Pauline Kael (23 page)

 

Although Pauline definitely had her favorites among directors, her
New Yorker
reviews were, from the beginning, full of surprising reactions. She went out of her way to praise a movie that few saw,
Greetings
, directed by a twenty-eight-year-old filmmaker named Brian De Palma.
Greetings
wasn’t in the macabre vein of the later films that made De Palma famous but was an off-kilter comedy about three young New Yorkers trying to keep from being drafted, and it had been shot in two weeks for very little money. Rutanya Alda, who played a supporting role in the film, recalled how the tiny budget made it essential to work fast and accurately: “Brian would say, ‘I’ve got only three minutes of film—we’ve got to get the scene in three minutes.’” Locations were snapped up wherever they could arrange them cheaply: one sequence in a bookstore was shot at three in the morning without the owner knowing about it. Pauline acknowledged that some of
Greetings
was a mess, but she also recognized a vibrant, original talent;
Greetings
went on to win the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Pauline noted De Palma as a talent to watch.

During her first year at
The New Yorker
she also experienced some unexpected reversals of opinion. Her longtime readers were particularly caught off guard by her review of Ingmar Bergman’s
Shame
. For years she had struggled with Bergman’s body of work and had come to the conclusion that she had no temperamental affinity for much of it. She loved the humanity the director showed toward the foolish lovers of
Smiles of a Summer Night,
and the contemporary wit and sensibility he brought to his medieval allegory
The Seventh Seal
. But
Wild Strawberries
, a major breakthrough for Bergman on the international art-house circuit, had left her both dissatisfied and unconvinced, and once he had gone into his long series of films that probed man’s attempt to unravel the mystery of God’s silence, Pauline had gradually lost interest. It was not simply, as some have suggested, that Bergman’s tempo was too slow for her, or that she disliked contemplative films; it was that she questioned the profundity of the dilemmas he was setting forth on the screen. She was deeply suspicious of the way Bergman had been turned into a cultural hero by college students who, she felt, didn’t grasp how simpleminded many of his ideas were. (“I did my own share of soul-wrestling,” she once said, referring to her youth, “and it’s not too tough to do.”) She was uncomfortable with the sort of unwritten contract Bergman had with his audience, in effect asking to take them by the hand and explore the spiritual crises that were plaguing his own life, over and over, in film after film.

Pauline believed
Shame,
however—a study of the ravaging effects of war on a married couple (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) living on an island—to be a significant artistic step forward for Bergman.
Shame
succeeded, in her view, because he had reversed direction and made “a direct and lucid movie . . . Bergman has pulled himself together and objectified his material. There are no demons, no delusions. Everybody is exactly who he appears to be, so we can observe the depth and complexity of what he is. There is no character who may or may not represent Bergman; he is not lost in the work but is in control of it, and is thus more fully present than before.” She thought that
Shame
had an “almost magical lack of surprise; it has the inevitability of a common dream.” There is a strong indication that she was comparing Bergman with Godard when she offered this observation:

Inner order and outer chaos: it was a theme she would return to again and again in future reviews, and one that her critics, many of them guilty of misreading her, would take up as ammunition against her.

 

At
The New Yorker
, Pauline had many of the luxuries that most writers can only dream of—a generous-minded editor who, despite his attempts at interference, permitted her to write in her own true voice; no crippling space restrictions; an enthusiastic and informed readership.

Her main problem was money. Initially the magazine paid her $600 per column. Over a six-month period that meant an annual income in the neighborhood of $14,000—which, after taxes and set off against New York’s high cost of living, she found very difficult to live on. She told friends that she wanted Shawn to fire Penelope Gilliatt and give her the reviewing job year-round, so at least she could make a more respectable living. “She was sore because she was only paid half a salary, and salaries in those days were so awful,” recalled Jane Kramer. “But it was a very benevolent place, on the other hand. A paternalistic benevolence.” Pauline had a limited appetite for paternalism: It galled her that she was rushing to meet weekly deadlines when many of the magazine’s old-guard writers, cronies of Shawn’s from the war years and after, were getting money on their monthly “drawing accounts” when they hadn’t turned in a word of copy for years.

Her limited income made it all the more crucial for her to book as many speaking engagements as she could during her six months off from the magazine. (Since the success of her two books, Robert Mills’s office was flooded with offers.) She also had an arrangement with
The New Yorker
to take on outside writing assignments during her time off. In mid-1968 she accepted a major assignment from Willie Morris, the enterprising young editor of
Harper’s
, who had successfully lured an impressive array of new writers to his magazine, and the long essay she published in the magazine’s February 1969 issue, “Trash, Art and the Movies,” was perhaps her boldest statement yet of her own moviegoing personality.

