Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  M*A*S*H became one of the most potent symbols of the New Holly wood; contrary to expectations, it buried Mike Nichols’s highly anticipated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which would have a disappointing release in June 1970.

  Pauline’s attitudes toward pomposity and self-righteousness versus authenticity in screen drama were briskly consistent without being stiffly predictable. In February of 1970 Irvin Kershner’s Loving took her by surprise. It gave the talented George Segal, an actor Pauline had admired for years, a great role as a failed artist, plodding along while trying to provide for his wife and family, but never losing sight of the fact that he wasn’t what he once dreamed of becoming. “After so many movies that come on strong with big, flamboyant truths,” Pauline observed, “a movie that doesn’t pretend to know more than it does but comes up with some small truths about the way the middle class sweats gives us something we can respond to; it gives us something we desperately need from the movies now—an extension of understanding.” Like Altman, Kershner earned her praise by shunning the easily theatrical and manipulative and simply showing life as it was lived.

  Late in February Pauline’s third book of criticism was published by Little, Brown. Again, her book had a sexy title, and also one that reflected her secure status at The New Yorker—Going Steady. It included all of her New Yorker reviews, plus “Trash, Art and the Movies.” By now a new book by Pauline was treated as something of a publishing event. “Pauline Kael is my favorite movie critic,” John Leonard stated in the opening of his New York Times review. It was a rave, with suggestions throughout that she had moved beyond the position of a mere film critic and into the pantheon of significant writers. Leonard admitted, “While I miss the polemics and the reviews of other reviewers that made her first two collections such evil fun”—the very thing that William Shawn had insisted on purging from her work—“I care about Miss Kael’s criticism as literature. Her reviews can be read before, immediately after, and long after we have seen the movie that inspires or exasperates her.”

  Appearing before that positive notice, however, was a more probing one in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, written by Charles T. Samuels, a member of the English faculty at Williams College and already a prominent film commentator. Seizing on some of Pauline’s comments in “Trash, Art and the Movies,” Samuels suggested that Pauline might be more of a reviewer than a genuine critic, less an aesthetician than a social historian. In “Trash, Art and the Movies,” Pauline had written, “One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done.” To Samuels, this was a warning sign. “By neglecting to analyze technique,” he wrote, “Miss Kael can do no more than assert that a given film is new, or beautiful, hoping that her language will provide the reader with something parallel to the qualities implicit in the work of art.” And underneath her consistent refusal to delve into formal analysis, Samuels went on—in the pointed yet cautious tone so often adopted by academics—was the implication that she ultimately came down on the side of trash rather than the side of art:

  About film art, she reminds her readers not to be solemn, and so does not bore them with the exegesis that is needed to justify her opinions. Instead, she arms them against the cultural stigma of Philistinism and creates some of her best epithets in behalf of avowed trash. No wonder, then, that Pauline Kael is so popular. She combines high spirits with low seriousness—a winning combination in movies and now, it seems, in their criticism.

  If it had been fair for her to rail unrelentingly against academia so many years, it was fair for academia to strike back, and that, clearly, was part of Samuels’s agenda. He revealed as much when he wrote with self-contained derision, “In her youth, as the author avows, she was a farm girl harried by schoolmarms spoon feeding her classics. The movies were her escape from ‘respectable,’ therefore emasculated, culture and she assumes that they function as a similar antidote for us all.” With these words Samuels laid the foundation of an argument against Pauline’s work that would grow louder and more insistent in the years ahead.

  Unlike many critics who insisted on maintaining a stance of complete neutrality and distance toward their subjects, Pauline enjoyed making a blatant show of her support. When she was in the company of artists of whose work she approved, she could be enormously warm and encouraging. Many of her colleagues, among them Joseph Morgenstern, were uncomfortable with this aspect of her personality, but Pauline saw no reason to remain aloof in such circumstances.

  She was also quite willing to confront the artists she considered failures and could be dismissive and fault-finding with them. Because she believed she was simply expressing her honest opinion rather than seeking to do harm, she was often naïvely baffled when the objects of her scorn reacted negatively to her criticism. A mutual friend had put her together with Mart Crowley, whose The Boys in the Band—the story of a group of gay men who play out their longings and regrets in high, bitchy style during a birthday celebration—had been a tremendous hit Off-Broadway and then had transferred to Broadway for another highly successful run. Pauline attended a performance of the piece in the company of the playwright and afterward, at the home of the mutual friend, she excoriated Crowley, telling him she found the play empty, cheaply theatrical, and superficial. As they talked and drank, Pauline became ever more abusive, until Crowley, stunned and wounded, got up and retired to another room. After a couple of hours, during which she got increasingly drunk, Pauline sought out Crowley to tell him that the next time she saw him he would no doubt be very rich and famous. (William Friedkin’s screen version of The Boys in the Band was even more offensive to her; she thought Friedkin had compounded the play’s problems with too many lingering close-ups aimed at currying sympathy for his poor, suffering-through-their-wisecracks characters.)

