Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  The NYFCC operated under a fairly simple system: Nominations were made by writing down one name or title per category on a folded slip of paper. Any selection lacking at least two votes was eliminated. On successive ballots members ranked first-, second-, and third-place choices on a point system—and the balloting continued until one choice had a clear two-thirds majority. All of the balloting was secret; no critic was permitted to take the floor and argue the case for his favorites unless a stalemate occurred.

  Because the NYFCC held to such strict rules, there was practically no opportunity for personality clashes to arise among its various members. Only occasionally was there a disruption of the circle’s orderliness—as in 1969, when Renata Adler, who had briefly succeeded Bosley Crowther as chief movie critic of The New York Times, announced that she could take no more of the meeting and stormed out, insisting that she had to see her analyst immediately—and whatever alliances and rivalries revealed themselves, did so subtly. Judith Crist remembered that “at one end of the table were the intellectuals [Adler, Stanley Kauffmann, Andrew Sarris] and the rest of us were the ink-stained newspaper people.” Pauline would attend the meetings in her regulation outfit—plain slacks, simple blouse, and sneakers—and sit passively, a Sibyl-like smile on her face, as she cast her votes. “I always felt that there was an assumption that there was tension between Pauline and Judith,” remembered Kathleen Carroll, who covered movies for the Daily News. “Competitive, no question. Both very bright and ambitious. I think most of us in the group really felt it.”

  At the time Pauline was far less widely known than Crist, who was unquestionably the most recognizable name and face in the NYFCC. In 1968 Clay Felker had hired her to become the first film reviewer of the trend-setting New York magazine, and she was also the movie critic for the mass-circulation TV Guide and film commentator for the popular morning newsmagazine series The Today Show on NBC-TV. It was estimated that between TV Guide and The Today Show, Crist’s sharp and succinct opinions reached more than 23 million people, and that her income hovered between $45,000 and $50,000 annually. (Pauline’s New Yorker salary was a pittance by comparison.) An indication of Crist’s celebrity came in September 1968, when TV Guide ran a full-page ad in The New York Times, featuring Crist and Bob Hope with the tag line, “Headliners and by-liners help us do the job.” Crist’s taste in films was generally very good, and like Pauline, she was unafraid to acknowledge her fondness for trash.

  If Crist was at this time America’s most visible movie critic, there was serious competition coming up fast, courtesy of Rex Reed. As a boy in Texas, Reed had developed a love for the films of golden-age Hollywood. In the late 1960s and early ’70s he was in the enviable position of writing about films during an all-new golden age, but he was far less interested in discussing the work of the new directors than he was in glorifying the stars of his youth, a predilection that hardly damaged his standing with the public. In his Daily News column he regularly took out after the new breed—he didn’t understand Robert Altman at all—and delighted in provocative anti-intellectual comments, such as dismissing Ibsen’s A Doll’s House with, “I have slept through more productions of this dated play than almost anything else I can think of.” He possessed a knack for the colorful, often vituperative, personality profile, which helped give him a reputation for “telling is like it is.” Middle-aged talk show hosts such as Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were all too happy to have him spout off about the New Hollywood’s lack of decent, human stories, and Reed, with his blend of withering, Waldo Lydecker–style sarcasm and high-mindedness, seemed to satisfy Middle America’s view of what a movie critic was supposed to be.

  In 1970, Reed appeared as Myron, the sex-change candidate, in Michael Sarne’s much-reviled film version of Gore Vidal’s bestselling novel Myra Breck-inridge . (Fellow reviewers reveled in pointing out Reed’s complete lack of acting ability.) When they were both at the height of their fame, Reed and Crist had a standoff. Reed had made an unflattering remark on a television talk show about Crist’s celebrity endorsements—she had recently done an ad for a popular feminine-hygiene spray—and later, when she was interviewed on television and asked about the Reed incident, she responded, “Well, when he shows up at screenings, the big question is ‘Does he or doesn’t she?’” “That was the lowest point of my public life,” recalled Crist. “The minute it came out of my mouth, I could have killed myself.” Later, Reed and Crist patched up their differences, but the episode was evidence of how prominent movie critics were becoming in the pop-culture consciousness.