“There is so much talk now about the art of the film,” Pauline wrote, “that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.” Again, she encouraged audiences to respond to what they genuinely enjoyed—not to second-guess themselves as they might have been taught to do in school. And if what they enjoyed was a cheap youth exploitation picture like
Wild in the Streets
, that was fine, “because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t.” Movies like
Planet of the Apes
and
The Thomas Crown Affair
couldn’t possibly be defended as works of art, she wrote.

The genuine movie-lover knew in his gut that what movies had to offer was not an academic study in perfect artistic unity. “At the movies we want a different kind of truth,” Pauline wrote, “something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful,” whether that was a line, a scene, a performance that somehow had resonance. Audiences needed to understand that a low-grade picture like
Wild in the Streets
“connects with their lives in an immediate, even if a grossly frivolous way, and if we don’t go to movies for excitement, if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little drive that we accept ‘good taste,’ then we will probably never really begin to care about movies at all.”

Pauline’s championing of the lowbrow—the good, vital lowbrow—was really a plea for some degree of emotional honesty on the part of the audience. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies,” she confessed. “I don’t trust
any
of the tastes of people who were born with such good taste that they didn’t need to find their way through trash.”

This was not a unique point of view among movie critics. Joseph Morgenstern shared it, as did Judith Crist, who often used the phrase “trash—but delicious,” to get through to her students at Columbia University. But Pauline took it in a new direction by pointing to the folly of the reverse perspective: the attempt to identify “art” in movies that were merely a smokescreen of directorial manipulation. She focused on some notable recent examples:
Petulia
,
The Graduate,
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
—all critically acclaimed box-office hits. She regarded
Petulia
as a pitiful attempt to take advantage of the pessimism and alienation that Americans had come to feel in the turmoil of the 1960s, and dismissed it as “obscenely self-important.” Kubrick’s
2001
, with its view of the blissful potential of space, where anything was possible, rendering the petty existence of life on Earth irrelevant, was “a celebration of cop-out” and fundamentally an expression of the oversize ego of its creator. She felt that, like many directors, Kubrick had fallen into the trap of the Big Idea, and along the way, he had abandoned his early promise (
The Killing
,
Paths of Glory
) and had come “to think of himself as a myth-maker.” The ultimate, redeeming value of trash, she argued in her summing up, was that it leaves us wanting, hoping for more—“Trash has given us an appetite for art.”

In October 1968 she had had an opportunity to test these theories when Twentieth Century–Fox sneaked into release a little movie called
Pretty Poison
, a psychological thriller about a bizarre loner (Anthony Perkins) who impresses a young girl (Tuesday Weld) by telling her that he’s a CIA agent; the twist is that the girl is much more disturbed than he is.
Pretty Poison
showed some of the influence of
Bonnie and Clyde
. (The tag line for the movie was “She’s such a sweet girl. He’s such a nice boy. They’ll scare the hell out of you.”) Fox hated the film and wanted to cut it drastically. But Richard Zanuck, who had taken over from his father as head of the studio, pointed out that if
Pretty Poison
was cut much further, it wouldn’t be possible to sell it to television, because it wouldn’t fit a standard time slot. So Fox opened it in New York at the out-of-the-way Riverside Theatre at Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway.

On a gray, chilly day, Pauline telephoned Joseph Morgenstern at
Newsweek
and asked if he had heard anything about the film. Morgenstern hadn’t, so the two of them headed for the Riverside, where there were only three other people in the audience. They both loved the movie and rushed back to their respective desks to write about it. In particular, it gave Pauline an opportunity to indulge in one of her favorite pastimes—bashing the studios:

Pretty Poison
was Pauline’s kind of movie—a story of mayhem told with an appealingly subversive point of view and unexpected twists and turns—but it had the chintzy look of a cheap TV show and a tinny TV-style musical score by Johnny Mandel. Even the film’s screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., felt that she had overpraised it. “When she was on somebody’s side, they could do no wrong for a while, which actually clouded her critical judgment, in my opinion,” Semple said. “Loyalty is nice, but in many ways she was better as a cultural critic than a movie critic. Her weakness was her extreme, idiosyncratic views, sui generis, of things. I generally agreed with her, and she liked good movies rather than bad movies. But I do think she often made up her mind whether she liked the movie and
looked
for reasons
why
she liked it.”

When the New York Film Critics Circle met to vote on its awards for 1968, a deadlock occurred between two movies in the Best Screenplay category. Pauline insisted on a compromise choice for
Pretty Poison
, and managed to win the majority of voters over to her side.

After the awards ceremony, she had dinner with Semple. “I’m going to bring a friend along,” she told him, and showed up with six people. Semple recalled it a “a habit of hers when she went out to dinner. You’d get stuck with a very substantial check. I always considered it sort of amusing, but I know a couple of people who gritted their teeth—‘Don’t ask Pauline to go out to dinner with you. You’ll pay for it.’”