  In March 1970 Pauline—more unwillingly than ever—again made way for Penelope Gilliatt to take over “The Current Cinema.” She continued to complain to her friends that, while The New Yorker might offer a lively, informed readership—she delighted in the letters she constantly received from her readers—it did not, on a six-month schedule, pay enough to allow her to live comfortably in New York.

  The city itself continued to challenge her. After five years she still hadn’t grown accustomed to its noise and chaos and aggression; she once told a reporter that while her tone on the printed page might be quite assertive, she was not, in life, a particularly assertive person. (This was only partly true; in an argument, she could be quite formidable.) She despised the greased machinations of the city’s social network, the way so many gifted and deserving individuals were looked down upon because they didn’t have money or an Ivy League education—while socially connected people of lesser talent generally had an easier time of it.

  She was often most comfortable in the company of people like herself, who came from the West Coast or the Midwest—anywhere but the carved-in-marble runway to success that New York represented. She answered as much of her fan mail as she could, often in great detail. If a young film fan approached her, either at a screening or by mail, telling her that he wanted to be a critic, she was usually happy to provide good counsel. Several close friends attributed this to her egalitarian, West Coast roots, the simple background that she might not care to discuss in any depth, but that clearly she had not forgotten.

  In time she found an escape—a spacious, turreted Victorian house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small, attractive town right on Route 7, in the heart of the Berkshires. It was a lovely, graceful, unspoiled area, near the Housatonic and Green rivers. Two Berkshire Heights Road stood on a four-and-a-half-acre lot and was in a state of decay, but the asking price—$37,000—was attractive, and she and Gina decided to go to work on it. The down payment and costly repairs virtually depleted Pauline’s savings, but she considered it a sound investment. She looked forward to the day when she and Gina would be able to m
ove there full-time. As she told a reporter years later, “I never adapted to New York. I feel better in the country.”

  On May 26, 1970, Pauline received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It was presented to her “for her film criticism, written fast, out of a desire to respond to new movies before they have settled into history. Her exacting standards and her enthusiastic recognitions of excellence have been a stimulus to the quality of film-making and film-viewing.” The $3,000 she was given was as welcome as the honor itself.

  She occupied herself in the summer of 1970 with reading, and clipping articles from The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications that might be useful reference points when she resumed her New Yorker duties in September. She also paid close attention to Penelope Gilliatt’s columns in “The Current Cinema,” and remained frequently baffled by Gilliatt’s cloudy style. A brilliant, well-read woman, Gilliatt possessed a formidable intellect that Pauline respected. Her reviews were much shorter than Pauline’s, but they were often vaporous, their central points difficult to identify. It is possible that Shawn prized this very quality in Gilliatt’s writing, simply because it provided such a startling contrast with Pauline’s own style, but for those who loved the latter, the six months that Gilliatt was on reviewing duty were an opportunity to pass over the pages of “The Current Cinema” as quickly as possible. In the spring of 1971, one disgruntled reader vented his frustration to Shawn in the form of a poem:

  Gimme a P,

  Gimme a G,

  But don’t send Gilliatt back by sea.

  Give ’er the fare, give ’er the fare

  To get to England

  Quick!

  By air.

  Gilliatt was a sweet-natured woman who was generally well liked by her colleagues at The New Yorker. She did, however, have a serious drinking problem. Patrick Crow, an editor at the magazine, remembered sitting in O’Lunney’s Bar near The New Yorker offices and seeing Gilliatt saunter in in mid-afternoon and toss down four Scotch and sodas. When the bartender asked her if she wanted a fifth, she replied that she had to go to the office and read proof. She was constantly plagued by money worries, and while she needed her post at The New Yorker to maintain any reasonable kind of lifestyle, she seemed unable to perform her critic’s duties without the aid of a drink. Her friend Jane Kramer recalled that Gilliatt “could focus under the most intense sedation—alcohol, God knows what pills she was taking. Most people would be conked out. But with Penelope . . . it focused her mind. She wrote some of her best fiction that way.”

  Pauline was convinced that Shawn was effectively holding her back by not giving her the chance to write “The Current Cinema” year-round. She had clearly demonstrated her connection to the younger readers that the magazine’s advertising department coveted, and while Gilliatt may have possessed a keener sensitivity to certain European films, she was not tuned in to the tenor of the times in the way that Pauline was. Pauline’s resentment of Gilliatt’s presence at the magazine grew by the day. She was not uncivil to her, but she spent plenty of time complaining about Gilliatt to friends and colleagues. “My sense was that they stayed out of each other’s way almost intentionally,” said Jane Kramer. “Penelope, during a lot of that time, would have been happy to see Pauline. I’m not sure Pauline would have been happy to see Penelope. She talked to me about it in these terms: ‘I can’t believe that I am not in every week—this other mind has nothing to do with what I can say.’ I know that there’s something to be said for having comparative critical voices, but I’m not sure that when you’ve got something like Pauline, you don’t stick to it as the one critical voice, because it creates a vocabulary that people attach themselves to.”

