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Michael Schulman’s “Deepfaking Orson Welles.” It’s about a fascinating attempt by a startup studio to use artificial intelligence to restore Welles’s mangled 1942 masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Schulman talks with the key people involved in the project – Edward Saatchi and Brian Rose. He chronicles the making of “The Magnificent Ambersons.” He visits the Los Angeles set where the new A.I. scenes are being shot. And he explains the challenge of the project: 

Simply prompting the computer to suck up the existing movie and spit out new scenes would create a cold, uncanny-valley effect. A.I. tends to flatten lighting, and that would clash with Welles’s rich chiaroscuro. Then, there was what Saatchi called the “happiness” problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. “In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,” he said. “That’s part of why having the actor is really important.”

Schulman even participates in the process. He writes,

Saatchi gave me a preview of how it would all work. Between takes, the crew subbed me in for Pressley, putting me in a period coat and a clip-on tie, and had me blunder through one of Eugene’s lines. Two hours later, the A.I. team sent back a rough clip of Cotten doing the line—turning his head as I’d turned mine, speaking in his voice but with my delivery, even breaking into a laugh, as I had done after tripping over the words. “Usually, we’d spend a lot more time on it, but this is just to give you a feel,” Saatchi said. Still, it was pretty impressive—and disorienting.

“Deepfaking Orson Welles” is a glimpse of the future – the use of A.I. to riff on old movies. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Three inspired lines in this week’s New Yorker:

1. Scott Shepherd plays multiple roles, but is particularly droll as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging hornily through Dublin. – Emily Nussbaum, “Goings On: Off Broadway”

2. Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette. – Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s”

3. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. – Jill Lepore, “The Chapman House”

Brody Distorts Kael

Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz

I see Richard Brody is at it again – distorting Pauline Kael’s great “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 1971). In his “Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over Citizen Kane” (newyorker.com, November 14, 2020), he says that Kael “argued that much of what’s great about Citizen Kane in fact arose not from Welles but from the contributions of Mankiewicz and the rest of the cast and crew.” Wrong! Kael never said that. What she said is this: “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” That’s the exact opposite of what Brody says she said. In case there’s any doubt about Kael’s position, she went on to say, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he [Welles] took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.” Where are The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checkers? Anytime Brody refers to Kael, he should be checked. He seems incapable of accurately stating her views. 

Michelle Dean on Pauline Kael: Not Sharp

Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (2018) contains at least nine questionable statements about Pauline Kael:

1. Dean describes Kael’s writing as “consistently inconsistent, tending to passionate riffs, insisting that the only principle worth defending was pleasure.” This makes Kael sound almost irrational – more expressive than logical. It underrates the “thinking” in her criticism. Kael’s thinking process often took the form of argument. She was an exhilaratingly powerful arguer. Many of her best pieces are arguments. In “Circles and Squares,” she argues against the auteur theory. In “Bonnie and Clyde,” she argues in favor of movie violence. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” she argues against “high culture.” In “Raising Kane,” she argues against the widespread view that Citizen Kane is the sole creation of Orson Welles. These pieces are as intellectual in their light as they are passionate in their heat, and they insist on a lot more than just pleasure. 

