Pauline Kael (27 page)

One of Pauline’s responsibilities, apart from her departmental reviewing, was to provide capsule reviews of the many films that were being shown in repertory and art cinemas around New York. Sally Ann Mock, who worked on the front-of-book “Goings On About Town” section, often found herself in the position of negotiating an uneasy truce between Pauline and Gilliatt. “My personal feeling—more than personally—is that Pauline did not have any respect, particularly, for Penelope,” said Mock. “I ran into several problems with both of them, actually. One would write a blurb, maybe on an older film. In the fall and winter Pauline would write a blurb, and in the spring Penelope would come in and want to rewrite it. And in the fall Pauline would want to rewrite Penelope. I finally said, ‘I can’t do this.’” Gardner Botsford, the editor of “Goings On About Town,” eventually put a stop to this practice. Pauline’s complaints about Gilliatt continued unceasingly—but it would be years before “The Current Cinema” became hers alone.

B
y the early 1970s the view of New York City as the center of dazzling glamour and chic romanticism—the view that Hollywood had peddled in pictures ranging from
The Awful Truth
to
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
—was dead and buried. The New York that now emerged onscreen was a city that was closer to the everyday experience of the people who lived there. The crime rate was high and growing higher, the decades-long decline of Harlem had reached its nadir, and Times Square had become a playground for junkies and hookers.
Midnight Cowboy
had shown the seedy realities of Manhattan street life and won an Academy Award for Best Picture in the process.

Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the New York of the late ’60s and early ’70s as a completely bleak, fear-ridden place where pleasure was hard to come by. The city was, among other things, a haven for committed movie-lovers, who had an astonishing number of repertory cinemas and art houses from which to choose. In those pre-home-video days, there was plenty of moviegoing activity to be found in all parts of Manhattan. On seedy Avenue B, there was the Charles, where the rats and mice often scurried over the customers’ feet. There was the Bleecker Street Cinema and also Theatre 80 Saint Marks, where the projector was situated behind the screen and customers could sink down in the lumpy seats and lose themselves in scratchy prints of thematically paired double features—two Bette Davis vehicles
, Jezebel
and
In This Our Life
, or everyone’s favorite French Revolution bill,
A Tale of Two Cities
and
Marie Antoinette
.

Uptown, there was the Regency on Sixty-seventh Street, which once ran Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece
Belle de Jour
for close to one full year. On Broadway between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets was the New Yorker Theater, launched by Pauline’s friends Dan and Toby Talbot. The Talbots had opened the theater on March 17, 1960, with a screening of Olivier’s
Henry V
and Albert Lamorisse’s short film
The Red Balloon
. That initial run grossed $10,000, and soon the New Yorker became the most popular place on the West Side to take in first-class foreign-language films and hard-to-find Hollywood classics. The New Yorker later gained a bit of on-camera immortality when Woody Allen shot a scene there for his 1977 comedy
Annie Hall
—the one in which Alvy Singer (Allen) clashes with a pontificating academic type who is mangling the theories of the media expert Marshall McLuhan.

A few blocks uptown, on Ninety-fifth Street just west of Broadway, was the reassuringly run-down Thalia, where the seats were on a slight incline, and friends of old film could encounter some of the most difficult-to-find old Hollywood classics. (The Thalia was also featured in
Annie Hall
.) And on 107th Street, the Olympia showed a constantly rotating program of old Spanish-language films. Over the years, even more repertory cinemas would crop up all over town, in some unlikely neighborhoods, proving Toby Talbot’s assertion that “there was an obvious hunger for film. Our patrons were as interested in
who
made the film as in what it was
about
and
who
was in it. They cared about visual style and wanted to follow a director’s body of work.”

Pauline delighted in the public’s growing excitement about what was happening in film. She felt she was at the vertex of the most thrilling burst of activity taking place in the arts, and although she often attended the theater, she commented to friends that generally she didn’t find it nearly as exciting as film. The commercial theater, in her view, was still trading on tired conventions and predictably “serious” forms of audience manipulation, and had not succeeded in really connecting with the times, as the movies now showed every promise of doing.

