Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Her limited income made it all the more crucial for her to book as many speaking engagements as she could during her six months off from the magazine. (Since the success of her two books, Robert Mills’s office was flooded with offers.) She also had an arrangement with The New Yorker to take on outside writing assignments during her time off. In mid-1968 she accepted a major assignment from Willie Morris, the enterprising young editor of Harper’s , who had successfully lured an impressive array of new writers to his magazine, and the long essay she published in the magazine’s February 1969 issue, “Trash, Art and the Movies,” was perhaps her boldest statement yet of her own moviegoing personality.

  “There is so much talk now about the art of the film,” Pauline wrote, “that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.” Again, she encouraged audiences to respond to what they genuinely enjoyed—not to second-guess themselves as they might have been taught to do in school. And if what they enjoyed was a cheap youth exploitation picture like Wild in the Streets, that was fine, “because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t.” Movies like Planet of the Apes and The Thomas Crown Affair couldn’t possibly be defended as works of art, she wrote.

  But they are almost the maximum of what we’re now getting from American movies, and not only these but much worse movies are talked about as “art”—and are beginning to be taken seriously in our schools.

  It’s preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art—as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not; it’s just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us into thinking we’re getting art for our money when we haven’t even had a good time.

  The genuine movie-lover knew in his gut that what movies had to offer was not an academic study in perfect artistic unity. “At the movies we want a different kind of truth,” Pauline wrote, “something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful,” whether that was a line, a scene, a performance that somehow had resonance. Audiences needed to understand that a low-grade picture like Wild in the Streets “connects with their lives in an immediate, even if a grossly frivolous way, and if we don’t go to movies for excitement, if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little drive that we accept ‘good taste,’ then we will probably never really begin to care about movies at all.”

  Pauline’s championing of the lowbrow—the good, vital lowbrow—was really a plea for some degree of emotional honesty on the part of the audience. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies,” she confessed. “I don’t trust any of the tastes of people who were born with such good taste that they didn’t need to find their way through trash.”

  This was not a unique point of view among movie critics. Joseph Morgenstern shared it, as did Judith Crist, who often used the phrase “trash—but delicious,” to get through to her students at Columbia University. But Pauline took it in a new direction by pointing to the folly of the reverse perspective: the attempt to identify “art” in movies that were merely a smokescreen of directorial manipulation. She focused on some notable recent examples: Petulia , The Graduate, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—all critically acclaimed box-office hits. She regarded Petulia as a pitiful attempt to take advantage of the pessimism and alienation that Americans had come to feel in the turmoil of the 1960s, and dismissed it as “obscenely self-important.” Kubrick’s 2001, with its view of the blissful potential of space, where anything was possible, rendering the petty existence of life on Earth irrelevant, was “a celebration of cop-out” and fundamentally an expression of the oversize ego of its creator. She felt that, like many directors, Kubrick had fallen into the trap of the Big Idea, and along the way, he had abandoned his early promise (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and had come “to think of himself as a myth-maker.” The ultimate, redeeming value of trash, she argued in her summing up, was that it leaves us wanting, hoping for more—“Trash has given us an appetite for art.”

  In October 1968 she had had an opportunity to test these theories when Twentieth Century–Fox sneaked into release a little movie called Pretty Poison , a psychological thriller about a bizarre loner (Anthony Perkins) who impresses a young girl (Tuesday Weld) by telling her that he’s a CIA agent; the twist is that the girl is much more disturbed than he is. Pretty Poison showed some of the influence of Bonnie and Clyde. (The tag line for the movie was “She’s such a sweet girl. He’s such a nice boy. They’ll scare the hell out of you.”) Fox hated the film and wanted to cut it drastically. But Richard Zanuck, who had taken over from his father as head of the studio, pointed out that if Pretty Poison was cut much further, it wouldn’t be possible to sell it to television, because it wouldn’t fit a standard time slot. So Fox opened it in New York at the out-of-the-way Riverside Theatre at Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway.

  On a gray, chilly day, Pauline telephoned Joseph Morgenstern at Newsweek and asked if he had heard anything about the film. Morgenstern hadn’t, so the two of them headed for the Riverside, where there were only three other people in the audience. They both loved the movie and rushed back to their respective desks to write about it. In particular, it gave Pauline an opportunity to indulge in one of her favorite pastimes—bashing the studios:

  When I discovered that Pretty Poison had opened without advance publicity or screenings, I rushed to see it, because a movie that makes the movie companies so nervous they’re afraid to show it to the critics stands an awfully good chance of being an interesting movie. Mediocrity and stupidity certainly don’t scare them; talent does. This is a remarkable first feature film by a gifted young American, Noel Black—a movie that should have opened in an art house—and it was playing in a vast and empty theatre, from which, no doubt, it will depart upon the week. And the losses will be so heavy that the movie companies will use this picture as another argument against backing young American directors.

