by Mark Harris
Then Pauline Kael stepped into the fray. After The New Republic rejected her Bonnie and Clyde piece, she took it to William Shawn at The New Yorker, which ran the essay, at its full length of seven thousand words, in its October 21 issue. Kael had written one long article for the magazine before—an essay on how television ruins and distorts movies, a favorite hobbyhorse of cinephiles in the mid-1960s36—but this was the first time she had taken on a single film for the magazine, and it was unmistakably an audition. At forty-eight, Kael had been putting together a living by talking and writing about movies for fifteen years; she had begun on the West Coast, writing film notes for Berkeley revival houses and making funny, combative appearances on San Francisco radio shows. By the mid-1960s, she was already so well-known in film circles for her pieces in Partisan Review that, after McCall’s fired her, Newsweek ran a story discussing the growing “Kael cult.” An attention getter by instinct, Kael relished any opportunity to position herself as the informal, gut-driven voice of sanity rising in opposition to whatever she defined as the current orthodoxy. While she was on the West Coast, she wrote, “I razzed the East Coast critics and their cultural domination of the country”; 37 now that she had come east, she chose more specific adversaries.
Kael knew that she could get herself noticed by picking a fight, as she had done a few years earlier when she went after Andrew Sarris with a piece in Film Quarterly that mocked him and twitted American auteurist critics for elevating what she felt was disposable work by minor talents to the status of art.38 On the page, she was a mass of theoretical contradictions—a snob who railed against elitism, an epicure who boasted of her taste for vulgarity, an undeniably auteurist champion of her own pet directors who mocked auteurism in others, and a critic who so enjoyed writing in reaction against her colleagues that her desire to be iconoclastic at all costs sometimes clouded her judgment. But she was also the wittiest and most provocative writer that the field of film criticism had ever produced, and her article on Bonnie and Clyde put her at the center of an ongoing conversation about American movies over which she presided for the next fifteen years.
From its first sentence—“How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?”39—Kael’s impassioned, forceful defense of Bonnie and Clyde, which she identified as the gateway to a new kind of American moviemaking, was as much about the film’s detractors as it was about the film itself. “Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about,” she began. “And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, once it has entered mass art, it can never again…be the private possession of an educated, or ‘knowing’ group.” She applauded the movie’s violence as central to its meaning: “It is a kind of violence that says something to us; it is something that artists must be free to use…. Will we, as some people have suggested, be lured into imitating the violent crimes of Clyde and Bonnie because Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are ‘glamorous’?…It’s difficult to see how, since the characters they play are horrified by it and ultimately destroyed by it…. Bonnie and Clyde needs violence; violence is its meaning.” She brushed off complaints about historical inaccuracy and bad taste as irrelevant. And she left little doubt as to whom she meant when she said, “Too many people—including some movie reviewers—want the law to take over the job of movie criticism; perhaps what they really want is for their own criticisms to have the force of law.”
Kael’s statement that “the whole point of Bonnie and Clyde is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing,” her understanding that “we don’t take our stories straight anymore—Bonnie and Clyde is the first film demonstration that the put-on can be used for the purposes of art,” and her awareness of the “eager, nervous imbalance” in which the movie intended to hold its audience all seemed uncannily in synch with the intentions of Robert Benton and David Newman. It was no accident. Though she didn’t disclose it in the piece, she had taken the screenwriters out to lunch before writing her essay40 and gotten an earful of their motives, their admiration for the French New Wave, and their storytelling strategy. Her remark that “though one cannot say of Bonnie and Clyde to what degree it shows the work of Newman and Benton…there are ways of making guesses” was deeply disingenuous but very much in line with her pooh-poohing of “the new notion that direction is everything.” Unsurprisingly, she made it clear that she didn’t see the movie as Arthur Penn’s accomplishment, although she praised him for the staging and editing of the dance-of-death sequence, which she called “a horror that seems to go on for eternity, and yet…doesn’t last a second beyond what it should.”
Kael’s piece marked a decisive shift of the critical consensus on Bonnie and Clyde against Crowther and won her the job as one of The New Yorker’s two permanent film reviewers; she replaced Brendan Gill, sharing duties with Gilliatt in six-month shifts that began in early 1968. But her rave did not, as has often been claimed, turn Bonnie and Clyde’s fortunes around. For one thing, Kael was uncharacteristically late to the brawl; the movie had already been open for two months by the time her article appeared. In its two New York engagements and one Los Angeles theater, it was continuing to do strong, steady business and was also doing well in single-screen bookings in Chicago, Denver, and Baltimore. But Warner Brothers had little faith in the picture’s ability to draw a broader audience. On October 4, the studio grudgingly began what it called a “midwest saturation” run, actually a barely publicized test release in which Bonnie and Clyde was booked in thirty-five theaters in and around Kansas City and Omaha.41 With little in the way of support or promotion from the studio, the results were predictably unimpressive. Just as Kael’s piece reached readers, Warner Brothers all but gave up. On October 10, the studio pulled the movie from the Forum, the New York theater where big crowds were still lining up to see what all the fuss was about, and replaced it with the Elizabeth Taylor–Marlon Brando melodrama Reflections in a Golden Eye.
