Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  It was a review that brought a civil retort from Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne, who took Pauline to task for getting her facts wrong. Sometime earlier, at an evening they had spent together at an Academy Awards party at the home of the literary agent Lynn Nesbit, Dunne and Didion had mentioned to Pauline that Frank Perry would be directing Play It as It Lays. Pauline regarded Perry as one of the most humorless and flatfooted of directors and asked—incredulously, Dunne remembered—why they wanted him. “I replied that actually we wanted Sam Peckinpah to do the picture, and that Sam wanted to do it,” Dunne wrote. “The studios reacted to Sam’s doing a picture about a woman as if it were suggested that Hitler do a film about the Jewish question. With Sam out, it became academic who directed.” Mike Nichols was interested, but negotiations with him broke down, and Perry had put up his own money to finance the script, making his assignment “a simple matter of economics.”

  A few weeks later Dunne wrote to her again, to tell her that he was reviewing her forthcoming collection, called Deeper into Movies, for the Los Angeles Times. “I confess a certain ambivalence about the book,” he wrote. “I think you’re the best movie critic in America, but I’m not altogether sure that’s a compliment.”

  At year’s end, she was completely let down by Sam Peckinpah’s latest, The Getaway, a violent picture about a bank robbery, which she described as “the most completely commercial film Peckinpah has made, and his self-parasitism gives one forebodings of emptiness. When a director repeats his successful effects, it can mean that he is getting locked in and has stopped responding to new experience. (Hitchcock is the most glaring example.) The Getaway is long and dull and has no reverberations except of other movies, mostly by Peckinpah.”

  Peckinpah wrote to Pauline from Durango, Mexico, where he had been living ever since the filming of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Illness had plagued the shoot, and he told her that he had at one point been forced to work with a fever of 104 degrees. But his tone in the letter was again apologetic, as it had been when she reviewed Straw Dogs: “Sorry you didn’t get my crude attempt at satire with Getaway,” he wrote. “It was a put on but few people realised [sic] it. . . . You said a great thing in your Getaway review about a director repeating himself. I am afraid I will be doing that for quite a while, until I get enough money to do the kind of scripts I believe in. But I suppose I will always be concerned with violence as that seems to be the only thing I am paid for.... I gather from brief excerpts that you are still as tough, talented and opinionated as ever, which is as it should be.” Still smarting from not getting to film Deliverance, a project he had coveted, he added that he didn’t see how such a fine novel could “be made into such a shitty film and be nominated for three awards. I don’t like your town but Hollywood is really a dunghill.” As a postscript, he added that “Rex and Judith loved” The Getaway: “That says something doesn’t it?”

  The pace of moviegoing that Pauline maintained at this time was extraordinary: As always, she saw many films that she didn’t care to cover, and in her December 23, 1972, column for The New Yorker, she contributed substantial essays on five films, including Robert Altman’s latest, Images. The study of the world of a schizophrenic woman who can no longer sort out reality from fantasy, it was a good representative of the kind of modestly budgeted film with a highly personal point of view that was being made regularly in the early 1970s. Altman had written the script several years before in Los Angeles and claimed not to have altered one word of it. Like all of his films of this period, Images didn’t cost much. Altman admitted that the story was probably influenced mostly by Bergman’s Persona, but he always stressed that he hadn’t meant it to be a precise study in schizophrenia; “I trust instinct more than any study of logical conclusions,” he later said.

  Pauline thought Images didn’t work, but she went easy on it in her review because of her respect for Altman’s gifts, which she found “almost frighteningly non-repetitive.” Altman showed every sign of continuing to expand as an artist—even in this “empty, trashy chic film,” a “psychological thriller with no psychological content, so there’s no suspense and the climax has no power.” Her review ended in something of a defensive mode: “It’s possible that this formidably complicated man has as many facets as this gadgety movie’s tiresome prisms, and that in reaching out instinctively and restlessly he’s learning techniques that he hasn’t yet found a use for. My bet is that he will; when he’s bad he’s very bad, but when he’s good he’s extraordinary.”

