Pauline Kael (42 page)

In that one paragraph, she accomplished several things: She cued the reader that she had given herself over, without reservation, to the film; she heckled the studios for not supporting Altman; and she proclaimed, before its release, that it was going to be a box-office smash. She admitted that “
Nashville
isn’t in final shape yet, and all I can hope to do is to suggest something of its achievement.” But she found the movie a profound comment on “the great American popularity contest. Godard was trying to achieve a synthesis of documentary and fiction and personal essay in the early sixties, but Godard’s Calvinist temperament was too cerebral. Altman, from a Catholic background, has what Joyce had: a love of the supreme juices of everyday life. He can put unhappy characters on the screen . . . and you don’t wish you didn’t have to watch them; you accept their unhappiness as a piece of the day, as you do in
Ulysses
.” Despite her antagonistic feelings toward the Catholic Church, this was a further expression of her belief that the Catholic upbringings of Coppola, Scorsese, and Altman was key to their success: Simply put, she believed that the Catholic fixation on guilt and sin and mystery had triumphed, in artistic terms, over the traditional Protestant obsessions with repression, self-denial, and an iron work ethic. Kathryn Altman, the director’s wife, would dismiss this idea years later, but Joan Tewkesbury somewhat agreed with Pauline, feeling that Altman, like many Catholics who have rejected their faith, was fascinated by “all of those things that are forbidden when you’re a kid. But it wasn’t conscious, and if you had said that to Bob, he would have told you you were full of shit.”

For Pauline,
Nashville
was the greatest example yet of Altman’s ability to characterize Americans in a way that had the flavor of satire, yet was so affectionate and complex and true that it went far beyond satire. The movie’s comment on America in one of its pivotal moments in history—post-Watergate—was rich and flavorful but never ungenerous, never a cheat, never an easy exposé, in the way that so many films such as
Midnight Cowboy
had been for years.
Nashville
was a brilliant success, in large part, because Altman included the audience in the experience of telling his story as much as he had included his actors. “Altman wants you to be part of the life he shows you,” Pauline wrote, “and to feel the exhilaration of being alive.... For the viewer,
Nashville
is a constant discovery of overlapping connections. The picture says, This is what America is, and I’m part of it.
Nashville
arrives at a time when America is congratulating itself for having got rid of the bad guys who were pulling the wool over people’s eyes. The movie says that it isn’t only the politicians who live the big lie—the big lie is something we’re all capable of trying for.” She ended with a great, crashing, symphonic chord: She called
Nashville
“the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen.”

Pauline remained on a high about
Nashville
for weeks afterward, and it helped to sustain her through her disappointment in Barbra Streisand’s latest vehicle, a sequel to her Oscar-winning Fanny Brice story,
Funny Lady
. Streisand had been reluctant to do the film, but she had acquiesced to the producer, Ray Stark, to whom she was under contract.
Funny Lady
was leaden and stale and charmless, but what shattered Pauline was that her favorite female star had taken on those same qualities. She found that what Streisand did in the film was “no longer singing, it’s something else—that strident overdramatiza-tion that turns a song into a big number. The audience’s attention is directed away from the music and onto the star’s feat in charging it with false energy. Streisand is out to knock you cold, and you get cold, all right.” At the end of her review, she admitted to her readers, “The main problem I had with
Funny Lady
is that I fell out of like with Barbra Streisand.” She observed that Streisand’s “volatility is gone; something rigid and overbearing and heavy seems to be settling into her manner. She may have gone past the time when she could play a character; maybe that’s why she turns Fanny Brice into a sacred monster. Has Streisand lost sight of the actress she could be?”

The review provided a kind of vindication for Streisand, who was not so stung by Pauline’s barbs that she couldn’t see she had been right not to want to do the film in the first place. Pauline was delighted when Streisand phoned her to tell her she thought her comments were just, but Ray Stark, who objected violently to the review, wrote Pauline a strong letter of complaint. She answered him in crusader mode, still trying to use her power for the good of those she considered to be the most gifted in the business:

From this point on, Pauline often saw herself as more than a critic. Her reviews became more urgent, more emotional, more haranguing. She seemed to feel that mere criticism wasn’t sufficient, that she might be the only thing standing between some of Hollywood’s biggest talents and some form of creative bankruptcy.

N
ashville
went into general release in the summer of 1975, and Pauline’s description of it as “the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen” was trumpeted in the print ads. As usual, when the film opened in New York, Altman, accompanied by Joan Tewkesbury, beat a path to the theater where it was playing, checking the movie lines at each showing.
Nashville
wound up costing only a little over $2 million, and with Pauline’s news-making advance rave, and the other, mostly positive reviews that came in over the summer, it was expected that the movie would have little trouble becoming a hit, as she had predicted.

Many of her fellow critics, however, were incensed that she had published the early review. They chose to view her action less as a case of passionate advocacy for a deserving picture than as an example of galloping arrogance and opportunism. They had all waited until the distributor had set up official press screenings—why couldn’t she? Those who had never trusted her trusted her even less now.

Some were quite vocal in their disapproval. A week after her review appeared in
The New Yorker
, Vincent Canby wrote a lengthy piece in
The New York Times
that opened with an assertion that Pauline hadn’t seen the “real”
Nashville
—that there had been no finished soundtrack, that it had been edited since she had viewed it, and might well have further cuts prior to general release. His tone was snide: “If one can review a film on the basis of an approximately three-hour rough cut, why not review it on the basis of a five-hour rough cut? A ten-hour one? On the basis of a screenplay? The original material if first printed as a book? On the basis of a press release? Gossip items?” He then launched into a merciless parody of her prose style, using an imaginary review of Elia Kazan’s forthcoming
The Last Tycoon
: “
The Last Tycoon
bombs like a paper bag full of water. It goes splat all over you and you wait there, like an idiot, hoping that someone will wipe you off.” (Perhaps not coincidentally, Canby had dedicated his new novel,
Living Quarters
, to Penelope Gilliatt.) In June, just after the film’s release, Rex Reed ridiculed Pauline on
The Merv Griffin Show
. He called Altman “really not very talented” and used Pauline’s
Nashville
review as evidence that she was “always foaming at the mouth about something.”

