Pauline Kael (40 page)

P
auline’s life had never been as exhilarating as it was now. Her existence revolved around going to movies, talking about movies, lecturing on movies, being interviewed about movies. Not only had the National Book Award put an official seal on her status, but that year she also received the Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, for the Best Magazine Column of 1974. Once she had been described as
one
of America’s most important and influential film critics, but now, there were few other qualifiers. She had achieved what she had always craved—major stardom—and with stardom came power.

The National Society of Film Critics was her pet group, far more than the New York Film Critics Circle. While the NYFCC was populated with critics who had been established long before Pauline’s arrival in New York, the NSFC boasted a number of new members whose careers she had nurtured. “With her review of
Last Tango
, I think,” observed Howard Kissel, then the film reviewer for
Women’s Wear Daily
, “she began to sense that she did have a power. And I think she had this notion that if the critics had a cabal, they could be more powerful.” Several of her colleagues felt she was overestimating the force that a group such as the NSFC could wield. “I would say film critics have power when it comes to some little movie that could be overlooked otherwise,” said Kissel. “But in terms of what Hollywood wants to sell—no.”

Already the legend of Pauline’s inner circle of critic protégés was building. Inclusion in the group was pursued, often desperately, by outsiders. But there were no guarantees of safety at any point. David Denby was a writer in his late twenties who had a burning ambition to become a critic. Pauline met him in 1967, while he was a student at the Columbia University School of Journalism. She got along well with Denby, who assumed an enviable position in the Kael circle, spending many late nights into morning at the Turin, listening in rapt fascination as she debated with her other guests and, as Denby recalled, mowed down “the reputations of virtually every writer in town.”

At this point Denby felt that he had been inducted into the literary boot camp of his dreams. Pauline might endlessly hector him and her other protégés about their thoughts and opinions, constantly pressing them to go further and deeper in their writing, to sort out and sharpen their ideas on the page. She could openly badger them about what she considered their middlebrow taste, but she was so witty and engaging that “those who didn’t turn away in anger were convinced that she was rough on them for their own good. At least, that was the promise.” She enjoyed playing the role of the tough fourth-grade teacher that so many writers crave: She held the young critics she took up to a dizzyingly high standard, going over their articles line by line—endlessly devoted, it seemed, to showing them how to improve their work. About one article of Denby’s that was in progress, Pauline said, “It’s shit, honey . . . and if you don’t make it better I’ll stick pins in you.” Toward the end of Denby’s time at Columbia, she suggested him for a film critic’s post at
The Atlantic Monthly
, and he got the job.

The problem was that, by Denby’s own admission, he was so drawn to, so dominated by, Pauline’s voice on the printed page that it crept into his own writing. She recognized her influence, too, and few things rankled her more than the awareness that her acolytes were blindly devoted to her. She loved being surrounded by like-minded people, but slavish imitators eventually invited her contempt. As far as Denby was concerned, Pauline’s followers had to go along with the general outline of her thinking, but they couldn’t be too obeisant; they had to demonstrate that they could think for themselves. When Pauline noticed the imitative streak in Denby’s writing, she wasn’t pleased. At some point during her
New Yorker
stint in 1972–73, Denby recalled, she telephoned him to tell him that she didn’t think he had the right stuff. “You’re too restless to be a writer,” she proclaimed. A few hours later, knowing that she had wounded him, she phoned again, telling him, “I’ve thought about this seriously, honey. You should do something else with your energy.”

In Denby’s case the student had for some time begun to be suspicious of the teacher and revolt against the rules of Pauline’s private academy. He had come to doubt some of her opinions (her rave for
Fiddler on the Roof
particularly baffled him) and claimed to have been present at a lunch at a Chinese restaurant in New York at which she had laid the director Nicholas Ray out flat, pitilessly analyzing his films one by one and altogether dismissing a good many of them, to the point that “Ray, his face cast down into his shrimp and rice, said hardly a word.”

So, when greeted with Pauline’s announcement that he was not fit for a career as a writer, Denby nervously disagreed with her and did the only thing he felt he could do: He withdrew from her life. They continued to see each other at professional gatherings in the years that followed—Denby would be film critic for
New York
and later
The New Yorker
—but Pauline never recanted her opinion. Denby would later recall the acute discomfort of being cast out not only by Pauline but by many of her acolytes, whom he had mistakenly considered friends. He would go on to an enviable career as a critic and commentator, but the hurt and humiliation that Pauline’s rejection brought remained with him for years.

She had a similarly conflicted relationship with another of her rebels, Paul Schrader. Since turning down the movie-reviewing post in Seattle that she had urged him to take, Schrader had been living in Los Angeles, trying to be a screenwriter. By 1973 he had finished a number of original scripts and, swallowing his pride, sent Pauline four of them—
Taxi Driver
,
The Yakuza
,
Déjà Vu
, and
Rolling Thunder
. Schrader wrote to her about them in May of that year, clearly wanting her to approve of the path he had taken. He told her that he considered
Taxi Driver
the best of the lot.

Pauline took the screenplay of
Taxi Driver
to bed with her late one night, expecting to leaf through only a few pages before dropping off to sleep. She was so riveted by it, however, that she read the entire script before dawn broke. She was unnerved by the characterization of Travis Bickle, the dissociative cabdriver so obsessed with purging the scum of New York, that she was unable to sleep with the script in the bedroom. Eventually she took it into another room, stacked a pile of other things on top of it, and went back to bed.

In mid-1974
Taxi Driver
was green-lighted by Columbia Pictures. Schrader was in New York and had dinner with Pauline and the Chicago film reviewer Roger Ebert at the Algonquin. Perhaps because she didn’t want to admit she had been wrong about which vocation he should choose, she never said much to Schrader about his script. All she offered about
Taxi Driver
that night was that she felt Robert De Niro would never be able to do justice to the part of Travis Bickle.