  While Pauline had no interest in engaging in open confrontations with her colleagues, there were very few whom she genuinely respected. After only two years at The New Yorker, she believed herself to be superior to all of them. She had little use for the work of Vincent Canby, Renata Adler’s replacement as chief film critic of The New York Times, whom she regarded as a man of pedestrian taste and middlebrow thinking who just happened to be a better writer than Bosley Crowther. She delighted in calling Joseph Morgenstern and other friends when she read Canby’s reviews in the Times, crowing over how he had missed a particular point. Life’s Richard Schickel was a good critic, but Pauline found him to be pompous and unpleasant. She respected The Saturday Review’s Hollis Alpert, even though their opinions on films often diverged, and she acknowledged the formidable intellect, literary background, and linguistic prowess of John Simon, although she found his criticism needlessly cruel and demeaning, and personally, she didn’t take to him at all. (Once, at a screening of a particularly trashy film, Simon greeted her by saying, “Pauline! Of course, you come to all the finest pictures.” She responded by giving him the finger.) Pauline also suspected Simon of not being able to surrender himself to the art form, as she could; she found his knowledge more impressive than his actual responses to film. She was anything but an intellectual snob, however, and was genuinely fond of the man who was arguably the worst writer in the circle, the New York Post’s Archer Winsten. (Pauline told friends that she had to admire a man whose great passion in life was for skiing.)

  On the whole, however, it was difficult for Pauline to approve of most of her colleagues for one simple reason: Practically all of them had preceded her in the profession. Pauline had a bit of a Magellan complex: It was easiest for her to give her approval when she was discovering a film or director before other critics had. Some of her friends felt that this explained her antipathy toward certain directors—Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, for example. Andrew Sarris had written expansively about both men early in his career, and Pauline wasn’t particularly interested in following his lead. “There were a lot of directors who were off the table for her because they were on Andy’s plate,” observed Paul Schrader, who began his career as a movie critic before becoming a director in the 1970s. “I always assumed Ford was one of those. Andy beat her to John Ford, and she beat Andy to Jean Renoir.” The same principle held true for critics themselves: She wouldn’t approve of many of them until the next generation came along—and she was in a position to help shape their career paths and push them toward positions of importance.

  In the fall of 1970 Pauline returned to The New Yorker with a traditional season-opening think piece designed to exhort her readers to pay attention to what was happening in the movie industry. “Numbing the Audience” was an open attack on the coarsely manipulative tactics of the studios’ attempts to latch on to new viewers. After pointing out that most of the films released over the summer had been both artistic and box-office calamities, Pauline declared that those who had engineered the corporate takeovers of the old studio system were going down a road that was certain to run out on them. “It used to be understood that no matter how low your estimate of the public intelligence was, how greedily you courted success, or how much you debased your material in order to popularize it, you nevertheless tried to give the audience something.”

  Too many of the new pictures, she argued, weren’t giving the audience anything. For key evi
dence she pointed to the mass of youth pictures, such as Getting Straight, one of the year’s big hits with college audiences. It starred Elliott Gould as Harry Bailey, a candidate for a master’s degree in English who had a past as a civil rights activist. There were a few sequences calculated to bring forth cheers from the audience—the police moving in on the campus demonstration; Harry having an emotional meltdown while being grilled in his oral exams by a pompous English professor. Gould was at his most appealing—the archetypal, sexy, brainy, questioning college man of the early 1970s. But Pauline felt that Getting Straight was a shameful waste, since “no contemporary American subject provided a better test of the new movie freedom than student unrest. It should have been a great subject: the students becoming idealists and trying to put their feelings about justice into practice.... Instead, we’ve been getting glib ‘statements’ and cheap sex jokes, the zoomy shooting and shock cutting of TV commercials; plus a lot of screaming and ketchup on the lenses.” She was horrified by these movies, which she believed took “the recently developed political consciousness of American students, which was still tentative and searching and (necessarily) confused, and reduced it to simplicities, overstatements, and lies.”

