Pauline Kael (32 page)

Those who believed that criticism should maintain a coolly objective tone were bothered by the emotional tenor of Pauline’s support for the film, and her review confirmed many suspicions that she was incapable of staying within “correct” critical boundaries. It gave her, however, the growing confidence that her impact on readers and audiences was even greater than she had imagined.

 

When Pauline returned to her
New Yorker
duties in the fall of 1971, she led off with one of the most misleading statements of her career. Her season-opening review was of John Schlesinger’s
Sunday Bloody Sunday
, a movie that posed a particular challenge for her: The screenplay was written by Penelope Gilliatt.

“Seeing
Sunday Bloody Sunday
was for me like reading a novel that was very far from my life and my temperament, and that yet when finished it had me thinking,” she wrote in the opening of her review.
Sunday Bloody Sunday
concerned a ménage a trois involving a middle-aged Jewish doctor, an uptight female employment officer, and the casually amoral younger man whom they both love. The film’s central theme was how people learn to give up their dreams and settle for less than they had once imagined having. The seminal scene took place between Alex (Glenda Jackson) and her mother (Peggy Ashcroft). At the end of a cheerless dinner, Mrs. Grenville tries to tell Alex why she has stayed with her work-obsessed, neglectful husband:

Pauline’s comment about the film’s being alien to her own temperament was correct in one sense: She was and always had been intractable with respect to any form of compromise. But its central situation—the sharing of a man with another man—was reminiscent of her own past, with Robert Horan or James Broughton in the role of
Sunday Bloody Sunday
’s central character. She found that “Peter Finch’s Dr. Daniel Hirsh is possibly a movie first—a homosexual character who isn’t fey or pathetic or grotesque.” She loved the fact that
Sunday Bloody Sunday
didn’t portray its protagonists as wallowing around in despair—as an American film might have done. Instead “the characters here all are coping; they’re not falling apart,” and she felt that the movie’s sophisticated approach to a delicate emotional situation made it “instantly recognizable as a classic.” She pointed out that the director, John Schlesinger, had “lost his stridency”—the quality that had made her dislike
Midnight Cowboy
. But she saved her highest praise for Penelope Gilliatt, who, she felt, had done “what few people who write for the screen think to do: she has kept her self-respect as a writer, and written not down but up. She has trusted the audience. Miss Gilliatt and I are ships that pass each other in the night every six months. It is a pleasure to salute her on this crossing.”

Like many other critics, Pauline had ascribed much of the film’s artistic success to Gilliatt, a fact that infuriated John Schlesinger. It may well have been an example of her tendency, as William Friedkin described it, to “mistake the film for the filmmaker. If she hated the filmmaker, there was nothing he or she could do.” Despite Pauline’s generosity in print, Gilliatt’s success with
Sunday Bloody Sunday
—she would receive an Academy Award nomination and win the New York Film Critics Circle award for her script—was bound to aggravate Pauline’s competitive streak. There were already numerous offers coming in for her to work on a film script, or to serve as a script doctor, but for the moment, she turned them all down. At this point she felt that she could be more of a positive force by staying at
The New Yorker
. Besides, the run of films was beginning to prove enormously exciting—so much so that she could scarcely wait to sit down at her drafting table and get to work.

In October, Columbia released a film made under the aegis of BBS Productions, one of the most enterprising constellations of New Hollywood talent and the company responsible for
Easy Rider
and
Five Easy Pieces
.
The Last Picture Show
was not part of the ’70s New Wave, however. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, it was a piece of traditional narrative about a group of frustrated, confused people—both young and middle-aged—in a dying West Texas town in the early 1950s. It was based on a book by Larry McMurtry, whose fictional Anarene had been inspired by his hometown of Archer City, where the picture was shot. Bogdanovich had definite ideas about the Texas he wanted to depict onscreen. McMurtry was also the author of
Hud
, and Bogdanovich was concerned that there not be a strong visual link between the two films. He objected to
Hud
’s “bland, barren, gray look which is the cliché version of Texas: a big, empty country. That’s not what it is at all—Texas is tortured, savage, cruel and broken.”

