by Brian Kellow
Bogdanovich then proceeded to expose, point by point, the weaknesses in Pauline’s research. Not only had she chosen not to consult Welles but she had failed to contact several of the other key players in her story. One was Marion Davies’s nephew Charles Lederer, who claimed that he had never—as Pauline had stated—shown the script to Davies. “That is 100 percent, whole-cloth lying,” Lederer told Bogdanovich, adding that he had returned the script to Mankiewicz, telling him that he didn’t think that Davies would be bothered by the characterization of Susan Alexander. He also told Bogdanovich that the early draft, called American, was lugubrious, and that Welles had “vivified the material, changed it a lot, and I believe transcended it with his direction. There were things in it that were based on Hearst and Marion—the jigsaw puzzles, Marion’s drinking—though this was played up more in the movie than in the script I read, probably because it was a convenient peg for the girl’s characterization.” (Lederer’s version of this episode is regarded by the Mankiewicz family as highly suspect, since the script reportedly was returned with annotations by the Hearst legal team.)
Bogdanovich quoted George Coulouris, who portrayed Thatcher, the man who becomes young Charles Kane’s guardian, dismissing Pauline’s essay as “twaddle.” The testimony of an actor in thrall to Welles might be questionable. But Bernard Herrmann, the composer of the film’s musical score, and famously not a man to play politics in any way, denounced Pauline’s research of the film’s classic opera sequences, in which Susan Alexander miserably fails her New York debut. Pauline claimed that Welles had pressed Herrmann to create the film’s fictional French opera-within-the-film, Salammbô, because the first choice, Thaïs, involved the expensive proposition of obtaining musical rights. Here she jumped to a conclusion, pointing out that Hearst had once been engaged briefly to Sibyl Sanderson, the American soprano for whom Jules Massenet had written Thaïs. Also she reported that Samuel Insull, one of the models for Kane, had built the Chicago Opera House in 1922, and that it had been managed for one disastrous season by the retired diva Mary Garden, in her day a famous Thaïs. But according to Welles, he had simply needed an opera that opened with a big dramatic aria for Susan Alexander, to drive home the point that her career is all but finished the minute the curtain rises. There were no operas in the standard repertory that fulfilled this requirement, since they all had lengthy introductory passages, mostly involving the chorus—so Herrmann simply had to write one.
Bogdanovich suspected that for all of Pauline’s knowledge of film history, she did not know much technically about how movies were really made. She had taken Sara Mankiewicz’s word for it that the script of Kane had changed very little from the first draft, but she had failed to grasp the degree to which scripts change in their long, tortuous evolution. Kane’s associate producer, Richard Barr, claimed that “The revisions made by Welles were not limited to mere general suggestions, but included the actual rewriting of words, dialogue, changing of sequences, ideas, and characterizations, and also the elimination and addition of certain scenes.”
Bogdanovich’s essay for Esquire was extremely courageous: For a rising young director, so dependent on popular and critical support, to take on the most celebrated movie critic in the United States showed great conviction and a brave lack of concern about the possible consequences of writing such an article. “The Kane Mutiny,” however, did surprisingly little damage to Pauline’s reputation. It did, however, represent a serious breakdown of The New Yorker’s fact-checking process. Significantly, no transcripts of Pauline’s purported conversations with John Houseman, George Schaefer, or Rita Alexander have survived—perhaps because she took no notes. The only research materials in her personal archive, housed at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, are copies of Howard Suber’s interviews. And Bogdanovich’s revelation of her inadequate research efforts did nothing to dissuade her from continuing to chip away at Welles’s achievements: In the future she would tell numerous colleagues that she did not believe that the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons had ever existed—that she felt Welles had simply abandoned the picture.
Decades after the publication of “The Kane Mutiny,” Bogdanovich happened to be having dinner with Woody Allen in New York. Allen, who was once quite friendly with Pauline, recalled that he had been with her when she had finished reading “The Kane Mutiny.” She was shocked by the evidence that Bogdanovich had stacked up against her.
