Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Unlike many of her colleagues, who thought it was appropriate to be entertained by press agents and publicists, Pauline maintained a strict code when it came to accepting gifts or even meals out. If she liked and respected the people, she treated them fairly—if not, she could be withering. Marion Billings, who worked on many of Martin Scorsese’s best pictures, was a publicist Pauline particularly admired. They met at a screening for Mean Streets, became friends, and for years had a regular lunch date at Armando’s, an Italian restaurant on West Seventy-sixth Street. Billings would make it clear that she was on an expense account, but Pauline never permitted her to pick up the check. “She respected me because I didn’t lie,” Billings recalled. At one point early in their friendship, Pauline gave her a copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, inscribed “For Marion—and there are all those others that out of charity I haven’t mentioned, but which are engraved on our behinds instead of our hearts. Love, Pauline.” Some of the others could try their best to ingratiate themselves with her, but it didn’t work. Sally Ann Mock of The New Yorker remembered one Christmas in the mid-’70s when a steady stream of bottles of liquor and boxes of chocolates was sent to Pauline from various publicists. Mock’s job that holiday season was to pack them all up and send them back.

  Michael Sragow, film critic for The Baltimore Sun, among other publications, once observed that 1977 was a pivotal year in the American movie industry—the year when film artistry quite suddenly reached a plateau as a number of changes began to make themselves felt throughout Hollywood. Pauline had guessed wrong about the long-term impact of a couple of the young-lion directors who had burst forth early in the decade, namely Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin. After three spectacular box-office successes in a row—The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon—Bogdanovich suffered three consecutive flops: Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, and Nickelodeon. Friedkin, after the enormous success of both The French Connection and The Exorcist, came up with the disappointing Sorcerer.

  Another factor whose influence Pauline didn’t quite fully appreciate was the enormous box-office (and critical) success of Jaws. The danger it presented was that the blockbuster was now becoming the backbone of the industry—something upon which every studio was beginning to depend. The studios increasingly wanted the safe guarantees of audience polls, demographic studies, and bank-approved stars. Low-budget films that were deemed lacking in mass appeal were routinely denied a big marketing and publicity push and might return only a few hundred thousand dollars at the box office. The studio executives were losing confidence in their ability to build a hit on good, basic story material, making it unlikely that a M*A*S*H or McCabe & Mrs. Miller could get financing. One sign that the producers didn’t really know which direction to go in was the decline of the sort of serious contemporary subjects that had flourished only a few years ago. The great dialogue between screen and audience that Pauline had dreamed of now showed every sign of being in jeopardy. The more she talked to her friends about the corrupt, moneygrubbing ways of Hollywood, the more she felt compelled to do something about the situation.

  She addressed this state of affairs in an essay she wrote before her six-month layoff in March 1977. In “Where We Are Now” she cited the rise of high-quality television films such as Roots and Sibyl, and that she had come to feel she was missing nothing in the cinema by staying home to watch them. “The movie studios aren’t putting up a fight,” she wrote. “The lassitude of the studio heads—in for a year or two, or just a half year, and then moving around in the conglomerate chess game—is a sign of their powerlessness. Suddenly, there are no strong men at the top. Heads of production come and go without having had a chance to build a reputation.”

  In mid-1977 another blockbuster was released and became so successful, with such a sharp eye on the youth audience, that it made Jaws seem like a faint ripple. George Lucas’s Star Wars was the mammoth hit of the era, and it penetrated the public consciousness in a way that was almost alarming. Children and teenagers went back to see it again and again. The Star Wars merchandising machine—action figures, lunch boxes, posters—swept through the world. It was not a movie Pauline was temperamentally disposed to admire: She found Lucas’s preoccupation with childhood thrills faintly depressing. “There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism,” she wrote. She objected to it because it was a big toy with “no emotional grip . . . It’s an epic without a dream.” And yet audiences were deliriously eager to follow Lucas on his journey back to childhood. Pauline’s two-paragraph commentary on Star Wars in the fall of 1977 was more than a dismissal: It was an indication that her audience, the great audience she believed in, had begun to lose its way.

