Pauline Kael (39 page)

Pauline thought that Allen’s new picture,
Sleeper
, a comedy set in 2173, was the most stable and most sustained of his films, “without the lapses that had found their way into his earlier work.” In it, Allen starred as the thirty-five-year-old owner of the Happy Carrot health food restaurant in Greenwich Village, who is admitted to the hospital for a peptic ulcer and wakes up two hundred years later. Allen had written to Pauline late in 1972 that
Sleeper
was a Buster Keaton–type comedy, though not in the pure Keaton spirit because of the intrusion of sound. Allen and Pauline had a friendly, long-running argument about the impact of sound on comedy, with Allen taking the position that sound prevented the great comics from achieving total reality. While Pauline found
Sleeper
consistently funny, something was missing: She felt that “Allen’s new sense of control over the medium and over his own material seems to level out the abrasive energy. You can be with it all the way, and yet it doesn’t impose itself on your imagination—it dissolves when it’s finished.”

Pauline saw deeply into the appeal Allen had for the 1970s movie audience: He was the brainy, nerdy kid who had always been beaten up on the school grounds but had managed to triumph because of his brains and wit, which, despite layers of insecurity and paranoia, he always believed in. Allen was the smart, irreverent observer of the social revolution that had been shaking up America since the ’60s, but although this brand of comedy was popular with young people—his script for
Sleeper
took gentle jabs at the NRA and the Nixon administration—he was anything but subversive. Quite the opposite: He was too much of a misfit to be a genuine hero of the youth movement, and he was a nostalgist with a deep love for traditional pop culture. Pauline was probably right when she judged that Allen had a misguided attraction to healthy conformity: “The battered adolescent,” she wrote, “still thinks that that’s the secret of happiness.”

Over a period of several years, Allen saw Pauline socially and frequently wrote to her when he happened to be out in California filming. He enjoyed having discourse with someone he considered to be such a superb critic, and the subjects of his letters varied widely. He wrote to her praising her advocacy of films such as
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
. He sent her the script for his comedy
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
, asking her to read it and make any suggestions for changes. He wasn’t afraid to disagree with her: He didn’t like
Sounder
at all, and he thought that
Straw Dogs
was nothing remotely approaching a work of art, fascist or otherwise. Certainly, however, Allen cultivated her strenuously, going so far as to take her side after Peter Bogdanovich’s rebuttal to “Raising Kane” appeared in
Esquire
, assuring her that it would fail to get any serious attention at all. He also knew that he always had a sympathetic ear whenever he complained to her about the indignities suffered by talented directors in Hollywood, writing to her in the summer of 1973 about the creative bankruptcy that he found so stifling.

 

During Christmas week, a film opened that exploded box-office records around the country: William Friedkin’s
The Exorcist
—a thriller based on William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel about the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl. Pauline was offended by the movie’s grotesqueries, but she was even more outraged by its attempts at an overlay of seriousness on a basic horror story. Pauline, whose distrust of organized religion had only intensified with the years, thought Blatty’s musings about the afterlife and the other side to be a lot of medieval nonsense, and she opened her review with a full-barrel attack: “When you see him on TV talking about communicating with his dead mother, your heart doesn’t bleed for him, your stomach turns for him.” She chose to interpret
The Exorcist
as a public relations effort on behalf of the Catholic Church, and she wanted desperately to see it exposed as such. (Friedkin, for his part, was a non-Catholic who recalled “learning about the Catholic Church while I was doing that film.”) To her
The Exorcist
was the grossest sort of study in manipulation; she saw “no indication that Blatty or Friedkin has any feeling for the little girl’s helplessness and suffering, or her mother’s, any feeling for God or terror of Satan.”

The Exorcist
had been a difficult film to get off the ground, despite the book’s success. According to Friedkin, three top directors—Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, and Mike Nichols—turned it down, largely because they didn’t think it would be possible to cast as the possessed Regan a young girl who could do everything that the script demanded of her. “The whole movie was balanced on that,” Friedkin remembered. “There was an open call for a thousand girls. Linda Blair never came to the open call. Her mother brought her in. [Until then] I thought I was going to have to do it with a sixteen-year-old. No one else came close.” The Warners publicity stated that Friedkin had actually looked at some five hundred girls, and Pauline seized on this fact for one of the most lacerating observations she ever put down on paper. “I wonder about those four-hundred and ninety-nine mothers of the rejected little girls.... They must have read the novel; they must have known what they were having their beautiful little daughters tested for. When they see
The Exorcist
and watch Linda Blair urinating on the fancy carpet and screaming and jabbing at herself with the crucifix, are they envious? Do they feel, ‘That might have been my little Susie—famous forever’?”

Blatty was incensed by her review and lit into her on television and in print interviews, though he apologized by letter a few months later. Friedkin was also upset about her attack, though he admitted that she had perhaps scored a point when she called
The Exorcist
“the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of
Going My Way
and
The Bells of St. Mary’s
.” “I found it wrong-headed,” said Friedkin. “On the other hand, I know many people who went into the priesthood because of that. I remember meeting James Cagney toward the end of his life, and he had seen it, and he said, ‘Young man, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. I had a barber for twenty years, and he saw the movie and he left being the barber to enter the priesthood.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Kael was probably right—but it wasn’t
intended
that way.”

The Exorcist
would eventually gross in the neighborhood of $165 million. Its success was also an early harbinger of sweeping change in the industry that not even Pauline could have predicted.

