Pauline Kael (24 page)

I
n the summer of 1969 Pauline made another trip to Europe—this time as part of a honeymoon party. She had become good friends with the young writer Gary Carey, who edited a magazine called
The Seventh Art
. Carey had planned to go to France with Pauline and Gina, when he decided to get married. Pauline liked his intended, Carol Koshinskie, and no one saw any reason to make a change in plans. Gary and Carol were married on July 5, 1969, and a little more than a week later joined Pauline, Gina, and another friend, the pianist Marvin Tartack, in the south of France. For three weeks they all traveled together, jammed into a tiny Volkswagen, eating at one three-star restaurant after another in Toulouse, Marseilles, and other towns.

The success of
Bonnie and Clyde
had signaled a hunger for something new in film, but the process of reshaping the audience was a chaotic one: The two years following
Bonnie and Clyde
witnessed an industry flailing about, not really sure of what moviegoers wanted or exactly how they were going to give it to them.

This was the theme Pauline took up when she returned to
The New Yorker
in September. Her first column marked the beginning of what would become a tradition: her revisiting of several of the movies that had opened during her six-month layoff, movies that she thought had been misinterpreted by Penelope Gilliatt or that she simply felt compelled to weigh in on herself. In 1969 she was most interested in commenting on the pictures that had become big box-office hits over the summer:
Midnight Cowboy
and
Easy Rider
.
Midnight Cowboy
was the story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), an aspiring stud from Texas who moves to New York City to strike it rich as a gigolo, only to wind up hustling closeted gay men in hotel rooms and public restrooms. Pauline thought that John Schlesinger’s attempt to portray the soulless squalor of modern urban life had a pessimistic tone that was like “the spray of venom,” and that what audiences really responded to was not the picture’s “grotesque shock effects and the brutality of the hysterical, superficial satire of America” but “the simple,
Of Mice and Men
kind of relationship at the heart of it”—Joe Buck’s alliance with the grimy, tubercular con man Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).

Easy Rider
, released in July, had made history by becoming the first movie made by and for the counterculture to become a massive commercial hit. Wrapped for somewhere around $500,000, it was reported to have made its entire cost back in one week of release; it went on to gross more than $19 million. This study of two druggie bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) drifting around the country barely had any plot at all, but it was a raw expression of youthful paranoia about the dangers represented by Middle America. While Pauline knew that it wasn’t particularly a good movie in any artistic sense, she was fascinated by what it offered its public. “What is new about
Easy Rider
,” she wrote, “is not necessarily that one finds its attitudes appealing but that the movie conveys the mood of the drug culture with such skill and in such full belief that these simplicities are the truth that one can understand why these attitudes are appealing to others.
Easy Rider
is an expression and a confirmation of how this audience feels; the movie attracts a new kind of ‘inside’ audience, whose members enjoy tuning in together to a whole complex of shared signals and attitudes.” The significance of both films was that they continued the dialogue with the audience that had been established in
Bonnie and Clyde—
a dialogue that Pauline had hoped to see continue for years.

If it was individual artists such as Dennis Hopper who were going to enrich that dialogue, it was the studios, Pauline feared, who might well succeed in silencing it altogether. Too much was at stake now; it was more important than ever for her to exhort her readers to support the true artists, the good films that enlarged the moviegoing experience, and cut down the tired, the dead, the formulaic, the meretricious. From this point on, she would dig even deeper in her writing than she had before, pointing out the connections between the movies and the times from which they sprang. In the years to come her reviews took on even greater immediacy, her own excitement over what she’d just experienced in the screening room practically exploding on the page. She began to write as if her own moviegoing life depended on it—and to her, it did.

Given her sense of what she believed was about to burst through in the movies, it was axiomatic that she would reserve her fiercest attacks for the filmmakers she considered the ones who best knew how to play the studio’s political games and milk the audience. Since they were, in her view, standing in the way of the genuine artists, she began to pounce on them with a reformer’s zeal. When she returned to
The New Yorker
in the fall of 1969, she took aim at the director George Roy Hill, whose Western
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
had just opened.

Butch Cassidy
took some of the thematic material of Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
—the dying frontier at the fadeout of the nineteenth century—and plastered a free-spirited, youth-movement sensibility on it. It was this low cunning that bothered Pauline most. Hill came from television, and although she thought there was “a basic decency and intelligence in his work,” she felt he didn’t “really seem to have the style for anything,” certainly not for this “facetious Western,” with its relentlessly jokey, chummy tone.

Butch Cassidy
was, as Pauline predicted, a huge hit, but it drew mixed reviews. In
Life
, Richard Schickel wrote that while he enjoyed the picture, its anachronistic, late-’60s dialogue consistently “destroys one’s sense of mood and time and place.” Pauline agreed. “The dialogue is all banter, all throwaways, and that’s how it’s delivered; each line comes out of nowhere, coyly, in a murmur, in the dead sound of the studio. (There is scarcely even an effort to supply plausible outdoor resonances or to use sound to evoke a sense of place.)”