  “I told her from the beginning that Spielberg was going to be responsible for a huge shift in money toward kids and movies,” recalled James Toback. “I told her, this is something you’re missing the boat on. Forget whether you think he’s a lousy director or a good director—the significance of Steven Spielberg has very little to do with what is on the screen. He, along with George Lucas, is completely shifting where money will be spent on movies from now on. The audience that is going to be appealed to is going to go way down in age. Movies are going to be made for twelve-year-old boys, and there’s going to be a sliver of money spent, relatively speaking, on the rest of us. And that’s what she was missing. I said, Jaws and Star Wars are going to change the whole structure of Hollywood. You could see it and feel it. And that is not a phenomenon that she ever really labeled.”

  In the fall of 1977 Pauline reviewed Fred Zinnemann’s Julia, based on a celebrated segment of Lillian Hellman’s bestselling memoir, Pentimento. In it, Hellman recalled, in a tone of tastefully restrained heroism, how in the 1930s she had gone deep into Nazi Germany on a dangerous mission to smuggle $50,000 to her old childhood friend Julia, who was involved in the underground resistance. Pauline had highly conflicted feelings about Hellman as a playwright. Despite her fond memories of Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes, she believed that Hellman’s precisely embroidered dramas laid out in neat arrangements of black and white represented the brand of immaculate craftsmanship that had seriously arrested the development of the American theater. But there was also already considerable evidence that the “Julia” episode had at the very least been partially invented. “She was quite obsessed with the fact that Hellman was a liar,” said Richard Albarino, “and that the story was fabricated. It wasn’t because of her politics. Pauline seemed to be like an old-time Adlai Stevenson liberal. Very moderate—not leftish. She didn’t like excess in any of these things. She had a great deal of admiration for the establishment and liked order—which I think is reflected in her review.”

  Pauline’s greatest difficulty with Julia, however, involved Jane Fonda. There had been signs that the actress might not fulfill the promise she had shown in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Klute. Since winning the Academy Award for the latter, Fonda had filmed only sporadically and not very substantially, choosing instead to involve herself in a stream of high-profile political causes—a direction Pauline felt was a betrayal of her natural gifts. Years later, Fonda’s biographer, Patricia Bosworth, recalled that in an interview Pauline held Fonda up as an example of a grandstanding actor who had buried herself in politics. “She thought it was ridiculous that actors dissipated their talents by becoming political,” Bosworth remembered. “She thought it was silly, and she had no respect for it at all.”

  Julia paid a highly romanticized tribute to female friendship—Pauline called it “classical humanist” filmmaking—and as such it was hailed as an important picture, particularly coming after so many years that had witnessed such a paucity of good opportunities for leading actresses. The very small company of bankable female stars included Fonda, Barbra Streisand, and Goldie Hawn. The press, therefore, was eager to suggest that Julia was at the fountainhead of 1977 pictures ushering in a new Era of the Woman. In a New York Times interview, Fonda felt the need to point out
that the relationship between Lillian and Julia in the film was “not neurotic or sexually aberrant.” She also held forth on the importance of pictures such as Julia. “Women in movies have always been defined in terms of men, or they are victims.... It is very important to make movies about women who grow and become ideological human beings and totally committed people. We have to begin to put that image into the mass culture.”

  The media jumped on Julia in just the way Fonda and the film’s producers had hoped. The picture was the focal point of a big Newsweek article called “Hollywood’s New Heroines,” about the upcoming spate of pictures for women—including Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point, Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, and Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based on Judith Rossner’s bestselling novel, a fictionalized account of a sexually promiscuous New York City schoolteacher who was murdered by a man she picked up in a singles bar. Pauline had admired the book’s “pulpy morbidity” and “erotic, modern-Gothic compulsiveness” but felt that Brooks had undermined a good opportunity by turning the film into a “windy jeremiad” about the dangers of a sexually liberated society, a pompous, moralizing drama that was essentially “an illustrated lecture on how nice girls go wrong.” Pauline could not understand this point of view: She didn’t see what was wrong with single women cruising bars, writing, “It’s what nice people do when they’re not feeling so nice, or when they can’t stand the complications of relationships.” And while she had previously admired Diane Keaton’s casual, affect-less acting style in Woody Allen’s comedies, she felt that in Goodbar the star had lacked “a powerful enough personality to bull her way through the huffing and puffing of Richard Brooks.” Pauline found it difficult to rejoice in the success of Julia and Looking for Mr. Goodbar simply because they provided substantial roles for actresses. She didn’t see how “women’s films” could possibly help women unless they were good films.