  Pretty Poison was Pauline’s kind of movie—a story of mayhem told with an appealingly subversive point of view and unexpected twists and turns—but it had the chintzy look of a cheap TV show and a tinny TV-style musical score by Johnny Mandel. Even the film’s screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., felt that she had overpraised it. “When she was on somebody’s side, they could do no wrong for a while, which actually clouded her critical judgment, in my opinion,” Semple said. “Loyalty is nice, but in many ways she was better as a cultural critic than a movie critic. Her weakness was her extreme, idiosyncratic views, sui generis, of things. I generally agreed with her, and she liked good movies rather than bad movies. But I do think she often made up her mind whether she liked the movie and looked for reasons why she liked it.”

  When the New York Film Critics Circle met to vote on its awards for 1968, a deadlock occurred between two movies in the Best Screenplay category. Pauline insisted on a compromise choice for Pretty Poison, and managed to win the majority of voters over to her side.

  After the awards ceremony, she had dinner with Semple. “I’m going to bring a friend along,” she told him, and showed up with six people. Semple recalled it a “a habit of hers when she went out to dinner. You’d get stuck with a very substantial check. I always considered it sort of amusing, but I know a couple of people who gritted their teeth—‘Don’t ask Pauline to go out to dinner with you. You’ll pay for it.’”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the summer of 1969 Pauline made another trip to Europe—this time as part of a honeymoon party. She had become good friends with the young writer Gary Carey, who edited a magazine called The Seventh Art. Carey had planned to go to France with Pauline and Gina, when he decided to get married. Pauline liked his intended, Carol Koshinskie, and no one saw any reason to make a change in plans. Gary and Carol were married on July 5, 1969, and a little more than a week later joined Pauline, Gina, and another friend, the pianist Marvin Tartack, in the sout
h of France. For three weeks they all traveled together, jammed into a tiny Volkswagen, eating at one three-star restaurant after another in Toulouse, Marseilles, and other towns.

  The success of Bonnie and Clyde had signaled a hunger for something new in film, but the process of reshaping the audience was a chaotic one: The two years following Bonnie and Clyde witnessed an industry flailing about, not really sure of what moviegoers wanted or exactly how they were going to give it to them.

  This was the theme Pauline took up when she returned to The New Yorker in September. Her first column marked the beginning of what would become a tradition: her revisiting of several of the movies that had opened during her six-month layoff, movies that she thought had been misinterpreted by Penelope Gilliatt or that she simply felt compelled to weigh in on herself. In 1969 she was most interested in commenting on the pictures that had become big box-office hits over the summer: Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. Midnight Cowboy was the story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), an aspiring stud from Texas who moves to New York City to strike it rich as a gigolo, only to wind up hustling closeted gay men in hotel rooms and public restrooms. Pauline thought that John Schlesinger’s attempt to portray the soulless squalor of modern urban life had a pessimistic tone that was like “the spray of venom,” and that what audiences really responded to was not the picture’s “grotesque shock effects and the brutality of the hysterical, superficial satire of America” but “the simple, Of Mice and Men kind of relationship at the heart of it”—Joe Buck’s alliance with the grimy, tubercular con man Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).

  Easy Rider, released in July, had made history by becoming the first movie made by and for the counterculture to become a massive commercial hit. Wrapped for somewhere around $500,000, it was reported to have made its entire cost back in one week of release; it went on to gross more than $19 million. This study of two druggie bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) drifting around the country barely had any plot at all, but it was a raw expression of youthful paranoia about the dangers represented by Middle America. While Pauline knew that it wasn’t particularly a good movie in any artistic sense, she was fascinated by what it offered its public. “What is new about Easy Rider,” she wrote, “is not necessarily that one finds its attitudes appealing but that the movie conveys the mood of the drug culture with such skill and in such full belief that these simplicities are the truth that one can understand why these attitudes are appealing to others. Easy Rider is an expression and a confirmation of how this audience feels; the movie attracts a new kind of ‘inside’ audience, whose members enjoy tuning in together to a whole complex of shared signals and attitudes.” The significance of both films was that they continued the dialogue with the audience that had been established in Bonnie and Clyde— a dialogue that Pauline had hoped to see continue for years.

  If it was individual artists such as Dennis Hopper who were going to enrich that dialogue, it was the studios, Pauline feared, who might well succeed in silencing it altogether. Too much was at stake now; it was more important than ever for her to exhort her readers to support the true artists, the good films that enlarged the moviegoing experience, and cut down the tired, the dead, the formulaic, the meretricious. From this point on, she would dig even deeper in her writing than she had before, pointing out the connections between the movies and the times from which they sprang. In the years to come her reviews took on even greater immediacy, her own excitement over what she’d just experienced in the screening room practically exploding on the page. She began to write as if her own moviegoing life depended on it—and to her, it did.

