Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  The two women met at a screening in Manhattan not long after the release of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. “Someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind,” recalled Cannon, “and it was Pauline. She said, ‘I’m a fan’—and she said that didn’t come easily with her. I said, ‘So am I a fan.’ And I was. Her voice was so strong, and she didn’t care what we thought of it, and she seemed to be true to it, always.”

  Another artist who benefited from Pauline’s critical support in the fall of 1969 was the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, whose new movie High School—a pitilessly straightforward look at the futility and frustration of life at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School—also played at the New York Film Festival. High School resonated deeply with Pauline, and she called Wiseman “probably the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in years.” What emerged most powerfully in her review of High School was her rage at what she believed to be the inadequacy of her own education. She found the teachers shown in the film to be “the most insidious kind of enemy, the enemy with corrupt values who mean well.” She loved the film’s unflinching treatment of teachers, the same kind of teachers she had grown to despise as a girl and had been railing against ever since:

  High School is so familiar and so extraordinarily evocative that a feeling of empathy with the students floods over us. How did we live through it? How did we keep any spirit? . . . Here it is all over again—the insistence that you be respectful; and the teachers’ incredible instinct for “disrespect,” their antennae always extended for that little bit of reservation or irony in your tone, the tiny spark that you desperately need to preserve your self-respect.

  Pauline immediately grasped what Wiseman was trying to get at in High School. “Many of us grow to hate documentaries in school,” she wrote in her by now familiar student-rebel tone, “because the use of movies to teach us something seems a cheat—a pill disguised as candy—and documentaries always seem to be about something we’re not interested in.” Wiseman, on the other hand, never stooped to didacticism. He took a dispassionate view of the audience’s common experience.

  Wiseman, who became a friend of Pauline’s and often dined with her and Joe Morgenstern, recalled, “Joe is a very soft-spoken, kind guy. I think that she was attracted to people who were not tough, or not tough in any obvious way.” After her review of High School appeared, the film turned up on about two hundred screens each month—amazing statistics for a documentary. Wiseman found himself the center of generous critical attention and didn’t mind that she reviewed his work only sporadically thereafter. “The impression I had was that she felt I didn’t need her,” he said, “and that she was saving her space for people who did.”

  For many longtime readers of “The Current Cinema,” Pauline’s increasingly expansive style took getting used to; after she returned to her reviewing post in 1969, a number of complaining letters landed on William Shawn’s desk. “Dear Sir: I think I’ve figured it out. Pauline Kael is the Long Winded Old Lady,” wrote one subscriber. “Six full columns to review The Arrangement in the Nov. 22 issue must stand as the ultimate in long-windedness. Oh for the days of John McCarten and Brendan Gill!” “There was a time,” wrote one reader from Virginia, “when a man could open up the magazine and learn from John McCarten in one very pungent paragraph why the movie stank. Today we have to learn how the condition of the director’s psyche, and that of all of us, has an effect on the movie condition as it is today, in 75,000 words.” Many of the readers who wrote complaining letters about Pauline were initially thrown by her intimate, conversational tone and her fondness for slang. It was not unusual for her to receive a few letters every month wanting to know why she hadn’t been properly educated, and when she was going to learn how to write in a way becoming to a New Yorker contributor; at least one reader even went so far as to ask her when she was going to take off her cowboy boots and become a proper lady writer.

  But to younger readers—always a key demographic for any magazine or newspaper—Pauline was becoming a heroine. In the dialogue between screen and audience, many young film fans considered this fifty-one-year-old woman from Berkeley the ideal moderator. She shared their enthusiasms, she had a clear sense of who her audience was, and she delighted in guiding them and tracking their progress. “They’re looking for ‘truth’—for some signs of emotion, some evidence of what keeps people together,” she wrote. “The difference between the old audiences and the new ones is that the old audiences wanted immediate gratification and used to get restless and bored when a picture didn’t click along; these new pictures don’t click along, yet the young audiences stay attentive. They’re eager to respond, to love it—eager to feel.”