Bogdanovich made the decision to shoot
The Last Picture Show
in black and white—the first major production since 1967’s
In Cold Blood
not to be filmed in color. “It’s a dismal town,” said Bogdanovich, “but I know damn well that in color it would look pretty, no matter how dismal.” The film avoided the distracting attitude and pose of hyperrealism—yet it offered an achingly recognizable and resonant slice of life, thanks in large part to Bogdanovich’s superb instinct for casting.

Although he had initially toyed with using old-time stars such as James Stewart and Dorothy Malone, he opted for less familiar faces as a means of achieving authenticity: Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges as the high school seniors Sonny and Duane, best friends who end a losing football season with the painful awareness that there will never be another one; Cybill Shepherd in her screen debut as Jacy, the teenaged tease who works her wiles on both boys; Ellen Burstyn as Lois, Jacy’s restless, still-beautiful mother; Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion, the town’s respected elder statesman; and Cloris Leachman as Ruth, the football coach’s depressed and lonely wife. Only Eileen Brennan, as Genevieve, the good-hearted waitress at Sam’s café, seemed a bit actressy, as if she’d seen too many Claire Trevor movies.

The Last Picture Show
received some of the year’s most extraordinary press. Andrew Sarris, still smarting over the damage that “Raising Kane” had done to Welles, wrote: “I have visions of Pauline Kael in the year 2001 setting out to prove that Bogdanovich was not the actual auteur of
The Last Picture Show
, but was in fact deeply indebted to Larry McMurtry’s novel and to an entire school of Texas novelists.”

Pauline’s own review of
The Last Picture Show
was positive, yet oddly measured, with more than a suggestion of the backhanded compliment. She was skittish about the possibility that the film—which she correctly predicted would be both a popular and critical success—would play into the hands of conservative filmgoers: that its traditional storytelling style would “turn into a bludgeon to beat other filmmakers with.” She praised the film for not taking the direction of “worked-up, raunchy melodrama about tangled lives but, rather, of something closer to common experience.” The movie never was “exploitative of human passions and miseries”; instead, it was “a lovingly exact history of American small-town life.” She said that the story, with what she took to be its resonances of the
Peyton Place
TV series, was “perhaps what TV soap opera would be if it were more honest—if it looked at ordinary experience in a non-exploitative way, if it had observation and humor. It is perhaps an
ideal
TV show.”

She had reservations about the way movies were used in the picture-show sequences. Bogdanovich had used
Father of the Bride
, starring the ravishing young Elizabeth Taylor, for an early sequence that showed Sonny’s dissatisfaction with his ill-tempered girlfriend (marvelously played by Sharon Taggart). For the end, when the picture show closes, Bogdanovich chose a clip from a film by one of his idols, Howard Hawks—
Red River
. It was the final “yee-haw” cattle-drive sequence, and he selected it to contrast the mythic lives of the cowboys with the small, aimless lives of those few in the audience on the picture show’s closing night.

Pauline found the contrast too obvious and broad. She could remember the endless run-of-the-mill product ground out by the studios in the late ’40s and early ’50s—films barely more satisfying than a cheap TV episode—and pointed out that even these dismal movies provided bored people with a form of escapism. “For several decades,” she wrote, “the generally tawdry films we saw week after week contributed to our national identity—such as it was.” Seeing bad movies week in and week out and “still feeling that they represented something preferable to your own existence” was “part of the truth of American experience.” She had a point: It wasn’t first-class films such as
Father of the Bride
and
Red River
that were representative of the weekly moviegoing experience as much as it was forgettable B pictures.

Bogdanovich, however, felt that Pauline’s idea couldn’t possibly work in cinematic terms. “Pauline misses the point,” he said nearly forty years after her review of
The Last Picture Show
appeared. “We used
Red River
because of the cattle drive—it shows you that the days of that kind of adventure and exuberance and excitement are gone—compared to what we’ve been seeing from the movie.” (It’s worth noting that in McMurtry’s novel, the movie was
The Kid from Texas
, a B picture with Audie Murphy and Gale Storm. Sonny and Duane, remembering all their date nights at the picture show, are bored with it and walk out on it. McMurtry wrote, “It would have taken
Winchester ’73
or
Red River
or some big movie to have crowded out the memories the boys kept having.”)