“How am I going to answer this?” she asked Allen.
“Don’t answer,” Allen told her.
And she never did.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By the time Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller opened in June 1971, regular readers of “The Current Cinema” were well accustomed to Pauline’s antipathy for the movie Western. In her capsule reviews in the front of The New Yorker, she dismissed one revered Western classic after another—She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Gunfighter, The Searchers, Two Rode Together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (Stagecoach was an exception.) Given her distaste for the genre’s conventions and sentiments, perhaps it was inevitable that Pauline would fall as hard as she did for McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In M*A*S*H, Robert Altman had subjected the military comedy to a kind of deconstruction; with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he did the same thing for the Western.
The basic story, based on a novel by Edmund Naughton, didn’t hold a lot of attraction for Altman; it was the atmosphere of a particular time and place that he was after. Set in the rain-soaked and snow-blanketed Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century, McCabe was about a small-time hustler who sets out to make his fortune by opening a whorehouse in a remote zinc-mining town. Altman later said that he took great comfort in the story’s familiar types—the drifter/loser hero and the good-hearted whore and the mercenary villains—believing they would give the audience an “anchor,” so he could concentrate on getting the feeling he wanted into the film.
Altman wanted the film to look like the old daguerreotypes of the turn of the century, and he and the production designer, Leon Ericksen, had worked out a muted color scheme in order to achieve it. Altman and the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, also hit on the idea of flashing the film (briefly exposing it to light during processing) in order to capture the desired washed-out effect. And in order to achieve a greater sense of realism, Altman encouraged his actors to overlap their dialogue, much of it once again improvised. Any other director might have turned the story into a conventional romance, but Altman later stated, “I don’t really care much about the story in a film.... I think more about the painting.” McCabe & Mrs. Miller was shaping up to be the most elliptical Western ever made—it was nearly an impressionistic study of a Western. Yet there was nothing fey or pretentious about it; for all its visual poetry, it also had tremendous bite and grit.
McCabe opened in June, and a number of the television critics, who commanded the widest audience, were hostile to it. Rona Barrett said in a broadcast that McCabe “saddened and disgusted” her, and that it was “rated R, presumably for rotten.” She also noted that at the screening at the Motion Picture Academy, some forty people “got up and walked out, unable to understand the onscreen mumbling.”
Under normal circumstances Penelope Gilliatt would have reviewed McCabe as part of her regular schedule, but Pauline persuaded both Shawn and Gilliatt to let her step in and write the review in the middle of her layoff. It was the most rapturous notice she had written to date—the first of the “bliss-out” reviews for which she would soon become famous. She opened with this sentence: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie—a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been.” She found the film “so indirect in method that it throws one off base. It’s not much like other Westerns; it’s not really much like other movies.” She loved the picture’s beguiling, allusive style, its almost dreamlike view of another time, and she praised Altman for having given up “the theatrical convention that movies have generally clung to of introducing the ch
aracters and putting tags on them. Though Altman’s method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom—as if he simply didn’t want to be straightforward about his storytelling.” Curiously, she mentioned neither Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography, with its innovative use of filters, or the inferior quality of the sound mixing.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller seduced Pauline so completely that she became its cheerleader. In the closing paragraph of her review, she confessed her fear that the movie might not find the audience it deserved. “Will a large enough American public accept American movies that are delicate and understated and searching—movies that don’t resolve all the feelings they touch, that don’t aim at leaving us satisfied, the way a three-ring circus satisfies?” Clearly, she was afraid the answer was no. The week that the review was published, she made an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, exhorting moviegoers to get out and support this major work by a brilliant American artist. McCabe & Mrs. Miller had had a soft opening, but suddenly, after Pauline’s drum-beating on television, box office returns picked up. There is no way of knowing how much Pauline’s advocacy had to do with the increase in McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s attendance, but Altman swore that it had been a key factor. In the end, although the film never achieved hit status, Pauline helped to make it one of the year’s most talked-about movies.
