Pauline Kael (18 page)

The Atlantic Monthly
eventually bought the entire piece for $1,900, but Pauline refused the cuts that the editors suggested, and by the fall of 1966, the
Atlantic
had dropped it. Perhaps it was not only the article’s length but its tone that made editors so nervous. It was Lumet who came off worst in Pauline’s essay, as he was portrayed essentially as an aggressive, ambitious whiz kid from television who was hungry for a commercial movie hit, the kind of director who was apt to get hired in these artistically bankrupt times because “he would not try to reshape the scenario or risk holding up production to do something unscheduled; he wouldn’t plead for a few extra days to get something right.”

“The Making of
The Group
” would not see the light of day until 1968, when it was published in Pauline’s second book,
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
. “I had heard it was going to be butchery, and I never read it,” Lumet claimed. “If there’s an unpleasantness to avoid, I avoid it.”

P
auline’s first column for
McCall’s
appeared on schedule in the magazine’s February 1966 issue. “The Function of a Critic” was a reprise of some of the ideas set forth in “It’s Only a Movie”:

Initially the editors of
McCall’s
seemed pleased with her tough, smart writing, and in the March issue she covered a number of new releases, including the movie that would turn out to be John Ford’s last,
Seven Women
, starring Anne Bancroft as the head of a group of women missionaries in 1930s China. Pauline observed that sitting through
Seven Women
was “rather like watching an old movie on TV and thinking, ‘No, no, they’re not
really
going to do that next’—but they do, they do, and superior as you feel to it, you’re so fascinated by the astounding, confident senselessness of it all that you can’t take your eyes off it.” In the same column, she lamented that Laurence Olivier’s magnificent
Othello
had been preserved only in a cheap filmed version of the play, not in a proper screen transcription with the full arsenal of technical possibilities at his disposal.

In the April issue, however, she ventured into more controversial territory with her review of David Lean’s
Doctor Zhivago
. This mammoth, meticulously detailed screen version of Boris Pasternak’s 1958 bestseller about the Russian Revolution had long been anticipated as one of the big movie events of the year, and it was already on its way to becoming one of the top-grossing films of all time. Pauline loathed the hype for the picture as much as she loathed Lean’s meticulously detailed and worked-out style of moviemaking, with every response carefully calculated, every shade of meaning put properly in place. She dismissed it as “stately, respectable and dead” and likened it to “watching a gigantic task of stone masonry executed by unmoved movers. It’s not art, it’s heavy labor—which, of course, many people respect more than art.” She went on to predict that it would further accelerate the race for superspectacles “that will probably have to bankrupt several studios before a halt is called.”

Pauline always claimed that none of the
McCall’s
editors attempted to dictate to her how to review a particular movie. It was one thing for her to dismiss a run-of-the-mill film that either made or lost a little money, and quite another for her to attack such a prestigious picture that had found its cultural niche so quickly. Still, the editors at the magazine gave her the benefit of the doubt for the moment.

Dwarfing even
Zhivago,
however
,
was
The Sound of Music
, which had been released in March of that year and would soon surpass
Gone With the Wind
as the top-grossing film of all time. A big, handsome film, shot in spectacular Technicolor in Austria, brimming with wholesomeness,
The Sound of Music
confirmed what
Mary Poppins
and
My Fair Lady
had shown the year before: that the movie musical wasn’t dead at all; provided it was big and splashy and colorful enough, it could be box-office gold.
The Sound of Music
also single-handedly rescued its studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, where production had slowed to a trickle after the devastating failure of the astronomically expensive
Cleopatra
.
The Sound of Music
’s soundtrack album was an enormous success; an entire generation of parents and children memorized the songs at home, and then treated themselves to repeat viewings of the movie. And in the spring of 1966,
The Sound of Music
beat
Doctor Zhivago
for the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1965.

Because it had been released months before she began work at
McCall’s
, Pauline had not reviewed
The Sound of Music
for the magazine. But in April 1966, when MGM released its own big entry in the family-musical sweepstakes—
The Singing Nun
, starring Debbie Reynolds—Pauline took it as an opportunity to annihilate retrospectively
The Sound of Music
, which she predicted would prove to be “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies for the next few years.”

While she herself was not immune to the movie’s basic appeal, as she acknowledged,

Taking such a morally indignant tone was a risky move, for while her righteous anger might have had its place in one of the small film or literary quarterlies, to attack a movie that the world had taken to its heart in a big-circulation women’s magazine such as
McCall’s
struck many readers as unsuitable and oddly misplaced.

By mid-May, it was announced that Pauline and
McCall’s
would part company, a story that was big enough news to merit coverage in
Newsweek
. “The reviews became less and less appropriate for a mass-audience magazine,” Stein told
Newsweek
. “I still think she’s one of the best movie critics around. My hiring her was, I thought, a noble experiment. The experiment did not work out.”

Pauline did not look back on her brief stint at
McCall’s
with rancor and celebrated her departure from the magazine by taking Gina on a trip to Europe in late May 1966. While they were stopping off in London at the Mount Royal Hotel, Robert Mills wrote to her that she had earned $1,000 in royalties for
I Lost It at the Movies
and $1,500 from the latest
McCall’s
payment. “What would you like us to do with all this money?” he asked.

