Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  For years Pauline had deplored the lack of first-class movies about the black experience. In “Trash, Art and the Movies,” she had claimed that the main distinction of the film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s almost universally admired play A Raisin in the Sun was that it taught us “that a Negro family can be as dreary as a white family.” So she was thrilled to kick off her New Yorker stint in the fall of 1972 with a review of Sounder, Martin Ritt’s drama about the near-collapse of a family of black sharecroppers during the Depression after the father is jailed for stealing food. She had expected a wearisome tribute to poor people that wore its good intentions on its sleeve; instead, she wrote, Ritt “never pushes a moment too hard or too far—the movie earns every emotion we feel. And I think it will move audiences—move them truly, that is—as few films ever have.” Pauline thought that Cicely Tyson, as the farm wife and mother, Rebecca, who must struggle along when her husband is sent to prison, had “the singular good fortune to play the first great black heroine on the screen.”

  One might have expected many critics to embrace Sounder, but Pauline’s was one of the most laudatory reviews the movie received. In The New York Times, Roger Greenspun found that Ritt seemed “to strive for classical plainness, but to succeed only in being ordinary.” Lindsay Patterson, also in the Times, boasted that he grew up in a small Louisiana town among black and white sharecroppers, and wrote that Sounder bore “no resemblance whatsoever to reality as I observed it, and sometimes lived it, among black sharecroppers.” Even Richard Schickel, who admired the film, worried about the reaction of the black audience: “Are they available only for fantasies about machismo-bound private eyes? Can they respond to the story of a black man of another generation for whom rage and militancy were simply not available as responses to injustice?” Despite a soft opening, Sounder was a hit, building slowly and steadily and proving especially popular in the new marketing technique of group sales; by January 1973, it would gross $3,251,000 on 115 engagements.

  Another smart and important film for the black audience appeared that fall—Sidney J. Furie’s Lady Sings the Blues, a biography of the great Billie Holiday, starring Diana Ross. Pauline, the inveterate jazz-lover, was riveted, even if she found that the film fell far short of its subject in musical terms: Much as she liked Ross’s acting, she thought her shallow pop singing was a pale echo of Holiday’s emotionally naked performances. Yet Lady Sings the Blues pleased her because it wasn’t “heavy and glazed,” as so many other singer biographies in the past had been. “Factually it’s a fraud, but emotionally it delivers. It has what makes movies work for a mass audience: easy pleasure, tawdry electricity, personality—great quantities of personality.” It held her, despite its inability to show what drove Holiday musically—what made singing the most important thing in her life. Pauline felt that the entire project was inflected with a pop sensibility, rather than a jazz one. “Pop music provides immediate emotional gratifications that the subtler and deeper and more lasting pleasures of jazz can’t prevail against,” she wrote. “Pop drives jazz back underground. And that’s what this pop movie does to the career of a great jazz singer.” She admitted that she had loved Lady Sings the Blues, yet she stressed that she didn’t “want Billie Holiday’s hard, melancholic sound buried under this avalanche of pop. When you get home, you have to retrieve her at the phonograph; you have to do restoration work on your own past.”

  As much as Pauline had praised several films of the past two years, as much as she obviously felt they were pointing in a new and intoxicating direction for the cinema, close readers of her column may well have had the sense that these pictures were simply preparation for some ultimate, as yet unknown event in her moviegoing life. Her reviews had began to pulsate with an almost palpable sense of anticipation and vulnerability, as if she were preparing herself for an experience so overpowering that she had never fully been able to imagine it. Having proclaimed that the last year had represented a legendary time for the movies, she now seemed poised for the supreme seduction. And it took place on October 14, 1972, the closing night of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, when she experienced Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.

  Bertolucci’s film had arrived at the festival accompanied by tremendous word-of-mouth excitement. There had not been the usual special screening for the critics, and the top reviewers in New York were vying for a seat at the final night of the festival. They already knew that Last Tango in Paris took on extremely adult and difficult subject matter—the MPAA had given it an X rating—and there was considerable talk that the movie was bound to run into difficulty with the notoriously difficult Italian censors. There was a chance that it might be banned altogether. In The New Leader, John Simon stated that the film’s distributor, United Artists, had had representatives present at the Lincoln Center showing, driving home the point that if the New York reviews weren’t strong enough, the censors might succeed in burying the picture.