  The message in that final paragraph seemed to be that the end result might be all-important in the work of other directors, but it was less so in Altman: In his films, the intention was given greater weight. For the most revered and influential film critic in America to take this position with a director did not necessarily do the director great favors in Hollywood. Pauline’s reviews may have made it a bit easier for Altman to get funding, but it also made him the object of many other directors’ resentment. Altman himself liked to tell people that he admired Pauline for never being in anyone’s pocket, but there is plenty of evidence that he spent considerable time wooing her. He loved having lengthy meals with her, at which the liquor flowed freely. Even more than most directors, Altman took an intense interest in the fate of his films; his wife, Kathryn, recalled him obsessively telephoning the management of the New York theaters where his pictures had opened and asking them how many receipts had been tallied for each showing. He felt that the critics could make or break him, and he wasn’t at all above courting the most important ones.

  Rene Auberjonois, who acted in Images, lived in Manhattan, on West Ninety-third Street, just around the corner from Pauline and Gina. He frequently ran into Pauline while waiting for a bus, and they would chat about whichever film he was doing. In Ireland, on the set of Images, Altman asked Auberjonois to do him a favor, which made the actor deeply ill at ease. “He made me sit down and write a postcard to Pauline Kael about being in Ireland and making the film. I felt incredibly awkward about it, because I didn’t really know her at all, but he assumed that because I lived around the corner from her, it would be all right for me to write a personal note to a film critic. I remember sitting there and not knowing what to say, and it was sent off, and I never heard from her.”

  By now Pauline was hearing frequently from stars and directors whose work she had reviewed. She regarded Carol Burnett as “probably the most gifted comedienne this country has ever produced,” but she thought her new film, Martin Ritt’s Pete ’n’ Tillie, about a mismatched husband and wife, was a waste of her talents. Pauline thought Burnett’s work in Pete ’n’ Tillie was “grimly controlled” and “an unnecessarily confined and schoolmarmish performance.” Her review brought her a letter of gratitude from Burnett, in which the actress admitted that she had known something was wrong during the filming but had been unable to figure out what it was.

  Pauline also received a letter from Sydney Pollack, director of Robert Redford’s new film Jeremiah Johnson, but it wasn’t one of thanks. Pauline disliked the movie partly because she had thought that Redford would evolve into “a new kind of hip and casually smart screen actor, and he’s already jumped into mythic-man roles in which tired, aging stars can vegetate profitably.” For much of the film, mountain man Jeremiah Johnson wages a war against the Crow Indians who have killed his wife and child; at the end comes a scene in which the Crows’ chief, signaling an end to hostilities, gives Johnson a sign of peace. Pauline wrote, “Jeremiah signals him back, giving him the finger.” Pollack wrote her a lengthy response, saying that she had misinterpreted the gesture, and that he could

  only assume that by that point you were so bored with the film that you were half asleep, since there is no other way to understand how you could see Johnson giving the finger to the Crow Chief. He quite clearly raises his hand in a salute.... The whole attempt, poorly done or not, was to present both the Indian and white man as they were, without judgment, according to my best efforts at research....
Now, I have been called a bum by some very prestigious critics the world over, including yourself, and while it tends to kill my appetite for a few days . . . those are the rules. But I have never been so completely misunderstood or misinterpreted as in those last few lines of your review.

  Pauline was disappointed when at the end of the year the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers the year’s Best Picture prize over The Godfather. She was equally displeased when Laurence Olivier (for Sleuth) triumphed over Marlon Brando—the result of an unusual and precedent-setting circumstance. She was also disappointed that Liv Ullmann (Cries and Whispers, The Emigrants) won Best Actress over her favorites, Cicely Tyson and Liza Minnelli.