This observation triggered a response from Hill, one that made Pauline cackle with glee when she read it to her friends:

If Pauline considered George Roy Hill a prime example of the kind of middling talent that could flourish in Hollywood, she found Paul Mazursky the kind of original artist she believed the industry should be nurturing. A former actor who had performed with the West Coast edition of the Second City comedy troupe, Mazursky directed his first picture,
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice—
a comedy about two married couples, one relatively open-minded (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood), the other strictly conventional (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon), who decide to face the sexual revolution head on by experimenting with other partners—in 1969. The script was funny without being epigrammatic; the comedy arose from character, as the four people began to pursue their own arousal—physicality with no strings attached. Unlike so many other directors of the time, Mazursky wasn’t concerned with making a long-winded commentary about the corruption of America’s moral values. He didn’t score points off his characters but seemed to love all of them; he treated them satirically, but the satire was warmhearted and generous-spirited.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
had the distinction of being the first American picture to open the New York Film Festival. There was tremendous buzz about it, and its ad campaign, featuring the four lead actors in bed together, would become one of the iconic movie images of the time. Those behind the picture were nervous about its reception, to the point of apologizing for it in advance. “Americans talk a lot about marital infidelity,” Mazursky said in the movie’s publicity notes. “But they are secretly shocked by it. I know if I told my wife I had been unfaithful to her . . . that would be the end.” Its producer, Mike Frankovich, told the New York
Daily News
, “I felt obliged to note that I did not believe the film would have an adverse effect on American morals.” Even Elliott Gould, who had the image of being one of the hippest of young actors, had reservations about accepting the role of Ted. “When it was offered to me, I turned it down,” he admitted. “I was afraid of it. I thought it seemed to be, to some degree, exploitative.”

The film festival audience loved
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
, but many of the initial reviews were negative—none more so than Vincent Canby’s in
The New York Times
. Canby found the film “unpleasant” and populated by characters who were “cheerful but humorless boobs, no more equipped to deal with their sexual liberation than Lucy and Desi and Ozzie and Harriet.”

At 8:30 on the morning Canby’s notice appeared, Mazursky was sitting at home, dejected, when his phone rang. “I read Canby’s review,” Pauline told him. “He’s a schmuck. I loved the movie, and I’m going to give it a great review.” This was the sort of line-crossing that many critics frowned on, but Pauline thought nothing of it. She was certain that there was no way she could be bought, no way she could wind up in the pocket of anyone in the film industry, no matter how powerful. Therefore, she saw no reason why she couldn’t flex her muscles a little and fraternize with directors.

“
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
is a slick, whorey movie,” she wrote in
The New Yorker
, “and the liveliest American comedy so far this year.” She loved Mazursky’s freedom with his actors, his way of “letting the rhythm of their interplay develop.” She felt that he had “taken the series of revue sketches on the subject of modern marital stress and built them into a movie by using the format of situation comedy, with its recurrent synthetic crises.” She particularly loved Dyan Cannon’s performance, writing that she “looks a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits.”

The two women met at a screening in Manhattan not long after the release of
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
. “Someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind,” recalled Cannon, “and it was Pauline. She said, ‘I’m a fan’—and she said that didn’t come easily with her. I said, ‘So am I a fan.’ And I was. Her voice was so strong, and she didn’t care what we thought of it, and she seemed to be true to it, always.”

Another artist who benefited from Pauline’s critical support in the fall of 1969 was the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, whose new movie
High School
—a pitilessly straightforward look at the futility and frustration of life at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School—also played at the New York Film Festival.
High School
resonated deeply with Pauline, and she called Wiseman “probably the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in years.” What emerged most powerfully in her review of
High School
was her rage at what she believed to be the inadequacy of her own education. She found the teachers shown in the film to be “the most insidious kind of enemy, the enemy with corrupt values who mean well.” She loved the film’s unflinching treatment of teachers, the same kind of teachers she had grown to despise as a girl and had been railing against ever since:

Pauline immediately grasped what Wiseman was trying to get at in
High School
. “Many of us grow to hate documentaries in school,” she wrote in her by now familiar student-rebel tone, “because the use of movies to teach us something seems a cheat—a pill disguised as candy—and documentaries always seem to be about something we’re not interested in.” Wiseman, on the other hand, never stooped to didacticism. He took a dispassionate view of the audience’s common experience.

Wiseman, who became a friend of Pauline’s and often dined with her and Joe Morgenstern, recalled, “Joe is a very soft-spoken, kind guy. I think that she was attracted to people who were not tough, or not tough in any obvious way.” After her review of
High School
appeared, the film turned up on about two hundred screens each month—amazing statistics for a documentary. Wiseman found himself the center of generous critical attention and didn’t mind that she reviewed his work only sporadically thereafter. “The impression I had was that she felt I didn’t need her,” he said, “and that she was saving her space for people who did.”

 

For many longtime readers of “The Current Cinema,” Pauline’s increasingly expansive style took getting used to; after she returned to her reviewing post in 1969, a number of complaining letters landed on William Shawn’s desk. “Dear Sir: I think I’ve figured it out. Pauline Kael is the Long Winded Old Lady,” wrote one subscriber. “Six full columns to review
The Arrangement
in the Nov. 22 issue must stand as the ultimate in long-windedness. Oh for the days of John McCarten and Brendan Gill!” “There was a time,” wrote one reader from Virginia, “when a man could open up the magazine and learn from John McCarten in one very pungent paragraph why the movie stank. Today we have to learn how the condition of the director’s psyche, and that of all of us, has an effect on the movie condition as it is today, in 75,000 words.” Many of the readers who wrote complaining letters about Pauline were initially thrown by her intimate, conversational tone and her fondness for slang. It was not unusual for her to receive a few letters every month wanting to know why she hadn’t been properly educated, and when she was going to learn how to write in a way becoming to a
New Yorker
contributor; at least one reader even went so far as to ask her when she was going to take off her cowboy boots and become a proper lady writer.