Bonnie and Clyde’s failure at the box office was overshadowed by what the trade papers were calling “Sidney Poitier Month.”42 In September, In the Heat of the Night and To Sir, with Love were, respectively, the number one and number two movies in the country. Though not a blockbuster, after eight weeks in release, Heat had easily earned back its $2 million budget and was on its way to what would be a healthy U.S. gross of about $7.5 million by the end of the year.43 In October, To Sir, with Love, a much bigger hit that was then in its fourth month in theaters, took over the top spot again.44Box Office magazine now ranked Poitier as the fifth-biggest star in Hollywood, ahead of Sean Connery and Steve McQueen.45 His drawing power was a shock to an industry that had, until recently, treated his employment in movies as something akin to an act of charity, and Hollywood greeted his new popularity with an orgy of self-congratulation, treating it as a further affirmation of the progress that his Oscar a few years earlier had purported to signify.
But just as Poitier’s success was being widely heralded, he was the subject of a frontal assault in The New York Times. On Sunday, September 10, the newspaper ran an essay by Clifford Mason, an African American aspiring playwright who occasionally wrote theater criticism, called “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?”—a sustained attack not just on Poitier’s roles, but on the actor himself. Mason cited A Patch of Blue (“Probably the most ridiculous film Poitier ever made…he’s running his private branch of the ASPCA, the Black Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Blind White Girls, the BSPCBWG”), The Bedford Incident (in which he played “a black correspondent who went around calling everyone sir. Did anyone ever see Gary Cooper or Greg Peck call anyone sir when they played foreign correspondents?”), and To Sir, with Love (“Instead of putting a love interest into a story that had none, they took it out”). Mason called Poitier’s career “a schizophrenic flight from historical fact that [imagines] that the Negro is best served by…taking on white problems and a white man’s sense of what�
��s wrong with the world…. All this Mr. Poitier endures, and more, without a murmur of protest…. In all of these films he has been a showcase nigger.
“White critics will…applaud every ‘advance’ in movies…as so much American-style democratic goodwill,” wrote Mason. “Gradualism may have some place in politics. But in art it just represents a stale, hackneyed period.” Poitier, he predicted at the end of his tirade, would never break free of roles in which he was “nonplussed by white arrogance…but, because of his innate goodness, finally [makes] that fateful decision to solve the problem for ‘them,’ good nigger that he is.”46
Times editor Seymour Peck’s decision to publish the article with its racial epithets intact was a minor radical-chic moment, a way of inviting an angry black man into the homes of the paper’s white readers, but its real effect was to expose, and deepen, the rift that had grown between Poitier and a younger, more militant black cultural intelligentsia. The week after the article ran, Poitier was attending a high school play in Harlem at the request of a friend, and Mason sat next to him, introduced himself, and asked if he had read the piece. “I want[ed] to say, ‘Yes, mother-fucker, I read your article,’” wrote Poitier in This Life. “Instead I say, ‘Oh, yes, I did.’ Period.”47 Poitier was determined to avoid a confrontation, but he couldn’t let go of his anger for months. He was terribly wounded by the story and furious at Mason’s decision to lay “the film industry’s transgressions at my feet,” but at the same time, he knew the arguments Mason was making represented the thinking of a portion of black America that was tired of compromises and half measures and was growing larger and stronger by the day. He paced his living room, reading the piece aloud and complaining to his friends, “Some day people will realize that I’m doing my part…. How long do you think I’d last if I came on like Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver?”48 “It was crushing to him to be attacked as an Uncle Tom,” says Katharine Houghton. “That kind of thing just tore him apart.”49
Forty years later, Mason expresses a degree of regret about the article. “I was trying to inject a sense into my own people that we have to be less happy about seeming advantages instead of real achievement,” he says. “But I sort of jumped all over Sidney because I wanted him to be Humphrey Bogart when he was really Cary Grant. I wanted him to be a personality type that he wasn’t, and that, of course, was unfair. But that role that Sidney always played—the black person with dignity who worries about the white people’s problems—you don’t play that part over and over again unless you’re comfortable with that kind of suffering.”50
Mason’s article, Poitier said later, started a “deluge” that steadily eroded his image among young black Americans and critics on the left. His acceptance by white moviegoers was used as evidence of how out of step his movies were with the needs and frustrations of his own people. Even journalists sympathetic to Poitier were starting to portray the actor as being aloof from the contemporary realities of the late 1960s; almost every profile and article made a point of referring to his Central Park West penthouse and its luxurious trappings, as if he were at an ivory-tower remove from the revolution taking place in the streets below. And the new level of success Poitier had achieved opened a floodgate of resentment among his own colleagues, who had kept silent when he himself was still struggling for parity with white movie stars but now demanded more from him than pleas for patience. Some of them wanted to know why doors weren’t opening for more African American performers; to them, Poitier’s career trajectory seemed to be creating new opportunities for no one but Poitier himself. “I’m tired of hearing Sidney say, ‘I’ll do this some time,’” said a black actor after sitting in Poitier’s living room and listening to him argue that his success would eventually benefit everyone. “It’s always some time. What’s the matter with right now?”51 Even Harry Belafonte, sometime friend, sometime rival, raised the possibility, however obliquely, that Poitier had sold out. “A lot of people have made their bargains with the devil,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Marlon has made his choice. Sidney has made his choice.”52 He didn’t elaborate on what he thought those choices were.