2. Dean says, “In ‘Trash, Art, and the Movies,’ Kael argues at length for erotics in the place of hermeneutics. As ever, she is interested in reaction, not aesthetics.” I’m not sure what’s being said here. Kael argued for erotics, but not in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” The movies discussed in that great essay – “Wild in the Streets,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Petulia,” “The Graduate” – aren’t especially erotic. Kael’s strongest argument for movie eroticism is her brilliant “Tango.” And in that piece, she doesn’t argue for it “in the place of hermeneutics.” If by “hermeneutics,” Dean means interpretation, she’s wrong to say that Kael argued for its replacement. Interpretation was one of her main critical tools. She was a superb interpreter: see, for example, her construal of the dark-and-light contrast in The Godfather (“The contrast is integral to the Catholic background of the characters: innocence versus knowledge – knowledge in this sense being the same as guilt”). And to say that Kael isn’t interested in aesthetics is crazy. No critic was more responsive to the look of a film – it’s light, color, texture, pattern, and design – than she was. Recall her description of the colors in Last Tango in Paris: “The colors in this movie are late-afternoon orange-beige-browns and pink – the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse pink.” Or how about this inspired bit from her “Movieland – The Bums’ Paradise,” a review of Robert Altman’s The Long Good-Bye: “When Nina van Pallandt thrashes in the ocean at night, her pale-orange butterfly sleeves rising above the surf, the movie becomes a rhapsody on romance and death.” There you have aesthetics and hermeneutics in the same sentence. 

3. Dean says, “Sontag had written that there was a kind of pleasure in analysis, in the taking apart and putting back together of things, something that Kael could never abide.” This misrepresents Kael’s critical approach. She was a phenomenal analyst. She had a vast mental storehouse of movie associations. Her great strength was looking at a movie and noticing subtle echoes of other movies. For example, in “Bonnie and Clyde,” she wrote,

The showpiece sequence, Bonnie’s visit to her mother (which is a bit reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart’s confrontation with his mother, Marjorie Main, in the movie version of “Dead End”), aims for an effect of alienation, but that effect is confused by all the other things attempted in the sequence: the poetic echoes of childhood (which also echo the child sliding down the hill in “Jules and Jim”) and a general attempt to create a frieze from our past—a poetry of poverty. Penn isn’t quite up to it, though he is at least good enough to communicate what he is trying to do, and it is an attempt that one can respect. In 1939, John Ford attempted a similar poetic evocation of the legendary American past in “Young Mr. Lincoln;” this kind of evocation, by getting at how we feel about the past, moves us far more than attempts at historical re-creation. When Ford’s Western evocations fail, they become languorous; when they succeed, they are the West of our dreams, and his Lincoln, the man so humane and so smart that he can outwit the unjust and save the innocent, is the Lincoln of our dreams, as the Depression of “Bonnie and Clyde” is the Depression of our dreams—the nation in a kind of trance, as in a dim memory. In this sense, the effect of blur is justified, is “right.” Our memories have become hazy; this is what the Depression has faded into. But we are too conscious of the technical means used to achieve this blur, of the attempt at poetry. We are aware that the filtered effects already include our responses, and it’s too easy; the lines are good enough so that the stylization wouldn’t have been necessary if the scene had been played right. A simple frozen frame might have been more appropriate.

There’s more analysis packed into that one passage than most critics provide in an entire review. Its intelligence has at least three registers: it notices the poetic effect of Bonnie’s-visit-with-her-mother sequence; it compares that effect with John Ford’s similar “poetic evocation” in Young Mr. Lincoln; and it criticizes the effect for being too stylized. 

4. Dean says, “In fact, for the rest of her life she [Kael] never again wrote anything like “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” eschewing these kinds of broader essays for the most part.” I can’t let this go by without pointing out that, in addition to her weekly New Yorker reviews, Kael wrote at least eight superb essays for the magazine: “Raising Kane,” “Numbing the Audience,” “On the Future of Movies,” “Notes on Heart and Mind,” “The Man From Dream City,” “Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences,” “Fear of Movies,” and “Why Are Movies So Bad?” – all of which came after “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

5. Dean calls Kael’s “Raising Kane” a “career disaster.” Really? Kael’s great essay stirred controversy. In it, she argued Citizen Kane isn’t the one-man show that many people (including its director, Orson Welles) believe it to be. She was criticized for failing to provide Welles’s viewpoint, particularly on the issue of the authorship of the script, which Kael attributed solely to Herman J. Mankiewicz. But the controversy didn’t hurt her in the least. The New Yorker didn’t fire her. She kept right on writing. Her career continued to rise. Two years after “Raising Kane,” she won a National Book Award for Deeper into Movies. 