  Given her sense of what she believed was about to burst through in the movies, it was axiomatic that she would reserve her fiercest attacks for the filmmakers she considered the ones who best knew how to play the studio’s political games and milk the audience. Since they were, in her view, standing in the way of the genuine artists, she began to pounce on them with a reformer’s zeal. When she returned to The New Yorker in the fall of 1969, she took aim at the director George Roy Hill, whose Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had just opened.

  Butch Cassidy took some of the thematic material of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch—the dying frontier at the fadeout of the nineteenth century—and plastered a free-spirited, youth-movement sensibility on it. It was this low cunning that bothered Pauline most. Hill came from television, and although she thought there was “a basic decency and intelligence in his work,” she felt he didn’t “really seem to have the style for anything,” certainly not for this “facetious Western,” with its relentlessly jokey, chummy tone.

  Butch Cassidy was, as Pauline predicted, a huge hit, but it drew mixed reviews. In Life, Richard Schickel wrote that while he enjoyed the picture, its anachronistic, late-’60s dialogue consistently “destroys one’s sense of mood and time and place.” Pauline agreed. “The dialogue is all banter, all throwaways, and that’s how it’s delivered; each line comes out of nowhere, coyly, in a murmur, in the dead sound of the studio. (There is scarcely even an effort to supply plausible outdoor resonances or to use sound to evoke a sense of place.)”

  This observation triggered a response from Hill, one that made Pauline cackle with glee when she read it to her friends:

  Listen, you miserable bitch, you’ve got every right in the world to air your likes and dislikes, but you got no goddam right at all to fake, at my expense, a phony technical knowledge you simply don’t have.

  I fought the studio to the bloody mat in order to get authentic sound.... The picture was shot 90% on location and when it was over and I didn’t have all the sound I wanted I took some horses and a couple of guys and on my own expense went out into the hills for two days and recorded the kind of sound I wanted myself. And I resent the hell out of a smart ass critic trying to show off their technical acumen and building up their image for their readers by pretending they can tell the “dead sound of a studio,” and that their ear is so marvelously acute that they know that “scarcely any attempt was made to supply outdoor resonances.” . . . You didn’t like the sound, say so, but cut out that bullshit about how you know where it was done and made.

  If Pauline considered George Roy Hill a prime example of the kind of middling talent that could flourish in Hollywood, she found Paul Mazursky the kind of original artist she believed the industry should be nurturing. A former actor who had performed with the West Coast edition of the Second City comedy troupe, Mazursky directed his first picture, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice—a comedy about two married couples, one relatively open-minded (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood), the other strictly conventional (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon), who decide to face the sexual revolution head on by experimenting with other partners—in 1969. The script was funny without being epigrammatic; the comedy arose from character, as the four people began to pursue their own arousal—physicality with no strings attached. Unlike so many other directors of the time, Mazursky wasn’t concerned with making a long-winded commentary about the corruption of America’s moral values. He didn’t score points off his characters but seemed to love all of them; he treated them satirically, but the satire was warmhearted and generous-spirited.

  Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had the distinction of being the first American picture to open the New York Film Festival. There was tremendous buzz about it, and its ad campaign, featuring the four lead actors in bed together, would become one of the iconic movie images of the time. Those behind the picture were nervous about its reception, to the point of apologizing for it in advance. “Americans talk a lot about marital infidelity,” Mazursky said in the movie’s publicity notes. “But they are secretly shocked by it. I know if I told my wife I had been unfaithful to her . . . that would be the end.” Its producer, Mike Frankovich, told the New York Daily News, “I felt obliged to note that I did not believe the film would have an adverse effect on American morals.” Even Elliott Gould, who had the image of being one of the hippest of young actors, had reservations about accepting the role of Ted. “
When it was offered to me, I turned it down,” he admitted. “I was afraid of it. I thought it seemed to be, to some degree, exploitative.”

  The film festival audience loved Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, but many of the initial reviews were negative—none more so than Vincent Canby’s in The New York Times. Canby found the film “unpleasant” and populated by characters who were “cheerful but humorless boobs, no more equipped to deal with their sexual liberation than Lucy and Desi and Ozzie and Harriet.”

  At 8:30 on the morning Canby’s notice appeared, Mazursky was sitting at home, dejected, when his phone rang. “I read Canby’s review,” Pauline told him. “He’s a schmuck. I loved the movie, and I’m going to give it a great review.” This was the sort of line-crossing that many critics frowned on, but Pauline thought nothing of it. She was certain that there was no way she could be bought, no way she could wind up in the pocket of anyone in the film industry, no matter how powerful. Therefore, she saw no reason why she couldn’t flex her muscles a little and fraternize with directors.

  “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is a slick, whorey movie,” she wrote in The New Yorker, “and the liveliest American comedy so far this year.” She loved Mazursky’s freedom with his actors, his way of “letting the rhythm of their interplay develop.” She felt that he had “taken the series of revue sketches on the subject of modern marital stress and built them into a movie by using the format of situation comedy, with its recurrent synthetic crises.” She particularly loved Dyan Cannon’s performance, writing that she “looks a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits.”