Pauline Kael (43 page)

Ritchie had gotten the idea for
Smile
when he had been a judge at Santa Rosa’s Junior Miss pageant; several of the acts for the film’s talent competitions, including the packing of a suitcase and Annette O’Toole’s “Sincerity Strip,” were lifted from real-life beauty contests. Even the long sequence of the Jaycees Exhausted Rooster ceremony, which involved inductees kissing a raw chicken’s behind, was taken from life. “Michael Ritchie really had the pulse of America in the most loving way,” recalled Barbara Feldon. “He had both the sharpest satirical eye and the most loving touch. At the time we were shooting in Santa Rosa, and when I saw it put together, I was stunned that it wasn’t mean. It was very sweet, actually.”

Pauline thought Ritchie’s direction was a bit uneven, but still she couldn’t help admiring
Smile
. “There hasn’t been a small-town comedy in so long,” she wrote, “that this fresh, mussy [
sic
] film seems to be rediscovering America.”

She was especially delighted by the festival’s final showing: François Truffaut’s
The Story of Adèle H
. The director had been on a self-imposed sabbatical for a few years, writing and studying and searching for inspiration for a new film. Pauline felt his exile had been worthwhile, for his new film affected her as none of his movies had in years.
The Story of Adèle H.
was an unusual choice of subject matter for Truffaut: Adèle (Isabelle Adjani), the younger daughter of Victor Hugo, who has grown up on the isle of Guernsey, where her famous father lives in exile, falls in love with a British lieutenant. They have an affair in England, but the lieutenant wearies of her, and is happy to leave her behind when he is transferred with his regiment to Nova Scotia. But she is determined to repossess him and, defying convention, follows him, hounding him, humiliating him—doing anything to make sure he becomes hers. She manages to sabotage his engagement to another woman of wealth and position, all the while growing more and more desperate and finally going insane.

Pauline was temperamentally drawn to stories such as
Adèle H
.—stories in which women were portrayed acting out their darkest passions, throwing off societal expectations of them, displaying a willingness to go as far as their romantic obsessions could take them. It was for the same reason that she loved the novels of Edna O’Brien, with their fearless confrontation of “the shocking messiness of love”; she prized O’Brien for her “perceptions of what I thought no one else knew—and I wasn’t telling.”

Pauline considered
Adèle H.
the first genuinely great movie to emerge from Europe since
Last Tango in Paris
. What she admired most was the way that Truffaut managed to tell his story in a way that was both “romantic
and
ironic: he understands that maybe the only way we can take great romantic love now is as craziness, and that the craziness doesn’t cancel out the romanticism—it completes it. Adèle’s love isn’t corrupted by sanity; she’s a great crazy. She carries her love to the point where it consumes everything else in her life, and when she goes mad, it doesn’t represent the disintegration of her personality; it is, rather, the final integration.”

The big American movie of 1975—the movie that captured the hearts of the public in the way that Pauline had hoped
Nashville
would—was
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, Milos Forman’s adaptation of the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey. Its story of Randle McMurphy, who leads a rebellion among the inmates of an Oregon state mental hospital, was closely tied to the political turmoil of the ’60s, with the inmates standing in for America’s free-spirited, searching youth, and the maddeningly calm and manipulative Nurse Ratched being viewed as a reflection of Nixon’s silent majority. These associations were inevitable, and because Kesey’s novel had been so popular, particularly with college students, an even reasonably faithful film version of it was probably destined to be a hit.

But
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
received mixed reviews when it opened in November, with several critics complaining that the novel had been oversimplified. Howard Kissel felt that a few years earlier, the good guys vs. bad guys scheme would have “led to a victory for the good guys. Now it is the bad guys who triumph—for no apparent reason other than to intensify the emotional blow to the audience.”

In her
New Yorker
review, Pauline took issue with the “long literary tradition behind this man’s-man view of women as the castrater-lobotomizers,” but she thought the film deserved credit for making Kesey’s comic-strip fantasy about freedom and repression human and more realistic. She found it “a powerful, smashingly effective movie” and praised Milos Forman for grasping “how crude the poet-paranoid system of the book would look on the screen now that the sixties’ paranoia has lost its nightmarish buoyancy.... Forman could have exploited the Watergate hangover and retained the paranoid simplicities that helped make hits of
Easy Rider
and
Joe,
but instead he . . . has taken a less romantic, more suggestive approach.” She thought that McMurphy was a great role for Jack Nicholson, with his “half smile—the calculated insult that alerts audiences to how close to the surface his hostility is.” She thought McMurphy was “so much of a Nicholson role that the actor may not seem to be getting a chance to do much new in it. But Nicholson doesn’t use the glinting, funny-malign eyes this time; he has a different look—McMurphy’s eyes are farther away, muggy, veiled even from himself. You’re not sure what’s going on behind them.”

The opening of a new Stanley Kubrick film had become an occasion for Pauline to dread. In the wake of
2001
and
A Clockwork Orange
, Kubrick had been all but deified by the media; the combination of his reputation as one of filmland’s true intellectuals and his attention-getting ways of making movies had many critics and reporters poised to salute his every effort as a Great Cultural Landmark. The new project was
Barry Lyndon
, based on Thackeray’s novel about a penniless Irish rogue who rises to dizzying wealth and social position in the mid–eighteenth century. Kubrick’s film moved at a perfect adagio tempo that was nevertheless surprisingly novel and hardly ever dull.

