by Brian Kellow
The first movie she reviewed that fall picked up on this theme: The Last American Hero, directed by Lamont Johnson, and based on an Esquire article by Tom Wolfe from nearly a decade earlier, told the story of Junior Johnson (rechristened Junior Jackson for the film), a backwoods boy who starts out trafficking his father’s moonshine and winds up a star on the stock-car racing circuit. The script concerned the idea that “corruption seems to be inescapable: if you want to win, you learn to take orders even from people whose idea of winning you don’t understand.... The film says that to win you give up everything you care about except winning.”
Pauline loved the film, which turned out to be another underdog for her to champion. She reported that Twentieth Century–Fox had cut the picture badly, losing some of its most important scenes, and then given it a pitifully limited opening in the South, pushing it as an action film when it was really a thoughtful character study. When it didn’t do well, the studio decided it had a loser on its hands, one that couldn’t possibly go over in urban areas, and gave it a limp one-week engagement in New York. Despite the fact that the studio didn’t bother about setting up any press screenings, Pauline sought out the film—it was Pretty Poison all over again. In her review, she suggested that if the movie could manage to find some kind of audience—several of the other reviews were also good—“perhaps someone in the head office at Fox could do the sane, decent thing and restore the cuts?”
Johnson thought that he had gotten “a screwing” by the studio when the film was released, so when he read Pauline’s favorable review, he dropped her a note thanking her. “I invited her to lunch, and we got drunk and had a marvelous time,” he remembered. “She was a marvelous character. Marvelous gestures. She reminded me of Zasu Pitts. She would tear at her bosom and roll her eyes in disgust or dismay or delight about something. Extremities were her big suit. The fact that she was as enthusiastic about me as she was spread happily through the industry.”
Pauline’s first column that season highlighted a characteristic of hers that would come increasingly under fire as the decade wore on. Her opening comments on the state of films during Watergate America, combined with her review of The Last American Hero—a film that did not warrant the in-depth analysis of one by Bertolucci or Coppola or Altman—made for a long article. Several of her colleagues had begun to snipe about the length of her pieces. “I am sorry to say that I think The New Yorker did her in by giving her unlimited space,” said Judith Crist. “And I think the older readers didn’t have the patience, whereas the younger readers were the devotees.”
At the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1973, Pauline saw another movie that seduced her completely: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. It was the thirty-year-old director’s fourth feature, and its subject returned him to his early days, growing up in Little Italy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Mean Streets, shot for around $500,000, is the story of Charlie Capp, Jr. (Harvey Keitel), who has grown up in Little Italy and now is trying to make his way to a more respectable life uptown, running a restaurant and nightclub. Charlie possesses a fatal flaw: he doesn’t have the demonic single-mindedness to make it in the brutal environment in which he’s grown up. As far as his uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova) is concerned, Charlie has two liabilities in particular—his epileptic girlfriend, Teresa (Amy Robinson), whom Giovanni considers a waste because she’s physically damaged goods; and her brother, Charlie’s good friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), a volatile, gleefully stupid punk who plays dangerous games with loan sharks. Johnny Boy, for all his shortcomings, has an honesty that eludes Charlie. While Johnny Boy is a law unto himself, Charlie has a fatuous side. He wants to be upwardly mobile, but he isn’t tough enough to do just anything to get there: he can’t bring himself to turn his back on either Teresa or Johnny Boy. He is exactly what Johnny Boy calls him—“a fuckin’ politician.”
As a slice of Italian-American New York life, Mean Streets was less concerned with a well-structured story line than with making the brutal circumstances of the characters’ lives practically come through the skin of the actors. In the opening sentence of her New Yorker review, Pauline dubbed Mean Streets “a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking.” She loved the way the picture portrayed the mercurial nature of violence, which “breaks out so unexpectedly that you can’t believe it, and is over before you’ve been able to take it in. The whole movie has this effect; it psyches you up to accept everything it shows you.” Pauline felt that the true novelty of Mean Streets was the way in which it delved into “the psychological connections between Italian Catholicism and crime, between sin and crime.” She thought that The Godfather, and now Mean Streets, had tapped into some previously unexplored connection between the characters’ lawless, hedonistic lives and the powerful sense of guilt they had absorbed from their Catholic education and family life.