With all of the enthusiasm New Yorkers showed for the movies, it wasn’t surprising that the activities of the New York Film Critics Circle were more frequently reported than they had been in years. Pauline was, by 1970, an integral member, having been admitted in 1968, following her appointment at
The New Yorker
. When it was founded in 1935, the NYFCC had been composed of newspaper critics only, but over time, the membership restrictions had been relaxed to include prominent magazine reviewers as well. From its inception the NYFCC had earned a reputation for going its own way, its members being less susceptible to a movie’s box-office standing than were the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy. As far back as the 1940s, the NYFCC sometimes awarded top prizes to performers not even nominated in that year’s Oscar race—Ida Lupino in
The Hard Way
, Tallulah Bankhead in
Lifeboat
. Pauline believed it was important to uphold the integrity of the group, as she believed that a good critic’s review was the only genuine truth on which moviegoers could depend: Everything else, she was fond of saying, was nothing but advertising in one form or another.

The NYFCC operated under a fairly simple system: Nominations were made by writing down one name or title per category on a folded slip of paper. Any selection lacking at least two votes was eliminated. On successive ballots members ranked first-, second-, and third-place choices on a point system—and the balloting continued until one choice had a clear two-thirds majority. All of the balloting was secret; no critic was permitted to take the floor and argue the case for his favorites unless a stalemate occurred.

Because the NYFCC held to such strict rules, there was practically no opportunity for personality clashes to arise among its various members. Only occasionally was there a disruption of the circle’s orderliness—as in 1969, when Renata Adler, who had briefly succeeded Bosley Crowther as chief movie critic of
The New York Times
, announced that she could take no more of the meeting and stormed out, insisting that she had to see her analyst immediately—and whatever alliances and rivalries revealed themselves, did so subtly. Judith Crist remembered that “at one end of the table were the intellectuals [Adler, Stanley Kauffmann, Andrew Sarris] and the rest of us were the ink-stained newspaper people.” Pauline would attend the meetings in her regulation outfit—plain slacks, simple blouse, and sneakers—and sit passively, a Sibyl-like smile on her face, as she cast her votes. “I always felt that there was an assumption that there was tension between Pauline and Judith,” remembered Kathleen Carroll, who covered movies for the
Daily News
. “Competitive, no question. Both very bright and ambitious. I think most of us in the group really felt it.”

At the time Pauline was far less widely known than Crist, who was unquestionably the most recognizable name and face in the NYFCC. In 1968 Clay Felker had hired her to become the first film reviewer of the trend-setting
New York
magazine, and she was also the movie critic for the mass-circulation
TV Guide
and film commentator for the popular morning newsmagazine series
The Today Show
on NBC-TV. It was estimated that between
TV Guide
and
The Today Show
, Crist’s sharp and succinct opinions reached more than 23 million people, and that her income hovered between $45,000 and $50,000 annually. (Pauline’s
New Yorker
salary was a pittance by comparison.) An indication of Crist’s celebrity came in September 1968, when
TV Guide
ran a full-page ad in
The New York Times
, featuring Crist and Bob Hope with the tag line, “Headliners and by-liners help us do the job.” Crist’s taste in films was generally very good, and like Pauline, she was unafraid to acknowledge her fondness for trash.

If Crist was at this time America’s most visible movie critic, there was serious competition coming up fast, courtesy of Rex Reed. As a boy in Texas, Reed had developed a love for the films of golden-age Hollywood. In the late 1960s and early ’70s he was in the enviable position of writing about films during an all-new golden age, but he was far less interested in discussing the work of the new directors than he was in glorifying the stars of his youth, a predilection that hardly damaged his standing with the public. In his
Daily News
column he regularly took out after the new breed—he didn’t understand Robert Altman at all—and delighted in provocative anti-intellectual comments, such as dismissing Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
with, “I have slept through more productions of this dated play than almost anything else I can think of.” He possessed a knack for the colorful, often vituperative, personality profile, which helped give him a reputation for “telling is like it is.” Middle-aged talk show hosts such as Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were all too happy to have him spout off about the New Hollywood’s lack of decent, human stories, and Reed, with his blend of withering, Waldo Lydecker–style sarcasm and high-mindedness, seemed to satisfy Middle America’s view of what a movie critic was supposed to be.

