Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Bogdanovich, however, felt that Pauline’s idea couldn’t possibly work in cinematic terms. “Pauline misses the point,” he said nearly forty years after her review of The Last Picture Show appeared. “We used Red River because of the cattle drive—it shows you that the days of that kind of adventure and exuberance and excitement are gone—compared to what we’ve been seeing from the movie.” (It’s worth noting that in McMurtry’s novel, the movie was The Kid from Texas, a B picture with Audie Murphy and Gale Storm. Sonny and Duane, remembering all their date nights at the picture show, are bored with it and walk out on it. McMurtry wrote, “It would have taken Winchester ’73 or Red River or some big movie to have crowded out the memories the boys kept having.”)

  In the same column in which she reviewed The Last Picture Show, Pauline covered Dennis Hopper’s new work with a perilously similar title: The Last Movie, which investigated the impact of a film crew on a band of natives in the Peruvian Andes. She admitted it was a sloppy mess, but she couldn’t help observing, “If Bogdanovich replaces Hopper as the hero of the industry—if, to the industry, he becomes the new hot director that everyone should imitate—the most talented moviemakers may be in trouble. Even Nixon could like The Last Picture Show.” (Sometime later, when Bogdanovich met Richard Nixon, “I told him that Pauline had said it was a picture that even Richard Nixon would like. He slapped his thigh and said, ‘I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not.’ Then he said, ‘The Last Picture Show? Black-and-white? Texas? I did like that!’”)

  Although Pauline was careful not to reveal too much of herself directly in her reviews, it had become possible for those who read her closely to get a sense of her position on various political issues—as was the case with her quip about Nixon’s liking The Last Picture Show. At around this time she also commented that she couldn’t understand how Nixon had gotten elected, because she didn’t know a single person who voted for him. The remark circulated widely in conservative circles, something that delighted Pauline no end.

  It was also possible from reading some of her reviews to discern where she stood in relation to the women’s movement—namely, that she kept a healthy distance from it. The bold choices she had made in her personal life—having Gina out of wedlock, doggedly pursuing her chosen profession even in the years when it brought her little income, refusing to stand in Edward Landberg’s shadow or to bend to William Shawn—suggested that she had been living her own version of a feminist ideal. She, of course, would never have characterized it that way: feminism reeked too much of dogma for her to be able to take it seriously and join the movement in any specific, organized way. The feminist sensibility, she feared, was a trap that shackled thinking and rendered one unable to come up with fresh and invigorating opinions. Also, she found many of the feminists she knew to have a certain humorlessness—always a cardinal sin. Pauline’s idea of being a feminist was to live her life rather like a Jean Arthur career woman: proving herself by doing her work better than any man, but always maintaining a sense of humor about herself.

  “I thought Pauline was deaf to feminism,” observed Karen Durbin, who worked with her at The New Yorker in the early ’70s before becoming a film critic. “Not hostile. It just wasn’t something she could hear. If she had been younger, my generation, I’m convinced she would have been a feminist firebrand. But as it was, she fought the fight by herself. It seemed to me one of the key insights of women’s liberation was the moment when I thought, ‘We don’t have permission.’ That’s what we’re fighting for. The pure nerve of the way Pauline would say what she thought and not mince anything—it must have been God’s own battle for her to create that permission for herself. And she lived by it. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t underneath that permission a tremulous place—‘Am I getting away with this?’”

  Pauline’s review of one of the year’s great critical and commercial successes, The French Connection, gave clear indications about how she felt living in New York City at the time. More and more films were being shot there, a development that had been actively sought by Mayor John V. Lindsay. But particularly since the success of Midnight Cowboy, filmmakers delighted in presenting the starkest, seamiest views of the city ever to wind up on film. The isolation of Tina Balser (Carrie Snodgress) in Diary of a Mad Housewife, lost in a maze of her husband’s ambition; Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels, the high-priced call girl in Klute, racing to get into her apartment because she knows someone is watching her; the junkie (Al Pacino) who says that death is “the best high of all” in The Panic in Needle Park; the squalid apartments of Barbra Streisand and George Segal in The Owl and the Pussycat—all of it showed New York as a place of bare trees and gray winter skies, where the inhabitants were simply caught up in the frenzy of trying to survive. Pauline continued to struggle with her own feelings of hostility toward the city, where she thought “everyone seems to be dressed for a mad ball.” She volunteered to her readers, “It is literally true that when you live in New York, you no longer believe that the garbage will ever be gone from the streets or that life will ever be sane and orderly.”

  The New York audience fascinated her, because she felt that a large sector of it was so attuned to the explosive rhythm of the city that they demanded to see it reflected on the screen. The French Connection was a fact-based account of one of the great narcotics busts in the history of the New York Police Department. The movies were now giving this audience what it wanted: violent, high-tension thrillers and action films geared to this crazed element in the audience, movies that were “often irrational and horrifying brutal.”