6. Dean says, “She [Kael] attributes much of the film’s [Citizen Kane’s] genius not to the much-laureled Welles, but rather to the relatively forgotten screenplay writer, Herman Mankiewicz.” This isn’t true. Kael argued that Mankiewizc was the sole author of the script and the creator of the movie’s central character, the newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane. But she was very clear on who was responsible for the film’s “magic.” She wrote, “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” And to underscore the point, she further says, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.”

7. Dean says of Kael’s “Raising Kane,” “Kael was not a reporter or researcher by trade. She didn’t have the kind of systematic mind it required. So there were holes.” This is another of Dean’s condescending remarks on Kael’s intelligence. The only “hole” in “Raising Kane” that Dean reports is Kael’s failure to consult Welles, never mind that his position on the question of who wrote Citizen Kane’s script was well known. As far as he was concerned, the script was his and Mankiewicz’s jointly. Dean uncritically adopts Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Kane Mutiny” as the correct version of the facts, notwithstanding that it’s based almost entirely on Welles’s self-serving testimony. She says, “Bogdanovich landed the attack that truly stuck it to Kael.” A few paragraphs later, she says it again: “It stuck to her.” Is this true? No, not according to Kael’s biographer, Brian Kellow: “ ‘The Kane Mutiny’ did surprisingly little damage to Pauline’s reputation” (Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, 2011). 

8. Regarding Renata Adler’s hatchet job, “The Perils of Pauline,” Dean says, “She [Adler] had clearly declared war on Kael. And she made a decent case.” Adler’s essay reviews Kael’s 1980 collection, When the Lights Go Down, calling it “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Adler’s technique of “counting the number of words and turning them back on a subject to make them look foolish” impresses Dean. She says, “Against Kael, who had so much copy available to analyze – all of it written in the structure of movie reviews – it was devastating.” But what Dean doesn’t comment on is Adler’s use of exaggeration. For example, Adler says of Kael,

She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections—and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one—they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion. It turns out, however, that Ms. Kael does think of them as critical positions, and regards it as an act of courage, of moral courage, to subscribe to them. The reason one cannot simply dismiss them as de gustibus, or even as harmless aberration, is that they have become inseparable from the repertory of devices of which Ms. Kael’s writing now, almost wall to wall, consists.

I remember my reaction when I first read that: Only four things Kael likes? Come on! Adler’s gross simplification of Kael’s movie taste is easy to refute. Think of Kael’s praise of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (“a beautiful pipe dream of a movie – a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been”). Think of her praise of Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (“You experience the elation of using your mind – of evaluating the material, and perceiving how it’s all developing, while you’re storing it up”). Think of her love of Jean Renoir’s work (“At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity – the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share”). Think of her love of thirties screwball comedy (“Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized – lovers talked back to each other, and fast”). Kael’s catalogue of movie love is endless, and completely unrelated to Adler’s nasty little list. This is typical of everything Adler’s scabrous essay alleges against Kael. It is, line by line, and without interruption, a grotesque distortion of Kael’s work. David Denby, in his Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012), calls it a “notoriously wrongheaded piece.” Dean’s treatment of it as a “decent case” is a major flaw in her book.

9. Dean says, “Adler’s words about Kael’s work would appear in every obituary when Kael died in 2001.” Well, there’s at least one obituary in which they don’t appear – David Denby’s tribute in the September 17, 2001, New Yorker. Denby says of Kael’s New Yorker writing, “In both abundance and quality, it was a performance very likely without equal in the history of American journalism.” 