In 1970, Reed appeared as Myron, the sex-change candidate, in Michael Sarne’s much-reviled film version of Gore Vidal’s bestselling novel
Myra Breck-inridge
. (Fellow reviewers reveled in pointing out Reed’s complete lack of acting ability.) When they were both at the height of their fame, Reed and Crist had a standoff. Reed had made an unflattering remark on a television talk show about Crist’s celebrity endorsements—she had recently done an ad for a popular feminine-hygiene spray—and later, when she was interviewed on television and asked about the Reed incident, she responded, “Well, when he shows up at screenings, the big question is ‘Does he or doesn’t she?’” “That was the lowest point of my public life,” recalled Crist. “The minute it came out of my mouth, I could have killed myself.” Later, Reed and Crist patched up their differences, but the episode was evidence of how prominent movie critics were becoming in the pop-culture consciousness.

While Pauline had no interest in engaging in open confrontations with her colleagues, there were very few whom she genuinely respected. After only two years at
The New Yorker
, she believed herself to be superior to all of them. She had little use for the work of Vincent Canby, Renata Adler’s replacement as chief film critic of
The New York Times
, whom she regarded as a man of pedestrian taste and middlebrow thinking who just happened to be a better writer than Bosley Crowther. She delighted in calling Joseph Morgenstern and other friends when she read Canby’s reviews in the
Times
, crowing over how he had missed a particular point.
Life
’s Richard Schickel was a good critic, but Pauline found him to be pompous and unpleasant. She respected
The Saturday Review
’s Hollis Alpert, even though their opinions on films often diverged, and she acknowledged the formidable intellect, literary background, and linguistic prowess of John Simon, although she found his criticism needlessly cruel and demeaning, and personally, she didn’t take to him at all. (Once, at a screening of a particularly trashy film, Simon greeted her by saying, “Pauline! Of course,
you
come to all the finest pictures.” She responded by giving him the finger.) Pauline also suspected Simon of not being able to surrender himself to the art form, as she could; she found his knowledge more impressive than his actual responses to film. She was anything but an intellectual snob, however, and was genuinely fond of the man who was arguably the worst writer in the circle, the
New York Post
’s Archer Winsten. (Pauline told friends that she had to admire a man whose great passion in life was for skiing.)

On the whole, however, it was difficult for Pauline to approve of most of her colleagues for one simple reason: Practically all of them had preceded her in the profession. Pauline had a bit of a Magellan complex: It was easiest for her to give her approval when she was discovering a film or director before other critics had. Some of her friends felt that this explained her antipathy toward certain directors—Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, for example. Andrew Sarris had written expansively about both men early in his career, and Pauline wasn’t particularly interested in following his lead. “There were a lot of directors who were off the table for her because they were on Andy’s plate,” observed Paul Schrader, who began his career as a movie critic before becoming a director in the 1970s. “I always assumed Ford was one of those. Andy beat her to John Ford, and she beat Andy to Jean Renoir.” The same principle held true for critics themselves: She wouldn’t approve of many of them until the next generation came along—and she was in a position to help shape their career paths and push them toward positions of importance.

 

In the fall of 1970 Pauline returned to
The New Yorker
with a traditional season-opening think piece designed to exhort her readers to pay attention to what was happening in the movie industry. “Numbing the Audience” was an open attack on the coarsely manipulative tactics of the studios’ attempts to latch on to new viewers. After pointing out that most of the films released over the summer had been both artistic and box-office calamities, Pauline declared that those who had engineered the corporate takeovers of the old studio system were going down a road that was certain to run out on them. “It used to be understood that no matter how low your estimate of the public intelligence was, how greedily you courted success, or how much you debased your material in order to popularize it, you nevertheless tried to give the audience something.”