In December 1974, when
The Godfather, Part II
was released, Pauline changed her mind about De Niro. The second
Godfather
film, once again directed masterfully by Francis Ford Coppola, was both a prequel and a sequel, picking up the story of Vito Corleone from his Sicilian childhood, and jumping ahead in time to the 1950s, when the new don, the cold-blooded Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), is establishing the family’s base of operations in Nevada.
The Godfather, Part II
was that rarest of all sequels: Unfolding at three hours and twenty minutes, it had much greater depth and breadth than the first film. Pauline found that she came close to not having “the emotional resources to deal with the experience of this film. Twice, I almost cried out at acts of violence that De Niro’s Vito committed. I didn’t look away from the images, as I sometimes do at routine action pictures. I wanted to see the worst; there is a powerful need to see it. You need these moments as you need the terrible climaxes in a Tolstoy novel. A great novelist does not spare our feelings (as the historical romancer does); he intensifies them, and so does Coppola.” She admitted that she found
The Godfather, Part II
so overwhelming that “about midway, I began to feel that the film was expanding in my head like a soft bullet.” Her review was a fine example of something she always sought to do—let the reader in on her thought processes. She thought that Michael’s closed-off self—his inability to have a single moment of happiness—came through brilliantly in Al Pacino’s performance. “Is it our imagination, or is Michael’s face starting to rot?” Pauline wondered of the film’s early scenes. She thought that De Niro, as young Vito, had “the physical audacity, the grace, and the instinct to become a great actor—perhaps as great as Brando.” Most of all, she expressed great admiration for Coppola, whose approach she found “openhanded: he doesn’t force the situations. He puts the material up there, and we read the screen for ourselves.” She found that “the sensibility at work in this film is that of a major artist. We’re not used to it: how many screen artists get the chance to work in the epic form, and who has been able to seize the power to compose a modern American epic? And who else, when he got the chance and the power, would have proceeded with the absolute conviction that he’d make the film the way it should be made? In movies, that’s the inner voice of the authentic hero.” It was one of her most deeply felt pieces of the period, and it elicited a note of praise from Penelope Gilliatt, who called it “a magnificent piece.”

It was Francis Ford Coppola’s year: He had released another, almost equally remarkable film a few months earlier—
The Conversation
, a harrowingly intimate story of a professional electronics surveillance expert whose life’s work has created a sick obsession with his own privacy. With its minimal dialogue and music,
The Conversation
had much in common with
Blow-Up
, but it was a far more vital and less pretentious film. Because it was released in the summer of 1974, Pauline missed reviewing it for
The New Yorker
, but she did manage to get comments on it into a special essay she wrote for the magazine in August, “On the Future of Movies.”

That
The Conversation
had not done well in general release, she wrote, was classic proof of the corruption of the studio heads, who couldn’t accept that Coppola was “in a position (after directing
The Godfather
) to do what he wanted to do; they’re hurt that he flouts their authority, working out of San Francisco instead of Los Angeles. And they don’t really have any respect for
The Conversation
, because it’s an idea film.” Paramount, she claimed “didn’t
plan
on
The Conversation
being a success, and nothing now is going to make them help it become one.” Pauline identified what she saw as a steadily encroaching trend: Young audiences were no longer quite so willing to take a chance on an unusual, quiet, complicated picture as they might have been a few years ago. She was right that the atmosphere was changing—possibly because the spirit of organized protest had seriously faded and the disillusionment in the wake of Watergate was having a numbing effect on so much of American social and cultural life. It was becoming apparent that “audiences like movies that do all the work for them.... They don’t mind being banged over the head—the louder the better.” While she didn’t state it explicitly, “On the Future of Movies” clearly conveyed her concern that the Altmans and Scorseses and Coppolas were going to face difficulties in the years to come. Cutesy comedies like
The Sting
and slam-bang thrillers like
The Exorcist
were what audiences seemed to crave, and they were benefiting from all of the studios’ backing, while smaller films like
Thieves Like Us
and
The Conversation
vanished. She overstated her case, however, when she claimed, “The movie companies used to give all their pictures a chance, but now they’ll put two or three million, or even five, into selling something they consider surefire, and a token—a pittance—into the others.” Although blockbuster marketing was steadily on the rise, and the audience numbers were giving it validation, she neglected to mention that old Hollywood had frequently trashed some of its finest work by not releasing it properly—Fred Zinnemann’s
The Member of the Wedding
, Charles Laughton’s
Night of the Hunter
, and Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil
being but three examples from the 1950s.

Near the end of “On the Future of Movies,” she made another pitch for the artist in Hollywood:

It was a compelling argument, but Fred Goldberg, vice president of United Artists, wrote Pauline a sharp letter objecting to her claim that Paramount hadn’t properly supported
The Conversation
. Goldberg claimed that the studio had spent $95,000 on advertising for the film’s pre-opening and first week, including two full-page ads in
The New York Times
, one of them quoting the film’s many laudatory reviews. Goldberg pointed out that $95,000 was an impressive budget for a theater containing 589 seats. The effort had paid off for one week, because the New York gross was excellent—$30,000—but despite big ads throughout the New York run, the gross began to dip quickly. Goldberg added that if Pauline thought that after that kind of backing, Paramount still did not want
The Conversation
to be a success, it was a sign that she was playing to her prejudices and didn’t “really care about the business end of motion pictures.” He accused her of underestimating the real power of selling a film—word of mouth in the audience—which no one could ever predict. In closing, he added that he still considered her “a hell of a writer.”