Pauline Kael (44 page)

In time,
Taxi Driver
would be held up as one of the richest examples of the bold new directorial sensibility that had sprung up in American films of the 1970s. So it is surprising to read the reviews it received on its initial release. Many, like Vincent Canby’s, were positive. But there was plenty of negative press, too. Andrew Sarris disliked “its life-denying spirit, its complete lack of curiosity about the possibilities of people. Between Scorsese’s celebrated Catholic guilt and Schrader’s celebrated Protestant guilt even a Checker cab would groan under such a burden of self-hatred.”

It must have been difficult for Pauline to write about the film, given her history with Schrader, and in the review she pointedly did not go into any detail about Schrader’s contribution; she simply mentioned that he wrote the script. All the credit was given to Martin Scorsese, whom she thought “may just naturally be an Expressionist . . . Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness.” Although she initially told Schrader that De Niro wouldn’t be up to playing Travis, she thought that he had given a wondrous performance: He had “used his own emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance had something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in
Last Tango
.” She wrote, “No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying.”

Ultimately, Pauline saw
Taxi Driver
as a brilliant expression of her own fears about New York. In the screening room where she first viewed the film—Bernard Herrmann’s score had not yet been added—she sat in stunned silence at the ending, in which Travis winds up being acclaimed as a hero and resumes his restless night-driving search, which will surely explode in violence once again. Her friend Joseph Hurley recalled that when the movie was over, she leaned back in her seat and cried,
“He’s still out there!”

In the spring of 1976 Pauline’s fifth collection appeared, covering the period of her
New Yorker
reviews from September 1972 to March 1975. The working title had been the jokey
All the Way with Movies
, but when she had tested it on her friends and none of them liked it, she switched it to
Reeling
. This time she paid a price for the wildly passionate enthusiasm she expressed in her reviews.

Once again coverage of her book occupied the prestigious front page of
The New York Times Book Review
. Once again, it was no longer enough to hail it as an important volume of criticism; by now, Pauline occupied such a significant place in the literary as well as popular culture that some deeper perspective was needed. The illustration the
Times
chose was a constellation of star shapes filled with the head shots of various artists, including Robert Altman, Barbra Streisand, Marlon Brando, and Martin Scorsese. Pauline’s face dominated—the biggest star of all.

The assigned reviewer was Robert Brustein, the erudite theater critic. His essay opened on a positive note with a generous mention of Pauline’s “animation and charm as a movie reviewer.” Brustein felt that “at a time when many critics are expressing feelings of dejection, even a sense of apocalypse about their subjects, Miss Kael continues to write about movies with the breathless delirium of one smitten with young love.”

Brustein expressed his concern, however, that she had become too much of a clucking mother hen concerning the fates of the movies and directors she loved, and that her writing was “becoming larded with hyperbole.”

Brustein went on to say that her energetic style was best digested by reading only a few reviews at a time. “It is always an entertaining book,” he wrote, “and piece by piece a brilliant one, but taking it in large doses, you may get frazzled by all the feverish energy, flashing like St. Elmo’s fire, around so many ephemeral works.”

She was likewise criticized for her hyperbole in
The Village Voice
’s review, written by Richard Gilman—and illustrated with a doctored photo of Pauline wearing star-shaped sunglasses. While acknowledging her formidable gifts as a writer, Gilman wrote, “What she so often practices now, setting the lead for her fellows, is an amalgam of idiosyncratic opinion, star gazing, myth-mongering, politics, sociological punditry, and intervention as a kind of co-worker in the medium. It may be in tune with the times, may be much more satisfying to many readers than the tradition (her popularity of course suggests that it is), but it’s surely different from criticism as we’ve known it.”

Gilman’s most damning words came in characterizing her involvement with directors, writers, and other people in the industry, which he interpreted as a “desire to relieve the lonely detachment of the commentator by an active role, a direct hand in it all. I mean by this her notorious abandonment of critical neutrality, the scandalous apotheosis of
Nashville
before it was finished; the trafficking with certain directors and screenwriters as evangelist and would-be colleague.”

