Pauline Kael (36 page)

She worried that
Last Tango
would be misunderstood, feared, dismissed. She worried that “Americans seem to have lost the capacity for being scandalized”—in other words, that audiences had become numb to raw emotion. They needed to grant themselves the freedom to respond wholeheartedly to the movie, that it “might have been easier on some if they could have thrown things,” as the audience had on opening night of
Le Sacre du Printemps
, because she felt that “this is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies.” And in the final paragraph of her review, she bared herself to her readers, much as Paul encouraged Jeanne to bare herself to him: “I’ve tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing.”

Her concern that
Last Tango
would be misunderstood turned out to be justified. The only other major reviewer who covered its opening at the festival was Vincent Canby, who expressed very mixed feelings about it. Once the film had its official New York opening at the Trans Lux Theater on the East Side of Manhattan, many of the reviews referred, somewhat derisively, to Pauline’s rhapsodic enthusiasm. The final tally, according to
The New York Times
, was twelve favorable, five mixed (including Stanley Kauffmann and Rex Reed), and two negative (John Simon and WPIX’s Jeffrey Lyons).

Pauline’s review of
Last Tango
did more than anything else to date to boost her reputation as the era’s wisest and most searching film critic. United Artists took out a hugely expensive two-page advertisement in
The New York Times
in which her review was reprinted in its entirety. But her impassioned advocacy for the film ultimately worked against her in some ways. She had gone farther out on a limb with her review of
Last Tango
than she had ever gone for any film in her life. “Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?” she had written, and, like many audacious statements about art, it was to be held up to ridicule for years to come. Her review of
Last Tango
signaled the beginning of a certain degree of skepticism and mistrust on the part of many readers who had previously been devoted to her opinions; in later years, many would point to it as the first of her seriously misguided reviews.

One person unnerved by Pauline’s passion for
Last Tango
was William Shawn. While he generously allowed her ample space for her review and did not try to moderate her position, he did not understand her fascination with the sexual behavior that the picture portrayed. He had barely recovered from an incident earlier in 1972, when Pauline and her good friend the writer and
New York Times Book Review
editor Charles Simmons had gone together to see
Deep Throat
, the era’s most talked-about and financially successful porn film. Pauline was intrigued by the movie’s publicity and the fact that it made its star, Linda Lovelace, a household name. “I remember we came out of the movie,” recalled Simmons, “and I said, ‘You know, I never saw a pornographic movie before—that was pretty good.’ Pauline said, ‘You lost your cherry on a good one.’” She attempted to bully Shawn into letting her review
Deep Throat
, but he drew the line at writing about pornography in
The New Yorker
: His answer was a heated, unequivocal no.

Pauline felt so strongly about the impact of
Last Tango
that she had difficulty discussing it, even with close friends. “I saw
Last Tango
, not with her, but I saw it,” recalled Simmons. “I said, ‘That was just a dirty movie.’ If you did that kind of thing, she would absorb it and not defend it at all.” But the failure of so many of her colleagues to share her opinion of the film’s value upset her. Her nemesis Andrew Sarris had not been won over by the movie, which he called “stylistically wasteful and excessive.” He felt that “its best scenes are isolated from each other, and the dull moments in between stretch into dull minutes.” But he saved his sharpest words for a slap at Pauline: “Under ordinary circumstances, it would be grossly unfair to single out any one film critic for an ego-puffing practice that is beginning to corrode all film criticism. Still, when the one critic in question has been unduly abusive in print toward the excerpted enthusiasms of others, the temptation to turn the tables over a flagrant lapse in critical decorum becomes well nigh irresistible.” He also snidely commented that given the five-dollar ticket prices, it would behoove the management of the Trans Lux to pipe in excerpts of
Le Sacre du Printemps
.

At one of Hoyt Spelman’s advertising lunches, Pauline was railing to an enthralled table of listeners about Sarris’s lack of support for
Last Tango
. Spelman, a great lover of puns, was sitting next to an agency mogul. “That,” he whispered to his luncheon partner, “was her last tango with Sarris.”