January 4, 2016 Issue

Opening this week’s issue – the first of 2016 – I was delighted to encounter an old friend – Pauline Kael. Her capsule review of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1967) is in “Goings On About Town: Movies.” It’s a condensed version of the note that Kael included in her great 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), which is itself an abridgement of her “Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way,” in her classic 1968 collection Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. All three versions contain variations of Kael’s memorable description of the movie’s battle sequence. Here’s the original description:

He [Welles] has directed a sequence, the battle of Shrewsbury, which is unlike anything he has ever done, indeed unlike any battle ever done on the screen before. It ranks with the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa – that is, with the best ever done. How can one sequence in this movie be so good? It has no dialogue and so he isn’t handicapped: for the only time in the movie he can edit, not cover gaps and defects but as an artist. The compositions suggest Uccello and the chilling ironic music is a death knell for all men in battle. The soldiers, plastered by the mud they fall in, are already monuments. It’s the most brutally somber battle ever filmed. It does justice to Hotspur’s great, “O, Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth.”

That “The soldiers, plastered by the mud they fall in, are already monuments” is inspired. The lines “How can one sequence in this movie be so good? It has no dialogue and so he isn’t handicapped: for the only time in the movie he can edit, not cover gaps and defects but as an artist” refer to the movie’s disastrous, imperfectly synchronized sound track that Kael mentioned earlier in her essay:

Although the words on the soundtrack are intelligible, the sound doesn’t match the images. We hear the voices as if the speakers were close, but on the screen the figures may be a half mile away or turned from us at some angle that doesn’t jibe with the voice. In the middle of a sentence an actor may walk away from us while the voice goes on. Often, for a second, we can’t be sure who is supposed to be talking. And the cutting is maddening, designed as it is for camouflage – to keep us from seeing faces closely or from registering that mouths which should be open and moving are closed.

Kael’s condensation of “Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way” for 5001 Nights at the Movies contains a vivid reference to Chimes at Midnight’s flawed soundtrack (“It is damaged by technical problems resulting from lack of funds, and during the first twenty minutes viewers may want to walk out, because although Shakespeare’s words on the soundtrack are intelligible, the sound doesn’t match the images, and often we can’t be sure who is supposed to be talking”). And it retains the brilliant description of the battle of Shrewsbury, except that it deletes the lines alluding to the technical trouble (“How can one sequence in this movie be so good? It has no dialogue and so he isn’t handicapped: for the only time in the movie he can edit, not cover gaps and defects but as an artist”).

The capsule review of Chimes at Midnight that appears in this week’s New Yorker deletes all references to the movie’s sound problems. It reproduces the Shrewsbury battle passage that Kael used in 5001 Nights at the Movies, not the one in her original essay.

Perhaps Chimes at Midnight has been refurbished and the technical problems that Kael described have been fixed. If so, I can see why her references to those problems have been deleted from the capsule review that appears in the current issue. But if they haven’t been fixed, I submit that her reference to them should be retained. They are, I believe, the main reason she calls the film not a masterpiece, but a “near-masterpiece.”

The Collaborative Achievement of "Citizen Kane"

Calling Citizen Kane “a one-man show,” as Richard Brody does in his capsule review ("Goings On About Town," The New Yorker, September 10, 2012), is unfair to the film’s screenwriter (Herman J. Mankiewicz) and its brilliant Expressionist cinematographer (Gregg Toland). Pauline Kael is right when she wrote, in her classic “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20 & 27, 1971), “Lacking the realistic base and the beautifully engineered structure that Mankiewicz provided, Welles has never again been able to release that charming, wicked rapport with the audience that he brought to Kane." She’s right about Toland’s contribution, too. She says, “In the case of the cinematographer, Gregg Toland, the contribution goes far beyond suggestions and technical solutions. I think he not only provided much of the visual style of Citizen Kane but was responsible for affecting the conception, and even for introducing a few elements that are not in the script.” Undoubtedly, it’s Welles’s theatrical flourish, his showmanship, that makes Kane the great, satisfying movie it is. Kael says, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.” But Welles needed Mankiewicz and Toland to help make his magic. Contrary to Brody’s opinion, Citizen Kane isn’t a one-man show; it’s an inspired collaboration. Mankiewicz and Toland deserve their due.