Pauline acknowledged the film’s visually arresting quality and found its first segments mesmerizing. She thought the novel had probably intrigued Kubrick because of its “externalized approach,” which he had devised a way of matching in stately pictorial terms. But she felt he had missed Thackeray’s lighthearted, satirical tone. For her, the movie wore out its welcome fairly soon. “As it becomes apparent that we are to sit and admire the lingering tableaux,” she wrote, “we feel trapped. It’s not merely that Kubrick isn’t releasing the actors’ energies or the story’s exuberance but that he’s deliberately holding the energy level down.” She couldn’t help jabbing Kubrick in a rather personal way when she wrote of her disappointment in seeing the picture’s “slack-faced and phlegmatic” star, Ryan O’Neal, “his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet.” Every frame of it was a reflection of the director’s self-importance. “Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures,” she wrote. She also expressed her desire that Kubrick “would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects” such as his early, expert noir thriller
The Killing
.

Barry Lyndon
divided the New York critics, ten of whom, led by
Time
’s Richard Schickel and
The New York Times
’s Vincent Canby, wrote favorably of it, with eight writing unfavorably. There was further divisiveness at that year’s voting for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, which Rex Reed reported in his column in the
Daily News
. “I think it is important to remind everyone that
Barry Lyndon
was the head-on favorite of many of the voters,” he complained, “losing out in the third ballot only because the absentee critics lost their rights to proxies. I was voting for
Barry Lyndon
all the way.” Reed, like many others, was incensed that
Nashville
took the Best Picture prize both from the NYFCC and the National Society of Film Critics.

When Sam Peckinpah’s
The Killer Elite
was released that winter, Pauline wrote an odd essay for “The Current Cinema” titled “Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah.” Less a review than a lengthy mash note, it offered an enormous amount of ammunition to her critics; Andrew Sarris could hardly be blamed if he felt that Pauline was becoming more of an auteurist than he had ever been. She liked
The Killer Elite
, which she found “intensely, claustrophobically exciting.” But the essay was most concerned with her admiration for her maverick friend, who continued to spit in the faces of the movie executives who thought they knew how to handle artists:

And later:

All of this was unquestionably sincere. But it was too much—Pauline was all but turning Peckinpah into a Christlike figure in the pages of
The New Yorker
. If Pauline admired the “craziness” in artists, Peckinpah gave it to her in spades. She failed to see that her idolatry of him was a kind of romanticism, that perhaps the executives who tried to keep him on track during the course of making a film might possibly have a legitimate point of view as well.

Pauline and Peckinpah continued to keep up a close correspondence. In 1976, he wrote to her from England, where he was filming
Cross of Iron
and coping with a trying sabbatical from alcohol:

Some people gossiped that Pauline was sleeping with Peckinpah, and still others thought there was a romantic connection between her and her good friend Richard Albarino, a handsome, energetic New York writer whose company Pauline enjoyed because his intellectual tempo was similar to hers. But those closer to her knew better. The fact was that Pauline had been finished with men for some time. “She was done completely,” said James Toback. “One hundred percent. And if you wanted to misinterpret her life about the ones who were sort of escorting her, the one that you could have misinterpreted was Dick Albarino. It had the appearance of that, but that was not true.”

Having missed the opportunity to write about Paul Mazursky’s
Blume in Love
, Pauline was delighted to celebrate his next movie,
Next Stop Greenwich Village
, an autobiographical account of his days as a young actor in New York. She parted company with her fellow critics, however, when she reviewed Lina Wertmuller’s
Seven Beauties
in the winter of 1976, a film that was acclaimed in
The New York Times
as “Miss Wertmuller’s
King Kong
, her
Nashville
, her
8½
, her
Navigator
, her
City Lights
.” “If
Seven Beauties
is all these things, what is it?” Pauline wondered. This film about the misadventures of a Neapolitan man during World War II who runs afoul of the Nazis and is sent to a concentration camp where he pathetically tries to win favor with a female commandant was, Pauline thought, “beyond annoyance . . . it’s extremely ambitious, and I think it’s a gloppy mess.” She disliked Wertmuller’s films—she hadn’t responded to the much-acclaimed
Swept Away
, either, complaining that “the characters never shut up”—and noted that it was futile to discuss “the stated ideas in a Wertmuller film because they can’t be sorted out . . . The way Lina Wertmuller makes movies, she has to believe that disorder is creative. She plunks in whatever comes to mind, and rips through the scenes. It’s all bravura highs and bravura lows, without any tonal variation,” all the while believing that she was “raising the consciousness of the masses.”

She also strayed from the herd with her review of Martin Scorsese’s
Taxi Driver
. Pauline, of course, had a long history with the project, and the end result was just as unnerving as she had imagined it would be that night two years earlier, when she had read the script in bed and then been afraid to have it in the room with her. Perhaps no mainstream film—not even
Midnight Cowboy
—had so fully explored the seamy side of New York, which in 1976 was still a grim, crime-ridden city in which old-time residents bemoaned the ugly decline of neighborhoods such as Times Square, where much of the movie’s action took place. The character of Iris, the twelve-year-old hooker played by Jodie Foster—the focal point of Travis’s reformer’s zeal—was a movie first, and genuinely disturbing. There is an unnerving sequence in which Travis attempts to date Betsy, the campaign worker portrayed by Cybill Shepherd, by taking her to a porn film in Times Square. And there is the depiction of Travis’s insane assassination plot aimed at the political candidate Palan-tine. Like
Nashville
,
Taxi Driver
considered the violence that marginalized outsiders could inflict on those who occupied center stage.