  Two of the biggest hits of the summer of 1970 were John G. Avildsen’s Joe and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. The critical and commercial success of Joe came as a surprise: it was a crudely written and acted, modestly budgeted look at the pent-up rage and resentment of the hardworking, play-by-the-rules parents of the hippie generation—Richard Nixon’s silent majority. Joe was really an old-fashioned melodrama that got a tight grip on its audience by depicting the violence and destructiveness that the older generation was capable of inflicting on the young, and Pauline saw it for what it was—a film “slanted to feed the paranoia of youth.” At the picture’s violent climax, “members of the audience responded on cue with cries of ‘Next time we’ll have guns!’ and ‘We’ll get you first, Joe!’ ” Pauline thought that Joe’s “manipulation of the audience is so shrewdly, single-mindedly commercial that it’s rather terrifying to sit there and observe how susceptible the young audience is.”

  She continued to worry that young audiences didn’t think deeply enough, didn’t read enough. They didn’t even, she claimed—though she didn’t quote any relevant statistics—go to the movies that often; they simply went to a handful of films over and over again. It also bothered her that audiences cheered the end of Five Easy Pieces, in which the social dropout Robert Eroica Dupea (Jack Nicholson) abandons his girlfriend (Karen Black) at a gas station, bums a ride off a trucker, and goes cruising down the freeway, in search of nothing and heading nowhere in particular.

  After the Kent State shootings in May 1970, some 4 million American students participated in campus strikes. Pauline thought that American youth was actually in a superb position to work for positive social change, but she was surprisingly conservative on the subject of outright rebellion. In the ’60s she had chastised her nephew Bret Wallach for demonstrating against the Berkeley chancellor Edward W. Strong, assuring Bret that Strong was really a good man. She sensed that in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in 1968, the ongoing mess of Vietnam, and the Manson Family murders, young people weren’t as interested in working for the good of something as they were in withdrawing from everything. Anger was transmuting itself not into action but into apathy. Too many young people, Pauline worried, were “not caring, and not believing anything. They go numb, like the young girl in Joe, looking vaguely for some communal Eden where those without hope can cling to each other, and they accept and prefer the loser self-image, not wanting to believe that anything good can happen to them.”

  It was an observation that revealed Pauline’s allegiance—whether or not she cared to admit it—to the period in which she had grown up. For all her unconventional thinking and her strong identification with many in the younger generation of directors and actors, she held to the solidly old-fashioned view that real happiness came through hard work and testing yourself, through identifying a goal and going after it with everything you had. The numbing of the audience that she wrote about in October 1970 was alien to her temperament: She believed that youth should be encouraged to move forward. Instead, the movies were encouraging them to drop out.

  There was one person, however, whom she did not encourage to move forward. For a number of years Gina had shown a marked interest in modern dance. Pauline was happy to help fund her studies but stopped short of urging her to explore a career as a dancer. It remained important to her to keep Gina close by, as her typist, first reader, editor. The pattern had long ago been established: The household dynamic centered on Pauline’s career. The fact that her fame continued to grow did not mean that she was any more secure in terms of considering living a life on her own. To many of her friends her relationship with Gina, while clearly affectionate, rippled with an evident tension. Gina continued to make world-weary, half hearted complaints about being enslaved by her mother, but she seemed less able than ever to strike out on her own. To Charles Simmons, an editor at The New York Times Book Review who became a good friend of Pauline’s in the early 1970s, people missed the point when they criticized Pauline for being overprotective. “She owned Gina,” stated Simmons.

  Pauline could never quite find it within herself to encourage Gina to enter into the mainstream of life. Dana Salisbury felt that Pauline’s obliviousness to what might be best for Gina was part of a much larger family emotional blueprint. Salisbury claimed that all three of the Kael sisters were “tone deaf about the effects of things on people. In the case of my mom, I know that it was not deliberate. In the case of Rose, she was unwilling even to consider it. In the case of Pauline, she was above considering it.”