  Pauline had recently begun exchanging letters with a young screenwriter named Robert Getchell, who had asked his agent to send along his new script “to save me the buck twenty.” Getchell’s screenplay concerned a Southwestern housewife named Alice who suddenly finds herself widowed and takes to the road with her young boy, in pursuit of the singing career she long ago abandoned. Getchell had written it with Shirley MacLaine in mind, and MacLaine had been eager to do it and had planned to try to get Peter Bogdanovich to direct; then she had gone to work on the presidential campaign of George McGovern, “never to be heard from again,” Getchell wrote.

  Pauline read the script with fascination, and while she found it sharp and witty and tough and beautifully observed, she suggested a few improvements. “The idea should be for them to keep going with lots of engagement,” she wrote to Getchell, “to get something out of life along the way—not to look for a happy end.” She added that she thought it should be directed by Altman, choosing not to think about the dilemma that might lie ahead if Getchell’s script were to be filmed and she were to review it for The New Yorker.

  The run of good films that appeared in late 1972 did not carry over to the new year: Most of the movies Pauline reviewed from January to March were disappointments. The major event of the winter months was the publication of her latest volume of criticism, Deeper into Movies, once again by Little, Brown. In her author’s note Pauline stated that this collection was “a record of the interaction of movies and our national life during a frantic time when three decades seem to have been compressed into three years and I wrote happily—like a maniac—to keep up with what I thought was going on in movies—which is to say, our national theater.” She added, “Right now, movie critics have an advantage over critics in most other fields: responsive readers. And it can help you to concentrate your energies if you know that the subject is fresh and that your review may make a difference to some people.”

  It was a sentiment that was picked up in the opening paragraph of the front-page notice in The New York Times Book Review on February 18, 1973. The reviewer was the eminent literary critic Irving Howe, who opened with the observation, “Right now, movie criticism in America seems livelier, more pungent than literary criticism.... Movies have recently carried a sharper air of excitement than have books; and some people have begun to develop, or fumble toward, a film esthetic.” Howe admired Pauline’s “crisp sentences,” “aggressive wit,” and the fact that “she brings to her movies a grounding in literary culture such as some movie reviewers take to be merely ‘linear’ and others don’t even know they need.” He admired the fact that “her approach to a new film is empiric and careful, not too different from that which a good critic of drama or fiction would employ.” There was a caveat, however. “Sometimes she drops into a sort of brawling, Marie Dressler–like posture to assault the position of high-brow seriousness from which, in the main, she works.” He questioned her “excessive praise for movies like M*A*S*H and McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and picked apart her taste in advocating for films such as Fiddler on the Roof, The Conformist, and The Last Picture Show: “I suspect either that, as a result of seeing too many movies, her standards are slipping or she is kidding. And it doesn’t look as if she’s kidding.” Howe took an academic’s viewpoint of what he considered her principal weakness—that she did not “work out of a secure critical tradition. Its absence allows her a pleasing freedom of improvisation, but makes very hard the achievement of reflective depth and delicate judgment.” The other reviews were excellent, and, for the fourth consecutive time, a Kael collection enjoyed brisk sales.

  In the summer of 1973 Pauline took time out from her lecture appearances to accept an offer from The New York Times Book Review to write about the latest project by Norman Mailer: a coffee-table-sized illustrated biography of Marilyn Monroe, titled simply Marilyn. Pauline had never been a fan of Mailer; in 1968 she had panned his film Wild ’90, calling it “the worst movie that I’ve stayed to see all the way through.” While she certainly recognized Mailer’s literary gifts (just as she recognized Joan Didion’s), she didn’t particularly respond to them; these representatives of New Journalism were mostly showing off too self-consciously for her taste, and she recoiled from Mailer’s brand of literary machismo.