  With a script by Bertolucci and Franco Arcali, Last Tango in Paris told the story of Paul (Marlon Brando), a forty-five-year-old American living in Paris who has reached a critical juncture in his life. He and his wife have run a flea-trap hotel, where the wife often conducted affairs right under Paul’s nose, including one with a long-term resident of the hotel. As the film opens, Paul’s wife has died—a suicide, though the details are intentionally murky. While perusing a vacant apartment he is thinking of renting, he encounters Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a twenty-year-old Parisian girl who is also looking at the apartment. Their attraction to each other is instantaneous, and they surrender to it with total abandon, having sex in the empty apartment. Paul persuades her that they must not know anything about each other—they must not even reveal their names. Paul rents the place, and for several days they meet to have sex. But it wasn’t like the sex that had ever been portrayed on the screen before: Because of the emotional intensity behind it, nothing like it had been seen even in a hardcore porn film. Last Tango’s most famous moment—when Paul uses a stick of butter to lubricate his sodomy of Jeanne—was hardly the most shocking thing in the film. “Everything outside this place is bullshit,” says Paul, as he presses Jeanne to confront her inner core for the first time. He induces her to stick two fingers up his ass. He tells her that he’s going to get a pig to fuck her; that he’ll vomit in her face and make her swallow the vomit. “Are you going to do all that for me?” she asks. This dialogue stunned the audience, unaccustomed to seeing and hearing real intimacy between a man and a woman on the screen. (It’s possible that the most intimate scenes prior to the ones between Paul and Jeanne had been those featuring Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret in the decidedly G-rated Ship of Fools.)

  Midway through the picture there is a shattering scene in which Paul rails at the corpse of his wife, laid out in the funeral parlor. He tells her that he could never, ever have discovered the truth about her. She was dishonest with him from the beginning—dirtier than the dirtiest street pig, he tells her. He hopes she rots in hell, because “our marriage was nothing more than a foxhole for you, and all it took for you to get out was a thirty-five-cent razor and a tub full of water.” Paul is losing himself in Jeanne, attempting to find the truth through erotic means. “Listen, you dumb dodo,” he tells her, when she keeps protesting that she’s really in love with her young television filmmaker boyfriend (Jean-Pierre Léaud), “all the mysteries that you’re ever going to get to know in life are right here.”

  The scene at the casket was a history-making moment in world cinema. It was doubtful that any screen actor had ever exposed himself so completely and pitilessly as Brando did in that scene; it made his very fine work in The Godfather look like child’s play—a harmless exercise.

  When the lights came on after Last Tango in Paris at the New York Film Festival screening, Pauline was almost speechless. Her friend George Malko, who accompanied her to it, recalled her as being “drenched”—unable even to go out for a drink with him to discuss it afterward. Pauline recalled that
there was very little chatter among the critics at the party following the screening; most people seemed to be in a state of shock.

  Most of the critics planned to wait to review Last Tango until it had opened in Italy and then officially in New York in January. But Pauline could not wait; she retired to her desk at the Turin and wrote her lengthy review as if in one great gasp. Her review had to be a masterpiece—it was, as far as she was concerned, the most important review she had ever written. Such a risky piece of filmmaking demanded the riskiest piece of criticism she could muster.

  The intensity of her response worked both for and against her, winning her a deeper level of loyalty from her New Yorker readers who were swept along by her passion for the film, yet ultimately alienating those who felt she had simply overpraised it. Perhaps not even William Shawn was prepared for her opening:

  Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972; that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. The movie breakthrough has finally come.

  The strange, mysterious relationship of sex to intimacy—and the ways in which the two simultaneously feed and contradict each other—was one of the most powerful themes in Last Tango, and it was one that Pauline responded to with her whole being. She had a deep respect for the nature of genuine sexual bliss, the eagerness to engage, however fleetingly, in complete surrender to another. As she sat in the darkness at Lincoln Center, dazzled by what was unfolding on the screen, she knew she was witnessing a revolutionary step in the portrayal of human emotions, and that it would be pointless to write about the film with anything less than total abandon.

  Brando’s performance stunned her. In her review she called up her memory of seeing him on Broadway in Truckline Café back in 1946—a performance so visceral that she had thought he was “having a seizure onstage.” His work in Last Tango was the most revealing work she had ever seen an actor do onscreen. His performance as Paul was “a study of the aggression in masculine sexuality, and how the physical strength of men lends credence to the insanity that grows out of it gives the film a larger, tragic dignity. If Brando knows this hell, why should we pretend we don’t?”

  She worried that Last Tango would be misunderstood, feared, dismissed. She worried that “Americans seem to have lost the capacity for being scandalized”—in other words, that audiences had become numb to raw emotion. They needed to grant themselves the freedom to respond wholeheartedly to the movie, that it “might have been easier on some if they could have thrown things,” as the audience had on opening night of Le Sacre du Printemps, because she felt that “this is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies.” And in the final paragraph of her review, she bared herself to her readers, much as Paul encouraged Jeanne to bare herself to him: “I’ve tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing.”

  Her concern that Last Tango would be misunderstood turned out to be justified. The only other major reviewer who covered its opening at the festival was Vincent Canby, who expressed very mixed feelings about it. Once the film had its official New York opening at the Trans Lux Theater on the East Side of Manhattan, many of the reviews referred, somewhat derisively, to Pauline’s rhapsodic enthusiasm. The final tally, according to The New York Times, was twelve favorable, five mixed (including Stanley Kauffmann and Rex Reed), and two negative (John Simon and WPIX’s Jeffrey Lyons).