Pauline was incensed by many of the carping reviews that
Reeling
received, but at least one of them led to an enduring friendship. Greil Marcus, the rock critic and books columnist for
Rolling Stone
, published a review of
Reeling
that also accused her of lapsing into hyperbole. “Everything had to be the greatest, the best, the newest,” he recalled. “And it seemed to be out of control, and I didn’t know what this was about.” When Marcus’s review appeared, Pauline telephoned him at his home in Berkeley. “Did you really mean all that stuff that you wrote about me?” she asked. Marcus said that he did. “Well,” said Pauline, “my daughter agrees with you, but I don’t. I’m coming to Berkeley and would like to meet you.”

The Marcuses invited her to dinner, and when she arrived at their house, she looked around and asked where the other guests were. “She just sort of expected that there would be a big party for her,” Marcus said. “Which it had never occurred to us to do. We had a marvelous time, and she lived up to all our fantasies, which is to say, she was extreme in her opinions—extreme in her likes and dislikes, whether it had to do with movies or books or food or anything.”

The spring of 1976 was occupied with a heavy promotional tour for
Reeling
, which started with lectures at the College of Marin, Berkeley, the Los Angeles Film Festivals (Filmex), Immaculate Heart College, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. There were numerous radio and television interviews, including an hour-long appearance on Los Angeles’s KNBC-TV. She also was eager to appear on several of the national talk shows whose invitations she had previously declined, including those of Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, and Phil Donahue. She wrote to her editor Billy Abrahams that she would be “happy to do any radio or TV that comes up, but wish to avoid newspaper and magazine interviews, as I am too tempting a target for bitchy reporters.”

By the summer of 1976 Pauline had a new agent, Perry Knowlton of Curtis, Brown Ltd. Peter Davison of the Atlantic Monthly Press was delighted and wrote Knowlton a congratulatory note, advising him, “She is not lacking in exigence as an author, nor, I’m sure you will find, as a client.” But the publisher was relieved that at last she was handling her business affairs over to a proper agent, having been without one since dispensing with Robert Mills’s services several years earlier.

She had a number of new projects in the offing, one of which was a collection of her capsule reviews. Knowlton offered it to Billy Abrahams for an advance of $75,000. Abrahams balked at the asking price and offered $25,000, which Pauline turned down out of hand. There was also
Lays of Ancient Hollywood,
a collection of essays on actors, with “Cary Grant—The Man from Dream City” as its centerpiece. But Abrahams again found Knowlton’s request for $75,000 “too high by far,” and passed; the long-planned book never materialized.

In the fall of 1976 Pauline saw a movie at the New York Film Festival that she admired very much—the Swiss director Alain Tanner’s
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000
, the story of a group of left-leaning men and women who are attempting to adjust to the fact that the social revolution they anticipated in the ’60s has not come to pass. It was a witty and quietly provocative talkfest, austerely but beautifully photographed, and while some critics objected to its odd structure—John Simon found the people in it “as uncomfortable to watch as a backless chair is to sit in”—Pauline thought it “a marvelous toy, weightless, yet precise and controlled.” She was indulgent of what would become the year’s smash hit,
Rocky
, saying that the picture was “shameless, and that’s why—on a certain level—it works. What holds it together is innocence.” She was won over by Sylvester Stallone’s performance in the title role, as a down-and-out debt collector who gets a chance at the world heavyweight boxing title. “Stallone has the gift of direct communication with the audience,” Pauline wrote. “Rocky’s naïve observations come from so deep inside him that they have Lewis Carroll enchantment.”