 

Pauline was never above taking on “serious” writers, particularly those who were the darlings of the literary establishment. And in 1972, few authors occupied such an enviable critical position as Joan Didion, one of the most acclaimed essayists of the New Journalism movement. Didion was unquestionably a superb stylist. She had an eye that moved like a roving camera, picking up revelatory plangent details and never focusing on them too hard or for too long. In the 1960s Didion and her husband, the essayist and novelist John Gregory Dunne, had relocated to Los Angeles, where, in addition to their other projects, they pursued screenwriting careers. In 1970 Didion published a second novel,
Play It as It Lays
, which made use of her Hollywood experience in its account of Maria Wyeth, a sometime actress and model numbly trying to cope with her overwhelming feelings of isolation in Los Angeles. At the time there were a number of women writers who were connecting with a wide readership by making modern anxiety and aimlessness “hip”—Paula Fox’s
Desperate Characters
, Lois Gould’s
Such Good Friends
, and Sue Kaufman’s
Diary of a Mad Housewife
were all popular examples of this trend.
Play It as It Lays
was thought to be one of the finest examples of this sensibility, and it earned Didion some of the strongest reviews of the year.

Not surprisingly, given the difference in their literary temperaments, Pauline pounced with her review of the film version of
Play It as It Lays
, released in the fall of 1972. The story of Maria’s plight struck her as “the ultimate princess fantasy”—that is, a study of a woman “too sensitive for this world—you see the truth, and so you suffer more than ordinary people, and can’t function.” It wasn’t only the sensibility of the novel that annoyed her, it was Didion’s celebrated style, which Pauline found “ridiculously swank.” She found
Play It as It Lays
absurdly self-conscious, “a writer’s performance, with every word screwed tight, and a designer’s feat, the sparse words placed in the spiritual emptiness of white pages.” Her review included a rather personal swipe at Didion, who, she reported, “wanted Frank Perry to direct—possibly because he had already glorified the suffering little-girl-woman in
Diary of a Mad Housewife . . .
The adaptation is a novelist’s wish fulfillment: narration that retains the most ‘eloquent’ passages in the book, dialogue virtually intact, and a transfer to the screen of the shattered-sensibility style by means of quick scenes that form a mosaic.”

It was a review that brought a civil retort from Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne, who took Pauline to task for getting her facts wrong. Sometime earlier, at an evening they had spent together at an Academy Awards party at the home of the literary agent Lynn Nesbit, Dunne and Didion had mentioned to Pauline that Frank Perry would be directing
Play It as It Lays
. Pauline regarded Perry as one of the most humorless and flatfooted of directors and asked—incredulously, Dunne remembered—why they wanted him. “I replied that actually we wanted Sam Peckinpah to do the picture, and that Sam wanted to do it,” Dunne wrote. “The studios reacted to Sam’s doing a picture about a woman as if it were suggested that Hitler do a film about the Jewish question. With Sam out, it became academic who directed.” Mike Nichols was interested, but negotiations with him broke down, and Perry had put up his own money to finance the script, making his assignment “a simple matter of economics.”

A few weeks later Dunne wrote to her again, to tell her that he was reviewing her forthcoming collection, called
Deeper into Movies
, for
the Los Angeles Times
. “I confess a certain ambivalence about the book,” he wrote. “I think you’re the best movie critic in America, but I’m not altogether sure that’s a compliment.”

 

At year’s end, she was completely let down by Sam Peckinpah’s latest,
The Getaway
, a violent picture about a bank robbery, which she described as “the most completely commercial film Peckinpah has made, and his self-parasitism gives one forebodings of emptiness. When a director repeats his successful effects, it can mean that he is getting locked in and has stopped responding to new experience. (Hitchcock is the most glaring example.)
The Getaway
is long and dull and has no reverberations except of other movies, mostly by Peckinpah.”