“I represent ten million people in this country, and millions more in Africa…and I’m not going to do anything they can’t be proud of,” Poitier said at a press conference to promote the start of production of For Love of Ivy. “Wait till there are six of us—then one of us can play villains all the time…. First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.” Poitier was referring, he said, to “frightened, bug-eyed maids and shuffling butlers.”53 But it was his own résumé of antiseptic, nonconfrontational role models that was drawing fire. The actor Brock Peters said publicly that Poitier’s recent hits “don’t go much further historically than, say, The Defiant Ones ten years ago”54 and suggested that Poitier was complicit in his own on-screen desexualization.
For the first time, Poitier agreed to take a role that departed from his spotless image: He would play the leader of a group of black revolutionaries who masterminds a payroll robbery in Universal’s The Lost Man. But while the mainstream press focused on the fact that he would receive a career-high $750,000 for the role,55 Poitier felt a deep pessimism about his own prospects. If In the Heat of the Night’s Virgil Tibbs had not assuaged the critics who faulted him for his on-screen passivity, he had little doubt what they would make of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. For fifteen years, Poitier had fought a battle for acceptance in an industry that was virtually closed to black people, and he had, just a year earlier, believed that For Love of Ivy would represent a giant step forward, a movie in which he could at last play a black man with a healthy libido and a romantic and professional life that had nothing to do with the white world. Now, he sensed it would be too little, too late. Throughout the fall of 1967, as one story after another appeared celebrating his breakthrough in mainstream Hollywood, Poitier felt, with growing certainty, that “my career as a leading man in Hollywood was nearing its end.”56
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Mann Theatre in Minneapolis was a good-luck charm for Dick Zanuck. In 1965, he and Robert Wise had flown to Minnesota with a print of The Sound of Music for a sneak preview at Ted Mann’s big road-show playhouse. The city was in the middle of a blizzard so terrible that Zanuck and Wise wondered if anybody would show up. “A sneak was still a real sneak back then,” says Zanuck. “You didn’t advertise the picture, but you tried to pick a theater that was showing a similar movie so that you’d get a friendly audience, and we’d usually leak what movie we were showing to a local disc jockey to get the word out.” Zanuck cheered up a little when he saw a long line of Minnesotans lined up outside the Mann, bundled against the snow but determined to get in. The movie got a standing ovation before its first intermission. “We were all delirious,” he says. “We came back to the hotel and waited in my suite, Bobby Wise and some of the executives and distribution guys, everyone from the picture. We got drunk and we waited for the comment cards to arrive.” About four hundred audience members had written down their reactions. “Getting that many was a good sign,” says Zanuck, “because when they like the picture, they’ll take the time to write a card. By the time we got them, we were all pretty smashed. We divided them up and everybody started reading them off: ‘Excellent! Excellent! Excellent! Excellent! Excellent!’ In my pile, there was one ‘Very Good.’ I was so tanked up that I got enraged—I wanted to call Ted Mann and find out if there was any way of tracing who could have possibly written the card. We were living in such a stupefied world with that kind of hit.”1
By September 1967, when Zanuck, Arthur Jacobs and Natalie Trundy, Richard Fleischer, Leslie and Yvonne Bricusse, and the Fox brass all flew up to Minneapolis to preview Doctor Dolittle in the same theater, stupefaction, superstition, and liquor seemed to be an appropriate set of operating principles when it came to the fate of the movie. For the last several months, Zanuck had allowed the journalist John Gregory Dunne to have access to all but a few meetings and
conversations at 20th Century-Fox for a book he was planning to write on a year in the life of a movie studio, and Jacobs, who had recovered from his heart attack and thrown himself into micromanaging every aspect of Dolittle’s release, proved to be irresistible material for Dunne. Jacobs had lost thirty pounds since his illness but was otherwise the same chain-smoking, hard-drinking, fast-talking operator that he had always been. Dunne captured him proudly tooling around the Fox lot on a golf cart, showing off his new sports car, and boasting about the $12 million that fifty licensees had committed to promoting Dolittle on everything from cereal boxes to bottles of chocolate soda. He witnessed Jacobs’s zeal in pushing Fox’s “song plugger” Happy Goday to get dozens of singers to record songs from the movie before its release, including Bobby Darin, Andy Williams, and Tony Bennett. Goday even convinced Sammy Davis Jr., who apparently had gotten over his hard feelings about being dropped from the film two years earlier, to record an entire album of Dolittle music.2