Fortunately, there was Robert Altman, who was proving to be not only in artistic command but highly prolific
. Thieves Like Us
, his newest picture, was released in February 1974. Filmed in and around Jackson, Mississippi, on a budget of $1.25 million,
Thieves Like Us
was an unusual film for Altman in that it followed its source material, a novel by Edward Anderson about a trio of bank robbers during the Depression, rather closely.

By now Pauline anticipated Altman’s new films with such fervor that she decided to make a visit to the set of
Thieves Like Us
. She knew that the material was very close to that of
Bonnie and Clyde
, but she read Anderson’s novel and liked it, and she was curious to see how Altman would transform it. Pauline’s presence was a major event for the cast and crew, who felt her support for their work as keenly as Altman did. “I remember her walking in and seeing her for the first time,” the screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury said, “and you just wanted to rush up and say, ‘My God, I think you’re wonderful—and thank you!’ And she just went straight for Bob, and we thought . . . okay. She walked around and looked and they talked.” Tewkesbury recalled that it was obvious that Pauline preferred the company of big men in the movie industry to hanging out with other women. To her, Pauline resembled a major cultural figure such as the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. “What you got was this sense of women who really had to come through the journalistic ranks, which meant they were competing with the boys and not with each other,” said Tewkesbury. “So you got very short shrift from these girls.”

Thieves Like Us
was a beautifully sustained piece of work, and because it was more plot-driven than Altman’s earlier films, it had the potential to capture a wider audience. For Pauline, it was yet another Altman triumph; it had “the pensive, delicate romanticism of
McCabe
, but it isn’t hesitant or precarious . . . It’s the closest to flawless of Altman’s films—a masterpiece.” She had long loved to describe the dry, cautious writing of some of her fellow critics as “saphead objectivity”; there was none of that in her review of
Thieves Like Us
:

In both New York and Los Angeles, her colleagues began to grumble: Pauline was not keeping a healthy distance from her pet director. At the San Francisco Film Festival in the fall of 1973, Altman spoke at a retrospective of his own work, telling audiences that “Pauline Kael saved
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
when the studio and the distributors were going to junk it, and she did the same for
The Long Goodbye
. Naturally I agree with everything she said.” Pauline’s detractors predicted that, sooner or later, it all had to end badly. One thing that delighted them: Her rapturous support failed to keep
Thieves Like Us
from being a box-office disappointment.

Pauline’s 1973–74 season at
The New Yorker
ended with a pair of “road” pictures about criminals on the lam: Steven Spielberg’s
The Sugarland Express
and Terrence Malick’s
Badlands
. In
The Sugarland Express
a daffy blonde named Lou Jean goads her husband to escape from a Texas prerelease prison so they can kidnap their child, whom the welfare department has taken from them and placed in foster care. Pauline rightly thought that she sensed the influence of Robert Altman in the film’s clear-eyed and perceptive, but never condescending, view of America. She recognized immediately Spielberg’s gift for camera technique and jazzy visual storytelling: “In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this film is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.” She loved that Spielberg had managed to get a naturalistic performance out of Goldie Hawn as the blissfully oblivious Lou Jean, who revels in her newfound celebrity and never stops believing that everything is going to work out just fine. Most important, Spielberg loved the art form and knew how to use it: “If there is such a thing as a movie sense—and I think there is (I know fruit vendors and cabdrivers who have it and some movie critics who don’t)—Spielberg really has it.”

She was bored, however, by
Badlands
, which she judged to be yet another oppressively sour film about the dead end of American life, with no ray of light and not much humor. She found this study of two killers named Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) in flight through the Plains states “an intellectualized movie—shrewd and artful, carefully styled to sustain its low-key view of dissociation. Kit and Holly are kept at a distance, doing things for no explained purpose; it’s as if the director had taped gauze over their characters, so that we wouldn’t be able to take a reading on them.”
Badlands
wasn’t playful enough for Pauline; the violence had no comic edge to it, and she was bound to tire of Holly’s “poetic” voice-over narration.

Her review, however, caused her unexpected difficulties with William Shawn. When he read her March 8, 1974, column while it was in production, he cornered her in
The New Yorker
offices. Terrence Malick was a Harvard friend of Shawn’s son, Wallace. Shawn said, “I guess you didn’t know that Terry is like a son to me.”

“Tough shit, Bill,” Pauline answered, as she prepared for her six-month layoff.

 

In June 1974 Pauline delivered the address at the 142nd commencement exercises of Wesleyan University. Over the past few years she had begun to amass a string of honorary doctoral degrees from various universities around the country. On June 18, 1972, Columbia College awarded her a Doctor of Arts and Letters, and on May 27, 1973, she gave the commencement address at Smith College, which also conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Letters upon her. On June 19, 1973, she gave a speech, “The Effects of Movies,” at the commencement exercises at Kalamazoo College, where she received a Doctorate of Humane Letters. While her opinions on the general state of academia hadn’t changed, she enjoyed speaking before graduating classes and getting a chance to mingle with the students.

A few months earlier, on April 18, 1974, Pauline received her most distinctive honor to date when
Deeper into Movies
received the National Book Award in the category of Arts and Letters. In addition to the citation, the award carried a cash prize of $1,000. Janet Flanner presented her with the award, praising her not only as a writer but as a
New Yorker
colleague, causing Pauline to hang her head humbly. In her acceptance speech, she said, “Movie criticism is a happy, frustrating, slightly mad job. You can’t help knowing how ridiculous you appear when you interpose your words between the public and the vast machinery of advertising and publicity. Often you know you’re going to be made to look a fool. And so I’m particularly grateful for this award, as a recognition for those of us who try to sort out what’s going on in the mass media, without getting swept up in the circus. Thank you.”