The young writer Carrie Rickey, a former student of Pauline’s old friend Manny Farber, accompanied Pauline the night she saw
Rocky
(which happened to be Election Night, 1976) and would remember the evening for reasons apart from the movie. After the screening, Pauline and Rickey went to her room at the Royalton and watched the election returns. Pauline, who supported Jimmy Carter, was incensed when Rickey admitted that she had cast an absentee ballot in her native California for Eugene McCarthy. “She screamed at me for doing that,” recalled Rickey. “She lectured me on why I needed to be for Carter. We also had a very interesting conversation about whether
Nashville
predicted Carter—this weird populist governor from a Southern state augured for a Carter win.”

Rickey also remembered Pauline’s lack of interest in the feminist movement. Rickey was quite intrigued by the contrast between the female and male aesthetics in film. “I had proposed back then that the women who directed movies—and there weren’t a lot of them—used longer takes and not a lot of cuts. I thought their rhythm was inimical to mainstream cinema, which was more quick cuts and actions. Pauline said, ‘Stay away from that feministic stuff’—her word—‘it’s going to kill your career.’”

The picture that excited Pauline most in late 1976 was an unexpected one: Brian De Palma’s
Carrie
. Based on a novel by Stephen King,
Carrie
was a horror tale about the drab, unpopular high school girl (Sissy Spacek) dominated by her crazed, fundamentalist mother but gifted with powers of telekinesis. The film climaxed at the senior prom, where, after her sadistic high school classmates humiliate her by rigging the election so that she is voted prom queen and then dumping a bucket of pig’s blood on her, she exacts a horrifying revenge on all of them. In
Carrie
, De Palma went far beyond the parameters of the typical horror film, infusing it with a great deal of warmth and humor, and a rather astute point of view about growing up in 1970s America. It had a nasty, funny, subversive feel, and was perhaps the ideal horror film for the post-Watergate era. Pauline had admired aspects of De Palma’s low-budget efforts in the 1960s, but with
Carrie
, she felt he had arrived onscreen as a major talent. And the acclaim she heaped on him caused a great deal of eye-rolling among her colleagues, who felt that the director had turned out nothing more than a well-crafted commercial product.

Pauline thought
Carrie
had “a beautiful plot,” and she laid another of her superlatives on De Palma, who, in her judgment, had “the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies.” She loved the teasing sense of humor and pulp sensibility that he brought to the horror movie. To Pauline,
Carrie
seemed to be taking off from a number of other movies, including
Psycho
,
The Way We Were
, and one of her favorite classic bad films, 1935’s
She
, with Helen Gahagan. In his 1960s films, she pointed out, De Palma had used mostly stationary camera setups, but here his camera swirled dizzingly in scene after scene, particularly the romantic moment with Carrie and her dream date (William Katt) at the senior prom, in which the audience has the sensation of dancing along with the couple and getting completely drawn into the most gloriously romantic night of poor Carrie’s wretched life. She celebrated De Palma’s emergence as a stylish, tongue-in-cheek director. “He’s uncommitted to anything except successful manipulation,” she wrote, “when his camera conveys the motion of dreams, it’s a lovely trick. He can’t treat a subject straight, but that’s all right; neither could Hitchcock. . . . Everything in his films is distanced by his persistent adolescent kinkiness; he’s gleefully impersonal.”

If her elevation of De Palma’s “persistent adolescent kinkiness” into some kind of major achievement baffled many of Pauline’s friends as well as her enemies, it was her review, in the end, that carried the day for De Palma and his cast. Nancy Allen, who played the movie’s chief villainess, remembered vividly the day that Pauline’s review appeared. “I think that Brian was just thrilled,” she said. “And disgusted at the same time, because the studio wasn’t treating it like it was anything better than a slasher picture.” De Palma quickly became one of the directors Pauline felt compelled to promote. Allen remembered that she had the reputation for being a bit chilly toward her pet directors’ wives and girlfriends, but she found Pauline warm and friendly. “She liked Brian a lot and there I was, the girlfriend. I didn’t know if I would be accepted or not. She was very pleasant and said hello and smiled sweetly. I remember thinking,
Okay, that was all right
. She was possessive. They were her guys.”