The most surprising review Pauline wrote during this period was of The Way We Were, a nostalgic romantic drama directed by Sydney Pollack and written by Arthur Laurents. The Way We Were was one of the hit films of the time that connected with the nostalgia craze that had arisen in the early 1970s. But the adoration for the past also implied a decided ambivalence about the present—a topic Pauline had been writing about in “The Current Cinema” for years. The student protest movement had begun to run out of steam by 1972, and by 1973, with the cessation of American military action in Vietnam, young rebels seemed tired, confused, unsure of how to channel their energies. “We were easily discouraged,” wrote essayist Joyce Maynard, “quick to abandon hope for change and to lose interest.” Pauline may have been a tremendous advocate of the movies that grew out of the atmosphere of unrest in the late’60s and early ’70s, but she had always been curiously unpredictable on the question of open rebellion. Organized activism and protest were not anything she cared to involve herself with, given their group mentality, and she tended to counsel her young friends, caught up in campus rebellion, to channel their energies into what they dreamed of doing for a living—particularly if they wanted to write. As attuned to the times as she may have been, she had hung on to her old-school, Greatest Generation approach to work, and any trace of sentimentality about the ennobling virtue of organized activism had long since vanished.
The nostalgia movement had been slower to come into mainstream movies than it had to fashion and the theater, but The Way We Were was a sure sign of its arrival, and of the general shift in public tastes that would evolve over the next several years. A sentimental love story about a smart, committed girl who falls in love with a man who can’t take a stand on anything, it wasn’t at all Pauline’s kind of movie. But her unexpected approval of the picture probably could be boiled down to a single factor—Barbra Streisand.
The Way We Were traced the unlikely and uneasy love that develops between Katie Morosky, an outspoken Jewish political activist, and Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford), an apolitical WASP with a talent for writing. The two meet in the 1930s at Columbia University, where Katie is deeply involved in the student Communist Party and takes everything she does seriously—too seriously. Despite her humorlessness, her dedication and intellectual spark attract Hubbell, who, in classic WASP tradition, lives his life trying not to offend anyone. The two commence a love affair a few years after leaving Columbia, and they eventually marry. When Hubbell is offered a screenwriting contract with a major Hollywood studio, they head west, and it is there that their marriage slowly comes apart in the climate of the Communist witch hunts. The film ended with a touching coda in the early ’50s, back in New York: Katie, her political fervor undiminished, is handing out leaflets on a street corner, and Hubbell, also unchanged except for a new girlfriend, bumps into her for one last conversation. Both now see that their marriage was doomed, but their affection for each other is intact.
The Way We Were was launched on choppy waters. Redford had been reluctant to take the part of Hubbell, because he thought—correctly—that the story was really Katie’s sto
ry and he would wind up playing second fiddle to Barbra Streisand. Once Redford was on board, Laurents got the word that he was fired. The director, Sydney Pollack, blamed it on the producer, Ray Stark, and Stark blamed it on Pollack. According to Laurents’s memoir, eleven writers were brought in, including Alvin Sargent and Dalton Trumbo, the latter an original member of the Hollywood Ten. None of them reworked the script to Stark’s satisfaction, and soon enough, he had rehired Laurents. But there were further travails ahead: The political content made the studio nervous, because they feared it might dwarf the love story.
With Streisand on Laurents’s side, some of the crucial lines about the blacklist stayed in the film. But Laurents lost one important scene, one in which Hubbell tells Katie that someone has informed on her. The studio that employs him has told him that unless Katie clears herself by naming names before HUAC, he will lose his studio contract. Katie responds, painfully, “It’s amazing how decisions are forced upon us willy-nilly.” The scene was excised, and Pollack later said, rather defensively, that all of the cuts made were justified—that “it’s hardly the definitive film about McCarthyism. It was never intended to be.” To Laurents, the loss was heartbreaking. To those in the audience who pondered the scene’s meaning at all, it now appeared that Hubbell and Katie were breaking up because he had slept with his old flame (Lois Chiles).