  For years Gilliatt had written striking pieces of fiction, and recently, she also had her eye on a screenwriting career. The instinctively competitive Pauline, who believed that she had put any ambition to do creative writing strictly behind her, could not help but feel that Gilliatt was in danger of outdistancing her by pursuing areas of writing apart from reviewing films.

  One of Pauline’s responsibilities, apart from her departmental reviewing, was to provide capsule reviews of the many films that were being shown in repertory and art cinemas around New York. Sally Ann Mock, who worked on the front-of-book “Goings On About Town” section, often found herself in the position of negotiating an uneasy truce between Pauline and Gilliatt. “My personal feeling—more than personally—is that Pauline did not have any respect, particularly, for Penelope,” said Mock. “I ran into several problems with both of them, actually. One would write a blurb, maybe on an older film. In the fall and winter Pauline would write a blurb, and in the spring Penelope would come in and want to rewrite it. And in the fall Pauline would want to rewrite Penelope. I finally said, ‘I can’t do this.’” Gardner Botsford, the editor of “Goings On About Town,” eventually put a stop to this practice. Pauline’s complaints about Gilliatt continued unceasingly—but it would be years before “The Current Cinema” became hers alone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the early 1970s the view of New York City as the center of dazzling glamour and chic romanticism—the view that Hollywood had peddled in pictures ranging from The Awful Truth to Breakfast at Tiffany’s—was dead and buried. The New York that now emerged onscreen was a city that was closer to the everyday experience of the people who lived there. The crime rate was high and growing higher, the decades-long decline of Harlem had reached its nadir, and Times Square had become a playground for junkies and hookers. Midnight Cowboy had shown the seedy realities of Manhattan street life and won an Academy Award for Best Picture in the process.

  Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the New York of the late ’60s and early ’70s as a completely bleak, fear-ridden place where pleasure was hard to come by. The city was, among other things, a haven for committed movie-lovers, who had an astonishing number of repertory cinemas and art houses from which to choose. In those pre-home-video days, there was plenty of moviegoing activity to be found in all parts of Manhattan. On seedy Avenue B, there was the Charles, where the rats and mice often scurried over the customers’ feet. There was the Bleecker Street Cinema and also Theatre 80 Saint Marks, where the projector was situated behind the screen and customers could sink down in the lumpy seats and lose themselves in scratchy prints of thematically paired double features—two Bette Davis vehicles, Jezebel and In This Our Life, or everyone’s favorite French Revolution bill, A Tale of Two Cities and Marie Antoinette.

  Uptown, there was the Regency on Sixty-seventh Street, which once ran Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece Belle de Jour for close to one full year. On Broadway between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets was the New Yorker Theater, launched by Pauline’s friends Dan and Toby Talbot. The Talbots had opened the theater on March 17, 1960, with a screening of Olivier’s Henry V and Albert Lamorisse’s short film The Red Balloon. That initial run grossed $10,000, and soon the New Yorker became the most popular place on the West Side to take in first-class foreign-language films and hard-to-find Hollywood classics. The New Yorker later gained a bit of on-camera immortality when Woody Allen shot a scene there for his 1977 comedy Annie Hall—the one in which Alvy Singer (Allen) clashes with a pontificating academic type who is mangling the theories of the media expert Marshall McLuhan.

  A few blocks uptown, on Ninety-fifth Street just west of Broadway, was the reassuringly run-down Thalia, where the seats were on a slight incline, and friends of old film could encounter some of the most difficult-to-find old Hollywood classics. (The Thalia was also featured in Annie Hall.) And on 107th Street, the Olympia showed a constantly rotating program of old Spanish-language films. Over the years, even more repertory cinemas would crop up all over town, in some unlikely neighborhoods, proving Toby Talbot’s assertion that “there was an obvious hunger for film. Our patrons were as interested in who made the film as in what it was about and who was in it. They cared a
bout visual style and wanted to follow a director’s body of work.”

  Pauline delighted in the public’s growing excitement about what was happening in film. She felt she was at the vertex of the most thrilling burst of activity taking place in the arts, and although she often attended the theater, she commented to friends that generally she didn’t find it nearly as exciting as film. The commercial theater, in her view, was still trading on tired conventions and predictably “serious” forms of audience manipulation, and had not succeeded in really connecting with the times, as the movies now showed every promise of doing.

  With all of the enthusiasm New Yorkers showed for the movies, it wasn’t surprising that the activities of the New York Film Critics Circle were more frequently reported than they had been in years. Pauline was, by 1970, an integral member, having been admitted in 1968, following her appointment at The New Yorker. When it was founded in 1935, the NYFCC had been composed of newspaper critics only, but over time, the membership restrictions had been relaxed to include prominent magazine reviewers as well. From its inception the NYFCC had earned a reputation for going its own way, its members being less susceptible to a movie’s box-office standing than were the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy. As far back as the 1940s, the NYFCC sometimes awarded top prizes to performers not even nominated in that year’s Oscar race—Ida Lupino in The Hard Way, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat. Pauline believed it was important to uphold the integrity of the group, as she believed that a good critic’s review was the only genuine truth on which moviegoers could depend: Everything else, she was fond of saying, was nothing but advertising in one form or another.