Those who believed that criticism should maintain a coolly objective tone were bothered by the emotional tenor of Pauline’s support for the film, and her review confirmed many suspicions that she was incapable of staying within “correct” critical boundaries. It gave her, however, the growing confidence that her impact on readers and audiences was even greater than she had imagined.
When Pauline returned to her New Yorker duties in the fall of 1971, she led off with one of the most misleading statements of her career. Her season-opening review was of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, a movie that posed a particular challenge for her: The screenplay was written by Penelope Gilliatt.
“Seeing Sunday Bloody Sunday was for me like reading a novel that was very far from my life and my temperament, and that yet when finished it had me thinking,” she wrote in the opening of her review. Sunday Bloody Sunday concerned a ménage a trois involving a middle-aged Jewish doctor, an uptight female employment officer, and the casually amoral younger man whom they both love. The film’s central theme was how people learn to give up their dreams and settle for less than they had once imagined having. The seminal scene took place between Alex (Glenda Jackson) and her mother (Peggy Ashcroft). At the end of a cheerless dinner, Mrs. Grenville tries to tell Alex why she has stayed with her work-obsessed, neglectful husband:
MRS. GRENVILLE: Darling, you keep throwing in your hand because you haven’t got the whole thing. There is no whole thing. One has to make it work.
What you don’t know is that there was a time when I left him. We had different opinions about everything. Everything seemed impossible.
ALEX: When?
MRS. GRENVILLE: You were three. He left me alone. It was good of him (pause). But I was mad not to know how much I was going to miss him.
You think it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing.
Pauline’s comment about the film’s being alien to her own temperament was correct in one sense: She was and always had been intractable with respect to any form of compromise. But its central situation—the sharing of a man with another man—was reminiscent of her own past, with Robert Horan or James Broughton in the role of Sunday Bloody Sunday’s central character. She found that “Peter Finch’s Dr. Daniel Hirsh is possibly a movie first—a homosexual character who isn’t fey or pathetic or grotesque.” She loved the fact that Sunday Bloody Sunday didn’t portray its protagonists as wallowing around in despair—as an American film might have done. Instead “the characters here all are coping; they’re not falling apart,” and she felt that the movie’s sophisticated approach to a delicate emotional situation made it “instantly recognizable as a classic.” She pointed out that the director, John Schlesinger, had “lost his stridency”—the quality that had made her dislike Midnight Cowboy. But she saved her highest praise for Penelope Gilliatt, who, she felt, had done “what few people who write for the screen think to do: she has kept her self-respect as a writer, and written not down but up. She has trusted the audience. Miss Gilliatt and I are ships that pass each other in the night every six months. It is a pleasure to salute her on this crossing.”
Like many other critics, Pauline had ascribed much of the film’s artistic success to Gilliatt, a fact that infuriated John Schlesinger. It may well have been an example of her tendency, as William Friedkin described it, to “mistake the film for the filmmaker. If she hated the filmmaker, there was nothing he or she could do.” Despite Pauline’s generosity in print, Gilliatt’s success with Sunday Bloody Sunday—she would receive an Academy Award nomination and win the New York Film Critics Circle award for her script—was bound to aggravate Pauline’s competitive streak. There were already numerous offers coming in for her to work on a film script, or to serve as a script doctor, but for the moment, she turned them all down. At this point she felt that she could be more of a positive force by staying at The New Yorker. Besides, the run of films was beginning to prove enormously exciting—so much so that she could scarcely wait to sit down at her drafting table and get to work.
