Pauline Kael (33 page)

The New York audience fascinated her, because she felt that a large sector of it was so attuned to the explosive rhythm of the city that they demanded to see it reflected on the screen.
The French Connection
was a fact-based account of one of the great narcotics busts in the history of the New York Police Department. The movies were now giving this audience what it wanted: violent, high-tension thrillers and action films geared to this crazed element in the audience, movies that were “often irrational and horrifying brutal.”

While other critics reviewed
The French Connection
simply as a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, the embodiment of what would soon become the cliché “high-octane thriller,” Pauline insisted on examining it in the context of the realities of contemporary New York, and of the audience that the city’s seemingly endless decline had helped to create. She acknowledged that the film was “extraordinarily well made,” yet she seemed no more able to share any genuine enthusiasm for
The French Connection
than she had for
The Last Picture Show
, because of what she thought the movie represented: “what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks. There’s nothing in the movie that you enjoy thinking over afterward. . . .”

She also stepped apart from the crowd with her review of the film version of the spectacular Broadway hit musical
Fiddler on the Roof
. Despite the handsomeness and vigor of its big-screen translation,
Fiddler
received very mixed notices. Because of Pauline’s deep love of musicals, she often felt betrayed by what happened to them once they were transferred to the screen, but
Fiddler on the Roof
surprised her. After acknowledging that the musical comedy was “primarily an American Jewish contribution” to the theater, she called it “probably the only successful attempt to use this theatrical form on the subject of its own sources—that is on the heritage that the Jewish immigrants brought to this country.” She thought part of the reason the film worked well was because it was directed by someone she was careful to point out was a gentile, Norman Jewison. She implied that he avoided the pitfalls a Jewish director might have fallen into by laying on the ethnic sentiment too thick. Jewison presented “the Jews as an oppressed people—no better, no worse than others,” side-stepping the “self-hatred and self-infatuation that corrupts so much Jewish comedy.” Her review demonstrated, once again, her remarkably unsentimental attitude toward her own Jewish heritage:

Her review moved Norman Jewison to write to her: “Thank you for your in
depth
critique.... As Sholem Aleichem would simply say—(in his square way)—go in peace—and God be with you!”

One of Pauline’s pet theories was that a director’s finest work was nearly always done early on; she believed that as most directors aged and became wealthier and more famous, they became concerned with making grander and grander artistic statements, at which point they usually fell flat. And no director of the time was more concerned with the Big Idea than Stanley Kubrick, whose new film,
A Clockwork Orange
, opened at the end of 1971.

Based on the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess,
A Clockwork Orange
was set in the not-too-distant future, where Britain has degenerated into a completely mechanized, brutal, soulless society. The perfect representative of this moral vacuum is the character Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a callous teenaged punk and head of his “droogs,” a gang that steals, tortures, and rapes just for the sheer pleasure of it. Eventually he is arrested and undergoes a brainwashing that neutralizes him, robbing him of his individuality. It was the type of grandiose topic with all the attendant portentousness that typically made Pauline wince. Prior to the film’s release, Kubrick held forth on the film’s significance in numerous interviews. He told
The New York Times
that Alex symbolized “man in his natural state, the way he would be if society did not impose its ‘civilizing’ process upon him. What we respond to subconsciously is Alex’s guiltless sense of freedom to kill and rape, and to be our savage natural selves, and it is in this glimpse of the true nature of man that the power of the story derives.”

Many in the press felt that Kubrick had turned out a genuinely great film, but there were a few dissenters: Richard Schickel disliked the fact that Alex had been “directed toward cuteness at every opportunity,” and that his victims were all malignant and grotesque, resulting in “a viciously rigged game.” Andrew Sarris predicted that his colleagues in the New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics would select
A Clockwork Orange
as the year’s best picture, adding “If such a catastrophe has indeed occurred, I disclaim all responsibility.”

Pauline believed she had a clear-eyed view of Kubrick’s intentions. At the end of the picture, when Alex’s former victims turn on him and he reverts to his old, corrupt self, she grasped that Kubrick intended it as “a victory in which we share . . . the movie becomes a vindication of Alex, saying that the punk was a free human being and only the good Alex was a robot.” She was deeply disturbed by Kubrick’s grotesque portrayal of the victims, which she found “symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, ‘Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.’ In the new mood . . . people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims—that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassination, post-Manson mood. I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.”

While she made it clear that she in no way advocated censorship, she felt that she and her colleagues had to speak out against the “corrupt” morality that so many directors were attempting to force-feed the gullible public:

Her impassioned argument, however, fell mostly on deaf ears:
A Clockwork Orange
became an immense success, one of the year’s most widely discussed films.

 

Pauline’s concern about audiences’ being turned on by violence were nothing if not timely: In the weeks that followed the release of
A Clockwork Orange
, a number of extremely brutal films opened in theaters, including
Dirty Harry
, which marked Clint Eastwood’s first appearance as the San Francisco police inspector Harry Callahan. (Pauline would have a lifelong antipathy toward Eastwood, whom she considered minimally talented and absurdly macho.)
Dirty Harry
took as its theme the corruption and unfairness of a legal system that rewards criminals by getting them off on technicalities: Pauline found it a “right-wing fantasy” about the police being “helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals.”