The Way We Were was hardly a first-class film, but Pauline responded to it, albeit with qualification—likening it to “a torpedoed ship full of gaping holes which comes snugly into port.” She found that the sentimental sequences, story holes, Marvin Hamlisch’s heavy-handed score, and the “bewildering” time chronology were all outweighed by “the chemistry of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.” She thought that Streisand had “miraculous audience empathy” and that she “caught the spirit of the hysterical Stalinist workhorses of the thirties and forties—both the ghastly desperation of their self-righteousness and the warmth of their enthusiasm.” She considered that playing Katie was a risk for Streisand, because it required her to be “defensive and aggressive in the same breath”—exactly the qualities that many moviegoers (men, in particular) had always objected to in her persona. But Pauline believed Streisand to have made a “gradual conquest of the movie public” and thought she and Redford made The Way We Were “hit entertainment and maybe even memorable entertainment”—a line that was quoted in large type at the top of the movie’s print ads.
In the end, however, Pauline seriously overestimated Streisand’s acting ability. In Katie’s big telephone scene, in which she sobs her heart out to Redford because she isn’t attractive enough for him, Streisand was poorly directed, and in the scene in which she lashes out at Hubbell’s friends for their lack of political commitment, she made Kate seem strident and humorless. All in all, her Katie seemed slightly self-conscious—the work of an actress gunning to be taken seriously.
Robert Altman’s next film was a riff on the film noir genre, based very loosely on a novel by one of the masters of the detective story, Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye took Chandler’s private-eye hero, Philip Marlowe, and transported him to early ’70s Los Angeles. According to Altman, his idea was to make the story “Rip Van Marlowe”—the detective essentially wakes up thirty years later with his own code of ethics intact, but finds that everything around him has changed. The plot—Marlowe is implicated in a crime when he does an old friend a favor by driving him to Tijuana, and the friend’s wife turns up murdered—was negligible in terms of how it unfolded. What mattered most, as was always the case with Altman’s films, was the atmosphere and the people. Altman, along with his scenarist, Leigh Brackett (who had coscripted Howard Hawks’s Marlowe classic The Big Sleep), created a stunningly atmospheric portrait of modern L.A., with its lacquered blondes, blocked alcoholic writers, and assorted drifters, loonies, and movie industry wannabes and hangers-on. Most detective films turn on details that are so precisely controlled that the audience may not feel it has time to breathe, but The Long Goodbye was exhilarating in its looseness. Altman was aided immeasurably by the superb camerawork of Vilmos Zsigmond, who used his film-flashing technique to make the movie look like old postcards of L.A.; he also kept the camera moving continually, giving the audience a quiet, sustained sensation of being on a voyage of discovery.
The Long Goodbye was another project to appeal to Pauline’s white-knight impulse: Its L.A. opening in March 1973 was met with stinging reviews and grossed only $10,300 in the opening week. A misleading advertising campaign that made it look like a sleek detective thriller didn’t help. It was pulled from distribution and given a new campaign much closer to the ironic spirit of the film. Only then did it open in New York, and while it was too late for it to become the blockbuster it might have been, at least it turned out to be a hit in Manhattan, where it got mostly favorable reviews and enjoyed a good run.