While it was much discussed among serious film-lovers, the huge potential country-and-western audience didn’t take to
Nashville
, and the movie suffered in those circles from poor word of mouth. The film proved to be too long, full of too many characters, its point of view a little too sophisticated for much of rural America.
Nashville
didn’t speak to the country as a whole in the way that Altman had hoped and Pauline had imagined it would. It would make back its cost and then some, but it was hardly the blockbuster she had anticipated. Joan Tewkesbury recalled, “Nobody got rich. But it created a kind of firestorm that allowed everybody to keep working, so that was the payoff.”

 

In the spring of 1975, Pauline picked up two more honorary degrees. On May 13, Haverford College awarded her a Doctor of Humane Letters; the citation read, in part, “In the twilight land of flickering forms she is an outpost of literacy, keeping Mythos safely chained to Logos. Her service is to the best in our imagined selves.” Five days later she received a Doctor of Humane Letters from Paul E. Bragdon, the president of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. On June 1 she was an honored guest at the hundredth annual commencement of the Massachusetts College of Art. She made a few appearances on the lecture circuit, then returned to New York, where she and Gina packed up their belongings at 333 Central Park West and moved full-time up to Great Barrington. The Turin had simply become too expensive, and her salary at
The New Yorker
remained too low for it to be feasible for her to maintain a residence in Manhattan. Over the years, she had continued to complain about living in the city, often telling people that life in New York meant being forced to clear off your work area to set the table for dinner. She reveled in the fresh air and quiet of Great Barrington, but the move did present one practical obstacle: She still didn’t drive and relied on Gina as her chauffeur. An arrangement was made with
The New Yorker
that she would come to town every two weeks, see a group of movies back-to-back, stay at the Royalton Hotel in midtown, and then return to Great Barrington to finish writing her reviews, with express mail services taking the place of bicycle messengers.

As usual she spent much of the summer making preparations for her fall season at
The New Yorker
. This partly involved reading a stack of books and plays whose film versions were due to be released. As always, she clipped newspaper articles she thought might be pertinent to some of her reviews. She also watched news programs religiously and made careful notes on matters that she thought might be addressed in her own writing.

In July, she made her usual midsummer solo appearance in
The New Yorker
with a lengthy tribute to Cary Grant that she had been working on for some time. “Cary Grant—The Man from Dream City” was by far the most perceptive analysis of the actor’s appeal that had been written to date. The essay was far more than an appreciation of Grant; it was also a penetrating examination of the screwball comedy genre. There were a few echoes of her view of Herman Mankiewicz in “Raising Kane” when she wrote, “Cary Grant is your dream date—not sexless but sex with civilized grace, sex with mystery. He’s the man of the big city, triumphantly suntanned. Sitting out there in Los Angeles, the expatriate New York writers projected onto him their fantasies of Eastern connoisseurship and suavity.”

Pauline’s comments on the Grant legend were extraordinarily acute. She felt that one of the keys to his appeal was his odd, sexy reticence: “He draws women to him by making them feel he needs them, yet the last thing he would do would be to come right out and say it.” She felt he was “not the modern kind of actor who taps his unconscious in his acting. Part of his charm is that his angers are all externally provoked; there are no internal pressures in him that need worry us, no rage or rebelliousness to churn us up.” Instead, “We could admire him for his timing and nonchalance; we didn’t expect emotional revelations from Cary Grant . . . He appeared before us in his radiantly shallow perfection, and that was all we wanted of him.”

The most influential film that summer was Steven Spielberg’s second feature,
Jaws
, which Pauline thought showed all the confidence, wit, and command of technique that she admired in his debut theatrical film,
The Sugarland Express
.
Jaws
was the kind of jazzy, comedy-inflected thriller she loved, a film that didn’t take itself too seriously and represented, as far as she was concerned, the best that American pop culture had to offer—a junk-food film made with craft and wit and style. She wrote that it might well be “the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made.”

The film opened on June 20, just nine days after
Nashville
, in a wide-release pattern—no starting in a few theaters and waiting for word of mouth to build. With a major television ad campaign paving the way,
Jaws
became one of the biggest moneymakers in history in a remarkably short time, eventually grossing a staggering $458 million—dwarfing
The Exorcist
’s earnings of two years earlier. It established an overnight marketing revolution in Hollywood; the summer blockbuster had been born. Because Pauline admired the film and its director, she failed to perceive where its astonishing success might lead, and how it might ultimately make life more difficult for many of the artists she had spent years championing.

Pauline had a better time than usual at that year’s New York Film Festival; she believed that the great artistic explosion that had ignited films in the late’60s might really endure for a time. There were several American movies she liked, one of which was Michael Ritchie’s
Smile
, a comedy set in small-town America about the fictional Young American Miss teenage beauty pageant. It was, in a way, a cousin of
Nashville
, making its comments through the filter of an established American pop institution. Also like
Nashville, Smile
had a definite post-Watergate feel about it: the characters of Big Bob (Bruce Dern) and Brenda (Barbara Feldon), the principal organizers of the pageant, were determined to hold on to their sunny, superficial views of the world despite the fact that America had changed for good.