  She was delighted, however, by Steven Spielberg’s new film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about a random group of people whose lives are changed forever by a vision from outer space. Close Encounters was the latest step in Spielberg’s appeal to the mass comic-book imagination, and Pauline thought he had delivered a wonderful picture suffused with “a child’s playfulness and love of surprises . . . You can feel the pleasure the young director took in making it.” She thought the sequence in which the extraterrestrials’ spaceship hovers over a Wyoming mountaintop as the awestruck earthlings look on was “one of the peerless moments in movie history—spiritually reassuring, magical, and funny at the same time.” Spielberg may not have had “the feelings for words which he has for images,” but he was worth another of her superlatives: He was “probably the most gifted American director who’s dedicated to sheer entertainment.” The pleasure she took in the wonders of a Close Encounters or the Gothic teenage-pop sensibility of a Carrie was beginning to make her critics question whether she was becoming too enamored of the shiny-new-toy aspect of movies at the expense of depth and profundity.

  But it was another piece of Hollywood pop that really animated her that Christmas season—John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, with John Travolta as Tony, a working-class Italian-American kid from Brooklyn who lives out his fantasies on the dance floor of a disco hall called the Odyssey. For Pauline it was a fascinating social document, a look at “how the financially pinched seventies generation that grew up on TV attempts to find its own forms of beauty and release.” Pauline loved the picture’s mise-en-scène: The scenes in the disco suggested “a TV-commercial version of Art Deco; the scenes there are vividly romantic, with the dancers in their brightest, showiest clothes, and the lights blinking in burning neon-rainbow colors, and the percolating music of the Bee Gees . . . These are among the most hypnotically beautiful pop dance scenes ever filmed.”

  She was especially intrigued by Saturday Night Fever’s star:

  There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious. In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta has this rawness to such a degree that he seems naturally exaggerated: an Expressionist painter’s view of a young prole.... His large, wide mouth stretches across his narrow face, and his eyes—small slits, close together—are, unexpectedly, glintingly blue and panicky. Walking down the street in his blood-red shirt, skintight pants, and platform soles, Tony moves to the rhythm of the disco music in his head. It’s his pent-up physicality—his needing to dance, his becoming himself only when he dances—that draws us into the pop rapture of this film.

  One of the greatest mysteries of Hollywood in the 1970s is why it took the film industry so long to deal with the Vietnam War. Since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords and swift withdrawal of American troops in early 1973, the defining conflict of an entire generation had seldom surfaced onscreen. It was fitting that Jane Fonda, the Hollywood star most publicly associated with the antiwar movement, was the driving force behind the first major studio film in some time to take on the Vietnam experience at home.

  Fonda often referred to Hal Ashby’s Coming Home in interviews as her “baby”—the movie she cared about more than any of the others she had made. She had been very frank in interviews about her difficulty getting cast in films ever since winning the Academy Award for Klute. In the mid-1970s, with the steady erosion of the American counterculture, the major studios were reluctant to take a chance on an actress whose views on the Vietnam War had been so unpopular with such a large sector of the public. The remnants of Nixon’s silent majority held Fonda in contempt, and the younger audience that had rallied behind her was no longer ablaze with the spirit of protest; many of those former activitists seemed battle-fatigued, eager to get on with their lives. With the lack of belief in institutions, which had cast a pall over the country since Watergate, Americans seemed to be pulling into themselves more than they had in years: The pursuit of private pleasure and prosperity was steadily dwarfing concern over the public good.