  The very idea of Mailer on Monroe was bound to make her a little dubious from the outset. To Pauline, Monroe was at best an overripe, teasing blond comedienne who became adept at a kind of “self-satire,” and Pauline thought that Monroe’s “slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style.” Pauline had found Monroe amusing in her one all-out carnal temptress role, as Rose Loomis in the 1953 Henry Hathaway thriller Niagara. But by 1973, the Monroe cult, campaigning to have the star considered a potentially great actress consistently deprived of the right material, had built to fever pitch. The woods were full of actors who claimed to have been present at the famous Actors Studio class in which Monroe played a scene from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie with Maureen Stapleton, reportedly to revelatory effect. (Her performance as Roslyn in The Misfits, written by her husband Arthur Miller, makes a persuasive argument that she was not everything that was being said of her. Miller may have had the best intentions of giving her something meaty to dig into as an actress, but she simply could not pull it off: her interminable pauses between lines are a heavy-handed cue to us that she’s being “emotional” and derail any chance she has of getting a real performance tempo going.)

  Part of the problem Pauline had with Mailer’s take on Monroe was that he was trying to mine the legend for more than it was worth. “Who knows what to think about Marilyn Monroe or about those who turn her sickness to metaphor?” Pauline wondered. “I wish they’d let her die.” She found that Mailer inflated Monroe’s career “to cosmic proportions. She becomes ‘a proud, inviolate artist,’ and he suggests that ‘one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.’ He pumps so much wind into his subject that he’s trying to make Marilyn Monroe worthy of him, a subject to compare with the Pentagon and the moon.”

  Yet she found some of his insights impressively acute. He was especially good on Monroe’s early years in an orphanage and how they may have been the foundation of her constant lying and a need to compartmentalize her life. “His strength—when he gets rolling—isn’t in Freudian guesses but in his fusing his knowledge of how people behave with his worst suspicions of where they really live,” wrote Pauline. She also admired his description of the Hollywood machine and “the psychological and sexual rewards the studio system offered executives.”

  The book was a case of split personality, as Pauline saw it: “a rip-off all right but a rip-off with genius.” She admitted that Mailer came up with “a runaway string of perceptions and you have to recognize that, though it’s a bumpy ride, the book still goes like a streak.” Ultimately, however, Marilyn suffered from the author’s need to inflate its subject and wallow in his own theorizing; in the end, it became “Mailer’s way to perform character assassination with the freedom of a novelist who has created fictional characters.” The book finally was undone for her by “malevolence that needs to be recognized . . . Neither the world nor Marilyn Monroe’s life should be seen in Norman Mailer’s image.”

  Pauli
ne’s review of Marilyn became one of the most widely discussed pieces of criticism of the year, and, as she had predicted, it did nothing to prevent the book from being one of the year’s most popular releases. Her appearance in the New York Times Book Review did, however, lead to a baffling encounter with William Shawn. When she dropped by The New Yorker offices over the summer, she ran into him, and he asked her why she hadn’t let him have the review for the magazine. “What for?” Pauline replied. “You wouldn’t have printed it.”

  “That’s right,” Shawn sighed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In the summer of 1973 Pauline was, like so many other Americans, riveted by the television coverage of the Watergate hearings. She knew that “The Current Cinema” was not the place for political grandstanding, but she made her feelings about the Nixon administration known while appearing on a symposium in Manhattan in early 1973. As Newsweek quoted her: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are, I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

  When she returned to her New Yorker post in the fall of 1973, she offered her observations on the dominant mood in the country: “The Watergate hearings have overshadowed the movies this summer, yet the corruption that Watergate has come to stand for can be seen as the culmination of what American movies have been saying for almost a decade.” The country was sinking deeper into a state of hopelessness. “The Vietnam War has barely been mentioned on the screen,” Pauline wrote, but she rightly felt that you could sense its presence in many of the era’s most intriguing films, from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to Midnight Cowboy to action films such as The French Connection, in which “there was no virtuous side to identify with and nobody you really felt very good about cheering for.” It worried her that films now embraced such “a depressive uncertainty,” a trend she didn’t see as representing artistic growth, but rather as an easy response to world events. “When Vietnam finished off the American hero as righter of wrongs, the movie industry embraced corruption greedily,” she wrote; “formula movies could be energized by infusions of brutality, cynicism, and Naked Apism, which could all be explained by Vietnam and called realism. Moviemakers could celebrate violence and pretend, even to themselves, that they were doing the public a service.”