  Some of her fans had now taken to phoning her at home to ask her opinion of various films, and she was generally good about fielding these calls. Her number was also close to that of the Thalia Theater, one of the leading revival houses in Manhattan, and while she initially considered the “wrong number” calls for the theater a nuisance, she began to keep a schedule for the Thalia handy and cheerfully told callers what was playing that day, just as she had at the Cinema Guild.

  If she was on deadline, however, she sometimes pretended to be her own secretary. Ruth Perlmutter, who was running a repertory film program at Philadelphia’s Walnut Theater in the late ’60s, once phoned her to ask which Robert Bresson film she should program. Pauline, posing as her own secretary, informed Perlmutter that Ms. Kael was on deadline. Perlmutter played along and asked the “secretary” what she thought of Au Hasard, Balthasar.

  “Grim,” said Pauline, and excused herself and hung up.

  Late in 1969 Pauline used her column for some intriguing speculation about the future of two actresses she admired—Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand. Fonda had spent most of the ’60s trying to make her mark as a sexy comedienne, but her films—Sunday in New York, Any Wednesday, Barefoot in the Park—were commercial in the flimsiest sense, and by the end of the decade, most critics regarded her as a case of potential wasted. Then, late in 1968, she was offered the screen version of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel about a group of desperate people competing in a brutal dance marathon in Hollywood. Fonda played Gloria, a would-be actress who can’t get into Central Casting; her ferocious anger is all she has left to hang on to. “How’re you going to feed it?” she snaps to a pregnant competitor (Bonnie Bedelia). When her own partner (Red Buttons) is dying of a heart attack on the floor, Gloria screams at him, “I’m tired of losing!” In the end, Gloria breaks down completely when her new partner (Michael Sarrazin) accidentally rips one of the silk stockings she’d stopped riding streetcars for a month in order to afford. She asks him to shoot her, to put her out of her misery—and he calmly grants her wish.

  Fonda’s tough, economical performance dazzled Pauline. “She doesn’t try to save some ladylike part of herself,” she wrote, “the way even a good actress like Audrey Hepburn does, peeping at us from behind ‘vulgar’ roles to assure us she’s not really like that.” Pauline went on to predict that Fonda stood “a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as Bette Davis did in the thirties.”

  Streisand, meanwhile, opened at the end of the year in Twentieth Century–Fox’s gargantuan screen version of the Broadway smash Hello, Dolly!, a project Pauline regarded as a horrible waste of the actress’s talents. “Somewhere along the line,” she wrote, “Hollywood got the idea that musicals were ‘family entertainment’—and had to be wholesome and overproduced and full of mugging actors and cloying ingénues and a processed plot and all the rest of the paraphernalia that has made so many people say ‘I can’t stand musicals.’” Streisand, she argued, was in a perfect position to take musicals in a new direction—contemporary and smaller-scale, scored with the pop music that the public “is alive to.” She was encouraged that even the $20-million-plus excesses of Hello, Dolly! couldn’t camouflage Streisand’s gifts as a sexy comedienne and singe
r. But Pauline insisted that the actress needed “to be liberated from period clothes and big-studio musical arrangements . . . Streisand could inaugurate a new kind of musical, because she uses song as Astaire used dance, expressively, to complete a role and make it a myth.”

  The new year began with Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, which had opened to widespread critical acclaim. It distressed Pauline to see her colleagues throwing bouquets at this slow-moving, overlong drama about the changing fortunes of a wealthy German family during the rise of the Third Reich. One of the most widely discussed aspects of The Damned was the long sequence depicting a beer party thrown by the Brownshirts that turns into a men’s orgy. It didn’t possess the slightest hint of eroticism, but many reviewers hailed it as an example of the daring possibilities created by the screen’s new permissiveness. Pauline believed that Visconti was “not using decadence as a metaphor for Naziism but the reverse: he’s using Naziism as a metaphor for decadence and homosexuality.” The trouble, she thought, was that “Visconti, though drawn to excess, lacks the gifts of an F. W. Murnau or a Fritz Lang; he’s carefully flamboyant.” The Damned provided a good example of one of the dangers of the screen’s new openness: too many critics who should have known better rushed to praise it simply because of its flashy sensationalism, combined with the gravity of its Nazi Germany setting. Pauline was one of the few critics to review the result, not the concept, confessing, “I have rarely seen a picture I enjoyed less.”