  Because of this prevailing climate, there was some doubt that a drama about Vietnam’s effect on the home front would be able to capture an audience of any size. Coming Home, set in Los Angeles, involved Sally Hyde (Fonda’s character), the wife of a gung-ho marine officer (Bruce Dern) assigned to Vietnam. While her husband is away, she begins working as a volunteer in a veterans’ hospital. There she meets Luke (Jon Voight), a former high school classmate; once a star athlete, he’s now a paraplegic. The two of them begin an affair, and gradually, Sally’s consciousness is raised—the times begin to change her, in ways that will ultimately destroy her marriage.

  Ashby had had a difficult time getting a workable screenplay in hand, and the end result showed it. Pauline found the movie to be “a mixture of undeveloped themes, and is so thinly textured that Ashby has filled in the dead spaces by throwing a blanket of rock songs over everything. (It’s disconcerting to hear words like ‘strawberry fields forever’ when you’re trying to listen to what people are saying to each other.)” And while she thought that the film was “evocative of that messy time; it’s permeated with free-floating anxiety,” she didn’t like the performances of either Fonda or Dern. Fonda, she felt, was “trying to act without her usual snap, and the result is so unsure she comes flutteringly close to a Norma Shearer performance.”

  She considered Dern miscast because he seemed equally deranged before and after going to Vietnam. And one of the things that disturbed her most was the simpleminded comparison of the husband’s workmanlike lovemaking with the crippled Luke’s ability to bring Sally to a thrilling orgasm. “There’s a strong enough element of self-admiration in the film’s anti-Vietnam attitudes,” she wrote. “It’s not enough that Hyde is wrong about the war; he’s got to be a lousy lover, too.” Despite Ashby’s handiwork in the editing room, there was no arguing with his own assessment: “We started before we were ready.”

  In February Paul Schrader’s debut film as a director opened. It was Blue Collar, about a trio of Detroit auto workers who attempt to blackmail their union and win
d up getting crushed underfoot for their trouble. Pauline found it too heavy-handed: “Blue Collar says the system grinds all workers down, that it destroys their humanity and their hopes,” she wrote. She thought Schrader might have made a decent film had he focused on the friendship of the three men and how it is destroyed in the process of trying to get rich. But she believed he lacked the necessary wit and invention; she felt that the humorless streak revealed in Taxi Driver defeated Schrader here.

  While the industry was busily congratulating itself for having realized that there was a profitable market in films about real women’s issues (Julia, The Turning Point, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar), the crest of this particular wave came in February, with the release of a movie that struck a much deeper nerve. Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman dealt with a subject that was becoming much discussed in the late ’70s: women who found a way of coping, often quite happily and successfully, without a man. The women’s movement had only pressed itself deeper into the general culture as the decade went by, and as far as many were concerned, the progress hadn’t unrolled at a fast-enough rate. As yet, there were very few female CEOs. Hollywood was still very much an old boys’ club, although in the mid-’70s, Pauline’s friend Marcia Nasatir made history by becoming the first woman vice president and head of production at United Artists; Sherry Lansing would not ascend to the presidency of Twentieth Century–Fox until 1980. Still, the spirit of the women’s movement was very much alive in the literary and entertainment worlds. It was there in the success of nonfiction works such as Nancy Friday’s bestselling study of identity, My Mother/My Self, and novels such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In entertainment, the changing times were more present on the small screen than they were in the movies. The Mary Tyler Moore Show had achieved a landmark success by presenting a woman spinning through her thirties without being married, and the woman alone cropped up in sitcoms such as Rhoda, Phyllis, and Alice. Even Edith Bunker, the sheltered Queens housewife on CBS’s iconic hit All in the Family, was shown to be working toward some kind of stronger sense of herself as the decade moved on. An increasing number of made-for-television films explored subjects of great concern to women, ranging from A Case of Rape, with Elizabeth Montgomery, to Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter, with Gena Rowlands and Bette Davis.