  Pauline’s review of Last Tango did more than anything else to date to boost her reputation as the era’s wisest and most searching film critic. United Artists took out a hugely expensive two-page advertisement in The New York Times in which her review was reprinted in its entirety. But her impassioned advocacy for the film ultimately worked against her in some ways. She had gone farther out on a limb with her review of Last Tango than she had ever gone for any film in her life. “Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?” she had written, and, like many audacious statements about art, it was to be held up to ridicule for years to come. Her review of Last Tango signaled the beginning of a certain degree of skepticism and mistrust on the part of many readers who had previously been devoted to her opinions; in later years, many would point to it as the first of her seriously misguided reviews.

  One person unnerved by Pauline’s passion for Last Tango was William Shawn. While he generously allowed her ample space for her review and did not try to moderate her position, he did not understand her fascination with the sexual behavior that the picture portrayed. He had barely recovered from an incident earlier in 1972, when Pauline and her good friend the writer and New York Times Book Review editor Charles Simmons had gone together to see Deep Throat, the era’s most talked-about and financially successful porn film. Pauline was intrigued by the movie’s publicity and the fact that it made its star, Linda Lovelace, a household name. “I remember we came out of the movie,” recalled Simmons, “and I said, ‘You know, I never saw a pornographic movie before—that was pretty good.’ Pauline said, ‘You lost your cherry on a good one.’” She attempted to bully Shawn into letting her review Deep Throat, but he drew the line at writing about pornography in The New Yorker: His answer was a heated, unequivocal no.

  Pauline felt so strongly about the impact of Last Tango that she had difficulty discussing it, even with close friends. “I saw Last Tango, not with her, but I saw it,” recalled Simmons. “I said, ‘That was just a dirty movie.’ If you did that kind of thing, she would absorb it and not defend it at all.” But the failure of so many of her colleagues to share her opinion of the film’s value upset her. Her nemesis Andrew Sarris had not been won over by the movie, which he called “stylistically wasteful and excessive.” He felt that “its best scenes are isolated from each other, and the dull moments in between stretch into dull minutes.” But he saved his sharpest words for a slap at Pauline: “Under ordinary circumstances, it would be grossly unfair to single out any one film critic for an ego-puffing practice that is beginning to corrode all film criticism. Still, when the one critic in question has been unduly abusive in print toward the excerpted enthusiasms of others, the temptation to turn the tables over a flagrant lapse in critical decorum becomes well nigh irresistible.” He also snidely commented that given the five-dollar ticket prices, it would behoove the management of the Trans Lux to pipe in excerpts of Le Sacre du Printemps.

  At one of Hoyt Spelman’s advertising lunches, Pauline was railing to an enthralled table of listeners about Sarris’s lack of support for Last Tango. Spelman, a great lover of puns, was sitting next to an agency mogul. “That,” he whispered to his luncheon partner, “was her last tango with Sarris.”

  Pauline was never above taking on “serious” writers, particularly those who were the darlings of the literary establishment. And in 1972, few authors occupied such an enviable critical position as Joan Didion, one of the most acclaimed essayists of the New Journalism movement. Didion was unquestionably a superb stylist. She had an eye that moved like a roving camera, picking up revelatory plangent details and never focusing on them too hard or for too long. In the 1960s Didion and her husband, the essayist and novelist John Gregory Dunne, had relocated to Los Angeles, where, in addition to their other projects, they pursued screenwriting careers. In 1970 Didion published a second novel, Play It as It Lays, which made use of her Hollywood experience in its account of Maria Wyeth, a sometime actress and model numbly trying to cope with her overwhelming feelings of isolation in Los Angeles. At the time there were a number of women writers who were connecting with a wide re
adership by making modern anxiety and aimlessness “hip”—Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends, and Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife were all popular examples of this trend. Play It as It Lays was thought to be one of the finest examples of this sensibility, and it earned Didion some of the strongest reviews of the year.

  Not surprisingly, given the difference in their literary temperaments, Pauline pounced with her review of the film version of Play It as It Lays, released in the fall of 1972. The story of Maria’s plight struck her as “the ultimate princess fantasy”—that is, a study of a woman “too sensitive for this world—you see the truth, and so you suffer more than ordinary people, and can’t function.” It wasn’t only the sensibility of the novel that annoyed her, it was Didion’s celebrated style, which Pauline found “ridiculously swank.” She found Play It as It Lays absurdly self-conscious, “a writer’s performance, with every word screwed tight, and a designer’s feat, the sparse words placed in the spiritual emptiness of white pages.” Her review included a rather personal swipe at Didion, who, she reported, “wanted Frank Perry to direct—possibly because he had already glorified the suffering little-girl-woman in Diary of a Mad Housewife . . . The adaptation is a novelist’s wish fulfillment: narration that retains the most ‘eloquent’ passages in the book, dialogue virtually intact, and a transfer to the screen of the shattered-sensibility style by means of quick scenes that form a mosaic.”