For Pauline, The Long Goodbye was another Altman masterpiece, and she was beginning to despair of his ever finding a mass audience again. “Maybe the reason some people have difficulty getting into Altman’s wavelength is that he’s just about incapable of overdramatizing,” she wrote. “He’s not a pusher.” In a judgment that sounded suspiciously auteurist, she praised Altman’s contribution at the expense of Leigh Brackett’s, saying that although Brackett’s name was on the picture as scenarist, “when you hear the improvised dialogue you can’t take this credit literally.” Elliott Gould, for whom The Long Goodbye represented a return to stature after two years in the box-office wilderness, felt that the comment about Brackett was not quite fair. “But I understand Pauline,” Gould said. “When we showed the picture at the empty Grauman’s Chinese Theater before it opened, I was there and Leigh was there. I felt it was like an American jazz performance that Bob allowed me to do. I’m talking to myself all the time, because there’s no one to talk to except my cat. I said to Leigh Brackett, ‘Does this validate the work that you did?’” Brackett, fortunately, liked the end result.
While Pauline was hardly alone in enjoying friendships with filmmakers—Richard Schickel and Judith Crist, among others, fraternized with directors and stars, though they maintained their reputations as tough, honest critics—her relationships were more problematic. Because her praise could be more passionate than that of any other critic, it was all the more traumatic for the artists when she turned on them with that same degree of passion.
A particularly complicated case arose with Woody Allen. She had enjoyed two of his recent comedies, Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, feeling that he had come a long way from the facile unevenness of his first solo directorial feature, Take the Money and Run. To Pauline, Allen’s recent work suggested he was “an erratic comic genius,” and she admired the fact that Allen had “found a nonaggressive way of dealing with urban pressures. He stays nice; he’s not insulting, like most New York comedians, and he delivers his zingers without turning into a cynic.” For Pauline, Allen’s “essential sanity” was “the base from which he takes flight.”
Pauline thought that Allen’s new picture, Sleeper, a comedy set in 2173, was the most stable and most sustained of his films, “without the lapses that had found their way into his earlier work.” In it, Allen starred as the thirty-five-year-old owner of the Happy Carrot health food restaurant in Greenwich Village, who is admitted to the hospital for a peptic ulcer and wakes up two hundred years later. Allen had written to Pauline late in 1972 that Sleeper was a Buster Keaton–type comedy, though not in the pure Keaton spirit because of the intrusion of sound. Allen and Pauline had a friendly, long-running argument about the impact of sound on comedy, with Allen taking the position that sound prevented the great comics from achieving total reality. While Pauline found Sleeper consistently funny, something was missing: She felt that “Allen’s new sense of control over the medium and over his own material seems to level out the abrasive energy. You can be with it all the way, and yet it doesn’t impose itself on your imagination—it dissolves when it’s finished
.”
Pauline saw deeply into the appeal Allen had for the 1970s movie audience: He was the brainy, nerdy kid who had always been beaten up on the school grounds but had managed to triumph because of his brains and wit, which, despite layers of insecurity and paranoia, he always believed in. Allen was the smart, irreverent observer of the social revolution that had been shaking up America since the ’60s, but although this brand of comedy was popular with young people—his script for Sleeper took gentle jabs at the NRA and the Nixon administration—he was anything but subversive. Quite the opposite: He was too much of a misfit to be a genuine hero of the youth movement, and he was a nostalgist with a deep love for traditional pop culture. Pauline was probably right when she judged that Allen had a misguided attraction to healthy conformity: “The battered adolescent,” she wrote, “still thinks that that’s the secret of happiness.”
Over a period of several years, Allen saw Pauline socially and frequently wrote to her when he happened to be out in California filming. He enjoyed having discourse with someone he considered to be such a superb critic, and the subjects of his letters varied widely. He wrote to her praising her advocacy of films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller. He sent her the script for his comedy Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, asking her to read it and make any suggestions for changes. He wasn’t afraid to disagree with her: He didn’t like Sounder at all, and he thought that Straw Dogs was nothing remotely approaching a work of art, fascist or otherwise. Certainly, however, Allen cultivated her strenuously, going so far as to take her side after Peter Bogdanovich’s rebuttal to “Raising Kane” appeared in Esquire, assuring her that it would fail to get any serious attention at all. He also knew that he always had a sympathetic ear whenever he complained to her about the indignities suffered by talented directors in Hollywood, writing to her in the summer of 1973 about the creative bankruptcy that he found so stifling.