  While other critics reviewed The French Connection simply as a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, the embodiment of what would soon become the cliché “high-octane thriller,” Pauline insisted on examining it in the context of the realities of contemporary New York, and of the audience that the city’s seemingly endless decline had helped to create. She acknowledged that the film was “extraordinarily well made,” yet she seemed no more able to share any genuine enthusiasm for The French Connection than she had for The Last Picture Show, because of what she thought the movie represented: “what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks. There’s nothing in the movie that you enjoy thinking over afterward. . . .”

  She also stepped apart from the crowd with her review of the film version of the spectacular Broadway hit musical Fiddler on the Roof. Despite the handsomeness and vigor of its big-screen translation, Fiddler received very mixed notices. Because of Pauline’s deep love of musicals, she often felt betrayed by what happened to them once they were transferred to the screen, but Fiddler on the Roof surprised her. After acknowledging that the musical comedy was “primarily an American Jewish contribution” to the theater, she called it “probably the only successful attempt to use this theatrical form on the subject of its own sources—that is on the heritage that the Jewish immigrants brought to this country.” She thought part of the reason the film worked well was because it was directed by someone she was careful to point out was a gentile, Norman Jewison. She implied that he avoided the pitfalls a Jewish director might have fallen into by laying on the ethnic sentiment too thick. Jewison presented “the Jews as an oppressed people—no better, no worse than others,” side-stepping the “self-hatred and self-infatuation that corrupts so much Jewish comedy.” Her review demonstrated, once again, her remarkably unsentimental attitude toward her own Jewish heritage:

  Younger members of the audience—particularly if they are Jewish—may be put off by the movie if their parents and grandparents have gone on believing in a special status with God long after the oppression was over, and have tried to prop up their authority over their children with boring stories about early toil and hardship.... Too many people have used their early suffering as a platitudinous weapon and so have made it all seem fake. And I suppose that Fiddler on the Roof has been such a phenomenal stage success partly because it can be used in this same self-congratulatory way—as a public certificate of pas
t suffering.

  Her review moved Norman Jewison to write to her: “Thank you for your in depth critique.... As Sholem Aleichem would simply say—(in his square way)—go in peace—and God be with you!”

  One of Pauline’s pet theories was that a director’s finest work was nearly always done early on; she believed that as most directors aged and became wealthier and more famous, they became concerned with making grander and grander artistic statements, at which point they usually fell flat. And no director of the time was more concerned with the Big Idea than Stanley Kubrick, whose new film, A Clockwork Orange, opened at the end of 1971.

  Based on the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange was set in the not-too-distant future, where Britain has degenerated into a completely mechanized, brutal, soulless society. The perfect representative of this moral vacuum is the character Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a callous teenaged punk and head of his “droogs,” a gang that steals, tortures, and rapes just for the sheer pleasure of it. Eventually he is arrested and undergoes a brainwashing that neutralizes him, robbing him of his individuality. It was the type of grandiose topic with all the attendant portentousness that typically made Pauline wince. Prior to the film’s release, Kubrick held forth on the film’s significance in numerous interviews. He told The New York Times that Alex symbolized “man in his natural state, the way he would be if society did not impose its ‘civilizing’ process upon him. What we respond to subconsciously is Alex’s guiltless sense of freedom to kill and rape, and to be our savage natural selves, and it is in this glimpse of the true nature of man that the power of the story derives.”

  Many in the press felt that Kubrick had turned out a genuinely great film, but there were a few dissenters: Richard Schickel disliked the fact that Alex had been “directed toward cuteness at every opportunity,” and that his victims were all malignant and grotesque, resulting in “a viciously rigged game.” Andrew Sarris predicted that his colleagues in the New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics would select A Clockwork Orange as the year’s best picture, adding “If such a catastrophe has indeed occurred, I disclaim all responsibility.”

  Pauline believed she had a clear-eyed view of Kubrick’s intentions. At the end of the picture, when Alex’s former victims turn on him and he reverts to his old, corrupt self, she grasped that Kubrick intended it as “a victory in which we share . . . the movie becomes a vindication of Alex, saying that the punk was a free human being and only the good Alex was a robot.” She was deeply disturbed by Kubrick’s grotesque portrayal of the victims, which she found “symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, ‘Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.’ In the new mood . . . people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims—that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassination, post-Manson mood. I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.”

  While she made it clear that she in no way advocated censorship, she felt that she and her colleagues had to speak out against the “corrupt” morality that so many directors were attempting to force-feed the gullible public:

  At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools.... There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship.... Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it’s eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it’s worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what’s in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?