 

Mills cast around for another regular reviewing job, and while Pauline and Gina were still abroad, he received an offer:
The New Republic
wanted her to be its regular movie columnist, to replace one of the critics she admired least, Stanley Kauffmann, who was leaving for what would be an extremely short-lived stay as drama critic for
The New York Times
. Founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, the magazine had long been known for its in-depth essays on politics and culture that generally embraced a liberal point of view. By the 1960s its political stance was harder to pin down. While it had come out against the Vietnam War, it was also sharply critical of the wave of protest and activism that had swept across America in mid-decade. Its circulation was anything but mass—it hovered on either side of 50,000—and its editor, Robert Evett, offered Pauline terms that were not nearly as lucrative as the
McCall’s
deal had been—twenty-four columns a year at $300 each. Still, she believed that as an outlet for her talents,
The New Republic
made more sense than
McCall’s
had.

Her debut column appeared on October 8, 1966—“The Creative Business,” another analysis of the artistic bankruptcy rampant in Hollywood—after which she settled down to the business of reviewing movies. Her October 22 column featured reviews of two sprawling epics,
Hawaii
and
The Bible
, and surprisingly, for someone who had always harbored an antipathy to the grandiosity of David Lean’s films, she liked both.
The Bible
was directed by John Huston, and she preferred his approach to the “ploddingly intelligent and controlled” work of Lean; she thought
Hawaii
was superbly edited, and that its director, George Roy Hill, “compensates for his inexperience in the medium by developing strong characterizations that succeed in binding the material.”

It was a disagreement over
Hawaii
that led Pauline to one of the most enduring of her friendships with a colleague. Joseph Morgenstern was a young critic at
Newsweek
who had been invited to appear on the entertainment reporter Pat Collins’s radio show to discuss current films. When he arrived at the studio, he found that Pauline was also a guest. “I could hardly get a word in edgewise,” Morgenstern remembered. “The talk turned to
Hawaii
. At the time, I thought it was just a big, clumsy movie. Pauline said vociferously on the radio that it has a social conscience, talks about smallpox, this and that. But she overpraised it, as was her wont. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on the air, and I said it. That goaded her. And as soon as we got off the air, she said, ‘That was fun, honey. Let’s have a cup of coffee!’” It was the beginning of a thirty-six-year friendship.

It had begun to bother Pauline that the youth audience, in particular, didn’t seem more discriminating about the movies it considered “great.” All that seemed to matter was that they felt hip. She regarded this as the worst sort of narcissism, while at the same time dreading that her lack of enthusiasm for many of the new pictures might brand her as some kind of hidebound reactionary. She was particularly troubled by some of the films coming out of Britain, with their bouncing pop-music scores, fast editing, and accelerated camerawork taking in the gritty streets of mod London.

In her November 5, 1966, column for
The New Republic
, “So Off-beat We Lose the Beat,” she complained that
Morgan!
was nothing more than “a modernized version of an earlier, romantic primitivist notion that people are conformists, animals are instinctively ‘true’ and, of course, ‘free.’ ” She suspected that
Morgan!
was “so appealing to college students because it shares their self-view: they accept this mess of cute infantilisms and obsessions and aberrations without expecting the writer and director to straighten it out or resolve it and without themselves feeling a necessity to sort it out.” Yet she was intrigued by the wild enthusiasm the youth audience showed for it and for
Georgy Girl
. In an obvious jab at Dwight Macdonald, she added, “And if it be said that this is sociology, not aesthetics, the answer is that an aesthetician who gave his time to criticism of current movies would have to be an awful fool. Movie criticism to be of any use whatever must go beyond formal analysis.”

By December Robert Mills felt confident in requesting a raise per
New Republic
column, as Pauline “could find good use for another one or two hundred dollars a check.” In a short time, however, friction developed, as she often had a difficult time confining herself to the assigned word count. The lack of communication also disturbed her: Sometimes her column was dropped from an issue without explanation. When it did appear in print, it was often in a significantly altered form—either cut or, worse yet, rewritten, with observations and word choices that were not her own. She complained to Mills, but the editors continued to make wholesale changes without consulting her.

Pauline was beginning to turn up as a frequent guest on radio programs and film-critic panel discussions. But their organizers began to anticipate her appearances with equal parts excitement and dread, since she behaved with a candor that sometimes crossed over into rudeness. One such episode took place in the spring of 1966, when Judith Crist invited her to appear on a radio program she was hosting. The other guest was Ginger Rogers, who was about to open on Broadway as Carol Channing’s replacement in the hit musical
Hello, Dolly!

Pauline had praised Crist’s critical integrity, and when she showed up to tape the radio show, all seemed promising. “Judy Crist!” she shouted as she got off the elevator. “The
one tough critic
in New York!” The program got under way, and Crist began questioning Ginger Rogers about
Kitty Foyle
, the 1940 soap opera that had earned her a Best Actress Academy Award. Rogers began to speak about how her agent had tried to discourage her from doing
Kitty Foyle
, and how she had persisted and wound up winning the Oscar. “Your agent was right,” snapped Pauline. Rogers, looking as if she was about to burst into tears, was shocked into silence, leaving Crist to vamp about
Kitty Foyle
and other matters.