  Then, in mid-January 1970, she was seduced once again. The movie was Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, brought out by Twentieth Century–Fox. Even the backstory of the film was bound to appeal to Pauline’s rebellious streak: It was made by a group of artistically brilliant, rule-breaking, authority-defying bad boys under what basically amounted to the cover of darkness. The director was Robert Altman, a forty-four-year-old director who had grown up in Kansas City and had a low-level, stop-and-start career, mostly in television. The publicity handout for M*A*S*H described him as “a B-25 pilot in World War II, freelance magazine writer and producer of many prize-winning documentary films.” (Next to this last credit, Pauline scribbled “such as?”) He had worked extensively in television, directing episodes of Bonanza, Bus Stop, Combat!, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His most recent feature had been That Cold Day in the Park, starring Sandy Dennis, and Pauline had loathed it.

  M*A*S*H had started life as a novel by the pseudonymous Richard Hooker. Ring Lardner, Jr., had reviewed the book—a comedy about doctors serving in the Korean War—for The New York Times and thought it would make a terrific picture. Lardner’s agent, George Litto, approached the producer Ingo Preminger at Twentieth Century–Fox about the idea of turning it into a movie. Lardner wrote the script, which Fox liked, and when Preminger asked Litto whom he thought might direct it, he suggested one of his other clients—Robert Altman. No one at Fox knew who Altman was, so they sent out the script to more than a dozen of the most successful comedy directors—from George Roy Hill to Blake Edwards—all of whom passed on it, seeing it as nothing more than a string of vignettes. Litto pressed Altman once more. Having met with nothing but rejection from their other directorial candidates, Fox reluctantly signed him up.

  “Bob had gotten fired from Warners on a movie called Countdown,” George Litto recalled, “because he had all the actors talking at the same time.” In M*A*S*H he adopted the same technique, in an attempt to dispense with traditional story setups and exposition and to come right in on the action as if he were jumping into the middle of a cocktail-party conversation. Rene Auberjonois, who played the chaplain who goes by the name of Dago Red, recalled an episode that underlined the essence of what Altman was after on film. One night Altman and Auberjonois were walking down Eighth Avenue in Manhattan after a play. There was a lot of street traffic, and suddenly Altman stopped and asked Auberjonois, “Did you hear that?” “He was referring to a conversation that we had both sort of heard,” recalled Auberjonois, “between two people coming toward us, but you could only hear a small section of it. But that small section told you everything. You could extrapolate on that and have a complete scene and a whole story out of it, but you had only to hear a few broken sentences. And I think that was the key—that you don’t hear most of what is going on around you. But what you do hear is enough to tell you the whole story.”

  M*A*S*H was a wartime comedy in which not one shot was fired. It was not a piece of military slapstick, like Operation Madball. It was a counterculture comedy: The setting may have been a MASH unit during the Korean War, but the audience’s association was naturally with the war in Vietnam; in fact, specific references to Korea had been deleted. The trio of flip, rebellious doctors, played by Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, and Tom Skerritt, chased women, drank to excess, pulled cheap practical jokes on fellow officers, and thumbed their noses at anything resembling authority; it was their only way of coping with the insanity into which they’d been unwillingly thrust.

  Nobody paid much attention to M*A*S*H while it was in production, as studio executives were preoccupied with two enormously expensive World War II pictures that were undergoing various budget and production difficulties, Tora! Tora! Tora! and Patton. That suited Altman: There were certain passages that he didn’t want the powers-that-be seeing in rushes, for fear they might get nervous and start looking over his shoulder, interfering with what he wanted to put on the screen. He used fog filters to give the scenes a fuzzy, unfocused, dirty look—clarity was the last thing he was after. M*A*S*H’s surgery scenes, in which the doctors wisecracked their way through the most gruesome procedures, were graphic—realistic without being sensationalistic. These moments were seamlessly juxtaposed with other hilarious scenes—the doctors pulling down the side of the tent while the officious Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) is taking a shower; Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) asking the pompous surgeon Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) about the sounds Hot Lips makes in bed; and the “Last Supper” sequence, in which the well-endowed, libidinous dentist Painless Pole (John Schuck) decides that he wants to commit suicide.