  Her impassioned argument, however, fell mostly on deaf ears: A Clockwork Orange became an immense success, one of the year’s most widely discussed films.

  Pauline’s concern about audiences’ being turned on by violence were nothing if not timely: In the weeks that followed the release of A Clockwork Orange, a number of extremely brutal films opened in theaters, including Dirty Harry, which marked Clint Eastwood’s first appearance as the San Francisco police inspector Harry Callahan. (Pauline would have a lifelong antipathy toward Eastwood, whom she considered minimally talented and absurdly macho.) Dirty Harry took as its theme the corruption and unfairness of a legal system that rewards criminals by getting them off on technicalities: Pauline found it a “right-wing fantasy” about the police being “helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals.”

  But the film of the season that caused her the greatest apprehension was made by a director whose work she admired—Sam Peckinpah. She regretted that she had not been able to write about The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah’s 1969 drama about a gang of over-the-hill outlaws reuniting for a final spree, but the film had made an indelible impression on her by undermining any number of clichés of the Western genre. In Peckinpah’s west, innocent women and children were inevitably slaughtered, as those in the audience begged silently for it not to happen. The Wild Bunch had a wealth of unforgettable images—the outlaws passing a whiskey bottle back and forth as if it’s a holy chalice; brilliant close-ups, such as the army officer averting his eyes as two parts of a train collide; and Pauline’s favorite, the blowing up of a bridge, with army horses and riders “falling to the water in an instant extended to eternity.” She understood that Peckinpah’s unflinching presentation of violence had a positive purpose: to show how truly horrible war and destruction could be, and the toll that they took on the people caught up in them. At the time of the picture’s release, she spoke of his aim to “take the façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved . . . and then twist it so that it’s not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut.” Her difficulty with The Wild Bunch was that she felt Peckinpah had “got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence that what had begun as a realistic treatment became instead an almost abstract fantasy on violence; the bloody deaths repeated so often and so exquisitely, became numbingly remote.”

  Peckinpah was provocative and belligerent and a prodigious drinker, and Pauline enjoyed spending time with him, hashing out the imbecilities of the movie industry over bottles of whiskey. She delighted in their friendship and frequently sent him stories or novels she thought he might want to adapt for the screen. One was Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children; Peckinpah got drunk and read it one night and pronounced it so “profoundly depressing, it makes The Wild Bunch look like early Saroyan.” She also championed him as director of the screen version of James Dickey’s Deliverance, which eventually went to John Boorman. Peckinpah became one of Pauline’s pet “lost boys”—the ones she believed to be mistreated by the studio executives—and he in turn courted her assiduously, sending her roses whenever she paid a visit to Los Angeles.

  Peckinpah’s latest was Straw Dogs, and Pauline struggled with it more than she had with any other film of the season. With a script by Peckinpah and David Z. Goodman, based on Gordon Williams’s novel Siege at Trencher’s Farm, Straw Dogs was a study of what happens when a man who has purposely distanced himself from conflict is forced to confront his enemies and to defend his home and family—to the death. In the film’s long, terrifying finale, the pacifist hero (Dustin Hoffman) is forced to use his gifts for precise, str
ategic thinking to kill the men laying siege to his household, one by one. The final siege sequence lasted for nearly thirty minutes, and while many in the audience found the tension and the violence all but unbearable, they were placed in the inevitable position of cheering the death of each of the thugs.

  The film’s point of view was troubling both to viewers and, particularly, to the critics who were ever on the lookout for a higher sense of purpose in filmmaking. Peckinpah regarded all such attitudinizing with unconcealed contempt. “You can’t make violence real to audiences today without rubbing their noses in it,” he told William Murray for Playboy. “We watch our wars and see our men die, really die, every day on television, but it doesn’t seem real. We don’t believe those are real people dying on the screen. We’ve been anesthetized by the media. What I do is show people what it’s really like—not by showing it so much as by heightening it, stylizing it.”

  There is a heavy, somber, even somewhat cautious tone in Pauline’s review of Straw Dogs that is quite uncharacteristic of her work: Reading it, one gets the sense that writing it did not come easily. In the end she was forced to conclude that one of her favorite filmmakers had created a compelling but deeply offensive machismo fantasy, in which the hero had to become a killer in order to feel like a real man. “The vision of Straw Dogs is narrow and puny,” Pauline wrote, “as obsessions with masculinity so often are.” She believed that Straw Dogs revealed that Peckinpah’s “intuitions as a director are infinitely superior to his thinking.” Perhaps most of all, she was insulted by the “stale anti-intellectualism” of the hero’s being portrayed as weak and cowardly, unable to stay in the United States and deal with the violent changes that were splitting the country asunder.