But the film of the season that caused her the greatest apprehension was made by a director whose work she admired—Sam Peckinpah. She regretted that she had not been able to write about
The Wild Bunch
, Peckinpah’s 1969 drama about a gang of over-the-hill outlaws reuniting for a final spree, but the film had made an indelible impression on her by undermining any number of clichés of the Western genre. In Peckinpah’s west, innocent women and children were inevitably slaughtered, as those in the audience begged silently for it not to happen.
The Wild Bunch
had a wealth of unforgettable images—the outlaws passing a whiskey bottle back and forth as if it’s a holy chalice; brilliant close-ups, such as the army officer averting his eyes as two parts of a train collide; and Pauline’s favorite, the blowing up of a bridge, with army horses and riders “falling to the water in an instant extended to eternity.” She understood that Peckinpah’s unflinching presentation of violence had a positive purpose: to show how truly horrible war and destruction could be, and the toll that they took on the people caught up in them. At the time of the picture’s release, she spoke of his aim to “take the façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved . . . and then twist it so that it’s not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut.” Her difficulty with
The Wild Bunch
was that she felt Peckinpah had “got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence that what had begun as a realistic treatment became instead an almost abstract fantasy on violence; the bloody deaths repeated so often and so exquisitely, became numbingly remote.”

Peckinpah was provocative and belligerent and a prodigious drinker, and Pauline enjoyed spending time with him, hashing out the imbecilities of the movie industry over bottles of whiskey. She delighted in their friendship and frequently sent him stories or novels she thought he might want to adapt for the screen. One was Christina Stead’s
The Man Who Loved Children
; Peckinpah got drunk and read it one night and pronounced it so “profoundly depressing, it makes
The Wild Bunch
look like early Saroyan.” She also championed him as director of the screen version of James Dickey’s
Deliverance
, which eventually went to John Boorman. Peckinpah became one of Pauline’s pet “lost boys”—the ones she believed to be mistreated by the studio executives—and he in turn courted her assiduously, sending her roses whenever she paid a visit to Los Angeles.

Peckinpah’s latest was
Straw Dogs
, and Pauline struggled with it more than she had with any other film of the season. With a script by Peckinpah and David Z. Goodman, based on Gordon Williams’s novel
Siege at Trencher’s Farm
,
Straw Dogs
was a study of what happens when a man who has purposely distanced himself from conflict is forced to confront his enemies and to defend his home and family—to the death. In the film’s long, terrifying finale, the pacifist hero (Dustin Hoffman) is forced to use his gifts for precise, strategic thinking to kill the men laying siege to his household, one by one. The final siege sequence lasted for nearly thirty minutes, and while many in the audience found the tension and the violence all but unbearable, they were placed in the inevitable position of cheering the death of each of the thugs.

The film’s point of view was troubling both to viewers and, particularly, to the critics who were ever on the lookout for a higher sense of purpose in filmmaking. Peckinpah regarded all such attitudinizing with unconcealed contempt. “You can’t make violence real to audiences today without rubbing their noses in it,” he told William Murray for
Playboy
. “We watch our wars and see our men die, really die, every day on television, but it doesn’t seem real. We don’t believe those are real people dying on the screen. We’ve been anesthetized by the media. What I do is show people what it’s really like—not by showing it so much as by heightening it, stylizing it.”

There is a heavy, somber, even somewhat cautious tone in Pauline’s review of
Straw Dogs
that is quite uncharacteristic of her work: Reading it, one gets the sense that writing it did not come easily. In the end she was forced to conclude that one of her favorite filmmakers had created a compelling but deeply offensive machismo fantasy, in which the hero had to become a killer in order to feel like a real man. “The vision of
Straw Dogs
is narrow and puny,” Pauline wrote, “as obsessions with masculinity so often are.” She believed that
Straw Dogs
revealed that Peckinpah’s “intuitions as a director are infinitely superior to his thinking.” Perhaps most of all, she was insulted by the “stale anti-intellectualism” of the hero’s being portrayed as weak and cowardly, unable to stay in the United States and deal with the violent changes that were splitting the country asunder.

She was impressed by the staging of the scene in which the hero’s wife (Susan George) is raped, and pronounced it “one of the few truly erotic sequences on film.” To praise such material in aesthetic terms—she wrote that “the punches that subdue the wife have the exquisite languor of slightly slowed-down motion”—was an exceptionally bold move for a female critic to make in 1972, near the height of the women’s movement. But she qualified her praise: “The rape has heat to it—there can be little doubt of that—but what goes into that heat is the old male barroom attitude: we can see that she’s asking for it, she’s begging for it, that her every no means yes.” In an essay on
A Clockwork Orange
in
The New York Times
, Fred M. Hechinger had worried that “The thesis that man is irretrievably bad and corrupt is the essence of fascism.” Now Pauline picked up the idea and took it in a different direction: “What I am saying, I fear, is that Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with
Straw Dogs
, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art.”