In October, Columbia released a film made under the aegis of BBS Productions, one of the most enterprising constellations of New Hollywood talent and the company responsible for Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. The Last Picture Show was not part of the ’70s New Wave, however. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, it was a piece of traditional narrative about a group of frustrated, confused people—both young and middle-aged—in a dying West Texas town in the early 1950s. It was based on a book by Larry McMurtry, whose fictional Anarene had been inspired by his hometown of Archer City, where the picture was shot. Bogdanovich had definite ideas about the Texas he wanted to depict onscreen. McMurtry was also the author of Hud, and Bogdanovich was concerned that there not be a strong visual link between the two films. He objected to Hud’s “bland, barren, gray look which is the cliché version of Texas: a big, empty country. That’s not what it is at all—Texas is tortured, savage, cruel and broken.”
Bogdanovich made the decision to shoot The Last Picture Show in black and white—the first major production since 1967’s In Cold Blood not to be filmed in color. “It’s a dismal town,” said Bogdanovich, “but I know damn well that in color it would look pretty, no matter how dismal.” The film avoided the distracting attitude and pose of hyperrealism—yet it offered an achingly recognizable and resonant slice of life, thanks in large part to Bogdanovich’s superb instinct for casting.
Although he had initially toyed with using old-time stars such as James Stewart and Dorothy Malone, he opted for less familiar faces as a means of achieving authenticity: Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges as the high school seniors Sonny and Duane, best friends who end a losing football season with the painful awareness that there will never be another one; Cybill Shepherd in her screen debut as Jacy, the teenaged tease who works her wiles on both boys; Ellen Burstyn as Lois, Jacy’s restless, still-beautiful mother; Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion, the town’s respected elder statesman; and Cloris Leachman as Ruth, the football coach’s depressed and lonely wife. Only Eileen Brennan, as Genevieve, the good-hearted waitress at Sam’s café, seemed a bit actressy, as if she’d seen too many Claire Trevor movies.
The Last Picture Show received some of the year’s most extraordinary press. Andrew Sarris, still smarting over the damage that “Raising Kane” had done to Welles, wrote: “I have visions of Pauline Kael in the year 2001 setting out to prove that Bogdanovich was not the actual auteur of The Last Picture Show, but was in fact deeply indebted to Larry McMurtry’s novel and to an entire school of Texas novelists.”
Pauline’s own review of The Last Picture Show was positi
ve, yet oddly measured, with more than a suggestion of the backhanded compliment. She was skittish about the possibility that the film—which she correctly predicted would be both a popular and critical success—would play into the hands of conservative filmgoers: that its traditional storytelling style would “turn into a bludgeon to beat other filmmakers with.” She praised the film for not taking the direction of “worked-up, raunchy melodrama about tangled lives but, rather, of something closer to common experience.” The movie never was “exploitative of human passions and miseries”; instead, it was “a lovingly exact history of American small-town life.” She said that the story, with what she took to be its resonances of the Peyton Place TV series, was “perhaps what TV soap opera would be if it were more honest—if it looked at ordinary experience in a non-exploitative way, if it had observation and humor. It is perhaps an ideal TV show.”
She had reservations about the way movies were used in the picture-show sequences. Bogdanovich had used Father of the Bride, starring the ravishing young Elizabeth Taylor, for an early sequence that showed Sonny’s dissatisfaction with his ill-tempered girlfriend (marvelously played by Sharon Taggart). For the end, when the picture show closes, Bogdanovich chose a clip from a film by one of his idols, Howard Hawks—Red River. It was the final “yee-haw” cattle-drive sequence, and he selected it to contrast the mythic lives of the cowboys with the small, aimless lives of those few in the audience on the picture show’s closing night.
Pauline found the contrast too obvious and broad. She could remember the endless run-of-the-mill product ground out by the studios in the late ’40s and early ’50s—films barely more satisfying than a cheap TV episode—and pointed out that even these dismal movies provided bored people with a form of escapism. “For several decades,” she wrote, “the generally tawdry films we saw week after week contributed to our national identity—such as it was.” Seeing bad movies week in and week out and “still feeling that they represented something preferable to your own existence” was “part of the truth of American experience.” She had a point: It wasn’t first-class films such as Father of the Bride and Red River that were representative of the weekly moviegoing experience as much as it was forgettable B pictures.