While one can easily imagine Little Edie Beale's breathless excitement at being portrayed, in HBO's recent update of "Grey Gardens," by Drew Barrymore -- a Barrymore, by God! -- it is harder to imagine a time when the original version of "Grey Gardens" was, in a jarring word, demonized.
But in Joe McElhaney's "Albert Maysles," a credit-by-credit examination of the filmmaker who, along with his brother David, captured Little Edie and her let-it-all-hang-out mother in their decaying East Hampton habitat for the 1976 documentary, one is reminded of the early scoldings from critics, such as the New York Times' Richard Eder, who rebuked the depiction of Big Edie's "old sagging flesh."
The Edies, it seems, weren't the only ones out of step with their times.
As McElhaney, a Hunter College associate professor and author of books about Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli and others, makes clear, the Maysles brothers and their signature works, including the 1970 Rolling Stones-Altamont artifact, "Gimme Shelter," tended to be attacked more than applauded back in the day. Their dedication to direct cinema -- the unadorned, un-narrated life that just so happened to take place in front of Albert Maysles' always-running camera -- was more reviled than revered.
"How does one review this picture?" the New Yorker's Pauline Kael asked in her opening argument against "Gimme Shelter." "It's like reviewing the footage of President Kennedy's assassination or Lee Harvey Oswald's murder."
To call the rest of the Kael review scathing is to call Little Edie a touch eccentric. Denouncing the movie as a "cinema-verite sham," Kael goes on to blame the Maysles brothers for setting (and literally lighting) the stage for the stabbing death of 18-year-old concertgoer Meredith Hunter.
Oh well, a wrung-out reader might sigh, at least Kael didn't compare the Maysles to the Nazis. But wait. She did, comparing these sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Hitler favorite Leni Riefenstahl.
Kael, it's worth noting, wasn't the only person raising questions. Haskell Wexler, the cinematographer and documentary director who shot some apparently unused footage for the brothers' 1968 documentary "Salesman," suggested that the Maysleses goosed scenes on that film. In an interview with McElhaney, Albert doesn't outright refute Wexler but adds that "it's hard to think of too many moments where 'we've gone astray.' "