Peckinpah wrote to Pauline from Durango, Mexico, where he had been living ever since the filming of
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
. Illness had plagued the shoot, and he told her that he had at one point been forced to work with a fever of 104 degrees. But his tone in the letter was again apologetic, as it had been when she reviewed
Straw Dogs
: “Sorry you didn’t get my crude attempt at satire with
Getaway
,” he wrote. “It was a put on but few people realised [
sic
] it. . . . You said a great thing in your
Getaway
review about a director repeating himself. I am afraid I will be doing that for quite a while, until I get enough money to do the kind of scripts I believe in. But I suppose I will always be concerned with violence as that seems to be the only thing I am paid for.... I gather from brief excerpts that you are still as tough, talented and opinionated as ever, which is as it should be.” Still smarting from not getting to film
Deliverance
, a project he had coveted, he added that he didn’t see how such a fine novel could “be made into such a shitty film and be nominated for three awards. I don’t like your town but Hollywood is really a dunghill.” As a postscript, he added that “Rex and Judith loved”
The Getaway
: “That says something doesn’t it?”

 

The pace of moviegoing that Pauline maintained at this time was extraordinary: As always, she saw many films that she didn’t care to cover, and in her December 23, 1972, column for
The New Yorker
, she contributed substantial essays on five films, including Robert Altman’s latest,
Images
. The study of the world of a schizophrenic woman who can no longer sort out reality from fantasy, it was a good representative of the kind of modestly budgeted film with a highly personal point of view that was being made regularly in the early 1970s. Altman had written the script several years before in Los Angeles and claimed not to have altered one word of it. Like all of his films of this period,
Images
didn’t cost much. Altman admitted that the story was probably influenced mostly by Bergman’s
Persona
, but he always stressed that he hadn’t meant it to be a precise study in schizophrenia; “I trust instinct more than any study of logical conclusions,” he later said.

Pauline thought
Images
didn’t work, but she went easy on it in her review because of her respect for Altman’s gifts, which she found “almost frighteningly non-repetitive.” Altman showed every sign of continuing to expand as an artist—even in this “empty, trashy chic film,” a “psychological thriller with no psychological content, so there’s no suspense and the climax has no power.” Her review ended in something of a defensive mode: “It’s possible that this formidably complicated man has as many facets as this gadgety movie’s tiresome prisms, and that in reaching out instinctively and restlessly he’s learning techniques that he hasn’t yet found a use for. My bet is that he will; when he’s bad he’s very bad, but when he’s good he’s extraordinary.”

The message in that final paragraph seemed to be that the end result might be all-important in the work of other directors, but it was less so in Altman: In his films, the intention was given greater weight. For the most revered and influential film critic in America to take this position with a director did not necessarily do the director great favors in Hollywood. Pauline’s reviews may have made it a bit easier for Altman to get funding, but it also made him the object of many other directors’ resentment. Altman himself liked to tell people that he admired Pauline for never being in anyone’s pocket, but there is plenty of evidence that he spent considerable time wooing her. He loved having lengthy meals with her, at which the liquor flowed freely. Even more than most directors, Altman took an intense interest in the fate of his films; his wife, Kathryn, recalled him obsessively telephoning the management of the New York theaters where his pictures had opened and asking them how many receipts had been tallied for each showing. He felt that the critics could make or break him, and he wasn’t at all above courting the most important ones.

Rene Auberjonois, who acted in
Images
, lived in Manhattan, on West Ninety-third Street, just around the corner from Pauline and Gina. He frequently ran into Pauline while waiting for a bus, and they would chat about whichever film he was doing. In Ireland, on the set of
Images
, Altman asked Auberjonois to do him a favor, which made the actor deeply ill at ease. “He made me sit down and write a postcard to Pauline Kael about being in Ireland and making the film. I felt incredibly awkward about it, because I didn’t really know her at all, but he assumed that because I lived around the corner from her, it would be all right for me to write a personal note to a film critic. I remember sitting there and not knowing what to say, and it was sent off, and I never heard from her.”