In the same column in which she reviewed
The Last Picture Show
, Pauline covered Dennis Hopper’s new work with a perilously similar title:
The Last Movie
, which investigated the impact of a film crew on a band of natives in the Peruvian Andes. She admitted it was a sloppy mess, but she couldn’t help observing, “If Bogdanovich replaces Hopper as the hero of the industry—if, to the industry, he becomes the new hot director that everyone should imitate—the most talented moviemakers may be in trouble. Even Nixon could like
The Last Picture Show
.” (Sometime later, when Bogdanovich met Richard Nixon, “I told him that Pauline had said it was a picture that even Richard Nixon would like. He slapped his thigh and said, ‘I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not.’ Then he said, ‘
The Last Picture Show
? Black-and-white? Texas? I
did
like that!’”)

 

Although Pauline was careful not to reveal too much of herself directly in her reviews, it had become possible for those who read her closely to get a sense of her position on various political issues—as was the case with her quip about Nixon’s liking
The Last Picture Show
. At around this time she also commented that she couldn’t understand how Nixon had gotten elected, because she didn’t know a single person who voted for him. The remark circulated widely in conservative circles, something that delighted Pauline no end.

It was also possible from reading some of her reviews to discern where she stood in relation to the women’s movement—namely, that she kept a healthy distance from it. The bold choices she had made in her personal life—having Gina out of wedlock, doggedly pursuing her chosen profession even in the years when it brought her little income, refusing to stand in Edward Landberg’s shadow or to bend to William Shawn—suggested that she had been living her own version of a feminist ideal. She, of course, would never have characterized it that way: feminism reeked too much of dogma for her to be able to take it seriously and join the movement in any specific, organized way. The feminist sensibility, she feared, was a trap that shackled thinking and rendered one unable to come up with fresh and invigorating opinions. Also, she found many of the feminists she knew to have a certain humorlessness—always a cardinal sin. Pauline’s idea of being a feminist was to live her life rather like a Jean Arthur career woman: proving herself by doing her work better than any man, but always maintaining a sense of humor about herself.

“I thought Pauline was deaf to feminism,” observed Karen Durbin, who worked with her at
The New Yorker
in the early ’70s before becoming a film critic. “Not hostile. It just wasn’t something she could hear. If she had been younger, my generation, I’m convinced she would have been a feminist firebrand. But as it was, she fought the fight by herself. It seemed to me one of the key insights of women’s liberation was the moment when I thought, ‘We don’t have permission.’ That’s what we’re fighting for. The pure nerve of the way Pauline would say what she thought and not mince anything—it must have been God’s own battle for her to create that permission for herself. And she lived by it. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t underneath that permission a tremulous place—‘Am I getting away with this?’”

Pauline’s review of one of the year’s great critical and commercial successes,
The French Connection
, gave clear indications about how she felt living in New York City at the time. More and more films were being shot there, a development that had been actively sought by Mayor John V. Lindsay. But particularly since the success of
Midnight Cowboy
, filmmakers delighted in presenting the starkest, seamiest views of the city ever to wind up on film. The isolation of Tina Balser (Carrie Snodgress) in
Diary of a Mad Housewife
, lost in a maze of her husband’s ambition; Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels, the high-priced call girl in
Klute
, racing to get into her apartment because she knows someone is watching her; the junkie (Al Pacino) who says that death is “the best high of all” in
The Panic in Needle Park
; the squalid apartments of Barbra Streisand and George Segal in
The Owl and the Pussycat
—all of it showed New York as a place of bare trees and gray winter skies, where the inhabitants were simply caught up in the frenzy of trying to survive. Pauline continued to struggle with her own feelings of hostility toward the city, where she thought “everyone seems to be dressed for a mad ball.” She volunteered to her readers, “It is literally true that when you live in New York, you no longer believe that the garbage will ever be gone from the streets or that life will ever be sane and orderly.”