  Even some of the people working on M*A*S*H weren’t at all sure what Altman was up to. “I remember the sound engineer—an old-school, Twentieth Century–Fox elderly guy,” recalled Auberjonois. “I remember him sitting there after a take, and he threw up his hands and said, ‘I don’t know how they’re going to make anything out of this.’” The film was full of overlapping dialogue and barely heard asides, but once he began cutting the picture with the film editor Danford B. Greene, Altman showed an uncanny ability to pull it all together. The scenes in M*A*S*H had a comic rhythm unlike anything that had ever been put on film. Even some of the actors hadn’t been sure of Altman’s approach at first. “Donald Sutherland and I became very close during the process,” said Elliott Gould, “and we didn’t get Bob. And Bob thought we wanted to have him fired. We didn’t. We just didn’t get him. Thank goodness he let us reshoot something, and subsequently, we became great, great friends.”

  No one involved with the picture had any sense that it might turn out to be an immense hit. “We were completely under the radar,” said Auberjonois. “I seem to remember going into the commissary at Fox and sitting down and opening the menu to get lunch, and there would be the Doctor Dolittle Salad and the Hello, Dolly! Chowder, but there was nothing about M*A*S*H.” There was plenty of indication that Fox executives had backed the picture only because they knew Mike Nichols was shooting the screen version of Joseph Heller’s mammoth bestseller Catch-22 over at Paramount, and they felt Fox needed to be ready with its own antiwar comedy.

  Once they finally saw the finished product, however, they didn’t understand what they had. Its freewheeling, plotless structure bore no relation to anything they’d ever experienced. The head of the editing department at Fox predicted that M*A*S*H would go straight to drive-in release. Altman later claimed, “This picture wasn’t released—it escaped.” And then the reviews began to appear.

  Although The New York Times’s Roger G
reenspun liked the performances and admitted that the film was funny, he didn’t really respond to Altman’s techniques; most of the other important reviews, however, were quite positive—and leading the way was Pauline’s in The New Yorker. She titled her column “Blessed Profanity” and pronounced M*A*S*H “a marvelously unstable comedy, a tough, funny, and sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes that is at the same time a tale of chivalry. It’s a sick joke, but it’s also generous and romantic—an erratic, episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected.” It was perhaps the movie’s unexpected spirit that appealed to her most; she appreciated that “competence is one of the values the movie respects—even when it is demonstrated by a nurse (Sally Kellerman) who is a pompous fool.” Pauline also loved the film’s subversive sensibility and language (“I’ve rarely heard four-letter words used so exquisitely well in a movie, used with such efficacy and glee. I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty”) and Altman’s use of sound: “When the dialogue overlaps, you hear just what you should, but it doesn’t seem all worked out and set; the sound seems to bounce off things so that the words just catch your ear.”

  Like a great opera singer, she saved the best she had to give for the aria’s climax:

  Many of the best recent American movies leave you feeling that there’s nothing to do but get stoned and die, that that’s your proper fate as an American. This movie heals a breach in American movies; it’s hip but not hopeless. A surgical hospital where the doctors’ hands are lost in chests and guts is certainly an unlikely subject for a comedy, but I think M*A*S*H is the best American war comedy since sound came in, and the sanest American movie of recent years.

  The movie that “escaped” wound up becoming one of the year’s biggest successes, and Altman would always claim that M*A*S*H saved Fox (whose executives finally perceived that movies for the new audiences, rather than overdressed musicals, were the way to go). What was most interesting about Pauline’s reaction to M*A*S*H, given that Altman would soon become the director most closely associated with her tastes and sensibility, is that her review is remarkably succinct and in scale. She didn’t overreact to anything, didn’t proclaim the arrival of a new moviemaking messiah—as she well might have done had M*A*S*H appeared later in her career. But clearly she had perceived Altman’s greatest talent. In Elliott Gould’s words, “His pictures showed life taking its course.”