  The pictures that opened in the fall of 1970 were mostly poor, and Pauline had little good to say about any of them. In November, however, she was delighted to discover Barbra Streisand’s latest vehicle, The Owl and the Pussycat , based on Bill Manhoff’s hit Broadway comedy of 1967. Streisand played her first completely contemporary screen role—a New York prostitute who starts a bumpy romance with a neurotic, failed writer, played by one of Pauline’s favorites, George Segal. “I think George lifted Barbra, in a way,” recalled Buck Henry, who wrote the screenplay. “I was trying to capture Barbra’s New York accent and use it in the tawdriest way possible. I begged her to say ‘Fuck off’—I wanted her to say it so badly, and she did it wonderfully.” The teaming worked beautifully as far as Pauline was concerned. “Were Hepburn and Tracy this good together, even at their best, as in Pat and Mike?” she wondered. “Maybe, but they weren’t better.” Most of all, she thought it was bracing “to see Streisand get out from under the archaic production values of large-scale movies” such as Hello, Dolly! She found her “like thousands of girls one sees in the subway, but more so—she is both the archetype and an original, and that’s what makes a star.”

  In addition to the New York Film Critics Circle, Pauline belonged to another prominent critics’ group, the National Society of Film Critics. The society tended to be looked on as the bastard cousin of the NYFCC, although it had been founded for valid reasons. Since the city’s major newspaper strike in 1962, the NYFCC had accepted magazine critics as members, but it was still perceived as an organization dominated by daily newspaper reviewers. With the demise of The New York Herald-Tribune in 1967, only four daily newspapers were still operating, and it was decided that the handful of members of the NYFCC did not really constitute a proper sampling of critical thought in New York. Among the founders of the National Society of Film Critics were Hollis Alpert, Andrew Sarris, Joe Morgenstern, and Pauline. Partly because it was seriously underfunded, the NSFC never developed the cachet of the NYFCC; during some years, the society couldn’t afford even a no-frills awards dinner, so honorees were simply notified by mail. The organization, however, had other objectives, one of which was to establish a series of dialogues between critics and some of the m
ost acclaimed film directors of the day. Richard Schickel, who served as chairman of the NSFC in 1970, termed the project “a good idea in theory, a bad one in practice,” a point of view that was borne out when David Lean was invited to appear before the group following a special screening of his new film, MGM’s Ryan’s Daughter, at the Ziegfeld Theater on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan.

  In the 1960s few directors were as esteemed as David Lean. Both Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago had been enormous worldwide successes and had generally received good press, although some critics understandably preferred his earlier, small-scale work in pictures such as Brief Encounter and Oliver Twist. Ryan’s Daughter was a love story, set following the Easter Rising in Ireland, about a country lass (Sarah Miles) who escapes the disappointment of her marriage to a much older schoolteacher (Robert Mitchum) by having an affair with a British soldier (Christopher Jones). Lean gave this essentially simple story his customary grand-scale production, filming in the West of Ireland for more than a year. It was an arduous shoot; rather than use an actual village, Lean sought to construct one of his own, on County Kerry’s Dingle peninsula. Initially budgeted at $9 million, Ryan’s Daughter far exceeded that, while MGM’s new president and CEO, James Aubrey, fumed back in Hollywood. This was the era of small films, such as Joe and Five Easy Pieces, both of which had brought in enormous returns on minimal investments. To Aubrey and the other bosses at MGM, Lean was out of touch with the times. Lean, who had always been a revered prestige director, suddenly found his new picture annihilated by the critics, chief among them Pauline. She had never liked his fussy, meticulous brand of epic filmmaking, which she regarded as all polish and no surprises. His films, she wrote, had “no driving emotional energy, no passionate vision to conceal the heavy labor.” Ryan’s Daughter was nothing more than “gush made respectable by millions of dollars ‘tastefully’ wasted.”